My experience in blogging for inching up to twenty years is that racism deadens conversations. My experience also is that, while conversations are not easy to generate about race on my various postings, readers remain the same. Experience also informs me that people go silent because they are afraid to say the wrong thing.
But I keep writing about it, and we should keep preaching about it, because we must.
Derwin Gray, in his newest book How To Heal Our Racial Divide, talks about it and writes about it and he does so because it’s important. He and his wife Vicki are a multiracial couple and they are our friends. Derwin is a graduate of Northern Seminary and this book is connected to his DMin thesis.
His church, Transformation Church, on the border of North and South Carolina near Charlotte, is their attempt to build from the ground up a multiethnic church so that the culture is multiethnicity.
A multiethnic church takes time, it takes mistakes, it takes pain, but what it takes it can give back in the dream of the kingdom being glimpsed.
Today’s subject is why we should talk about race. Most use “race” as does this book but the term itself is a source of major discussions today, with “ethnicity” being a cultural marker. Our society is split on race, and racism is the explanation.
Here’s why we need to preach about it and do something about:
First, because we are called to love one another, and you can’t be racist and despise another person because of race or ethnicity. Love is the mark of a disciple of Jesus because Jesus was himself a loving person. John 13:34-35 reads,
I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Second, because racial reconciliation is central to “God’s mission and plan. God has always promised a multicolored, multiethnic family to Abraham, and that family was given to him in Jesus Christ.”
Third, Derwin was once asked “Why do you preach about racism so much?” His answer was because the Bible does, because the Bible preaches against the sin of racism, and because the Bible preachers about ethnic unity.
Fourth, because the vision of the kingdom of God is inescapably and culturally and essentially multiethnic. Read this vision:
They sing a new song:
You are worthy to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God
saints from every tribe and language and people and nation;
you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God,
and they will reign on earth (Revelation 5:9-10).
There is something profoundly multiethnic in Revelation. If you read it carefully you will know the Christian communities in the cities mentioned in chapters two and three were tiny, and hardly a threat to Rome and certainly not an uncountable multitude. So read that passage again. How was it going to get that big?
Fifth, because Jesus prayed for unity of all believers, and “all” means all.
I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me (John 17:20-21).
And, sixth, because the mission of God is to form a people for his glory from the whole world. Abraham heard the words of the promise that his people would bless all the nations of the world. And the apostle Paul took on this very mission: to teall the nations, the ethnic groups, about the gospel.
And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the Gentiles shall be blessed in you.” For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed (Galatians 3:8-9).
For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:13).
It’s worth talking about.
YES. And I would add because it is a matter of discipleship. Our minds and hearts need transformation by the Holy Spirit so that we can see and honor all people as God’s image bearers, repent of the ways we’ve not done that, and seek to repair what sin has broken.
Yes, please keep talking about the issue of race. But it's not that easy to do. Twenty-five years ago a number of us worked together to create a racially-diverse church, only to be surprised by the issues that challenged us. Music was the first challenge. Our black members were uninspired by our white hymns and our white members didn't get Black music. A small detail? No, it's about the very nature of worship in most churches. And that's just the beginning of the challenges.