Recently I joined a group of people who are working diligently to expose, root out, combat, and overturn racism in America, most specifically in the American church. As a member of this group, I am asked to listen and to learn before I speak, and to contribute seldom, whether it is words or in reactions. (“Love your emotional breakdown! So honest!”)
I’ll confess it’s hard to handle, because I mean so well! I’m one of the people who’s working for healing; how could you not want my participation and my insight and my support? How could you not want my contributions and my energy and my outside-the-group-but-inside-as-an-ally enthusiasm?
How indeed?
It has helped me to step back and to rethink a lot of what I’m doing and how I’m participating—and perhaps even what I am contributing.
For I am the chief of sinners when it comes to being a witness. I lose my temper, I don’t listen, I judge, I react swiftly, I shut down, I scorn, I isolate. I am quick to anger and quick to speak, and I think I alienate people when I think I’m being helpful. I think I have hurt and disappointed people with whom I have sought to be an ally and friend, and I think I have been stupid and insensitive to people who are trying to express their pain and their anger and their frustration. “I’m not like that! I’m friendly! I listen! Let me tell you all the ways I listen!” and so it goes, on and on.
I’m the chief of sinners here, because I think I’m doing a swell job, but in reality I am doing a piss-poor job. I am not gaining allies and not bringing about change. I am not seeing people rethink their positions or seek repentance and change. At best I experience conflict and disappointment and anger, and I leave my encounters frustrated and mad, asking what else I need to do, what else do I need to know, what else do I need to say.
I don’t have the answers. I don’t know what to do, frankly, about what I perceive as a grievous sin and categorical, dreadful wrongness in the American church. I see a great error in our understanding of each other, based upon a fatal, egregious error we made 500 years ago and have perpetuated and extended into the 21st century.
All I know is this, though—I want to seek healing, and I want to bring healing. I want to bring awareness and confession and repentance among my tribe, the white Christians with such wonderful words and such sincere hearts, but such deep and profound ignorance and indifference. I want to bring restoration between the peoples of the American church. I want to see the delightful diversity of our human race acknowledged and celebrated and honored, where we do have integration of general purpose and meaning, and self-identity and self-collection for our own community meaning and purpose. There should be a black church and a white church and an eastern Asian and a south Asian and an African church—whatever we collected ourselves as—and there should be the healthy understanding of our common ground that neatly collects our individual affinities.
I’m stumbling around, and causing pain, and making mistakes. I am so sorry that I am doing so, and I am trying to learn and to repent.
But I’m compelled to keep trying, for the love of my own tribe, for the love of the people in all the church, for the love of God who has loved us and redeemed us and made us one in Christ.
If I make mistakes—and I will—I own the pain and the repentance, the healing and restoration. That’s on me. But I would be ever so grateful if you’d call me out when I do make mistakes. It can be your gift to me, the chief of sinners.