On Saturday, August 12, and Sunday, August 13, faith leaders around the United States addressed their congregations who had watched the news coming from Charlottesville, Virginia. They had the privilege -- and challenge -- of helping people understand and interpret our society through the convictions of shared faith.It is not the first time clergy and other congregational leaders have had to respond to a significant event as it was still unfolding. Each time it happens is an incredible responsibility, one that requires the clarity of conviction in the midst of the confusion of circumstances. Sermons that have been written have to be rewritten. Educational classes become public conversations. Worship becomes confession and lament, and we together recommit to work for justice, equality, and peace.
The issues that two days in Charlottesville again laid bare within our society -- white supremacy, racism and injustice, violence and intimidation -- these issues are not new. And they will not be quickly healed or remedied. Congregational leaders will, tragically, have many more opportunities to confront them and to address them from the heart of faith. Congregational leaders will be given the opportunity to remind their congregations of God's deep hope for the world and our responsibility to be partners in pursuing it.
Our colleagues at Faith & Leadership have been collecting stories and learnings from Charlottesville and from other parts of the country, and we offer these resources to you to spark your imagination and remind you that you are not alone.
Faith & Leadership
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
Sarah Thompson: Jesus is calling us to pick up our cross
"Creating a better world for all God's people"
Christian leaders seeking to oppose white supremacy can take actions from public statements to non-violent direct action, says the executive director of Christian Peacemaker Teams, who trained clergy in Charlottesville.Christian leaders who seek to combat violence and hatred can do more than debate tactics and post to Facebook, says the executive director of Christian Peacemaker Teams.
She said those actions can range from making public statements to training in non-violent direct action -- skills as specific as how to dodge bullets. Church leaders also should work to connect with vulnerable people in their communities.
“We believe in the power of resurrection, so we need to not have fear of death. Bring to the communities that are so impacted by this the message to not be afraid,” Sarah Thompson said. “But we need to back up that message of 'Do not be afraid' with actions.”Christian Peacemaker Teams(link is external) was created in 1984 by leaders from historic peace churches -- Mennonite and Church of the Brethren -- who wanted to organize and train people to non-violently respond to conflict.
Much of their work has been in countries such as Iraq, Colombia, the West Bank and Mexico, but increasingly they have been called to work in North America. Their organization was invited to Charlottesville to train and prepare people in advance of the neo-Nazi rally there.
Thompson shared her thoughts on the work in Charlottesville with groups such as Deep Abiding Love(link is external) and Congregate Charlottesville(link is external), and offered suggestions for Christian leaders seeking to combat hate in their communities. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What is the basis for the work you do?Our basic perspective as Christian Peacemaker Teams is, What if those of us who believe in peace and justice are willing to train as hard for it as military is training for war? And what if those of us who believe in peace and justice were willing to give up our lives as much as we expect soldiers to give up theirs? What could happen?
What would happen if we put as many resources into creative, non-violent experiences as we do into violent, destructive ones? What could happen? That’s the vision.
Q: What would you recommend that people of faith do if these situations become more common or if they find themselves in places where demonstrations are happening?Something that’s really important is to spend less time debating about the tactics that the front lines use and get ourselves closer to the front lines.
Organize with your community. So prepare for political disasters, as well as natural disasters, by talking with your neighbors and forming really your own mini-sanctuary to know how to respond.
Prepare in advance, get some training, some non-violent direct action training on how to stay strong in the face of violence.
Q: What do you mean when you say get closer to the front lines?A lot of energy has been spent on like whether the antifascists were right in escalating the conflict [in Charlottesville] or not. Should we just ignore them and hope they’ll go away?
People are debating if it’s smart to be out there or not to be out there, when these things are going on. And people are debating that from a position of comfort, often, rather than training to see where you can find your place in the movement.
How to get close to the front lines? Prepare and do trainings and organize for how you want to lock arms, for what you want to do, for how you can build bridges. If you’re in the faith community, how you can build bridges with activists in your community who are not in the faith community?
What they did really well in Charlottesville was they worked hard to bring secular activists and activists of faith together in conversation about the different tactics that they were going to use in facing white supremacy and neo-Nazis.
And the fact that they were going to use different tactics didn’t stop them from working together and talking about how they could support each other in the actions they decided to take.
Q: When you say support each other, you mean the faith community and the antifa, or anti-fascists, who are being criticized for escalating the conflict?Instead of criticizing what people decided to do, get closer to the realities that we’re living in under the pressure of white supremacy and learn from that.
Because what antifa did was actually smart. They escalated the conflict, not intending to do harm, but they escalated conflict just enough so that the actual rally couldn’t happen, and that’s really important and it’s strategic because it’s significant that there was no platform given to white supremacy in Charlottesville. The white supremacists were there, but the rally did not happen.
And they were strategic enough to only do enough to get it canceled; once it was canceled they left.
Q: What specific actions would you recommend for Christian leaders?Here’s one thing you can do: Use your platform to make sure that you denounce white supremacy and its impact on our faith and how it’s captured so much of the imagination of Christians -- our purity politics, our patriarchy, our nationalism.
It’s really important if people personally don’t stand for [white supremacy], that they make a statement and they deal with the potential backlash. It’s important that people make their own statements. It doesn’t need to be long, it doesn’t need to add to the clamor.
There’s no such thing as a passive ally. The direction and pressure of society is to support white racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, so it’s important to be an active ally.
And they can say, too, not only what they denounce but what they’re for, and the steps that they’re personally taking to build that type of society. That’s welcome in the statement, which anyone in leadership can make.
Q: And you think that’s meaningful? I could see someone perceiving that as an empty gesture.Well, I would prefer if it wasn’t on Facebook and that they did speak about it from the pulpit and in Sunday schools and in other public spaces.
They can join fellow allies and make friends there and build real relationships with people who are different than them. But some of that starts with this statement, so that people know that you’re a faith person that they can turn to with their questions and their frustrations.
Q: What would you advise people who see debates on Facebook but aren’t sure what to actually do?I would convey to the Christian leaders who have privilege in any way, shape or form, that Jesus is calling us to pick up our cross and to spend time with those who are being crucified.
We believe in the power of resurrection, so we need to not have fear of death. Bring to the communities that are so impacted by this the message to not be afraid.
But we need to back up that message of “Do not be afraid” with actions. We need to recognize that our Christianity calls us to align with the poor and repressed and to challenge a state and the 1 percent that continues to make money off the backs of everyone.
What we’re partially seeing is white folks are now even being affected in the ways that blacks and brown people have been affected and they’re mad -- it’s just that their anger’s not directed towards the state, it’s directed towards more vulnerable people.
As faith leaders, it’s our job to help people direct their anger well and to build the communities that we want to see as an alternative. To recognize that limitless growth is not OK, limitless growth promoted by corporate businesses and these ways of being is not possible.
And so a deepening of our theology that accepts limits, that makes non-violence central, and that reaches across these divides to speak to people’s pain and helping to direct it in really healthy ways is what we can do.
It’s a time for us to count the costs and to move forward in boldness.
Q: Your work primarily is in other countries, but you were on the ground in Charlottesville. Talk about your organization and the work it does.
Our role was to support the work of local clergy in Charlottesville and their mobilization, and support the Deep Abiding Love Project, who called us in to do trainings with regards to dealing with multiple armed actors.
Because a lot of our non-violence trainings up until this point in the U.S. were about how to deal with the state as a violent actor.
However, we have learned from the wisdom from people around the world for the last 30 years is what to do when there are multiple violent actors in the mix: What to be aware of, how to protect yourselves and others, how to work across different sectors of a population in order to mobilize -- so that’s why we were there.
Q: Is this the first time you’ve taken experience learned overseas and brought it to bear in the U.S.?
We’ve been doing this since Ferguson. But actually even before, in anti-war stuff. We’ve always been about this exchange of ideas. We have lot to learn from brothers and sisters who are resisting everywhere.
So we’ve been doing it for a while, but it’s just being more popular and known right now. We train people in Chicago every year in a month-long peacemaker training, and then we also do these short-term trainings.
Q: And your trainings are about non-violent response to potentially violent actors?
Non-violent direct action is what we train, because that’s our area of expertise. Non-violent direct action for us is what flows out of our faith, because we don’t see any justification for violence in the life of Jesus, and so in the life of his followers is also one of a renunciation of violence.
Q: When you say “direct action,” what do you mean?
Direct action is going to be a disciplined, public approach to addressing a social harm. In this case, the social harm was the gathering of neo-Nazis, the white supremacists.
It is a coordinated and disciplined public witness resisting violence and proclaiming another way, another path.
Q: And you teach specific techniques and skills?
We teach techniques and skills, but we also work together on how to debrief and how to prepare and how to work with medics, and teach the history of social struggle and resistance.
We teach theology -- we look at our theology and see where the basis for this is and then build on that.
Q: How did you get involved in Charlottesville?
We were invited by Congregate Charlottesville, which was training local clergy to be ready for an action that was potentially arrest-able.
They were going to block the entrance to the park where the rally was to be held. And because their action was technically un-permitted, the state was going to remove them. The neo-Nazis arrived before the state could really react, and so things started popping off earlier.
Q: If people saw pictures or video of those folks, what would we have seen that reflect your training?
We worked with local clergy -- not as much for others who came in nationally -- but the local clergy who led the action understood the risks that they were taking. So we walked through the risks.
We walked through helping people figure out how to observe a lot of things and notice them and speak to them, where they move around. They used the power of song, they knew what their plan was and they knew who was leading the action, so they knew who to defer to and debrief later. There’s just a lot of little things.
The choice of tactics was already in place before I got there this time, but otherwise we would’ve developed together a plan for the action to make the strongest statement and to have the optics that are really important.
It’s about dramatizing the contrast between the world as it is and the world that we want to see, so I think the clergy did a great job of showing that they were standing on the side of love.
We practice our messaging; we talk about what we’re willing to risk; we practice bullet dodging. We practice zigzag running, we practice how to vacate an area safely, we practice how to yell if there’s a knife in the crowd, how to use body language, how to use our voices, and other things to reclaim the space for those who are seeking to resist injustice.
We practice thinking ahead of time about what our death would mean to our families and communities and to getting our advanced medical directives together and having our own statements written out about why we’re doing what we’re doing.
Q: And when you say bullet dodging, you mean literal bullet dodging?
Yes. We practice running, ducking, hitting the ground, zigzagging, finding safe spaces. We practice some community security tactics, knowing how to move two by two.
See, with the dynamics that are changing is that it’s not just the state that we’re up against, that people are facing, in terms of violence right now.
Q: And when say the state, you mean in the past it would’ve been violence potentially coming just from police -- law enforcement?
That’s correct. And it still does, but now we have another dynamic of it, the level of vigilante violence.
Q: Did you ever imagine that you would have to train people in the U.S. the way you train people abroad?
I’m not surprised, personally. A lot of people did feel that this was surreal, but we have seen levels of deterioration everywhere.
Read Faith & Leadership's interview with Sarah Thompson »
Faith & Leadership'
CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
Resources for leading amid tragedy and crisis
Bigstock / ThamKCResources for leading amid tragedy and crisisEvery tragedy -- large or small, public or private -- is different, but they all pose challenges for leadership. Our colleagues at Faith & Leadership have compiled from their archives resources for leading in times of tragedy and crisis.
Tragedy comes in many forms. The death of a child. A hurricane that kills hundreds. A string of mass shootings, now numbingly familiar … Newtown, Charleston, Orlando. At the center of each is human suffering and grief that can shake a family, a congregation, a nation, the world.
For those who lead churches and church-related institutions, such moments call upon the deepest skills of ministry and leadership. The following is a collection of articles and sermons from Faith & Leadership on leading in times of tragedy and crisis.
Leading in the midst of tragedy and crisis
Public tragedy
Craig T. Kocher: Leading institutions through public tragedy An institution’s response to a crisis should reflect the core virtues that shape the community’s ongoing life and sense of purpose, writes the former chaplain at the University of Richmond.
Dominique D. Gilliard: Reclaiming the power of lament
In an age of nonstop media that exposes us as never before to the world’s pain and brokenness, lamentation is an essential and even revolutionary act, one that the church needs desperately to reclaim, writes a young pastor.
William H. Lamar IV: Let us go to the other side
Faith and fear have always been intertwined in the Christian imagination, and our continued failure to reckon with this can only lead to continued violence, the pastor of Metropolitan AME Church says in this sermon.
William H. Lamar IV: Reject the myth of redemptive violence
In the aftermath of the mass killing in Charleston, South Carolina, church leaders must begin having real conversations about the truth of America’s history and its mistaken belief in the myth of redemptive violence, the pastor of Metropolitan AME Church says in this interview.
Natasha Jamison Gadson: After Charleston, what is the new normal for pastors, churches and Christian leaders?
The Charleston shooting presents more than just security challenges to church leaders, writes an AME minister. This moment demands honest language and an insistence that black bodies are the image of God.
Melissa Wiginton: Grace after the shooting
Everyone feels the tragedy, but few actually know the people who were hurt, writes the vice president for Education Beyond the Walls at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
Mark Ralls: Tucson as privation of the good
Christians surrender the vocabulary of evil at our peril, writes a UMC pastor.
Allison Backous Troy: How can we respond to campus shootings?
What is offered in the Gospels, and in the life of the church, is an invitation for our hearts to be healed -- an invitation that each of us can extend to others, writes a graduate of Seattle Pacific University.
Michael B. Brown: Raging winds and rising waters
Even after Hurricane Sandy left everyone feeling bruised and battered, the pastor of Marble Collegiate Church, New York City, reassured his congregation in this sermon that Christ is always with us in the storm.
Michael Jinkins: Remembering 9/11
Remembrance connects us to our past, but in a way that guides our future, writes the president of Louisville Seminary.
Bearing witness to the pain of violence
When a faith-based organization realized its tactics were not accomplishing its goal of stopping violence, members tried a new approach: simply being with people who were suffering.
Marcia Owen: Affirming the dignity of our neighbors
Justice and healing from violence are best approached by simply being with those who are suffering, says a United Methodist layperson who directs a faith-based organization.
Richard Newman: Seizing the moment
AME founder Richard Allen saw in the 1793 yellow fever epidemic an opportunity to help his fellow citizens and to advocate for equality, writes Rochester Institute of Technology history professor Richard Newman.
Tragedy and grief within a congregationKevin Adams: Ancient words in a new light
Faced with a grieving family, the Rev. Kevin Adams struggled for words. But a yearlong, congregationwide study of the Psalms helped prepare him for the moment.
Carol Howard Merritt: Serene Jones and Calvin’s ‘Anatomy of the soul
A lecture by Serene Jones reminded us we don’t have to look far to find trauma -- or grace, writes a minister, author and teacher.
Leading amid difference
Jessica Bratt: Beyond civility
I am disheartened by the vitriol in current social and political discourse, writes a Ph.D. candidate at Vanderbilt University. But let’s not pretend that civility will fix it.
Rhonda Mawhood Lee: Lessons in hospitality, from the Golden Temple of the Sikhs
At a time of increasing religious violence, an Episcopal priest recalls a long-ago visit to the Sikh Golden Temple in northern India, where radical hospitality forever shaped her vision of Christian community.
Melissa Wiginton: Crossing the aisle at Q
Try talking about something other than the worrisome future of the church, writes the vice president for Education Beyond the Walls at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
Rick Love: The key to peacemaking is drinking lots of coffee and tea
Christians should be proactive in reaching out to break down barriers between Christians and Muslims -- and often that means sharing food and drink, says the president of Peace Catalyst International.
Leanne Van Dyk: Welcome one another
At her inauguration as president of Columbia Theological Seminary, Van Dyk said the admonition to welcome one another in Romans 15 must spur us on to deeper faithfulness to the costly and difficult work of welcome.
Reconciliation and forgivenessL. Gregory Jones: Reconciling leadership from Nickel Mines
Five years after five children were killed and more wounded in a schoolhouse shooting, an Amish community shows how the tradition of forgiveness can enable a new future, writes the executive vice president and provost at Baylor University.
L. Gregory Jones and Célestin Musekura: The dance of forgiveness
Forgiveness is at the heart of the gospel, but learning how to embody it is not easy. In their new book, “Forgiving As We’ve Been Forgiven,” theologians L. Gregory Jones and Célestin Musekura provide a guide for the practice of forgiveness.
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela: Forgiveness is possible
Even after the worst atrocities, forgiveness is possible, says a South African psychologist and researcher. At its core lies empathy, the turning point where people encounter and recognize each other as human beings.
Maggy Barankitse: On forgiveness
In a short excerpt from a longer interview, the founder and president of Maison Shalom in Burundi explains the importance of forgiveness.
Crisis communicationsAnne Curley: Do the right thing
In the midst of church scandal or other crisis, leaders need to remember: people expect the truth, says communication expert Anne Curley.
Theodicy, suffering and pastoral ministryLisa Nichols Hickman: The ministry of ‘Why?’
Two scriptural resources for fielding the hardest, most important question, writes a pastor.
Ellen F. Davis: Radical trust
What kind of God would submit Abraham to the “test” of sacrificing his son, Isaac? There are just two possible answers, and both are difficult, the professor of Bible and practical theology writes.
Richard Lischer: The view from the ditch
In this sermon, the Duke Divinity professor says that from the perspective of the man in the ditch, the story of the good Samaritan asks something more profound than whether you’re willing to help: Are you ready to be rescued?
Samuel Wells: Inheriting the mantle
As new leaders in the church, divinity graduates have an opportunity to see in the church “the wonder of God’s miracles, the glory of God’s goodness, the joy of God’s humor,” writes the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, in this sermon.
Additional leadership resourcesSamuel Wells: Improvising leadership
Theatrical improvisation is an apt analogy for the Christian life and leadership, says the vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, in an interview. Both are about trust, faithfulness and imagination.
L. Gregory Jones: Lincoln’s leadership in the crucible
Abraham Lincoln’s handling of the Fort Sumter crisis in his first days as president seems miraculous until you consider that his character was formed over time to think and act in a particular way, writes the executive vice president and provost at Baylor University.
Nathan Kirkpatrick: The crash of Air France flight 447
The 2009 tragedy is a case study in leadership, teamwork and communication, writes the managing director of Alban at Duke Divinity School.
Stephanie M. Crumpton: Sometimes it’s not enough to say you’re sorry
When Christian leaders learn to hold grace and accountability in creative tension, the foundation is laid for responses that are truly transformative, writes a seminary professor.
Read more »
Faith & Leadership
RECONCILIATION, RACIAL & ETHNIC, THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION
Dominique D. Gilliard: Reclaiming the power of lament
A man in Ferguson, Missouri, holds on to a fence on August 15, 2014, at the site of a convenience store destroyed during rioting after the shooting death of Michael Brown by police.Bigstock/Gino Santa Maria
Reclaiming the power of lament
In an age of nonstop media that exposes us as never before to the world's pain and brokenness, lamentation is an essential and even revolutionary act, one that the church needs desperately to reclaim, says a young pastor.
Somewhere along the way, we modern Christians got lament wrong: we began thinking of it as optional instead of a required practice of the faith. A strange word to modern ears, “lamentation” feels inherently ancient. It brings to mind images of an overwrought demonstration of mourning -- sackcloth and ashes, “wailing and gnashing of teeth” of biblical proportions.
More than the mere expression of sorrow and regret, however, lamentation is a powerful act, one that the church desperately needs to reclaim. In our world of nonstop news and social media, lamentation is an essential and even revolutionary act.
Scripture suggests that lamentation is a liturgical act that reorients and transforms us. Lamentation is uncensored communion with God -- visceral worship where we learn to be honest, intimate and humble before God. Lamentation is both an acknowledgment that things are not as they should be and an anguished wail, beckoning the Lord to intervene with righteousness and justice.
When we lament, we confess our humanity and concede that we are too weak to combat the world’s powers, principalities and spiritual wickedness on our own. When we lament, we declare that only God has the power to truly mend the world’s pain and brokenness.
Why is that so relevant to our times? Tragedy, after all, has always existed. But today, we are bombarded by an unprecedented, unceasing stream of media that exposes us to the world’s pain and brokenness as never before.
We not only hear about the tragedies in Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and Waller County, Texas; we now also routinely see traumatizing video of unarmed civilians being killed -- Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Walter Scott, Sam Dubose.
Nevertheless, before we truly grieve one tragedy, another occurs. So in our rush to keep up with our newsfeeds, with the latest scandal, the newest tragedy, we move on before processing the trauma we have just witnessed. We move on to stay up to date -- and in part, because we believe that our minds and our hearts, like our smartphones, can hold only so much.
Lamentation, however, forces us to slow down. In the midst of daily tragedy, lamentation requires us to stay engaged after the cameras and publicity move on. It summons us to immerse ourselves in the pain and despair of the world, of our communities, of our own sinfulness.
Still, why lament?
Because, paradoxically, often the best way to cure pain is to engage it.
Lamentation prevents us from becoming numb and apathetic to the pain of our world and of those whom we shepherd. Lamentation begets revelation. It opens our eyes to death, injustice and oppression we had not even noticed. It opens our ears to the sounds of torture, anguish and weeping that are the white noise of our world. To live without lament is to live an unexamined life.
Lamentation requires four steps: remembrance, reflection, confession and repentance.
The first step, always, is to remember.
Memory and faith are fundamentally connected. Again and again, more than 100 times, Scripture implores believers to “remember.”
God repeatedly instructed Israel to remember that they were once slaves, foreigners and exiles. As a people liberated by God’s grace, Israel was to use that memory to shape and dictate their purpose, praxis and relationships. Remembrance was the linchpin of Israel’s faithfulness.
When Israel forgot, they turned from God, became self-centered, practiced idolatry and enacted injustice. Forgetting God’s command to “not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice” (Deuteronomy 24:17 NIV), Israel became disobedient, building social systems and structures that privileged some while discriminating against others.
Remembrance, therefore, is vitally important; it anchors our identity and compels us to make connections to the past. History is essential, because it provides context and greater clarity for our present and future.
Without history, lamentation seems unnecessary. Why would you lament what you do not remember?
A faith devoid of lamentation aborts history and forsakes remembrance. This is the predicament we find ourselves in today.
One of the primary failures of Western Christianity is its ahistorical nature. History summons us as Christians to confess, lament and repent of our role in and apathy toward our nation’s record of injustice and exploitation. Lamentation compels us to expose what the powerful seek to conceal and deny. If the church took history seriously, it would have no choice to but to lament the exterminated, demarcated and violated bodies of our nation’s past and present.
From the days of Pharaoh and Caesar right down to today, history and Scripture reveal that oppression is always institutionalized and structural. The sinful manifestations of a hardened heart have never been confined to interpersonal interactions. Too often, the hardened heart of an entire people is expressed collectively through institutions, organizations, governments -- and even the church.
Institutional injustice is part of our nation’s history. As a church, we have failed to confess and lament this reality. Too often, we have conformed to the pattern of this world and have not been transformed by the renewing of our minds. Consequently, we have become as prone as anyone else to engage in segregation, discrimination and oppression. The injustices of racism, sexism, classism, mass incarceration and militarism are all consequences of our failure to live in remembrance and lamentation.
History, however, roots us in humility; remembrance compels us to lament. In lamentation, we acknowledge that sin has distorted our relationship with God, our neighbors and creation. Lament beckons us to discern how we can recalibrate our relating in light of the gospel.
When faithfully engaged and authentically enacted, lamentation keeps us accountable to our baptismal vows. It reminds us of our need for God, one another and the Holy Spirit’s guidance. Lamentation is a form of centering prayer that shapes our discipleship and missiology; it illuminates blind spots in our lives and ministry, helping us to make our evangelism more responsible and contextual.
How well are we as church leaders cultivating space for lamentation? Recent studies suggest that we have room for growth.
In his upcoming book “Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times,” (link is external)Soong-Chan Rah, a professor at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, cites several studies documenting the church’s tendency to avoid lament. Psalms of lament, he notes, are the psalms most commonly omitted from the lectionary and other liturgies. Though they account for almost 40 percent of the psalms, laments represent a very small percentage of the contents in many denominations’ hymnals. And very few of the songs most commonly sung in worship are laments, Rah tells us.
Rah contends that the absence of lament in our liturgy results in the loss of memory.
“We are reluctant to stay in the narrative of suffering, lament and pain,” Rah writes in the book’s introduction.
In a watershed moment like the one we are in today, this is a problem. Without history and lament, how can the church know what healing, unity and reconciliation look like? And how can it model them for the world?
Read more from Dominique Gilliard »
Faith & LEADERSHIP
RECONCILIATION, RACIAL & ETHNIC
Drew G.I. Hart: Changing the way the church views racism
Changing the way the church views racismChristians need to adopt a deeper, more complex understanding of how race shapes our lives and communities, says the author and theologian in this interview. And to resist racism, we need to 'recover' Jesus, taking Christ and Scripture seriously.
The church in the United States has had a long and troubled history with race and racism. And though most people today agree that racism is bad, many Christians still operate out of deeply held social intuitions -- basically, gut feelings -- about race, shaped by the broader culture and even Christian culture, says Drew G.I. Hart.
“We all have to take responsibility as a society,” Hart said. “Maybe we’re not overt about it, but we’re all participating in a racialized society in which none of us have our hands clean.”
An assistant professor of theology at Messiah College, Hart is the author of “Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism,” published in January by Herald Press. In the book, Hart urges the church to move from a “thin” account of race and racism to a “thicker,” more complex understanding that acknowledges how race shapes our lives and communities.
“We’re all navigating race and racism every day,” he said. “The question is, are we doing it faithfully? Are we aware of this long narrative of history that shapes our lives, and are we resisting it in a way that honors Jesus Christ?”
Though it may sound simple and pious, one of the most important ways Christians can resist racism is to “recover” Jesus, taking Jesus and Scripture seriously, he said.
Drew GI Hart_mug.jpg
“If we begin to take seriously this story of Israel, fulfilled in the story of Jesus, it really disrupts the white supremacist narrative,” Hart said. “You can’t live into that and follow Jesus faithfully.”Hart has a B.A. in biblical studies from Messiah College, an M.Div. from Biblical Seminary, and a Ph.D. in theology and ethics from Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. This fall, he will begin teaching full time as an assistant professor of theology at Messiah College.
Hart was at Duke Divinity School recently to teach a seminar at the Summer Institute for Reconciliation(link is external) and spoke with Faith & Leadership. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: To start, tell us about your book, “Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism.”(link is external)I wrote it after I finished my Ph.D. comprehensive exams. Instead of starting my dissertation, I wrote that book.
It was after Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri, and the protests that arose. I wanted to speak to the church about what was going on and to give both a social and a theological framework for entering into these conversations.
The book tries to move the church from having a thin definition of racism to a thicker definition that understands racial hierarchy and what that actually means every day -- how our society is racialized, and how that shapes our lives and our communities.
I wanted to give the church a theological way of thinking about this. How do we reflect on the story of Jesus and maybe respond a little bit more faithfully as a church than we have in the past?
Q: How has the church viewed racism historically?It’s complicated. Today, everyone agrees that racism is bad, but how we even define racism is often so slim. We’re usually talking about the “bad” people, people “out there” -- the KKK and people who are engaging in overt racism.
What I’m trying to do is not to see racism as a problem that’s “out there.” We all live in a society that has shaped us unconsciously in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine until we take the time to do some deep self-examination and serious reflection on America’s past and present.
A few years ago, for example, Paula Deen said some really ugly stuff. Well, it was interesting watching how people responded. Almost everybody wagged their finger -- “Bad Paula Deen!” But they did it in such a way that she’s this isolated problem, rather than realizing that Paula Deen was socialized by communities.
She didn’t create this stuff; she didn’t invent this. She was shaped by communities that socialized her way of thinking and acting and speaking.
We all have to take responsibility as a society. Maybe we’re not overt about it, but we’re all participating in a racialized society in which none of us have our hands clean.
We’re all navigating race and racism every day. The question is, are we doing it faithfully? Are we aware of this long narrative of history that shapes our lives, and are we resisting it in a way that honors Jesus Christ?
Q: So what’s been the relationship between church and race in the United States?On one hand, very early, some deep theological work was done to help foster and justify race and racism and the system of slavery.
At the same time, African Christians were reinterpreting the life of Jesus and the significance of Jesus in a very different way. They knew that Jesus was not endorsing slavery but was a liberator and a friend of those who suffer, someone who came alongside them in the midst of hard times.
So there have always been these differences. There are these ebbs and flows and challenges and contradictions deeply embedded in American Christian faith as it relates to race and racism.
But overall, the dominant narrative of race and racism and the church is a very ugly one. Very few traditions have been able to sustain an ongoing community generation after generation that doesn’t just go with their gut about race. And by that I mean the socialized intuitions around race and racism.
Most people can agree that from 1619, when the first Africans were brought over, up until the mid-20th century, most white Americans had been socialized in such a way that they did not recognize racial injustice and oppression. But today we look back and we’re like, “Oh yeah, they were missing it, right?”
That’s not really controversial.
But today we are still in the same situation. Many Christians still operate out of their social intuitions around race and racism, shaped by the broader culture, or sometimes by Christian cultures. They still just go with their gut.
That is an opportunity for us to think about the life of Jesus. It’s a different way of engaging the world and seeing the issues when we explore the world from the vantage point of the crucified Christ. And it’s a very different posture entering into these conversations as the church.
Too often in America, the church is caught in these patterns rather than being the one breaking out of the patterns and bearing witness to the kingdom of God on earth.
Q: You said you want the church to move from a thin to a thicker account of race. What’s the thin account and what’s the thick?The thin account is the very individualistic framework of race and racism. It’s, I don’t like somebody because they’re black, or whatever their skin color is.
We have in our minds, again, the KKK and cross burnings and stuff. We think that’s what racism is, this very static understanding of racism. It’s very individualistic; it’s about personal prejudice or hatred from one person to another.
A thicker definition, for me, would be to take seriously the development of race over time in history.
Why was it constructed? What was it doing? What were the sociopolitical ramifications, the economic ramifications? How did it classify people into hierarchies? How is it a widespread phenomenon?
That’s a much thicker definition that engages and is in conversation with the sociology department -- not just thinking individualistically, but trying to stretch our minds to think about the social ramifications of race and racism.
It’s also, really, at the end of the day, taking seriously people’s experiences and listening to those stories and stepping back and making sense of the realities that people confront every day as it relates to even simple things like housing, education, jobs and opportunities.
It’s broadening our understanding that racism isn’t always mean people doing things; it’s not always overt racial prejudice. There are all these other forces at work in our society and in our lives that we’re sometimes unconscious of.
Q: Is it possible to talk about racism in the United States and the church without talking about white supremacy? Aren’t racism and white supremacy two sides of the same coin?Once we get that thicker understanding of race and racism, it forces us to talk about racial hierarchy -- which is to say that race was never a neutral term.
Race was something that was constructed, a humanly constructed idea. It’s not the same thing as talking about ethnicity; it’s not a natural, biological category.
In Europe, especially during modernity, people tried to classify humanity as they observed it from their vantage point. They thought they were being objective, and they tried to classify it just like they classified everything else. It was a pseudoscientific imagination being played out as they encountered for the first time what they thought were new worlds.
But this racial hierarchy is not neutral; it was always about white supremacy.
It’s imagining white as everything good and right and beautiful in the world; the most central component of the racial hierarchy has often been anti-blackness.
And the hierarchy is not static but dynamic. It plays out in different ways in different regions.
So yes, we have to be able to talk about white supremacy. The goal of race was always either to give white people social dominance or, at the very least, to give a psychological edge to poor white people who are being crushed by some of these same systems.
Not everyone is really participating in the dominance. But certainly, everybody’s being shaped by how it’s informing their identity in the world and how they see other human beings -- the kind of belonging that they’re able to have with other people, and who they can’t imagine belonging with.
Q: And as you said, the hierarchy, with its categories, is dynamic and changing. Different ethnic groups come to America, and the definition of “white” changes.Yes. At the center, in its origins in America, are Anglo-Saxon Protestants. So if you were Italian or Irish, you were not white. Read Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin; they’re making fun of even Germans.
We don’t realize how arbitrary and malleable and dynamic these categories are. They’re changing over time and according to the whims of the majority.
Race actually changes and expands and thins out. Who’s in and who’s out changes. These are not as fixed as we imagine them to be as categories.
On one hand, they’re socially constructed; on the other hand, they’re lived realities that we have to embody.
So sometimes we can’t make sense of the two at the same time. Either we only think about it as our lived reality or we only think of it as a social construct. But they’re actually both simultaneously.
Race is very real, like this table is real. But race is also constructed; it’s a lie, in terms of the biological claims and differences in humanity. It’s a lie, but it does shape our lives.
So we have to account for those realities and figure out, where do we go as Christians moving forward?
Q: So what’s the role of the church in this? How do you change the way the church views racism?One is creating communities where we have space to have open, honest, truthful dialogue. Often, churches are very monological. There’s no space for that kind of engagement -- to be truthful and work through stuff in community.
Absent that, it’s very hard to change, unless the person who’s controlling the monologue is open to engaging in these conversations.
Having a dialogical community is important. But more important is to recover Jesus.
That sounds kind of simple and kind of pious. But I really believe we’ve so domesticated and distorted Jesus to the point that this man that was a Jew living in first-century Palestine eventually becomes the possession of the West.
He becomes a figure that is possessed and controlled by the West itself, and loses his relationship both to what it meant to be a part of the covenants of Israel and to what Willie James Jennings talks about in “The Christian Imagination”(link is external) as [our forgotten] Gentile identity and how we enter in the story.
It is very important for us to recover our own sense of Gentile-ness, so to speak, as we approach Jesus and Scripture and Israel’s story. Communities that have seen themselves as the new Israel and the saviors to the world -- all of a sudden, we’re displaced and instead are Gentiles being engrafted into somebody else’s story.
And that requires us to take somebody else’s story seriously and see that in entering somebody else’s story, there’s grace, rather than feeling like everyone’s got to come through us and become like us to meet Jesus.
So that’s one aspect.
Another is to read our Scriptures a little more seriously and maybe a little bit more subversively. There’s something subversive about what happens when you read the narrative as a whole, particularly when you read it through the lens of Jesus Christ.
It’s interesting. How is Jesus reading Scripture as he sees the prophets playing a particular role in interpreting the meaning of Israel’s story and what God intended? You have a very radical understanding of this God who has always sided with the poor and the oppressed, the widow and the orphan, the marginalized, and who calls even Israel to remember when they were once enslaved.
And this prophetic tradition is fulfilled in the story of Jesus as he comes alongside the poor masses, vulnerable women, the Samaritans. Those are the folks he clings to, those who are sick and have no access to the rest of society. He says the least, the last and the lost are the folks who are going to have a privileged space around God’s kingdom.
So if we begin to take seriously this story of Israel, fulfilled in the story of Jesus, it really disrupts the white supremacist narrative. You can’t live into that and follow Jesus faithfully.
It disrupts even our sense of American exceptionalism and how we engage around the world. All these things, these narratives that we live by, get disrupted by the story of Jesus when that becomes our own story.
Certainly, we like to call ourselves a Christian nation, and people are quick to name Jesus -- “Yeah, I love Jesus.”
That’s great, but we don’t necessarily want to follow Jesus and take Jesus seriously. We’ll skirt Jesus at every opportunity when it disrupts our own narratives.
Q: Where do you see that most vividly in Scripture in Jesus -- the subversiveness that you’re talking about?I love the four Gospels. I feel like they get so neglected.
Each of them presents this Messiah that really flips the world upside down. All four together give us a vivid portrait of who Jesus is that really brings him to life in a way that the domesticated version of him can no longer remain.
It’s really about embodying and making the story of Jesus visible, both in our individual lives and then fleshing that out in community.
Read more from Drew G.I. Hart »
Faith & Leadership
RECONCILIATION, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP
Elaine Ellis Thomas: With love from C'ville
The Rev. Elaine Ellis Thomas, center with red stole, is flanked by two local rabbis in a procession of clergy and others. The group included Charlottesville Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy, wearing white t-shirt and jeans, who called for the statue of Robert E. Lee to be removed. Photo courtesy of Elaine Ellis Thomas"
With love from C'ville"
A participant in the clergy response to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally on Aug. 12 shares her story.
As tiki torch-bearing terrorists marched on the grounds of the University of Virginia on Friday, Aug. 11, hundreds of people were gathered in my church not 100 yards away, girding ourselves for what lay ahead the next day.
We prayed and sang and listened to the soaring words of Cornel West and Traci Blackmon. Christians and Jews and Muslims offered Scripture and song and prayer.
With candles lit along the center aisle, we sang “This Little Light of Mine” and freedom songs. Folks banged on the pews and stomped their feet (something you don’t often see in our Episcopal church).
The singing continued as the violence outside increased, threatening to spill over to our side of the street. We kept on singing and reassuring people until we were able to shepherd folks out a back door in the safety of groups.
Anxiety was high, so it’s a good thing that being a pastoral, calming presence is my job. But there were moments when I regretted not bringing that overnight bag I had thought about packing at home that morning.
I’ve been in Charlottesville, Virginia, for less than three years. But I have a deep connection with this place.
My grief and anger over the events of recent days spring from a deep love of this city that has welcomed me and privileged me with the responsibility of being a priestly and pastoral presence here.
I’m proud of the way disparate groups in Charlottesville joined together to confront this threat.
I am a member of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective(link is external), an organization founded by the Rev. Dr. Alvin Edwards, the pastor of Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church in Charlottesville, after the mass shooting in Charleston.
But there were other groups here as well, and activists from across the spectrum surrounded, protected and assisted when law enforcement was either absent or stretched too thin to help. We may not agree on tactics or message or language or much else, but in the heat of the moment, our common bond to fight domestic terrorism on our streets trumped everything else.
I have found friends among people whom I would otherwise have had no reason to know. It’s one of the many gifts of these hard days.
The morning after the gathering at my church, I rose before dawn and headed to the oldest African-American church in Charlottesville. Inside, people swayed to the sound of the praise band playing anthems from the civil rights movement. Cornel West urged us on to confront the neo-Nazis who had invaded our town.
We blessed those who planned to confront the demonstrators. Then we went into the street ourselves, leading a parade of clergy and community members in a several-blocks-long procession.
I spent most of my day at the First United Methodist Church, adjacent to Emancipation Park. I settled in for a long day of prayer, singing, offering respite and refuge, and most of all, declaring that evil will be confronted with the might of the people of God. Volunteers handed out water and snacks and provided cellphone chargers and quiet space for conversation or medical attention.
Like everyone else, I worried about the people holding space on the other side of the park, standing arm in arm, facing those who would just as soon mow them down as look at them. I wandered back and forth from the front steps overlooking the Robert E. Lee statue -- catching whiffs of pepper spray, witnessing the gut-churning sight of police snipers posted on the roof of the local funeral home -- to the back parking lot, where people entering the church passed through an ad hoc security station to prevent anyone from bringing weapons into this place of sanctuary.
But we didn’t kid ourselves that we were immune from violence. A gathering of counterprotesters in the back corner of the parking lot was assaulted by a roving band of black-helmeted white supremacists. They beat and knocked some of the counterprotesters to the ground before departing to wreak their violence somewhere else.
Throughout the day, we welcomed traumatized defenders of our streets who had come up against violence and hate. Word came in about the car attack a few blocks away, and soon people who had seen the crash made their way to us, dazed and in shock, to find a quiet place to rest, to sit, to receive care.
I wandered from person to person among Black Lives Matter activists, gender minorities, anti-fascists and others, some holding tightly to each other and weeping in the pews. There were no words to speak other than quiet blessing as I moved among them with an aching heart.
A local rabbi stayed at the church, looking out over the park, strumming her guitar and leading the singing. Her senior rabbi was also there, and I was struck by the fierce courage of these Jews, standing there clad in tallit and kippah, looking out over Emancipation Park at the gathering of neo-Nazis who have threatened a new Holocaust.
Early in the afternoon, they received news that someone had threatened their synagogue, vowing to “set fire to the Jews.” They’d already moved their sacred scrolls to a safe place but now were helpless to do anything other than watch and pray.
I did a lot of talking on Saturday and in the days following, and my message has been concise and consistent: the power behind us is far greater than the evil that confronts us. If we unite across our differences with a common goal before us, we can uproot and disarm ideologies of hate.
Yet we must not stop at reactive gatherings to confront protests brought to our streets and our neighborhoods. We cannot let exhaustion or fear or the magnitude of the work keep us from the deeper work of justice -- exposing the racist structures that allow white supremacy to flourish, and standing up for moral legislation, voting rights, economic opportunity, affordable housing and basic rights that are foundational to human flourishing.
This is the hope that I witnessed in action on the streets of Charlottesville that weekend, and it is the hope that I will carry in my heart in the days and weeks ahead as we continue the work of creating a better world for all of God’s people.Read more from Elaine Ellis Thomas »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
A House of Prayer for All Peoplesby Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook
Contrary to the oft-repeated truism, there are churches in America where Sunday is not the "most segregated day of the week," as Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook convincingly demonstrates in her compelling exploration of congregations tackling racial justice issues.
Yet the truism continues to haunt many congregations, and Kujawa-Holbrook reveals, through story and thoughtful analysis, what it means to create and live out multiracial community. Focusing on six congregations from different denominations, geographical regions, and settings, the author shows us the joys and struggles in their intentional pursuits of a more diverse and just community.
The stories in A House of Prayer for All Peoples will inspire leaders to explore their congregation's history, study their community's demographics, and, most of all, search their souls for ways they can develop and celebrate the diversity in their midst. The book is capped by an extensive annotated resource list for readers who want to explore the topic further.
Learn more and order the book »
A participant in the clergy response to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally on Aug. 12 shares her story.
As tiki torch-bearing terrorists marched on the grounds of the University of Virginia on Friday, Aug. 11, hundreds of people were gathered in my church not 100 yards away, girding ourselves for what lay ahead the next day.
We prayed and sang and listened to the soaring words of Cornel West and Traci Blackmon. Christians and Jews and Muslims offered Scripture and song and prayer.
With candles lit along the center aisle, we sang “This Little Light of Mine” and freedom songs. Folks banged on the pews and stomped their feet (something you don’t often see in our Episcopal church).
The singing continued as the violence outside increased, threatening to spill over to our side of the street. We kept on singing and reassuring people until we were able to shepherd folks out a back door in the safety of groups.
Anxiety was high, so it’s a good thing that being a pastoral, calming presence is my job. But there were moments when I regretted not bringing that overnight bag I had thought about packing at home that morning.
I’ve been in Charlottesville, Virginia, for less than three years. But I have a deep connection with this place.
My grief and anger over the events of recent days spring from a deep love of this city that has welcomed me and privileged me with the responsibility of being a priestly and pastoral presence here.
I’m proud of the way disparate groups in Charlottesville joined together to confront this threat.
I am a member of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective(link is external), an organization founded by the Rev. Dr. Alvin Edwards, the pastor of Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church in Charlottesville, after the mass shooting in Charleston.
But there were other groups here as well, and activists from across the spectrum surrounded, protected and assisted when law enforcement was either absent or stretched too thin to help. We may not agree on tactics or message or language or much else, but in the heat of the moment, our common bond to fight domestic terrorism on our streets trumped everything else.
I have found friends among people whom I would otherwise have had no reason to know. It’s one of the many gifts of these hard days.
The morning after the gathering at my church, I rose before dawn and headed to the oldest African-American church in Charlottesville. Inside, people swayed to the sound of the praise band playing anthems from the civil rights movement. Cornel West urged us on to confront the neo-Nazis who had invaded our town.
We blessed those who planned to confront the demonstrators. Then we went into the street ourselves, leading a parade of clergy and community members in a several-blocks-long procession.
I spent most of my day at the First United Methodist Church, adjacent to Emancipation Park. I settled in for a long day of prayer, singing, offering respite and refuge, and most of all, declaring that evil will be confronted with the might of the people of God. Volunteers handed out water and snacks and provided cellphone chargers and quiet space for conversation or medical attention.
Like everyone else, I worried about the people holding space on the other side of the park, standing arm in arm, facing those who would just as soon mow them down as look at them. I wandered back and forth from the front steps overlooking the Robert E. Lee statue -- catching whiffs of pepper spray, witnessing the gut-churning sight of police snipers posted on the roof of the local funeral home -- to the back parking lot, where people entering the church passed through an ad hoc security station to prevent anyone from bringing weapons into this place of sanctuary.
But we didn’t kid ourselves that we were immune from violence. A gathering of counterprotesters in the back corner of the parking lot was assaulted by a roving band of black-helmeted white supremacists. They beat and knocked some of the counterprotesters to the ground before departing to wreak their violence somewhere else.
Throughout the day, we welcomed traumatized defenders of our streets who had come up against violence and hate. Word came in about the car attack a few blocks away, and soon people who had seen the crash made their way to us, dazed and in shock, to find a quiet place to rest, to sit, to receive care.
I wandered from person to person among Black Lives Matter activists, gender minorities, anti-fascists and others, some holding tightly to each other and weeping in the pews. There were no words to speak other than quiet blessing as I moved among them with an aching heart.
A local rabbi stayed at the church, looking out over the park, strumming her guitar and leading the singing. Her senior rabbi was also there, and I was struck by the fierce courage of these Jews, standing there clad in tallit and kippah, looking out over Emancipation Park at the gathering of neo-Nazis who have threatened a new Holocaust.
Early in the afternoon, they received news that someone had threatened their synagogue, vowing to “set fire to the Jews.” They’d already moved their sacred scrolls to a safe place but now were helpless to do anything other than watch and pray.
I did a lot of talking on Saturday and in the days following, and my message has been concise and consistent: the power behind us is far greater than the evil that confronts us. If we unite across our differences with a common goal before us, we can uproot and disarm ideologies of hate.
Yet we must not stop at reactive gatherings to confront protests brought to our streets and our neighborhoods. We cannot let exhaustion or fear or the magnitude of the work keep us from the deeper work of justice -- exposing the racist structures that allow white supremacy to flourish, and standing up for moral legislation, voting rights, economic opportunity, affordable housing and basic rights that are foundational to human flourishing.
This is the hope that I witnessed in action on the streets of Charlottesville that weekend, and it is the hope that I will carry in my heart in the days and weeks ahead as we continue the work of creating a better world for all of God’s people.Read more from Elaine Ellis Thomas »
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
A House of Prayer for All Peoplesby Sheryl Kujawa-HolbrookContrary to the oft-repeated truism, there are churches in America where Sunday is not the "most segregated day of the week," as Sheryl Kujawa-Holbrook convincingly demonstrates in her compelling exploration of congregations tackling racial justice issues.
Yet the truism continues to haunt many congregations, and Kujawa-Holbrook reveals, through story and thoughtful analysis, what it means to create and live out multiracial community. Focusing on six congregations from different denominations, geographical regions, and settings, the author shows us the joys and struggles in their intentional pursuits of a more diverse and just community.
The stories in A House of Prayer for All Peoples will inspire leaders to explore their congregation's history, study their community's demographics, and, most of all, search their souls for ways they can develop and celebrate the diversity in their midst. The book is capped by an extensive annotated resource list for readers who want to explore the topic further.
Learn more and order the book »
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