What Living for 35 years in black communities taught me.

What did living for 35 years to two black communities---Jackson, Michigan and  West Jackson, Mississippi---teach me?

I attended three different Christian liberal arts colleges and took a number of Bible courses.  Unfortunately, this Christian education did NOT adequately prepare me for the challenges of living in poor and oppressed communities.   What additional things did I learn from these communities?

1.  To practice biblical Christianity, I needed to repent, restitute and relocate; also to release and rebuild.  Release in the sense of Isaiah 58:6ff and Luke 4:18; rebuild in the sense of doing Christian Community Development.  I did not learn this in white Christian colleges and churches.

2.  To develop a more comprehensive biblical theology, I needed to add a clear and compelling kingdom of God on earth theology---Jubilee justice that releases the oppressed poor.  In the OT, Isaiah's Messianic passages spell out the nature and characteristics of the Messianic kingdom.  Isaiah 9:7; 11:1-4; 16:5; 28:16-17; 42:1-4 and 61:1-4. In 61:1, I prefer the translation 'oppressed' over 'poor.'  I did not learn this in my Bible courses.

3.  I needed black mentors such as Tom and Barbara Skinner, John Perkins, and Martin Luther King to deepen both my theology and practice of biblical Christianity.

4.  I learned that sincere apologies for the historical sins of white ethnocentrism and oppression are good and necessary, but not good enough.  See Mark Labberton, "The People and the Black Book."

5.  Current white theology on ethnocentrism and oppression is limited and shallow while the biblical teaching is widespread (555 OT references) and critically important.

Over the 15 years that I volunteered at the Perkins Center in West Jackson, dozens of weeklong mission teams from Christian colleges and InterVarsity groups came to the Perkins Center.   None of them, almost all white, came with a good knowledge of even the biblical basics about oppression, justice and the kingdom of God.  The time period was from 1994-2010.