LOUD cries for justice punctuated songs of praise and worship at Fellowship Tabernacle in St Andrew yesterday morning, a mere 48 hours after its pastor, Reverend ‘Al’ Miller, was convicted on a charge of perverting the course of justice stemming from the 2010 Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke extradition saga.
“Jamaica is a land of justice and fairness… Lord, we don’t know how you are going to do it, but it will be done,” one woman said in prayer.
Miller’s guilty verdict was handed down by Parish Judge Simone Wolf Reece in the the Kingston & St Andrew Parish Court on Friday morning. He is to be sentenced on September 15.
He was arrested and charged in 2010 after being found on Mandela Highway, St Catherine, in the company of Coke — then a fugitive who was wanted in the United States to answer to drug and gunrunning charges.
Miller contended then, and maintained throughout the trial, that he was escorting Coke to the US Embassy in Kingston to surrender based on an agreement with the then police commissioner. However, the police testified that Miller, driving with Coke aboard his sport utility vehicle, led them on a high-speed chase on the busy thoroughfare.
Yesterday, the impassioned worship session at Fellowship Tabernacle, which lasted well over 45 minutes, saw congregants, including Miller, falling on their knees in prayer.
Many likened Miller’s situation to Jesus’s passion: crucified and buried on a Friday, but resurrected days after.
But Miller was in high spirits and addressed the conviction, before bringing the day’s message.
“The Spirit of the Lord has already done so much to encourage us, to give us divine perspective, and I just want to say on behalf of my family and I, thank you so much for the prayers, for the support you have given, and just continue to pray,” Miller told the congregants.
He stated that he had already spoken extensively on the issue during the early morning service, but that he wanted the rest of the congregants to have some benefit of the critical things he had said.
“So I want to just get to the word, but just to affirm to you that, look, we prayed, and when we prayed we committed this matter to God. and because of the truth we know when you have given something to the hands of a faithful Creator, who is all love, all goodness, all kindness, then whatever the outcome, God is in it,” the reverend stated.
“We had hoped that we would just see it finished and hope that they would just say innocent… but whatever it is for God, it’s part of my own role, a journey I must take because we’ve got a nation to change,” he continued.
Miller told the congregation that he knows that some have undergone great pressure and have suffered as a result of his situation, and so he apologised, but maintained that, “wi haffi do weh wi haffi do because we are going to transform.
“And, as a nation church, anything that happens to the nation will happen to us. We have seen that, over the years, the most important thing for the transformation of a nation is justice, because a nation must be built upon justice to get a just society to produce the prosperity,” the pastor stated.
He suggested that his legal troubles could be God’s response to the church’s cry for change, particularly in the area of justice, all while jokingly telling the congregation that “God set me up”.
“…If God didn’t want it, it couldn’t happen; so this is God. I had to enter in to get into the justice system, to understand it, because that’s the core thing we have to change to make the nation prosper,” Miller stated. “Because we are talking about the prosperity of nation, but as I said this morning, there can no prosperity without peace, and there can be no peace without justice, and there can be no justice without truth.”
He implored the congregants to be careful how they deal with the issue going forward, encouraging them to face the questions with “grace”.
