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April 13 - May 5, 2023
My blackness cannot be disrobed as I engage God’s Word. Neither can one’s whiteness, and I am grateful for that. Theology must always be done in community within the context of our unique biases, both as a means to enrich and to be challenged. But what makes white evangelicalism problematic is that it has never truly submitted itself as simply one of many perspectives within the buffet of American Christianity.
It’s awfully hard to define what one has normalized and main-streamed.
It’s like asking fish to describe water. This is the challenge we face with white evangelicalism. It has been the very water of mainstream American life for more than four hundred years. It has been the home team. White evangelicalism has not only brought its perspective, but it has historically done so from a position of religious, cultural, and political power. Left unchecked, this power has morphed into ugly periods of oppression and tyranny.
The problem with white evangelicalism is not that it has an accent, but that it fails to see the ethnic theological accent it possesses.
To be fully embraced within the world of white evangelicalism demands that we minister in the genre of pastoral pop. But the moment one of us steps out of that box and begins to hit other notes, we become aware of the proverbial glass ceiling.
Over the years, I’ve been challenged by white evangelicals to just get over it. Their refusal to try to see things from my ethnically different perspective is a subtle, stinging form of racist oppression. What’s more, it hinders true Christian unity and fellowship within the beloved body of Christ.
understand her story and journey, to try in some way to incarnate her pain and pilgrimage. This is the way forward into oneness. We will never experience true Christian unity when one ethnicity demands of another that we keep silent about our pain and travails. The way forward is not an appeal to the facts as a first resort, but an attempt to get inside each other’s skin as best as we can to feel what they feel and to seek to understand it. Tragedies such as the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson are like MRIs that reveal the hurt that still lingers, and the chasm that exists between
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Their refusal to take any steps toward us in their rhetoric or presentation shows the oppressive normalization of white evangelicalism, where its dastardly message is, “You bend to us; we will never bend to you.”
When people of color are left off the required reading lists of the syllabi, not referred to in class discussions, not pursued for significant faculty and staff positions, or represent a small percentage of chapel speakers, white evangelicalism sends the clear message that we don’t matter.
Great Commission is multiethnic and involves cross-ethnic and cultural encounters: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). However, when one fails to see the totality of what they are transferring in the journey of fulfilling the Great Commission, they do violence to Jesus’ command and to the individual.
Privilege is never the problem; it’s the stewardship of privilege that’s the issue. Just ask Jesus. No one came into this world more “privileged” than Jesus—the one and only Son of God. I’m grateful he leveraged his privilege for my good.
Far too many white evangelicals solely have relationships with minorities whom they help. If all of our relationships with a group of people are from a helping posture, one is bound to entrench the very thing we’re hopefully trying to dismantle—namely, inequality.
White folks need peer relationships with people of color who don’t just need them. People like me. I have good credit, and I can take you out to lunch and pay for it. I own my own home, and I don’t need your help. But as long as the only people of color our white siblings engage with are minority orphans on a mission trip who pose for a picture with them that gets posted on social media pages, the problems will continue to plague us well after I’m gone.
Minorities who occupy positions in staffs led by whites often find themselves with an Israelite-like frustration as they are asked to make bricks with no straw (Exodus 5:6–9). We are hired in the hopes of fostering diversity, yet deprived of the requisite power to bring about the desired change. The locus of power in the church is the pulpit, and to bar competent minorities from the sacred desk and yet still expect diversity is as silly as giving Jackie Robinson a uniform and a glove while leaving him on the bench and wondering why things haven’t changed in the major leagues.
Any leader who is unwilling to transfer power to others has a failed view of the incarnation. Jesus Christ, who is fully God, voluntarily curtailed dimensions of his deity behind the veil of his humanity so that he might walk with and die for us. Paul gets to the heart of this in what theologians call the great “kenosis passage” of Philippians 2. In a breathtaking show of humility, Jesus Christ “humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” (Philippians 2:8).
divesting yourself of power and empowering the marginalized in your midst by giving qualified people meaningful roles in your church or organization. In other situations, it may mean sharing financial resources, like the Christ followers in Acts 2 did, with a view to long-term health and sustainability. Examples abound, and yet all of these and more point to a gospel restitution in the legacy of Zacchaeus.
But I often find myself grieving over the loss of minority culture within the multiethnic church.
It’s the same old story played in slow motion: (1) minority family comes to church dressed up and calling me “Pastor Loritts”; (2) minority family begins dressing down and calling me “Pastor Bryan”; (3) minority family wears Crocs and calls me Bryan.
minorities look for permission for what’s acceptable from whites in a multiethnic environment.
white folks don’t do that, and because I’m a guest in their house, neither can I. White Owned.
Though I was the lead pastor of this church, I was clearly sharecropping on land I didn’t own—a land owned by white folks.
To maintain its seat at the head of the table, white evangelicalism must be in control; it needs power. If white evangelicals are not in power, they won’t choose to be present in any substantive measures. They won’t join our churches or go to conferences historically attended by different ethnicities. They must be in power.
Many of them have diverse boards, but it’s here that I’m seeing not just sharecropping dynamics at play but a sort of plantation politics emerging as well.
Multiethnic churches should have multiethnic boards. If I could sit down with myself a decade and a half ago, I’d say a godly elder board isn’t enough. Neither is a diverse godly elder board sufficient. What’s really needed is an equitable eldership where each person is confident in the sum total of who they are (spiritually and racially) and has no qualms about speaking truth to power.
If we are going to make any headway in the multiethnic church, white folks need to deed “the land” back to Jesus. It’s not their church; it’s his. At ground zero, this means our white siblings must go out of their way to create an inclusive environment where everyone is free to be who they redemptively are in Christ.
So Paul has him subjugate the Gentile dimension of his anatomy to honor the ethnically other.
Given all this, you’ll forgive me for rolling my eyes if you say calling your minority leader “pastor” is too much to ask. Neither is sitting in lament while hearing a hard message on historical racism instead of charging the pulpit to argue with the minority preacher as soon as he says, “Amen.” Lifting your hands past your shoulders may cut against the grain of your Presbyterian upbringing, but if it green-lights the minority person sitting a few seats down to freely worship the way they’re culturally conditioned, then this is a form of Zacchaen restitution.
We need Jesus-loving minorities who will speak truth to power and help maintain the health of the elder board.
Renegade elders encased in white skin serving in a multiethnic context amongst minority elders who are paralyzed by white idolization will only lengthen the sharecropping contract. Instead, we need Jesus-loving minorities with a steeled resolve encased in love. Or as my friend Dr. Barry Corey says, we need people who love kindness, people with firm convictions but soft edges. Plus, some robust back-and-forth in an elder room is often good medicine. Any expert in the field of group dynamics will tell you that contrarian thinking and conflict are signs of health among teams.
The shelf life of minority leaders pushing hard for reconciliation and justice on white evangelicalism’s land is short. They will either sell their souls and settle into a life of sharecropping, walk off the land and become bitter, or lovingly opt for genuine equity in the very land they’re working, where they are accountable stewards and not indentured servants. There needs to be an uprising for the latter.
Simply put, if we did not care for our own, who else would?
I have never believed that every church should be multiethnic.
Churches should match their community, and even beyond this, there is a place for immigrant churches that provide a meaningful point of entry into our great country and allow people to connect with God by worshiping and hearing God’s Word through their heart language.
entitlement happens when we consume without contributing.
As the offspring of fundamentalism, conservative evangelicalism has long loved her prophecy conferences, Bible studies, and family camps—accompanied by celebrity teachers—where a culture of consumption has bequeathed to her a genetic predisposition toward spiritual obesity.
more concerned with knowing right than doing what’s right, especially with respect to the ethnically other.
The gospel is both vertical and horizontal.
There can never be any true reconciliation horizontally without our first being vertically reconciled to God.
The Bible knows nothing of a vertical reconciliation that is not evident in horizontal reconciliation with others. An unforgiving Christian is an oxymoron. So is a racist one.
To Paul, vertical reconciliation required nothing less than horizontal reconciliation, and the theater in which this was to be enacted was the local church. In case you missed it, most of Paul’s churches were multiethnic, which is exactly why he deals with such issues as food and circumcision.
Prophetic courage must never be wielded in discrimination to induce white guilt. Preachers must be equitable in their pleas for justice.
White evangelicalism has always held a fond affection for the safe person of color. Frederick Douglass was the darling of abolitionists until he decided to marry one of their white daughters. It was then that he discovered he was good enough to be their brother-in-Christ, just not their brother-in-law. Some truths come just a little too close to home.
When any leader who aspires to move a church in a multiethnic direction asks where they can find a certain minority leader to match the demographic they want to pursue, this is often a telling indictment of the social circles that the leader has traveled in.
show me any Jackie on any staff who has not been legitimately heard and whose offerings have not been integrated, at least in part, and I will show you that what you really have is a token—a pair of red bottom shoes.
It’s only prosperity theology when the blessings become the ends and God becomes the means or the facilitator to these things. That’s wrong.
we are different,
we also had to abdicate any messianic delusions that somehow we were the fourth member of the Trinity called to change one another.
We can’t change the other person; we can’t even c...
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embrace the covenant of marriage.
the Christian worldview is one of vocation and not merely a job,30 and therefore it strips the employer of any utilitarian notions about Jackie. In the church, we should be at the forefront of modeling to the world how our vocational ministers are not just an amalgamation of skills, but are people—people to learn from and be bettered by, and vice versa. For Jackie or his employers (or anyone else) to pull the emergency brake and leave prematurely is to rob everyone within the community of the blessing that can only come with the collision of differents.
