People who call Jesus their Lord and Savior can no longer afford to merely engage in idle, albeit distressed, conversation about racism. At best, the watching world reads our inaction as proof of our irrelevance. At worst, we give the world another reason to reject the gospel. The church cannot let that stand. It’s not too late to turn things around, but the clock is ticking. The time to act to combat racism is now.
We’ve met plenty of Christians – that is, plenty of white Christians – who have a tendency to look the other way when it comes to racism. WHen pressed, they say that things have gotten better and that if we stir things up, we might make things worse. Well, clearly things are already pretty stirred up, and ignoring evil in the hope that it will go away has never worked. Ignoring evil just makes it easier for evil to spread.
Other white Christians, upon hearing stories about black women being verbally insulted and then rammed with a truck, are flat-out surprised. Of course, they know about the big stories that everyone hears about in the news. But they thought those were isolated events. They are shocked to discover that the tip of the iceberg actually has a huge iceberg underneath.
Black people, on the other hand, are neither shocked nor surprised. They know about these stories because they keep happening. They keep happening to them, to their friends, and to their family members.
From “Black and White: Disrupting Racism One Friendship At A Time” by Teesha Hadra and John Hambrick