I just started reading From Every People and Nation by J. Daniel Hays. It’s an attempt to study what the Bible says about race and to apply this to black/white relations in the Christian church in America. I’ve been very personally challenged so far.

The book starts by recounting a conversation Dr. Hays had with a black colleague, Dr. Isaac Mwase. Dr. Hays said that racism was an important issue in American Christianity. Dr. Mwase replied that it is the most important in the Church. That was an interesting reply. If that doesn’t ring true with you, read what Dr. Hays wrote next:

This conversation illustrates to some degree a phenomenon that I encountered regularly as I read through some of the recent literature dealing with the race problem in the Church today. Black scholars identify the racial division in the Church as one of the most central problems for contemporary Christianity, while many White scholars are saying, “What problem?”

p. 17

I don’t know about you, but I can quickly identify with the person that ask, “What problem?” I think I’m in for a real eye-opener. I’m looking forward to the uncomfortable but always-healthy work of the Spirit as He unveils ways that I have been guilty of racism. It has no place in God’s church. We are all descended from Adam. If you’re reading this and you have been born again, we have all been united with Christ. It’s worth quoting Ephesians 2 at some length:

For he himself (Christ) is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

In context, God is referring to the Jews and non-Jews in the first century coming together. If Christ knocked down the wall between Jews and non-Jews in the early Church, blacks and whites should also enjoy the benefits of that same uniting work today. Culturally, there was far more that separated a Jew from a non-Jew than there is separating blacks from whites. This also applies to Asians, Hispanics, and other ethnic groups. I’m only confronting the subtle racism in the Church between blacks and whites because that is where most of the tension has been in America regarding race.

We have no business discriminating on the basis of race in the Church. The sad thing is that many of us probably don’t realize we’re doing it.

• Do you tend to ask, “What problem?” when people talk about racism in the Church?
• Do you have any hesitation about dating/courting or marrying someone of a different skin color?
• Do you naturally gravitate toward people of your own skin color?

If so, perhaps you need to ask God to reveal racism in your own heart.

Tags: church, racism, reconciliation, relationships