Monday, September 30, 2013

95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #64


To break out of the white cultural status quo of today’s evangelical movement, we must confront hard truths about ourselves and about the things that truly drive our institutions. If we don’t, we’ll never find ourselves in that place of total freedom and faith until that allows us to be used by God in radical ways.  As evangelical leaders, are we trusting in God to use us to build his kingdom—in all its glorious diversity—or are we too busy trying, in his name, to preserve our own?

Edward Gilbreath, Reconciliation Blues: A Black Evangelical’s Inside View of White Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 82-83. 

[Read the Introduction to 95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity here.]

Sunday, September 29, 2013

95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #63


America is a racist nation by nature, and the American church is complicit in this sin if it continues to remain silent. . . .One of the blights on American history will be that we the church, those of us who call ourselves by God’s name, did not lead in the struggle for racial reconciliation, that we did not provide a model, that we were not the ones showing the way. . . .The world awaits a different statement from the Christian community about race. Racial reconciliation has been a very difficult thing for the American church to pursue. We’ve gone all over the world to win souls, but we haven’t dealt very well with racial reconciliation right here in America. As Christians, it’s possible for us to do wonderfully holy things crossculturally without ever experiencing a fundamental change in our thinking about crosscultural matters.

Edward Gilbreath, Reconciliation Blues: A Black Evangelical’s Inside View of White Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 46-48, 81. 

[Read the Introduction to 95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity here.]

Saturday, September 28, 2013

95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #62


Our common history in this country has enslaved us in different ways, but it has enslaved us all. You might say we’ve suffered different generational curses. Some of us have been held down by discrimination, and some of us have been prisoners to power. Some of us have been addicted to crack, and some of us have been addicted to money. But God has set us free for life together.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Free to Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2008), 191.

[Read the Introduction to 95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity here.]

Friday, September 27, 2013

95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #61


The tragedy of our public life in America is that we have tried to move beyond a history of racial injustice without accounting for how race made us who we are as a nation. . .Another way of saying this is that the language of multiculturalism makes it harder for the church to speak in tongues.  Caught up in the story of America, we forget that the Bible reverses the story of Babel not with a melting pot but with Pentecost.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Free to Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2008), 180-181.

[Read the Introduction to 95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity here.]

Thursday, September 26, 2013

95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity: #60


The same ideology of white power that shaped white Christianity also influenced the formation of the black church.  If white Christians had submitted themselves more to Jesus than to the idol of whiteness, they would have embraced black brothers and sisters as equals and there never would have been a “white church.”  But there would have not been a black church either.  All of our histories have been compromised by the sin of white supremacy.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Free to Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2008), 147.

[Read the Introduction to 95 Theses for Christian Racial & Ethnic Unity here.]