This week a year ago, our world was shook with the COVID-19 pandemic. As many of us sheltered in place to flatten the curve, life seemed to become less noisy. Then, another disease broke through that quiet—racial inequity. The explosion has been deafening.
It was not that racial inequity had not been there (particularly for persons of color). Yet with the impact of COVID-19 and the constant unknown, America’s sin of institutionalized, systemic racism reared, roared, and ravaged beyond surface tension.
Hashtags increased. Protests escalated.
Unsure of Christians
In all the chaos, I looked for the church. The bride of Christ. I saw some Christ’s followers having mind-renewing, life-shifting epiphanies as their eyes opened to the realization of racism in 21st century America. Then, I noticed other Christ followers, some of them in my local church community and some whom I called friends.
- They were angered by the manner of the protests, not the injustice that caused them.
- They were angered by the phrase, Black Lives Matter, not the racial inequity that spawned it.
- They were angered by the division of opinion on racism within the church, not the racism itself.
- They were angered by the terms white privilege and white fragility without doing the soul-searching work to understand it.
- They were angered by the use of racial terms like black and white because they falsely believed God to be “color-blind”.
Witnessing them, I felt unsafe and unsure. For months, I have been at a crossroads when it comes to church. These racial injustices revealed the true mindsets of the white people in my church networks. Some of them did not love me and people who looked like me as much as they loved themselves. This was not of Christ. These Christians were not like him.
“Jesus is ideal and wonderful, but you Christians—you are not like him.”*Bara Dada, philosopher
How could I keep showing up, whether virtually or in-person, to worship with Christians who were not like Christ?
* Jones, E. Stanley. The Christ of the Indian Road, New York: The Abingdon Press, 1925. (Page 114)