Christ in Crisis: Why We Need to Reclaim Jesus

by Jim Wallis

After many converts, the early believers of “the Way,” as they were first called, settled into a new life together characterized by radical economic sharing, deep fellowship, great joy, and transforming worship in an increasingly diverse community of rich and poor, men and women, old and young, and even free and slave.

Francis tells us that as a result of indifference, “We end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own.”18

The necessary punishing of individuals who commit or cover up such horrendous acts isn’t enough; the institutional and patriarchal systems that undergird and protect such behavior must be honestly addressed and changed.

All white people need to understand that white supremacy—as a myth and a lie, an ideology of racial difference and superiority, and an idol for the white church—is underneath everything in America and needs systematic and continual confrontation and transformation. And the idolatry of white Christianity literally separates us from God, as idols always do. All people need to understand that our nation, church, and world have a fundamental imago Dei problem in which people face

oppression simply because of the color of their skin.