If you are not a believer, you are probably ready to give that question a wholehearted “yes.” That’s because you have felt it.
On the other hand, If you are a believer, you might be feeling the exact opposite and a bit defensive. I was utterly surprised when that question rose up in me this week. It happened as I listened, and listened again, to episode 28.
Whoever you are, I hope you can hear me describe my journey through this week without judgment or resistance. I can invite that now only because I made my way through some crazy feelings and landed in a place of gratefulness. I needed to be blindsided by some truth tucked away in Danté’s story.
In the 1960s the church actually believed and taught that slavery had to happen, because the African people were so horribly sinful. Their only hope was that we would go to them with the gospel and conform them to the ways of our faith. While I believe this was generated by people who truly cared and thought they had it “right,” I am sad about how wrong it was. I’m sad by the way it fostered racism as it unwittingly promoted both superiority and fear. In the church; evidenced in the way Danté experienced racism in the context of his Christian school.
When Danté described his perception of the sin of the American church, it exposed some things in my heart that were devastating. He named it as “Our efforts to conform people, who have been made in the image of God, to our own image.”
That’s was the goal of our missionary efforts because we failed to see God’s image in people.
Today we see God’s image. Now the goal to conform people to our image is more subtle, but it is still there.
The questions rising up for me today are these?
What else have we gotten wrong?
When did our invitation to explore the love of Jesus together change from, “Come be with us,” to “Come be like us.”
When did our posture change from humble delight that Jesus rose from the dead to a demand that the world conform to our beliefs and morals?
How can we be so certain that we are right?
How has it become so easy for us to put ourselves above our fellow humans as a judge?
How did we become so arrogant while living under a message that has no room for anything less than absolute humility?
I may not be a white supremacist, but I think I suffer from a brand of it that I’m calling “Christian supremacy.”
I listened to Dante’s story in a way that is requiring something huge from me. I‘m convicted and I am ready to change. How about you? Are you ready to join me in a conversation to explore what is behind all of our good efforts as a church?
Those of you outside the church will you support us in our desire to change and wonder about the possibility of another form of supremacy in you? Supremacy of so many varieties is alive and well among us in America, and I’m getting in touch with just how destructive it is.
I also love to imagine what’s possible if we would choose to open ourselves up to the humility invited by the simple question of “If we matter…”
Mentioned in this episode
If We Matter Episode 28: It’s a human problem
Resources
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