The Deeply Formed Life: Five Transformative Values to Root Us in the Way of Jesus

by Rich Villodas

Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil’s definition incredibly helpful. She succinctly captured the multifaceted nature of biblical reconciliation: “Reconciliation is an ongoing spiritual process involving forgiveness, repentance and justice that restores broken relationships and systems to reflect God’s original intention for all creation to flourish.”5 In this definition, Dr. McNeil underscored a number of realities that must be engaged for true reconciliation to take place; namely, the personal and public dimensions of it.

Lisa Sharon Harper’s simple delineation of terms helpful, as she distinguished race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality from a biblical perspective: Race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality often are used as interchangeable words, but each one has a different shade of meaning…. Ethnicity is biblical (Hebrew: goy or am; Greek: ethnos). Ethnicity is created by God as people groups move together through space and time…. Culture is implicit in Scripture, but the word itself is never used. Culture is a sociological and anthropological term that refers to the beliefs, norms, rituals, arts, and worldviews of particular people groups in a particular place at a particular time. Culture is fluid…. Nationality indicates the sovereign nation/state where an individual is a legal citizen. It is a geopolitical category determined by the legal structures of the state…. Race is about power—in political terms, dominion. As a political construct, race was created by humans to determine who can exercise power within a governing structure and to guide decisions regarding how to allocate resources.

American novelist James Baldwin observed, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”7 As we examine the multilayered reality of race, we will be better equipped to offer theologically grounded responses to see the new family of Jesus flourish all over the world.

We are all shaped by a particular history and context and formed by family, friends, and the media. This means we carry blind spots and biases. To discriminate is not necessarily a bad thing (it’s wise to be discriminating in whom you trust as a close friend, for instance). However, discrimination that makes some humans out to be superior or inferior to others is a dangerous lie and destructive sin.

To do the work of racial reconciliation is to take ownership of the marginalizing ways we see others who are in some form or another different from us. One of the biggest challenges in the conversation on race is our refusal to do the work of identifying and exposing our individual racial prejudice. We have been socialized to see people in certain ways. This is a problem for all of us regardless of our skin color. However, historically not all racial bias has the same social impact. The racial bias in the hands of people of color is quite different from racial bias in the hands of the dominant culture. In the dominant culture, racial prejudice morphs into racism in larger institutional and societal ways. Individual racial prejudice is about how we negatively and often violently perceive others, but institutional racism is about how power is used.

our value of individualism blinds us to the injustices from which some benefit at the expense of others. I’m aware of this in my congregational context.

Just as with spiritual beings, not everyone believes or acknowledges that the world system exists. Some see institutional racism as obvious, while others refuse to give it any credence. Not surprisingly, the divide reflects the racial assumptions about the nature of morality, responsibility, and sin. In one of his incisive articles, sociologist Dr. Michael Emerson remarked, “Whites tend to view racism as intended individual acts of overt prejudice and discrimination….Most people of color define racism quite differently. [For people of color], racism is, at a minimum, prejudice plus power, and that power comes not from being a prejudiced individual, but from being part of a group that controls the nation’s systems.”

Dr. Cornel West said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

Isaiah couldn’t remain silent. In the first two verses, he wrote, “Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees, and the writers who keep writing oppression, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be their spoil, and that they may make the fatherless their prey!”

The cry of Isaiah is for righteousness—for justice. And justice very simply is about having right relationships, one with another. To do justice means that every person is taken seriously as a human being made in the image of God. So Isaiah wrote these prophetic words because the people who were in charge of ensuring that society was ordered toward justice were doing the opposite. Isaiah cried out against the larger structures of human existence. Isaiah was basically saying that on an institutional level, people were being sinned against. There were unjust laws that were oppressing people. Justice was being withheld, and the poor and widows were being mistreated. This was not a new problem.

When we think about our racialized society from very early on in the history of the United States (and beyond), the institutions of our society have been likewise culpable of systemic sin; every institutio...

We Assume That Racial Reconciliation Is Possible Without Justice

The pursuit of justice more often is about taking up one’s cause with whoever is in power in whatever context and seeking to work collaboratively to bring about fairness, just policies, and equitable community life.

We Assume That Racial Reconciliation Means Color Blindness

We Equate Diversity with Racial Reconciliation

On the surface, diversity looks wonderful, especially in church settings. However, as with justice, the temptation is for us to stop there. When we make diversity the end goal, we are no different from New York City subway cars. New York City subway cars are crowds of diverse, anonymous people in close proximity. But the church is called to be more than a sanctified subway car. When the gospel is deeply at work, racial reconciliation results in a diverse community that embraces the unique gifts and acknowledges the distinctive sins of their ethnic-racial-social makeup while experiencing loving communion with others under the lordship of Jesus.

We Want Friendship or Evangelism to Solve Racism

For three decades, our congregation has worked extremely hard to bridge racial barriers. Our staff, leadership, preachers, and worship leaders represent the diversity of our congregation. We address racial injustice, encourage relationships across ethnic differences, and seek to model something of the kingdom of God. But even with this history, there remain blind spots.

This meeting led to additional good conversations, which helped us pinpoint particular areas that needed to be discerned, such as whether we needed more ethnic-specific communities within our church, and it served as a good reminder that the work of racial healing is deep. Our leadership team agreed that we were not equipping leaders at our church well enough to promote our core value of reconciliation, so we decided to gather together key leaders to dialogue, train, and deepen our commitment to racial wholeness. For us, the journey continues.

Democracy in Black, professor Eddie Glaude wrote, “Everyone possesses racial habits, often without even realizing it. Habits, in general, predispose us to see our world in particular ways, and often we consider them helpful things….Not only do these habits shape how we interact with people of different racial backgrounds, they also guide how we think about and value groups collectively.”1

THE HABIT OF REMEMBERING

At New Life, we have a spiritual formation tool we use called the genogram (more on this in chapter 6). A genogram is a tool out of family systems theory for examining the ways we have been shaped by our families of origin. It reveals both the positive and negative legacies that have been handed down. Unless we look back to see how we have been improperly formed, we will continue to live out the same patterns from one generation to the next. This tool has broader use, as it applies to our churches and country as well. The goal of doing a genogram as an individual is not to hate your parents and families; it’s to objectively assess the good, the bad, and the ugly. The same applies for our country: to look at the history of our country is not to result in us hating it; in all actuality, it’s to help us love it better.

Author and lawyer Bryan Stevenson described an American “narrative of racial difference” that was an enduring and dangerous myth plaguing much of its people’s collective consciousness: “The great evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude and forced labor. To me, the great evil of slavery was the narrative of racial difference, the ideology of white supremacy that we created to make ourselves feel comfortable with enslaving people who are black. We’ve never addressed that legacy.”3 This narrative is more than just recognizing differences of race. The problem is that differences are assigned value and worth. In other words, the sin is in the hierarchy that was created based on racial differences. This hierarchy has served as the impetus for lynching, segregation, myriad civil rights abuses, and the ever-present “othering” that often leads to violence.

THE HABIT OF INCARNATIONAL LISTENING

When it comes to conversations on race, our level of offendability often reveals the level of our maturity.

At New Life, any strategy to racial healing in our neighborhoods requires us to practice incarnational listening. Like Jesus’s movement from Word to flesh, incarnational listening requires three movements of the heart.5 1. Leave your world. Let go of the familiar, take the risk, and step out (especially with regard to race and culture). 2. Enter into someone else’s world. Practice active, humble, and curious listening. 3. Allow yourself to be formed by others. Open up to their worldviews while holding on to yourself.

This is the work of reconciliation—not that we despise ourselves or others but that we listen and live humbly and incarnationally and through that process see the image of God in one another. Reconciliation is hard and protracted work, yet by the grace of God and the courageous steps we take, we can begin to taste today what is waiting for us when the new creation is fully consummated.

THE HABIT OF LAMENT

Deeply formed reconciliation can’t happen without the spiritual discipline of lamenting. The act of lament is the spiritually mature response to sadness and sorrow. Theology professor Soong-Chan Rah insisted, “Lament recognizes the struggles of life and cries out for justice against existing injustices.”8 In the practice of lamenting, we pour out our souls to God and in turn receive grace and power to respond.

THE HABIT OF RECONCILING PRAYER

In an important article, King’s wife, Coretta, wrote, “Prayer was a wellspring of strength and inspiration during the Civil Rights Movement. Throughout the movement, we prayed for greater human understanding. We prayed for the safety of our compatriots in the freedom struggle. We prayed for victory in our nonviolent protests, for brotherhood and sisterhood among people of all races, for reconciliation and the fulfillment of the Beloved Community.”

A deep life with God is required when engaging the powers of racial hostility, because in our work to dismantle this power, we can be prone to using tactics that conform to the destructive ways of this world. A person working for racial justice and reconciliation without a deep spirituality of prayer is missing an important part of the healing process.

This is why the image of the redwood root system I alluded to in the introduction is such a helpful analogy. I’ve seen many people work for racial justice and reconciliation without any commitment to prayer. When we live this way, we only see ourselves as righteous heroes exposing the powers of the world, while not seeing how complicit we are as parts of the world’s sinful structures. Prayer forges humility and opens us up to the love of God, out of which we work for healing. In this respect, prayer is both formational and invitational. Prayer forms us into people marked by the fruit of the Spirit; in prayer we invite God into the struggle of our lives. In our work of reconciliation, prayer is a steadfast refusal to give ourselves over to either resignation or self-reliance. Resignation says that things will never change. Self-reliance says we can change things in our own strength. The former is marked by despair, the latter by a futile confidence in our own efforts. Prayer for reconciliation’s sake is not disengaged and removed from the realities of life. Prayer can infuse us with, in the words of Old Testament theologian Walter Brueggemann, a “prophetic imagination.”11

The Sunday following the terrible event, we prayed this together at our worship services: Lord Jesus, your kingdom is good news for a world caught in racial hostility. We ask that you give us grace for the deep challenges our country faces. We confess our anger, our deep sadness, and our collective sense of weakness to see this world healed through our own strength. We honestly confess that our country has a long history of racial oppression; that racism has been a strategy of evil powers and principalities infected by structural sin. We confess that the gospel is good news for the oppressed and the oppressor. Both are raised up; both are liberated but in different ways. The oppressed are raised up from the harsh burden of inferiority, the oppressor from the destructive illusion of superiority. We confess that the gospel is your power to form a new people not identified by dominance and superiority but by unity in the Spirit. We ask that you help us name our part in this country’s story of racial oppression and hostility. Whether we have sinned against others by seeing them as inferior or have been silent in the face of evil, forgive us of our sin. We pray for our enemies—for those who have allowed satanic powers to work through them. Grant them deliverance through your mighty power. We ask that you form us to be peacemakers. May we be people who speak the truth in love as we work for a reconciled world. Lord, we commit our lives to you, believing that you are working in t...

Everything wasn’t magically healed in that moment, but I believe that the Spirit was deeply at work in us as we confessed our powerlessness to God. A handful of people approached me with a renewed vision to connect prayer with their activism. They saw that prayer was not a way to ignore the problem but rather a means of engaging the issues from a different place—a deeper place. Unless people are instructed to have lives with God in prayer, any hope to see deep racial reconciliation literally won’t have a prayer.

THE HABIT OF RACIAL SELF-EXAMINATION

This short list of questions might help you identify any subconscious perspectives you have of others: Is there a particular people, ethnicity, or race that you don’t trust? Why? Is there any particular people, ethnicity, or race that you or your child cannot marry? Why? What types of people cause you to cross the street if you are walking alone? Why? What, if anything, happens inside you when you see interracial couples? Why? When was the last time you visited the residence of someone from a different culture or race, or invited the person to your residence? What type of person would you most trust to invest or steward your money? Why?

THE HABIT OF RENOUNCING WHITENESS

American theologian Willie James Jennings, “Whiteness was…a way of organizing bodies by proximity to and approximation of white bodies.”12 Said another way, Whiteness is an absolute way of viewing and assigning value to the world through the racialized perspective of White normativity.

Whiteness is at work when: certain neighborhoods are deemed inherently better when White people are present, and inferior when they are not; skin color is viewed as inherently superior the lighter it is; certain hair types are viewed as inherently good while some are seen as inferior; and white people are inherently seen as more reliable, authoritative, and trustworthy than people of color.

THE HABIT OF REGULAR CONFESSION, REPENTANCE, AND FORGIVENESS

At our church, when we gather for communion, we recite a historic confession from the Book of Common Prayer. This confession anchors us as people in desperate need of regular repentance and forgiveness. I submit this as a confession we regularly repeat as we work for racial reconciliation: Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name. Amen.14

Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf has said, “Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.”15 Christians are called to the deeply formed ways of confession, repentance, and forgiveness.

To be deeply formed for racial reconciliation means we must open ourselves to the truth that things we hate in others we also find in ourselves. In confession and repentance, we see that we have disappointed people, dominated and used others to their harm, rarely if ever given away power unless forced to, said harsh things, not followed through on a promise, gossiped, lied, been insensitive, and been unforgiving. We have confessed to being followers of Jesus without becoming truly shaped by the values he lived and died for. We have, in fact, applied our religion in ways that benefit ourselves but bring harm to millions.

God wants to form the world deeply for the work of healing, and this kind of forming requires interior examination.

In Swiss psychologist Alice Miller’s provocative book The Body Never Lies, she named the tragic reality experienced by people who cut themselves off from their feelings and compensate this loss by appealing to the often sterile, unfeeling institution of the church: People who have been severed from their true feelings since early childhood will be dependent on institutions like the church and will let themselves be told what they are allowed to feel. In most cases it is very little indeed. But I cannot imagine that it will always be like this. Somewhere, sometime, there will be a rebellion, and the process of mutual stultification will be halted. It will be halted when individuals summon up the courage to overcome their understandable fears, to tell, feel, and publish the truth and communicate with others on this basis.