Be the Bridge: Pursuing God's Heart for Racial Reconciliation

by LaTasha Morrison

Jesus’s final prayer was oriented around a vision for unity, and he commissioned his church to be the healing agent that brings the ministry of reconciliation into broken and fractured places in society.

Is the church at large, and are we as individuals, currently making any contribution to healing the divisions? Or are we making things worse?

And why did America seem so bogged down in racial division and discrimination so many years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed?

It was a good church, full of good people, but I came to realize that I was the first and only African American person many of them had ever worked with.

sometimes church leaders even referred to non-White communities with terms like they, them, and those people.

talk less and listen more,

The typology of Black people is a racial reality in America.

for a few years I’d been on a journey of dismantling, deprogramming, and detangling many unhealthy worldviews I’d previously held relating to the intersection of politics and my Christian and racial identity. I’d come to realize that race is both a political and a social construct.

Her opinion of our emancipating president had been formed primarily by the economic effect his administration had on the American South.

it takes every tribe, tongue, and nation to reflect the image of God in his fullness.

color brave, color caring, color honoring, and not color blind.

This and other heartbreaking realities undermine the romanticized stories, the lies, of slavery and Reconstruction that have been woven into the accepted narrative.

Historical truths play an important role in our understanding of how we arrived in our current racial tension.

We can come to know the true facts, come to recognize our brokenness, yet not do anything about it. Awareness of the truth is useless without acknowledgment of our complicity or its effects on us.

we must first be brave enough to accept the historical truths and modern realities.

We have to sit in the sorrow, avoid trying to fix it right away, avoid our attempts to make it all okay. Only then is the pain useful. Only then can it lead us into healing and wisdom.

many present-day officials and citizens are unaware of the history and therefore don’t realize how the current poverty in north Tulsa traces back to the Greenwood tragedy. If they knew the truth, it might help frame the injustices of urban redlining in the city, where Black people were refused certain services based on race.

Help us not to rush from this place of hurting to triumphalism or repair but rather lament as you call us to do. May our lament be a form of worship, a joining of our hearts with yours, as we grieve the lack of your kingdom justice here on earth. Strengthen us for this path, as without you, the overwhelming depth of the problems that must be addressed

Shame and guilt are powerful motivators. In the context of racial reconciliation, shame and guilt often compel majority culture to cover up and whitewash sins.

In the Bible, guilt and shame are often communal and point to the need for corporate repentance. In

seeking ethnically diverse churches would highlight their complicity in structures of racism, and that complicity would bring so much shame and guilt.

The church will not be a leading example in racial healing until we feel the weight of communal guilt and shame and then allow it to push us into the truth. We won’t be agents of reconciliation until, like Ezra and Daniel, we take on the guilt and shame of our community and let it propel us toward confession.

none of us are disconnected from the sins of our culture’s past.

When darker African Americans see themselves represented, it helps diminish the stereotypes.

failure to confess undercuts our reconciliation with the Father and keeps us locked in unrighteous patterns, such as racism, bigotry, and colorism.

if you don’t do this work of confession, you’ll shortchange your healing and the healing of others. You’ll undercut the work of racial reconciliation.

true forgiveness, reparative forgiveness, can be experienced only when we first make space to feel the weight of grief, mourning, and lamentation and then, in the face of all of it, offer forgiveness.

Remember, forgiveness doesn’t happen on your timeline.

(Isn’t change the core of repentance?)

Awareness and confession of wrongdoing are vital steps in the reconciliation process. But confession alone isn’t enough. True reconciliation requires that we change our behavior, that we set a new trajectory.

This is what repentance looks like: changing course and committing to walking in a new direction.

considered the Declaration, the way it’d always been half taught in school. I considered those comments. Should we be surprised that white supremacy has been so difficult to root out in our country?

Because they weren’t seen as fully human. They weren’t seen as having been created in the image of God. They were considered to be something more animal. Something more like “merciless…Savages.”

Reconciliation requires truth telling and empathy and tears. It requires changed perspectives and changing directions (also known as repentance). But ultimately, that change of direction requires righting the wrongs perpetrated.

specific instructions regarding making amends are woven throughout the Mosaic civil laws, and stories about restitution are sprinkled throughout Scripture.

reparations might also take the form of creating previously unavailable opportunities or closing advantage gaps for those who have suffered marginalization. It might look like a wealthy White man funding a museum to commemorate the slaves, such as Whitney Plantation. It might look like a predominantly White church hiring a preacher of color, just as Gateway Church, my home church in Austin, did.

reparation is not punitive. Reparation is not about punishing anyone.

making wrongs right requires sacrifice. It requires rejecting upward mobility to level the playing field for others.

Jesus—God in flesh—came to reconcile us to God and restore our relationship to him. Throughout his ministry, he modeled the power of restorative reconciliation.

making space for restorative reconciliation highlights opportunities and allows us to seek ways to repair relationships.

We seek and extend forgiveness for the racial injustices we’ve perpetrated or suffered because we were forgiven by Christ himself. We repent and turn from our sin and do everything within our power to right the wrongs we’ve committed (or our ancestors have committed) because that’s the evidence of lives changed by God.

He reconciled us so we could bring reconciliation to others in his name.