Dear Church Quotes

“You showed me that my past didn't make me unworthy to receive the nearness of God in the elements. I could stand before the table of grace a whole person -- deeply flawed and still incredibly valued, hand-made by a loving God”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“Dear Church, I’ll say it again: systemic racism, white supremacy, and the whiteness of the ELCA constitute a theological problem, not a sociological one. And theological problems are often rooted in the symbolism of our liturgy and ritual. After all, we access God primarily through symbols and ritual.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“Dear Church, it’s time to stop prioritizing tradition and civility over the lives of the marginalized. Our well-meaning desires to be tolerant and welcoming have left us ill equipped to face radical evil.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“Dear Church, we have to wage peace in the name of Jesus Christ for this generation. We have to break the chains of sin and death holding all of us captive.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“Grace is free. But loving the neighbor has a high cost. It may cost our very lives and the church as we know it. We may lose it all. But we are armed with a fact that changes it all: the world believes Jesus is dead, and we know he isn’t.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“The reason the ELCA has remained so white is a theological problem, not a sociological one. We as church have declared racism a sin. But the demonic system that keeps racist structures in place is where our real work will need to begin. We need to name evil for what it is, and we won’t overcome it until we do.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“If you are a leader in this church and no one is following, you are just out for a walk.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“I don’t want a church of false unity. And some fundamental truths are worth fighting over.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“You would think that our seminaries would be labs for this sort of cutting-edge change in thinking and doing, but my time in seminary showed something completely different. Almost every syllabus I received seemed to be a love letter written to old, dead white men. My seminary education centered whiteness over and over again, and it didn’t matter what class, what theological discipline. Professors almost unconsciously deferred to whiteness as the standard, perpetuating the racist history of the academy.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“Our hymnody needs attention, too. We need to sit down with our music ministers and go through each hymn each week, every song, everything that we sing as community and start to deconstruct them—examining each lyric with a fine-tooth comb. We need to demand that our hymnals stand with us in solidarity, and whenever whiteness is centered theologically, we need to demand that those words be changed. We can publish better work. It’s already being produced. We just need to gather a community of writers and musicians willing to share their gifts and work. We need to pay them for their work. The old classics can be revised and shifted to reflect a vision of the kingdom of God as it should be, not filtered through whiteness. To worship the creator through song is one of the great joys of gathering as church together. When we deconstruct and decolonize the symbols we use in worship, we can slowly but surely change the way that same God is imagined, experienced, and worshipped.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“I have to squint to see past the symbols of my upbringing and begin to see my value and my worth—to see myself the way Christ intended, powerful and liberated, set ablaze by the Holy Spirit as she descends upon my life with all its blackness, waiting to be awakened by the gospel.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“You don’t have to call me nigger. You don’t have to tell me that black lives don’t matter. All you have to do is do what the Lutheran church has been doing for five hundred years. Introduce me to Jesus. He looks nothing like me, so I’m left thinking he can’t possibly be for me. If he looks like all the folks who have, in fact, told me that black lives don’t matter, how can I trust that he believes my life matters? This Jesus who doesn’t look like he was born in Nazareth in the Roman province of Palestine, who doesn’t look like a Jew from the Middle East. This Jesus who looks like you, not me. You have taught a five-year-old me that I am not like the creator of the universe—but you are. You and he look like cousins, as if you played together as children, as if he just dropped you off on his way to see the rest of your family.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“None of my formational memories include an image of Jesus that reflected my own blackness back to me. Instead, it was always a blue-eyed, blond-haired, European Jesus. This Jesus that the priest told me had sacrificed it all, his very life for me, who was put on the cross for the brokenness of the entire world—he looked down on me from the stained-glassed depictions of him and his truest followers, all white men. The children he welcomes are all white. I am not a child he would welcome.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“And symbols of whiteness show up in so many other places, too. I’m willing to bet there is at least one image of a white Norwegian Jesus in your church right now. Since I was a child, I have been bombarded by images of Jesus that look nothing like me, my people, or my culture. All of the images of Jesus I saw growing up looked like the teachers who were overwhelmed at my local beleaguered public school or like the police who saw my mother as a race traitor for marrying my father.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“But if we stick to the idea that Advent is a time of darkness, midnight, blackness when we await the dawn, light, and whiteness, we are conflating whiteness with holiness—a powerful symbol whose ill effects on our community we have yet to really explore.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“We can queer Advent by talking about how Jesus had two mothers, one being an unwed teenager and the other being Sophia, the Holy Spirit. We can create an anti-racist Advent by describing the slaughter of the innocents as exactly what it was: ethnic cleansing by a leader who wanted to ensure his genetic line continued to rule.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“Symbols are important; they shape the way we think about the world, often without us knowing it. If we don’t deconstruct harmful symbols, we will slowly poison our children.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“During Advent, we spend an entire season struggling through the darkness looking toward the coming light. The primary symbol and image we use for the season is the anticipation of an emergence from darkness to light. We could focus more broadly on Holy Anticipation. Or the God Child being born into a world where empire will try to lay waste to him. Or a God who throws God’s own self upon the world, clothed in vulnerability and dependency. Or the place of unwed teenage mothers in our world. Or the slaughter of innocents by a leader grasping  for  power.  We  don’t  tend  to  focus  on  the  theme of refugees fleeing radical evil. Or preparing the way of the  Lord by  creating  conditions  more  conducive  to grace.  Nope.  We  have  reduced  the  Advent  season  to “from darkness to light,” a theme reinforced by repetition and tradition. And darkness is just another way of saying blackness—another symbol that equates blackness with evil and light (whiteness) with good.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“Over and over again in our music, liturgies, displayed artwork, and language and word choices, we have reinforced the idea that white is holy and black equals sin. These passive suggestions have created an entire subconscious theology of race. For example, most pastors wear a white alb or surplice while they lead worship—using whiteness to represent baptism, purity, and closeness to the creator. We’ve never stopped to ask why we equate the color white to goodness. Every day we sit in church, we are being subtly fed this narrative about whiteness—a narrative that is at work in all of us consciously or subconsciously. The person who administers the sacraments: clothed in white. The colors of resurrection and ultimate victory: white. The candle you light at the anniversary of your child’s baptism: white. The message is clear, whether we realize it or not. White equals pure. And the inverse is also true: the absence of white—darkness or blackness—equals bad or evil.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“When we do decide to enact liturgy and symbols in our community to address race, we do so in very limited ways: write letters, issue joint statements, maybe sing an African American spiritual in worship (poorly), and then bring in one of our African-descent rostered leaders or non-rostered leaders to preach or give a talk. How many times have you sung “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at your church or at a synod event? Has anyone every taken the time to explain to you the rich history of that song? Has anyone ever told you that it is the “Negro national anthem”? I had to learn it to graduate sixth grade; my class was required to learn it, study it, and sing it at our final assembly. Did you know that black folks have been singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” at public events since before it was common practice to sing the national anthem at public events? If you are reading this and you have sung that hymn at your church and your pastor didn’t take the time to teach you that first, that’s just one example of the ways our church has failed to properly contextualize our symbols and liturgies.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“It is the church’s imperative to dismantle white supremacy in the twenty-first century; this is the way of the cross. Some faith-based organizations are taking up the mantle and engaging in specific anti-racist actions in their communities (and other faith-based organizations have been doing this for decades). But we rarely talk about how to address white supremacy symbolically in our worship and life together. Symbols matter.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“Dear Church, it’s time we wage peace. We are it. This is the front line. Our Sunday schools and pulpits are the tools we have to wage peace on this world. We have to raise a generation of anti-racist children who will in turn teach their children the dangers of the powerful drug that is whiteness and its addictive properties. We have to equip people to speak up and out in a way that fosters conversations and demonstrates genuine dialogue.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“In a church culture where we have become so heavily reliant on our intellectual heritage, we are unable to talk to our children about the evil that stalks this world. But the church must be one to draw the line. We have lost the ability to name radical evil because somewhere along the way, we stopped believing in it.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“We all have that fellow member or parishioner who shares incredibly racist memes and thoughts on social media. In fact, we have watched their descent into more extreme views fueled by a society that is ever more divided politically and spiritually. But most of my fellow leaders in the church and our laity feel like there is nothing they can do. Or even worse, they just don’t want to engage in the incredibly tough conversation.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“So what about our congregations and the way we relate to the world has left us completely ill equipped to call out this sort of radical evil as it festers in our pews? What are we doing to equip our members to engage with their families and the broader community? How are we training them to start to talk these folks back from the edge of the abyss?”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“White Lutheranism never confronted Dylann’s white-supremacist beliefs, and we need to examine our church structure, theology, and communities to understand why.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“Dignity doesn’t have price. Human worth doesn’t have a price. Justice does have a price, and it is often paid by the blood of the oppressed. It is time for us to bring everything into the light and pay back the debt. We need to be a church that is leading the way by putting our very bodies in the spokes of the wheels of injustice until the wheel breaks.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“Reader, if a thousand reasons are coming to your mind about why this wouldn’t work, or if you feel a fearful resistance to this idea in your gut, that is the enemy.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“If we don’t somehow find the moral courage to face systemic racism, name it as demonic, and have a proper exorcism, we will continue to be attacked by a legion  of  problems  as  we  stumble  into  this already-bewildering century. We may lose treasures, but they all rust and get eaten by moths anyway, and our reward lies somewhere else.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

“The way forward, I believe, will be drastic. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa can be a model for us. That commission created an avenue for claimants to step forward and ask for reparations, and for sinners to face their accusers.”
― Lenny Duncan, Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US