At my church, since shortly after Easter, we've been doing a sermon series on the Book of Acts. Now, it's been a very big-picture review of the book, we're not really doing every verse or even every story, we're focusing largely on the major beats of the book and what it says about the nature, origin, and source of power for the church. Last week, the sermon covered basically the whole first missionary journey, and this coming Sunday I've been asked to preach on the second. Which I am in the process of preparing, there is a big lesson from the whole trip, that's all fine. One thing I will not have time to talk about in depth there, however, that I really feel a desire to talk about, is what happened between those two trips.
Most of Acts 15 is occupied with the Jerusalem Council, at which they addressed the question of the day: how Jewish do gentile converts need to become to be considered Christian? That is, as non-Jewish people were entering what was then a predominately Jewish movement, how much did they have to adopt Jewish practice to be welcomed as members? The short answer in that particular instance was very little. It was observed at the council that the Holy Spirit was being poured out on gentile converts, which seemed to indicate God's acceptance of them (us, let's be honest here), and that acceptance into the church had been established as being a function of grace and not keeping the Mosaic law. Therefore, it made no sense to demand that people make themselves as Jewish as they could before they could be considered Christian. Which, as it happens, reminds me of something else going on. I've been trying to figure out a way to say some of this, but I think instead I'll let someone else present the general concept and then just show how it applies.
Shannon raises a number of concerns above, but the one that is most relevant here is that the default expectation of white Americans, and white American churches if I'm honest, is that black people need to prove they can be white before they can be considered Americans (or Christians, in the churches). Because of the nature of this blog, I'm going to zero in on the application specific to churches and Christians, using the same general concepts that Shannon uses to zero in on sports (his own area of expertise).
See, when countries like England and Spain and France were out conquering the world, they had this notion that having Christians in the culture made the culture Christian. When Spanish missions were popping up in the new world, for instance, they did not simply tell the native peoples around them about Christ and offer whatever gifts they had in service to the community. They demanded cultural conquest; in their minds, being Christian wasn't simply a matter of serving Christ as Lord and rejecting the authority and draw of sin. It wasn't simply being Catholic, as the missionaries were. It was living like the Spanish do, thinking like the Spanish do, speaking the Spanish language, eating Spanish food. Being Christian meant, for all intents and purposes, being thoroughly Spanish. This notion carried over to the new world. People around the world recoil at the concept of missionaries because they, or their elders, have memories of people coming in and establishing an American lifestyle and an American style of worship and American values and calling it all the gospel. This is why my wife and I, as hopeful future missionaries, are targeting a sending agency that would put us under the authority of native-born church planters, to lend them our skills and gifts but let them decide how the actual work is carried out; we are refusing to establish little outposts of America and call them churches, even accidentally. And this is happening at home. Consider the recoil against identity politics. I have heard some version of this at all kinds of levels, from major movements within denominations to individual elders at little local churches, that "well, we want to support people who are hurting, but we don't want to get wrapped up in identity politics." But what are identity politics? Basically, they're nothing more than people saying "because of this, or these, aspect(s) of who I am, I have these specific concerns and issues and goals." See, what we are saying when we talk about wanting to avoid that, is that we want to help people who are hurting, as long as they are hurting in ways we understand. As long as they are hurting in ways we hurt. That people who do not share our history, or our experiences, or our backgrounds, or our relationship to government authority, must nonetheless act like they do before we can view them as brothers and sisters with an equal share of Christ and an equal right to be supported as family. In fact, we sometimes treat it as an attack on the gospel itself to consider the possibility that people with a different ethnic background are facing different problems. As Shannon pointed out, we expect them to look at the flag and our nation's history through our lens rather than their own before we're willing to consider their concerns valid. Because this is what we've convinced ourselves Christianity looks like. Being a Christian means viewing the world and one's nation and one's flag and history the way white Evangelical Republicans do. And the result is that my Facebook wall has dozens of posts from people saying they do not, and cannot, understand how certain forms of protest help advance the cause. Hear me on this: no one cares if you understand. Very little of it is aimed at making you understand (blocking traffic does tend to have the implicit "if you're this angry about being unable to advance for an hour, imagine how angry you would be if your entire culture was unable to advance for decades" statement, but not everything does). The question is, are you listening? And if you are listening, what are you going to do about it?
Protest march against police violence - Justice for George Floyd by Fibonacci Blue. Used under Creative Commons.
This basic issue was already addressed. At the Council of Jerusalem it was decided that people who are part of, or enter, the church do not have any requirements to adopt the mannerisms or rules or behaviors of the people who were already in the church. They needed to serve Christ, and while this will make some changes in their lives, the established church doesn't get to dictate full compliance with their own cultural norms before they are seen as brothers and sisters in Christ. No ethnic or cultural group gets to decide that Christianity naturally looks like their cultural norms. They didn't need to act like they had lived under the strict Pharisaical laws for generations before the Holy Spirit was poured out on them, they didn't need to get circumcised or adopt Jewish rituals before they could be considered Christians and given all the welcome and support that entails. Why now do we behave as though our black brothers and sisters have to act like they have our background, act like they have only our problems, act like us before we can extend the fullness of brotherhood to them? Why do we demand that they think like us, vote like us, walk like us, live fully like us, eat our food, speak our language, protest in a way we approve, before we can see any way to support them as family?
What is it going to take for us to listen? How many people are going to die before we decide to work with the hurting, to mourn with those who mourn, to weep with those who weep, to stand as agents of the Author of Life against forces that are bringing death and destruction? How badly must the world break around us before we realize that our own brokenness is feeding into it? How much more will we burden our brothers and sisters, people in our churches and serving the same Christ, not only with the trials they already face, but with our silence and judgment in the face of it? "Now therefore why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they also are."
|
Social Justice in the Church | |
So they left. Because what had become apparent was that they were never anything more than guests. What so many white evangelical churches had done was welcome people in who didn't look like them, but then kind of expected those people to start looking like them. White churches continued to have white leadership that talked about the desire for reconciliation but did not ask what it was that had kept people away to begin with. There were no changes to the culture of those churches, no involvement of new ideas about practical issues secondary to the gospel. Sermons would look at abortion debates and rail on and on about the value of life and the need to protect it at all costs and then turn away any discussion on black youth laying dead in the street because they felt racial discussion was divisive; or worse, they would condemn the dead and pray for protection of the shooter from the trials they faced for killing someone. I've known some who have left the faith, or at least the church, entirely; but many simply walked away from a place they came to understand they never really belonged anyway and went looking for the places that had always looked like them.
Controversy | |
Recently, a group called Founders Ministries released the trailer to a new documentary called By What Standard? which boasted input from a wealth of Southern Baptist leaders and theologians. The description the documentary offers for itself is that it is attempting to reveal and counter views seeping into the church that threaten to water down the gospel. While the documentary has not been released, so no one outside of the production team really know what it will say, the trailer focuses on those who have criticized how the church has handled issues like racial turmoil and sexual assault. |
There are two things about which everyone involved, even the leaders being presented as attacking the church, seem to agree on. One is that the existing attempts at racial integration have not worked and probably can never work; the debate is about why it didn't work and what to do about it. The second is that there is nothing that should be allowed to take the place of the gospel at the heart of the church; the difference is whether or not other things have any place in the church.
You see, when someone comes along and says that we need to seek input from the people who feel hurt by the church, to find out how the church hurt them and if it can do anything to fix that, they are not necessarily saying that the church should then use that input as the fundamental basis for their activities. They can, of course, there are cases of that happening; but most often what is actually being suggested is that we learn how to apply the gospel in a way that more accurately shows the love of Christ and our unity in Him to the people around us. It is not a compromise of the gospel to ask how different people are hearing the gospel and what we can do to help them better understand it in their own lives.
It is true that we should not allow anything into our churches that contradicts the Bible. I would argue it is just as true that we should not allow ourselves to reject things that work alongside the Bible simply because they weren't born in the church. Social justice is not evil; it can become an idol, but so can everything else. I daresay our idea of a perfect church can be just as much of an idol. The desire to preserve the culture of the church, a culture that so often looks far more American than Christian, is not less of an incursion than allowing work to be done about real issues people in the community are facing.
And this is why racial integration didn't work. It's also why so many victims of abuse have left. It wasn't because the black people or the assault victims in the congregation demanded too much, it was because none of their requests or desires were considered important enough to try. We had decided that the culture of the church needed to look how we had designed it and then called any concern or idea that came from outside the white male experience as being a distraction. And any distraction was labeled an attempt to subvert the good work of the church, a "godless ideology." The white church was white to the core and made the mistake of thinking that anything black came from outside the church and had to be guarded against. We sought to bring them in so we could see they were there but never gave them the means to make it their home as well. The abused cried out for us to help them, to show the compassion of Christ on them and condemn the work of their abusers for their violence, and we told them they mattered and were important but refused to behave in any way that would show this to be true.
And now that they're leaving, we're bickering over whether or not it would be Christian of us to set our ideal experience aside and allow the changes that would make us look like the first century church we were trying to emulate in the first place. We told them their presence mattered but never allowed them to feel as though they mattered as people, let alone as siblings in Christ, as equal participants in a church that can cross cultural divides. We opened windows in our cultural walls and then cried foul when people on the other side pointed out that the wall was still there. We silenced people who had something uncomfortable to say and then condemned them for feeling invisible and unwanted around us.
It is true that we must not let the gospel, or the Bible that delivers that gospel, to be dethroned from the core of who we are. It is also true that in our treatment of people who have come to us asking for action regarding pain in their lives, we have been wrong. And we have people now standing up and calling us to repentance for our arrogance and dismissal of people who we invited in and then hurt. And if we will not at least be humble enough to ask if we were anything less than perfect, to even briefly consider the possibility that we are failing to live out the call God has placed on us, then we cannot expect God to have much patience with us.
There are places in this nation where the land is soft and yielding, where you can throw a hundred seeds, and ten good plants will sprout, and a thousand weeds, and the church will praise the massive amount of growth.
And there are places in this nation where the land is rocky and dry, where you can throw out a hundred seeds, and ten good plants will sprout, and they will stand alone in an otherwise barren field.
And it is growing increasingly frustrating to see people from the first land mourning how hard it is to see growth in the latter, and proclaim that they alone can farm it.
Archives
January 2023
September 2022
August 2022
June 2022
May 2022
April 2022
March 2022
January 2022
January 2021
August 2020
June 2020
February 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
July 2019
June 2019
May 2019
February 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
September 2018
Categories
All
1 Corinthians
1 John
1 Peter
1 Samuel
1 Thessalonians
1 Timothy
2 Corinthians
2 John
2 Peter
2 Thessalonians
2 Timothy
3 John
Acts
Addiction
Adoption
Allegiance
Apollos
Baptism
Baptist Faith And Message
Baptists
Bitterness
Book Review
Christ
Christian Living
Christian Nonviolence
Church Planting
Colossians
Communion
Community
Conference Recap
Conservative Resurgence
Deuteronomy
Didache
Discipleship
Ecclesiology
Ecumenism
Envy
Ephesians
Eschatology
Evangelism
Failure
False Teachers
Fundamentalist Takeover
Galatians
General Epistles
Genesis
George Herbert
Giving
Gods At War
God The Father
God The Son
Goliath
Gospel Of John
Gospel Of Matthew
Great Tribulation
Heaven
Hebrews
Hell
Heresy
History
Holy Spirit
Idolatry
Image Bearing
Image-bearing
Immigration
Inerrancy
Ireland
James
Jonathan Dymond
Jude
King David
Law
Love
Luke
Malachi
Millennium
Mission
Money
New England
Numbers
Pauline Epistles
Philemon
Philippians
Power
Pride
Psalms
Purity
Race
Rapture
Redemptive History
Rest
Resurrection
Revelation
Romans
Sabbath
Salvation
Sanctification
School
Scripture
Series Introduction
Sermon
Sex
Small Town Summits
Social Justice
Stanley E Porter
Statement Of Faith
Sufficiency
Testimony
The Good Place
Thomas Watson
Tithe
Titus
Trinity
Trust
Victory
Who Is Jesus
Works
Worship
Zechariah