23 churches report 907 Dec. 24 visitors

 

 

 

My View

To belong to Christ means we must attack the root structures of racial division far more than we have done so far. It’s not simply
an individual problem.
In seminary I shared a class project with a friend, now a pastor in Kansas. We would work late at night in the campus library. When we left, both driving older cars, he would inevitably be stopped driving through a white neighborhood by the police. I was never bothered.
The only difference I could tell was I was Anglo-American. He was African-American.
I don’t believe those police officers intended to be racist. Their actions reflected structural racism.
In Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, the authors document that ours is “a society wherein race matters profoundly for differences in life experiences, life opportunities and social relationships.”
They say we are “a society that allocates differential economic, political, social and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines that are socially constructed.”
To belong to Christ means we must engage in the hard work of rethinking how we can be bridge builders across the racial divide both individually and structurally.
I don’t have any great answers. I offer instead a great teaching from Paul on the truth of the gospel: “There is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free. There is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
I do know that oneness in Christ is the great cause to which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life. I do know oneness is a great cause to which the Christian faith has addressed itself in every generation.
Christ claims us. He calls us to confession, to forgiveness as the justified and to engagement in building bridges as the sanctified, those who belong to Christ.
Growing up I lived in an Illinois farming community. A law in that town during the early 1960s said that no person of Negro descent could remain in the city limits after sundown.
The largest collection of those with Hispanic surnames was outside the city limits in a huddle of homes that we referred to as “Little Mexico.”
We lived in a white, middle-class ghetto and weren’t aware of it. To my shame, I realized that we were part of the problem. Confession was, and still is, in order.
I believe God is calling on us as Christians to take the lead in building the bridges of God. We need to get out of the ghetto of indifference.
Part of the problem is that we are culturally, racially and nationally nearsighted. We can see things only from our perspective.
Dr. Deborah Plummer in Racing Across the Lines: Changing Race Relations Through Friendship comments, “As humans, we have a natural tendency toward ethnocentrism—the belief that our culture is the standard by which to judge all other cultures. We also have a tendency toward cultural myopic thinking—the belief that our culture is relevant to all others. If we hold a spiritual perspective and the belief that we are all created in the image and likeness of God, ethnocentrism and cultural myopia are not problematic. In the last analysis, we are all an expression of God’s diversity. Friends that cross racial lines reflect this truth.”
We need to reject cultural myopia and reach out in friendship. Friends, racial reconciliation is the cause of Christ. As Christians we are called to be bridge builders!