Rediscipling the White Church Quotes

“In my experiences with racial reconciliation conversations, there usually comes a moment when superficial talk gets real. Often this comes about because a person of color takes the risk to share how racism and white supremacy have impacted her life. And then, almost invariably, in response to this vulnerable testimony, a white person begins to speak, usually through tears. This person shares about how overwhelming this experience has been, how he hadn’t known the extent of our racialized society and its racist history, about how sad, angry, or confused he is feeling now. I’ve watched this happen so many times that I can almost predict it: the move away from a person of color’s experience to a white person’s emotions. I have experienced these strong emotions myself, but as Austin Channing Brown points out, focusing on white emotions rather than the experiences of people of color can be dangerous. She writes, “If Black people are dying in the street, we must consult with white feelings before naming the evils of police brutality. If white family members are being racist, we must take Grandpa’s feelings into account before we proclaim our objections to such speech. . . . White fragility protects whiteness and forces Black people to fend for themselves.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“Individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism have built renowned and racially homogenous ministries, but these have been cold comfort to those members of the body of Christ who exist outside the boundaries of racial whiteness. If white Christians are to reckon with racial discipleship, we must also look critically at the deeply held assumptions that have thus far hindered our attempts to address racial segregation and injustice. While it’s been over a hundred years since Ida B. Wells and Dwight L. Moody overlapped in Chicago, the dynamic they illustrate continues today. In the current cultural moment, black Christians are fighting for more equitable criminal justice policies, immigrant churches are advocating for policies that don’t separate asylum-seeking parents from their children, and Native American believers are lamenting as ancient tribal lands are being polluted by oil pipelines. At the same time, there are prominent white Christians publicly debating whether justice, from a biblical vantage point, can ever be social. Some of these leaders wonder whether justice can even be considered Christian when not limited to an individual. As disheartening as this divide is between white Christianity and many Christians of color, white Christianity’s tools help us to see why we haven’t been able to move past it.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“As white Christians become closer with Christians of color, we will become better interpreters of the presence of the kingdom among us. After all, despite suffering our society’s racism and white supremacist assumptions, our siblings of color can still testify to the evidence of God’s kingdom. Over time, we too will develop the eyes to see with greater clarity as we invite others to join in following Jesus into the kingdom he has made available.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“One Sunday in the fall of 1898, thirty-three years after the end of the Civil War, the Reverend Francis Grimké stood before his church in Washington, DC, and preached a sermon titled “The Negro Will Never Acquiesce as Long as He Lives.” After a period of federal intervention in the South, Jim Crow violence had returned with a vengeance, and Grimké, like so many other black Christians, looked on in horror as a white, supposedly Christian, nation violently oppressed its African-American citizens. After describing the discouragement and horrors faced by black people, the pastor turned his attention to white churches, saying, “Another discouraging circumstance is to be found in the fact that the pulpits of the land are silent on these great wrongs. The ministers fear to offend those to whom they minister.” He then noted the sorts of sins that white Christians were comfortable calling out—alcohol, gambling, breaking the sabbath—before wondering at their silence in response to so much visible racial terror. I can almost hear the anger and confusion in his voice as he revealed the hypocrisy of the white churches and their pastors. “They are eloquent in their appeals to wipe out these great wrongs, but when it comes to Southern brutality, to the killing of Negroes and despoiling them of their civil and political rights, they are, to borrow an expression from Isaiah, ‘dumb dogs that cannot bark.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“I see at least three reasons why the gospel, as many white Christians understand and proclaim it, causes so few disturbances within our racialized society. The first has to do with the dualistic spirituality that separates people’s souls from their bodies. In this view, the priority of evangelism is to save souls for an eternity with God; everything else is secondary. An evangelistic sermon climaxes with a call to conversion without ever meaningfully addressing the material realities in the new Christian’s life. So this new believer is left to assume that the point of the Christian life is salvation from sin for heaven. A second reason for our culturally palatable evangelism is the hyper-individualism we’ve discussed in previous chapters. Because white Christianity tends to view people as self-contained individuals, we can miss significant relational connections and networks. We are blind, for example, to the cultural privilege into which white people are born in this country. Similarly, the generational oppression and disempowerment attached to the African-American experience is generally invisible to people who believe so strongly in people’s ability to determine their own future. From this individualistic vantage point, inviting people to follow Jesus will almost never disrupt the societal forces that resist the kingdom of God in their lives. Finally, in the previous chapter we observed how race detaches people from place. When Paul began proclaiming the gospel in Ephesus, both the Jews and the Greeks immediately saw how the kingdom of God challenged the deep cultural and religious assumptions of their city. But our detachment from place blinds us to how we have been impacted by our society as well as to how the gospel may very well be an offense to that same society.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“Given the individualism that is endemic to much of white Christianity, it will be important to regularly teach the communal nature of the Lord’s Supper. If we are to be shaped toward solidarity by the Communion meal, this note will need to be sounded more clearly by preachers and teachers.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“If discipleship practices offer the means to lead us from segregation to solidarity, lament provides the mood. We dare not come to this ministry of reconciliation with any other posture. We move forward humbly, as those only slowly awakening to the extent of the damage done by our previously defective discipleship. The road ahead will often feel unnatural to those of us who’ve been discipled in the narrative of racial difference. For those who’ve known only racial privilege, the journey toward equitable reconciliation will sting at times. We are accustomed to segregation, novices on this journey to solidarity. And so we must practice.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“There are two reasons for white Christianity—churches, fellowships, ministries—to pursue solidarity rather than first seeking to become multiracial/ ethnic/ cultural. First, as we have already seen, racial segregation is less about separateness than about the material damages of our racially unjust society. It is possible to build a multiracial ministry that leaves structures of racism and white supremacy totally undisturbed. In fact, it is easy for multiracial churches to bend toward the comfort of white people rather than the well-being of people of color. Focusing on solidarity moves the focus away from shallow togetherness onto the priorities and flourishing of Christians of color. “White American Christians in our society,” writes Drew G. I. Hart, “must do something seemingly absurd and unnatural, yet very Christian in orientation: they must move decisively toward a counterintuitive solidarity with those on the margins. They must allow the eyes of the violated of the land to lead and guide them, seeking to have renewed minds no longer conformed to the patterns of our world.” 2 The second reason for making solidarity our goal is that every expression of white Christianity can pursue gospel reconciliation immediately. Rather than outsourcing this essential Christian vocation to multiracial churches or to congregations in urban or racially diverse regions, every white congregation can contribute to the unity of the body of Christ across lines of cultural division. In fact, given what we have observed about the particular injustices associated with racial whiteness, it’s not a stretch to say that white churches have a front-lines role in the spiritual battle for reconciliation.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“We cannot afford to ignore the powerful effects of systems and structures in our pursuit of racial reconciliation and justice. In fact, addressing racial injustice through discipleship practices requires that we elevate the importance of structures, and not simply for the ways they have warped our imaginations and desires. To spiritually form white Christians in the face of racialized cultural structures, our discipleship practices will need to be sustained by healthy structures of our own. After all, we are not expecting individual white Christians to disciple themselves out of segregation. Instead, community structures that will continually call white Christians to faithful discipleship must be built and nurtured.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“Because individualism is the first challenge, it’s important to realize that a discipleship approach to racial justice and reconciliation depends on a community of Christians. There’s nothing especially innovative about this; for generations, Christians have gathered for corporate worship and, by participating in shared liturgical practices such as singing and Holy Communion, have together had their desires aimed toward the kingdom of God. By its very nature the Christian life is communal; individuals find new life within the locally expressed body of Christ. It’s not that we lose our individuality when we become Christians, but that who we are as individuals finds fuller and truer expression within the community of saints.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“By ignoring how white people’s racial habits have been shaped by the racial practices of a nation deceived by the narrative of racial difference, white Christianity has failed to disciple men and women into the kingdom of God.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“Before white churches pursue racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity as the solution to our segregation, we must first address the discipleship that led to our segregation in the first place.”
― David W. Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“The other reason we must include our children in these discipleship practices has to do with their own spiritual formation. Our children are born into the smog of our racialized society. Whether or not they recognize it or their parents point it out, these children are born into the historical wound of racial whiteness that, as Wendell Berry says about his own life, was “prepared centuries ago to come alive in me at my birth like a hereditary disease, and to be augmented and deepened by my life.”3 Too often, rather than helping them see through the deceptive smog to the truth, we leave our white children’s imaginations to be corrupted by the narrative of racial difference. And when we abandon our children to the deceptions of our racialized society, they “will observe racial disparities for themselves and explain them by presuming something must be wrong with people of color.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“Smith writes that “the liturgical practice of the offering indicates that Christian worship—which is a foretaste of the new creation—embodies a new economy, an alternative economy.”12 More than an act of charity or giving from our disposable income, the offering reveals “a reconfiguration of distribution and consumption” within the kingdom of God.13”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“Taken together, these three tendencies of white Christianity contribute to making our evangelism tolerable to society. While individual people may disagree with our beliefs, a culture infected with the narrative of racial difference and white superiority does not feel threatened by our discipleship.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“While mutuality is something we should teach, I’ve come to believe that white Christians most need to see it visibly expressed by their leaders. Because we have been discipled to see ourselves as detached from place and in many ways from our neighbors, we mostly engage with people of color from a posture of power. Cross-cultural missions trips and local service projects are usually done in the role of provider. Rarely do we see examples of white churches engaging with people of color from a position of mutuality, much less from a position of need. So, while we might articulate a theology of mutuality, the practice of presence requires that we see it lived out.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“Time and again, well-meaning white people who dispute the notion that they are privileged have told me that they, too, have experienced hardship in their lives. Some of us were raised with the belief that anyone can get ahead in our society if they’re willing to work hard enough; the notion that anyone has been given an advantage because of their race would be laughable if it weren’t so offensive. Ken Wytsma, founder of The Justice Conference, offers a helpful response to these pushbacks. He writes, “White privilege doesn’t mean your life isn’t hard. It means that if you are a person of color, simply by virtue of that, your life might be harder.” He continues, “White privilege means that even if you’re the unluckiest white person born in the United States, you were still born into a fortunate race.” 4 This is essential for us to understand. Regardless of the personal setbacks and struggles we’ve each known—including structural prejudices against women and poor people, for example—racial whiteness still grants white people a measure of advantage that differs for people of color.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“In some Communion liturgies the congregation will be asked to examine their hearts before receiving the sacraments, the language being borrowed from 1 Corinthians 11: 28: “Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup.” The current of individualism that runs so deeply through white Christianity leads us to think of this important part of the Lord’s Supper in highly individualistic terms. So, for example, we might recall an unacknowledged sin that can be confessed before coming to the table. This is all well and good, but the context for Paul’s admonition to examine ourselves is one in which class divisions and disparities had not been dismantled by the church. He is urging the church to consider how they, corporately, had succumbed to their society’s divisive hierarchies. The call to examine ourselves can include unconfessed individual sin, but we understand it more fully when we see it as an invitation to the entire community. Though it may initially seem strange, Holy Communion is a natural time for us to reflect on how racial discipleship has deformed our desires and assumptions.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“How was it possible, wondered the abolitionist, to have, men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning, to show me the way of life, and the path of salvation. He who sells my sister, for purposes of prostitution, stands forth as the pious advocate of purity. He who proclaims it a religious duty to read the Bible denies me the right of learning to read the name of the God who made me. He who is the religious advocate of marriage robs whole millions of its sacred influence, and leaves them to the ravages of wholesale pollution.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“About the connection between inadequate discipleship and injustice Dallas Willard wrote, The lack of concern for social justice, where that is evident, itself requires an explanation. And the current position of the church in our world may by better explained by what liberals and conservatives have shared, than by how they differ. For different reasons, and with different emphases, they have agreed that discipleship to Christ is optional to membership in the Christian church. Thus the very type of life that could change the course of human society—and upon occasion has done so—is excluded from the essential message of the church. 3”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“but as Jennifer Harvey notes, The problem of racism—the actual racial situation in our faith communities—is not separateness itself. And togetherness is certainly no solution. Separateness is merely a symptom. The real problem is what our differences represent, how they came to be historically, and what they mean materially and structurally still. Racial separateness is evidence of the extent to which our differences embody legacies of unjust material structures. Racial separateness is a to-be-expected outcome of the reality that our differences literally contain still painful and violent histories that remain unrepressed and unrepaired. Racial separateness reveals that our differences are the very manifestation of ongoing forms of racial injustice and white supremacy. A paradigm that cannot meaningfully incorporate this understanding within its very framing of the problem cannot begin to realize its own hoped-for ends. 16”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“In effect, white people are, to quote James Baldwin again, “still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.” 5 Then let’s try to understand.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“While we often think of where we live as a matter of personal preference, there is actually a massive amount of policy and legislation behind where we reside. As historian Richard Rothstein shows in The Color of Law, because racial discrimination was official federal policy through the middle of the twentieth century, black citizens were excluded from federally insured mortgages. 17 Not only that, housing developers were only eligible for government insurance if they maintained a strict policy of banning African Americans from inhabiting the homes they built. The racial divide we see today between many affluent suburbs and nearby urban neighborhoods is not an accident of history nor the amalgamation of countless individual choices; it is de jure (according to law) segregation, constructed and sustained by federal and, in many cases, state and local government policies. This means that the majority of us live where we do not simply as a matter of preference or convenience. How we decide where to live is shaped by what we might call a housing practice.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“For the most part, white Christianity is not making disciples who reflect and announce the division-healing kingdom of God, and the evidence is plain to see.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“White evangelical Protestants support political movements to ban or severely restrict refugees at rates higher than almost every other demographic. More than any other religious group, white evangelicals believe that increasing cultural diversity in the United States is a negative development—this despite the fact that the majority of new immigrants are Christians. Consider also the segregation within white churches that we noted in the introduction.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“In his classic book about discipleship and the kingdom of God, The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard claims that a disciple is, most basically, an apprentice “who has decided to be with another person, under appropriate conditions, in order to become capable of doing what that person does or to become what that person is.” 4 This will become clearer when we turn to racial discipleship, but it’s important to notice that there is nothing uniquely Christian about discipleship. Basically, we’re thinking about the relationship between a student and her teacher in which the student follows the teacher to become like her teacher in order to do what the teacher does.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“the segregation within white Christianity is not fundamentally a diversity problem: it’s a discipleship problem.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity

“From these women and men, I’ve come to see that the segregation inherent in the Christianity I grew up in is not neutral or merely a reflection of individual choices and preferences. We don’t really talk about segregation anymore. The word sounds like a relic of the civil rights movement, an era to be studied clinically from the distance of history. Most white people, despite the racial homogeneity of most of our churches, don’t think of ourselves as being segregated from people of color. And we certainly don’t imagine that we actively contribute to the racial segregation of our society. Consider, though, the racial and ethnic demographics of our churches. As a group, white evangelicals are 76 percent racially homogeneous while mainline Protestant denominations are 86 percent white. Though some denominations are racially diverse, the individual congregations within them are overwhelmingly not. Using a sociological definition, no more than 12 to 14 percent of American congregations are racially mixed.”
― David W Swanson, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity