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

by LaTasha Morrison

When we lack historical understanding, we lose part of our identity. We don’t know where we came from and don’t know what there is to celebrate or lament. Likewise, without knowing our history, it can be difficult to know what needs repairing, what needs reconciling.

I’d do my best to build a bridge between the majority and non-White church cultures. That bridge might open space for my White friends to better understand my history, culture, and experience and would provide room for my non-White culture friends to share their pain.

If you’re White, if you come from the majority culture, you’ll need to bend low in a posture of humility. You may need to talk less and listen more, opening your heart to the voices of your non-White brothers and sisters. You’ll need to open your mind and study the hard truths of history without trying to explain them away. You’ll need to examine your own life and the lives of your ancestors so you can see whether you’ve participated in, perpetuated, or benefited from systems of racism.

The truth is that each ethnicity reflects a unique aspect of God’s image. No one tribe or group of people can adequately display the fullness of God. The truth is that it takes every tribe, tongue, and nation to reflect the image of God in his fullness.

In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.3 This does not mean that we take a color-blind approach to community. Too many Christians believe that the ultimate goal should be seeing the world without color, and some even pretend to already be in this “holy” place. But Paul wasn’t suggesting that aspects of our gender or racial identity aren’t important, that we should all meld together into one indistinguishable throng. In fact, Paul emphasized that unity can be found in diversity. We all have been given different gifts; we all are different parts of the same body.4 In the love of the family of God, we must become color brave, color caring, color honoring, and not color blind. We have to recognize the image of God in one another. We have to love despite, and even because of, our differences.

Let’s consider this foundational truth: God didn’t create race. Did he create different ethnic groups? Yes. In both the Old Testament and the New Testament, scriptures identify different ethnic groups.

But despite the Bible’s recognition of differing ethnic groups, there is no indication of race. Race, as we know it, is a political and social construct created by man for the purpose of asserting power and maintaining a hierarchy. When we believe the lies embedded with racial hierarchies, reconciliation becomes impossible.

If we avoid hard truths to preserve personal comfort or to fashion a facade of peace, our division will only widen.

Jesus can make beauty from ashes, but the family of God must first see and acknowledge the ashes.

And even though it might be painful to recount our history as a country, denying it leads us nowhere. Truth is the foundation of awareness, and awareness is the first step in the process of reconciliation. Jesus said as much: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”12

As we discussed in chapter 2, racial reconciliation won’t come without awareness of the truth. But awareness alone won’t necessarily lead to reconciliation. 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.

Instead, we have to have the hard conversations so we can move to a place of deep lament. To lament means to express sorrow or regret. Lamenting something horrific that has taken place allows a deep connection to form between the person lamenting and the harm that was done, and that emotional connection is the first step in creating a pathway for healing and hope. 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.

Acknowledgment should lead us toward lament, toward seeking mercy, toward a collective conviction that we can and must do better. Willful ignorance of the facts, willful bias and prejudice—these things keep us from the awareness that leads to full acknowledgment and lament. They keep us from moving into the hard work of racial reconciliation.

Our Western society is highly individualized, and our measure of morality is based on individual guilt or innocence. We’ve all heard the justification: Why should I repent of racism? I never owned slaves. But in the Bible, guilt and shame aren’t described in such a narrow individualistic sense. In the Bible, guilt and shame are often communal and point to the need for corporate repentance.

In the book of Ezra, we read about how the people of Israel had become unfaithful to God. They’d taken up the forbidden practices of their neighbors, the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, and Amorites. Ezra, a priest and scribe, was personally innocent of the sins committed by the people, but he still felt the weight of guilt and shame. He prayed, “O my God, I am utterly ashamed; I blush to lift up my face to you. For our sins are piled higher than our heads, and our guilt has reached to the heavens.”4 See how Ezra acknowledged and lamented the truth of the sins of Israel? See how that acknowledgment and lamentation connected him with the guilt and shame of that sin? And identifying with that guilt and shame, Ezra cried out to the Lord.

Ezra shows us in the Bible how we grieve the sins of our community and nations past as if they are our own evesn if we ourselves are innocent of those particular sins. We identify withb the guilt and shame of our people.

Like Ezra, Daniel had been personally innocent of the offenses against God, but he did not try to distance himself from the collective sin of his people. He owned his part in it as a member of the community.

Although communal shame and guilt brought both Ezra and Daniel great personal distress, their response highlights the redemptive arc of Scripture. For them, experiencing shame and guilt provided an opportunity to recognize the ugly reality that had led to their current situation and initiate communal restoration. As members of a group, they assumed the responsibility to confess and seek reconciliation on behalf of that group.

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.

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.5

There’s a lot of talk about racial reconciliation these days. All too often, however, those conversations happen in a sermon, at a conference, maybe even around a dinner table, and folks assume that’s enough. They believe they’ve sorted it out, can offer one another great big hugs, and everything will be better going forward. But that’s not the way reconciliation works. 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.

As we discussed earlier, confession and repentance are collective acts, and true repentance takes into account the histories of the past. If repentance requires turning and walking away from the sins of our past, doesn’t it require walking toward something more reparative? So reparations and repentance are inextricably intertwined, and those who’ve inherited the power and benefits of past wrongs should work to make it right for those who’ve inherited the burdens and oppression of the past.

“Systems of injustice in society and in the church exact a heavy cost on those outside the centers of power and effectively block reconciliation…. Declaring that we are equal without repairing the wrongs of the past is cheap reconciliation.”6 Let’s

This is the concept of reparation, a concept God prescribed in Numbers 5:7, as we saw earlier. We call this kind of reparation restitution, but 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. Maybe it looks like a business advancing people of color in corporate leadership positions, like my friend Jessica Honegger at Noonday Collection. Or it might look like White people investing financial resources or leveraging their privilege or lending their platform to a non-White person to help get his or her business off the ground.

Reparation is about repaying or returning those things so as to restore equity.

How is the desire to make reparations, in the way Zacchaeus expressed, different from guilt? How is reparation related to the concepts of equality and equity?

A Prayer of Reparation Lord, those who have come before me were flawed. I am also flawed. Open my eyes, Lord. Am I guilty of muting the pain-filled volume of my sisters and brothers with my skewed sight? Have I prioritized my comfort over the equality and equity of my neighbors? Have I ignored the ways our systems have oppressed and suppressed others? Forgive me, Lord. I am in need of repair. Give me the heart and voice of reconciliation and show me what it means to actively make reparations to those around me. Provide a heart of righteous determination as I work to be the person you want me to become. In your redemptive name, amen. —MARIAH HUMPHRIES

The ultimate goal of our Be the Bridge communities is to bring racial reconciliation, which requires us to move through the bridge-building steps: acknowledging the past, lamenting it, confronting shame and guilt, confessing our collective sin, extending forgiveness, committing to repentance, making reparations, and ultimately moving into complete restoration.

Don’t get me wrong. There are times to be still, seasons when we need to pause and listen and rest. There are times when we need to be silent and take in new information. But I’ve learned over the years of beating the drum of justice and pursuing racial reconciliation that in this bustling world, it’s easy to mistake being still with complacency, to mistake waiting with hiding. When we realize we’ve settled for comfort instead of following conviction, we have to be willing to shake things up, even if stepping into our calling leads us into deep pain and discomfort.

“All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18–19, ESV). This was not an optional assignment.

The Hebrew word goy and the Greek word ethnos were used very frequently. These two words are typically translated into English as nations or Gentiles, but their meaning was very close to our modern understanding of ethnic groups.