Is the church AWOL?

After our retirement in 1994, my wife and I spent most of the next 15 years volunteering with the Perkins Center in West Jackson, Mississippi.  On Memorial day, 2005, John Perkins and I were standing in the parking lot of Antioch House, discussing the decline of the West Jackson community. Voice of Calvary Ministries had been doing Christian Community Development for 30 years, Habitat for Humanity had been building house for the poor.  But John, in one of his rare discouraging moments, asserted that the forces of decline were overwhelming the attempts to rebuild.

This fact raised the big question, WHY?  Many reasons, of course, such as the flight of not only whites, but also many middle class blacks to the suburbs.

But I would like to focus one factor---the lack of church involvement.  Since this is Mississippi, one might expect the white church would not do much to assist poor blacks.  But most of the black church in West Jackson was also uninvolved in ministering to their surrounding community.  They existed as spiritual oasis's.

Fast forward to 2016.  Jim Wallis has written another masterpiece calling on the white American church to repent of its white superiority and white privilege---its original sin---and commit itself to incarnating the kingdom of God as justice among the poor and oppressed.

Here are some nuggets from America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America:

"we will see that white privilege is the legacy of white supremacy.  White privilege is the assumption of racial entitlement and the normality of whiteness, something that most of those of us who are white still fail to recognize or resist. . . .  repentance is much more than saying we are brokenhearted and sorry; it means turning in a totally new direction."

American history, as it is commonly taught, is full of half-truths and untruths, even in Christian colleges.  "Untruths that we believe are able to control us, dominate us, and set us on the wrong path."  "And if the untruths are, more deeply, idols, they also separate us from God."

"New York City police commissioner William Bratton acknowledged at a church breakfast in 2014 the negative role of police against African Americans throughout American history.  'Many of the worst parts of black history would have been impossible without police. . . . Slavery, our country's original sin, sat on a foundation codified by laws enforced by police, by slave-catchers."

"An elder in my white church said to me one night, 'Son, you've got to understand: Christianity has nothing to do with racism; that's political, and our faith is personal."

""you can't continue to say you are not racist when you continue to support and accept systems that are."

"The United States of America was established as a white society, founded upon the near genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another."

"To benefit from oppression is to be responsible for changing it."

"Just as surely as blacks suffer in a white society because they are black, whites benefit because they are white."

What is biblical repentance?  It is turning in a new direction; it leads to transformation, revolution, the kingdom of God.  White American Christians are much like the Pharisees (Luke 11) "full of greed . . . who neglect justice and the love of God."  Kingdom people are full of generosity, justice and the love of God.