We don't know why the 'church people' of St Ann didn't want dancehall artiste D'Angel, to perform at their Spiritual Togetherness Charity concert yesterday, but whatever the reason, we think their spokesperson, Brother McKenley, handled the matter poorly.

According to Brother McKenley, who is quoted in Friday's edition of our afternoon publication Chat!, 'the church people don't want her right now ... not right now'. Are we to understand that he was speaking on behalf of all of them?

Surely, considering the fact that the dancehall artiste's picture had been included in the line-up of performers scheduled to appear - an indication that someone from the flock must have wanted her at some point - Brother McKenley could have found it possible to tender a more lucid explanation for public consumption.

Instead, he chose to throw the doors of controversy and conjecture open with a bald, inexplicable statement that cast the concept of the concert and the Friendship Seventh-Day Adventist Church, of which he is a member, in a bad light.

For there was nothing spiritual or charitable about Brother McKenley's declaration. Indeed, it smacked of the very opposite - cliquishness and hypocrisy. Had Brother McKenley wanted to, he could have found kinder ways of handling the situation. After all, isn't that what Christian charity is about?

But we detected in his attitude a streak of something very unsavoury, which has, for years, undermined the effectiveness of the church's influence on society.

We've seen this duplicity, this "all-animals-are-equal-but-some-are-more-equal-than-others" phenomenon crop up time after time in connection with a range of issues. And the tragedy is that the church often fails to recognise it. So notwithstanding their pious declarations of peace and love to all mankind, the church sometimes isolates individuals based on its often narrow and judgmental concepts.

For example, in the church's world, the introduction of casino gambling comes in for condemnation while bingos and raffles get the okay, and in the instant case, D'Angel gets rejected while others, upon whose characters it would be inappropriate to comment here, are embraced without question or reservation. What this type of reasoning does is ignore the plain and simple fact that there is no place for the caste system in Christendom.

People, notwithstanding their shortcomings, are people, and no one is more or less worthy than the other of being allowed to take part in the endeavour to 'win souls', as it were. In fact, sometimes the strongest message comes from the most unlikely quarters.

Recall a certain church in the Bahamas that recently invited dancehall artiste Macka Diamond to share her know-how with its members.

D'Angel may not be an epitome of her name, but unless she had planned to go on stage and totally denigrate the spirit of the occasion, we see no reason why she should have been shunted off the show simply because the church people 'didn't want her'.

This society is divided enough as it is already, and the last thing it needs right now is the type of farcical spiritual tokenism that the concert organised by Brother McKenley and his clan has to offer.

Executive Class

Gardens with Gravel

Death to the Mullet!