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July 17 - July 20, 2020
justice is something for which every generation has to strive.
True justice isn’t something we will see until the kingdom of God comes in its fullness. And until that day, we will call those under us to keep striving to right the wrongs for their own generation.
the pain caused by injustice has motivated me to spend a lifetime working for social change on behalf of widows, prisoners, the poor, and anyone who struggles.
For decades I’ve tried to meet people where they hurt. I’ve preached and desired to see “justice for all,” and I still fervently believe in it. God loves justice and wants His people to seek justice (see Ps. 11 and Mic. 6:8). But I’ve come to understand that true justice is wrapped up in love.
“God is love, and just as God is love, God is justice.”2
neither clenched fists nor helping hands alone will bring about the complete transformation God wants. Only love can touch us at the point of our pain and begin to heal us and make us whole—individually and collectively. We are called to love. To love God, to love our neighbors, even to love our enemies. Yes, love can be a real struggle. Anger is easier.
justice is a stewardship and economic issue, but truthfully, I think love is as well. Justice and love are intimately tied together in this way. Caring for those who have the least, loving our neighbors as we love ourselves, showing mercy to those around us—these are all issues of love, but they are also issues of justice.
We cannot have true justice unless it is motivated by love, just as God’s greatest act of justice, sending Jesus to die for us, was motivated by love.
The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie.
it is time to repent. It is time to forgive. It is time to move forward from the racism and bigotry that we have allowed to define us for too long. It is time for love, rather than pride and division, to be our final fight.
It’s also painful to think about the way the schools have resegregated themselves. And the church has helped. When the federal government ordered desegregation, many white parents decided to keep their kids from going to school with black kids. During the first year of integration, they formed all-white private academies. After the government said that was illegal and wouldn’t give them tax-exempt status, they turned the schools over to the churches.
However, I also see an undermining of the purpose of integration, resulting from decisions to move children out of the public schools. The most obvious sign is a weakened resolve by the community to see that all children receive a top-notch education. A separate and unequal education. Many Christians who send their kids to private schools don’t understand how this decision affects the quality of education for black children. It’s a major blind spot.
Integration may come with a cost, but when it leads to reconciliation, it is worth it.
I see people entrapped by the “-isms”—racism, sexism, ageism, classism, and so many others—that divide our church, choosing first to obey and revere these divisive systems rather than the God who has called us to be reconciled to one another and to be one in Christ Jesus. Perhaps people today aren’t declaring their allegiance quite as bluntly as the elder’s mother in the Mississippi Delta story I told earlier, but as we look at our churches, we cannot deny that they are divided by ethnicity, class, and age. We surround ourselves with people who are like us and value like-mindedness over
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CCDA started off with the three Rs—relocation, reconciliation, and redistribution—which
However, as time went on, it became apparent that a few more principles were needed to help better explain the work of CCDA. This realization led to the development of five additional principles—leadership development, empowerment, listening to the community, holistic development, and striving to be church based.
The church is to be the incarnated Christ here on earth now, which means all members ought to be doing the work Christ did while He was here.
A better way is possible. We all must have the compassion, wisdom, and mutual respect to rise above slander, slurs, and snubs to a place of love. What we ought to be striving for today is a new language of love and affirmation that will replace these hurtful slights. What if we started calling one another “friend,” no matter our race, politics, or economic class? Friends, I like that.
I knew what it was like to be beaten by someone who had absolute authority over me—someone who could beat me for any reason he wanted, or for no reason at all. I stepped between the man and the woman. The man was shocked. He did not touch me or say a word. He just walked away. Of course, I have no idea what happened later, but at least on that day the beating stopped.
One of the great surprises of recent history is this idea of nonviolent protest. Dr. King, Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela (after he came out of prison), and others led revolutions that didn’t depend on bloodshed and the violent overthrow of power structures. They realized the power in what Jesus taught about loving our enemies.
nonviolence takes more strength than violence—and it takes more than just human strength. It takes God’s strength working in human beings to produce self-control, gentleness, and the other fruit of the Holy Spirit. God’s power comes in our weakness and brokenness.
Whites need to take some responsibility for centuries of imperialism and failing to repent,
We all need to take responsibility for providing equal education and job training for all people and doing a better job of training our police officers not to resort to brutality.
We the church are called to be the light that shines in these dark places.
American society has lost its capacity for pluralism in many ways. We have begun to believe that if others don’t agree with us, then we don’t have to listen to them. We dehumanize people who don’t think like we do and, consequently, justify our violence against them. But we all are created in God’s image. We all are His children. We live in a country that proclaims freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and we must be willing to listen to and try to understand the thoughts and ideas of others. This is the way to make change happen without violence.
When you go to the place God has called you to go, are you a martyr or are you living out the highest possible calling in your life?
Do you really lose anything when you give up everything to get exactly what God wants for you?
the idea of relocation cannot be just about outsiders coming in; it has to be centered on leaders being raised up from within.
the only way we could make change happen was if we instilled in these children a love for their community that was stronger than the desire to get out. As more and more people with resources move out, the neighborhoods become poorer and poorer, and the community becomes drained of its most valuable asset. One of my best friends, Wayne Gordon, always said that the Remainers, those who stay behind, are the glue that holds a community together and helps make it a better place to live.
The second R—reconciliation—is the heart of the gospel. It is the process by which God brings us to Him and keeps us. It is the main activating force within the redemptive idea. It is the process of forgiveness of sin. The Bible makes it clear that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor. 5:19 NKJV). It’s also the process by which believers in Christ are joined to one another: “His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility”
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The way we accommodate racism and bigotry in the church, even today, is a heresy and a major blind spot.
When I first started preaching that message in the 1960s, I met huge resistance from many churches. Today, many Christians embrace the idea of reconciliation, and that encourages me. I fear sometimes, though, that our vision is still too small.
God is all about reconciliation, but we run the risk of missing Him when we allow racial reconciliation, or any kind of reconciliation, to rise as the dominating force—if we allow it rather than God Himself to become the ultimate goal.
Racial reconciliation is not a biblical term. People use race as a slave master, a means of injustice and exploitation. The very purpose of the gospel is to reconcile human beings to God and to one another. When human beings are reconciled to God, their relationship with every culture is in harmony. A reconciled church would be an incredible testimony to God’s ability to do things that are impossible for human beings to accomplish on their own. So what I call for—what I believe the gospel calls for—is unity across ethnic and cultural barriers. Jesus prayed for that the night before He died:
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The third R—redistribution—tends to make some folks nervous.
What I envision is Christians developing a new perspective on resources. Look around at everything God has created in this world! How can there not be enough to meet everyone’s basic needs—food, housing, clothing, health care, and so on?
We ought to talk about redistributing opportunities. Too much free stuff undermines people’s dignity and feelings of value. The value is more appreciated when it comes out of one’s own effort.
It’s estimated that 1 percent of the people in the world own 50 percent of the world’s wealth.2 Again, I’m not asking these billionaires to just give their money away to every person on the street but, rather, to help create an alternative system. These billionaires have the resources and businesses to provide job opportunities and fund nonprofits that can offer training schools for those who have never worked before. This is real redistribution: the people with the most skills and opportunities sharing with those who don’t have them.
businesspeople buying large plots of land in Latin America, breaking the land up into smaller plots, and providing ownership opportunities to people there who have never owned land before. What they’re discovering is that having smaller pieces of land owned by a larger number of people is making the society as a whole more productive. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that God’s way of doing things is the best way!
Habitat for Humanity is one of the most effective Christian organizations involved in redistribution efforts. People put some sweat equity into building their home and also have to pay some money back to Habitat for the project, but without any interest. This allows low-income families the opportunity to own their own home.
Programs like this instill gratitude in people and help them see the value of ownership, caring for and respecting the things they own. When people have ownership over something, if they help pay for it or build it, they are much more likel...
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Relocation is imitating Christ, who “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness” (Phil. 2:7) so He could show us the full extent of God’s love. Reconciliation is God bringing people into relationship with Himself and other people. Redistribution is caring for others’ needs as we care for our own.
Here’s another mystery about the incarnation: God was fully incarnated in Jesus, but He also dwells in each person who has received Him by faith.
take caution. Some people start talking about God in them, and then they take it further and start talking about God speaking to them or working through them exclusively, and then suddenly they are acting like little gods. Christ is in us, and He does speak through us, but we go too far when we make ourselves the prophetic word itself instead of vessels of that word. We can actually end up thinking it’s ours exclusively. It becomes an idol.
There will be those who sneak around among us, twisting God’s Word and drawing out disciples to themselves. That’s why it’s important to carefully examine the things people tell us about God—and test those things against Scripture. Luke praised such testing: “Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11). If the apostle Paul was not exempt from having his teaching held up against Scripture, our teachers today sure shouldn’t be.
We can also go too far to the other side though. One Sunday a young woman at church sang a song that just sort of lifted me. It spoke to me and touched me somehow. So afterward I spoke to her and told her how much her singing meant to me. She said, “It wasn’t me, it was all God.” I don’t think that’s quite true. Sure, it all begins with God. This woman is created in His image, and He gave her the gift of a beautiful voice. But she had to work to develop that gift; she had to decide to use it in a way that honors God. That was her contribution. So it was God working through her, but that
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The mystery here is that the God of all creation has called us to be part of His redemptive work. Thi...
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Throughout Scripture, we read about God’s concern for people who are vulnerable or suffering: the poor, the widows and orphans, the foreigners in the land, and so on. All Christians should feel a sense of calling to where there is pain in our society. Then if we hear something more specific from God, perhaps that requires some urgency, we should be willing to go to a different place.
In recent years, groups like InnerCHANGE (founded by John Hayes), Word Made Flesh (directed by Leroy Barber), and the Simple Way (Shane Claiborne’s community) have formed to minister incarnationally in suffering communities around the nation and world. One of many wonderful things I’ve noticed about these groups is that they also embody the redistribution idea—they call people to live at the level of others in the community, so that extra resources can be shared. They’re challenging people to give up some things so they’re able to better share their lives and their wealth with people who need
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More and more, though, I’m developing an urgent concern for the wealthy. Relocation and redistribution aren’t just for the benefit of those who receive the human and economic resources of people coming into the community. They are for the benefit of those who choose not to hoard the resources they have—who decide instead to forgo some of those material things and come to live next to and eat with and know the people God has called them to love.
