Brown people

I was raised in all white, Lutheran family, attended an all-white Lutheran church, and lived in an all white, non-Lutheran neighborhood. The public schools I attended were pretty much all white. Things changed little when I enrolled in a small all-white Lutheran college in Kansas and finished my undergraduate work at nearly-all-white Biola University in Southern California.

My parents were godly people, but they held racist notions. A few years ago, Marilyn and I hosted a foreign exchange student from Brazil. Claudia was with us for her full senior year in high school.

On a typically sunny Arizona day, we were in our van on our way to a family event. My mom was with us and was talking about being with a group of people. With some derision in her voice–and forgetting that Claudia was sitting behind her, she made a point of mentioning how many of those people were brown.

I cringed.

Later Claudia asked me if my mother liked her. “Of course she likes you, Claudia, “I replied. “She thinks your great. Why would you ask me that?”

Claudia answered me in subdued voice, “It was the way she was talking about brown people.”

Most people in my parents generation just didn’t know anything else. My folks were from northern Ohio, not the deep South, but feelings about racial differences ran deep in the north and Midwest, too. When Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball, there were no teams in the South. He played at home for the Brooklyn Dodgers and on the road in other northern cities, where he endured extraordinary abuse.

I know it’s hard for many people to believe this today, but Sammy Davis Jr., who campaigned vigorously for presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, was not invited to his Inaugural Ball because he was married to a white woman.

Phil Austin, a good friend of mine, shared openly about his personal experiences growing up with racial discrimination. A civil rights attorney who made a commitment to Christ when I was pastor at Word of Grace, Phil has a comfortably Anglo name but an unmistakably Latino face. In fact, when he ran for the Mesa City Council recently, his campaign signs had no Phil Austin photo, because he was was a candidate in a predominantly Anglo community. He didn’t win.

Phil blew me away when he told me that, in the 50s and early 60s, Blacks and Hispanics could only swim in the Tempe public pool on Fridays. They cleaned it Friday night and only white people people could swim there on the weekend.

My journey into the inner city

I grew up in the 60s, but I was entirely shielded and consequently ignorant of the issues of the Civil Rights Movement. I remember only a family comment here and there that Martin Luther King was communist.

Then, in my early 30s I heard African-American John Perkins speak at a conference on faith and justice. (For more about John Perkins see http://www.jmpf.org/content/) Creaking and popping like the a rusty hinge, the door of my heart started to open to the pain and challenges of ethnic minorities and those who are much less fortunate.

I became the preaching pastor at Word of Grace in 1982 when the church was just two years old. I was thirty-three. Already at that time, our kids attended the most ethnically diverse elementary school in the East Valley. Less than half were white.

Our church was landlocked. We purchased the old Central Christian Church facility at 315 N. Hobson, just a half mile from downtown in Mesa. Our “new” church was a huge expansion for us: three small buildings on less than four acres. But within just three years after relocating our weekend attendance topped 2000.

What to do? After a lot of thoughtful prayer, we decided we would not relocate our church in the burbs, that God had put us right there to make difference in our neighborhood. So we bought adjacent properties, thirty-seven of them, and expanded our facilities right there in the hood. By 2000, we had 4000 families in the urban core of the East Valley.

What to do?

When we broke ground on our new worship center in 1995, our special guest at the event, Vice Mayor of Mesa Pat Gilbert, commended us for not abandoning “the core of Mesa,” as he put it. Now zip 85204 is the most depressed and dangerous area in the East Valley, and our church was (and still is) just blocks away, in 85203.

We chose a path that gave us no choice but to engage in our neighborhoods. Every year I did a preaching series we called “A Heart for Others,” a fall focus our new senior pastor, Terry Crist, has sustained. He calls it “A Heart for the City.” In the last several years I was senior pastor at Word of Grace we had over a thousand adults in our congregation doing volunteer work in already existing community agencies, some faith-based, some not.

We also received an annual five-figure “Love Our City” offering, often over $50,000, which we gave to community agencies. We were a conservative church with a social conscience, and that was before President George Bush’s call for “compassionate conservatism.”

Black people

Personally, I became involved with the Mesa Martin Luther King weekend events, and participated in the annual Monday prayer breakfast. At the first official Mesa city breakfast to honor Dr. King, I was stunned to see I was the only white clergyman in attendance. I’ve also attended conservative Christian events, significant events, where there were virtually no Blacks in attendance, and I’ve preached in African American churches where my wife and I were the only white faces.

I’m not ready, like so many, to scream racism every time I see these disparities, but I can tell you this: Navigating the rapids of racial difference and misunderstanding is extraordinarily difficult.

People, yes Christian people, people who love and follow Jesus, think so differently, and the way they think is shaped by their culture, their race. They don’t always understand one another, and often they don’t even try. It takes time, patience, and emotional effort to listen and learn, and most of us would rather stay in our own worlds, listen to our own people, and reaffirm what we already think.

So what do you think?

How do you think? What influences your thinking about others?

Does any of this have any application SB1070, Arizona’s controversial immigration law? What do you think about SB1070? Or are you too angry to think clearly?

A couple years ago I stepped into the muck of it all when a number of conservative Christian leaders decided that, somehow, we should be a voice for both law-and-order and compassion.

We decided to hold a news conference, wondering if anyone would show up. Well, dozens of reporters, flashing cameras, and television news teams filled the room. I was the spokesman.

Gulp.

I made the “mistake” of saying really controversial things, like: We need civil discourse, not civil war.

That quote made it on to the front page of the Arizona Republic, and when KJZZ/NPR asked me for a phone interview, I could not have imagined it would end up being the lead news story most of the day. I said something like: Conservative Christians have been known for their stand against abortion and for marriage as a union between a man and woman. These remain vital issues for us, but it’s time we broaden our concerns for other voiceless people, for the poor, and for compassion and justice.

We need Christians to pray for and to propose realistic and compassionate solutions to a terribly complex problem.

In the last year or so, my son David, President of the Barna Group and author of the best-selling book unChristian, said to me, “Dad, it seems like Micah 6:8 has become the key verse of my generation.”

It reads: “He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Indeed, the last decade has seen a flurry of books on the “missional” church, some of the more notable being:

The Church of Irresistible Influence, Robert Lewis

The Externally Focused Church, Eric Swanson and Rick Rusaw

The Present Future and Missional Renaissance, Reggie McNeal

Seek the Peace of the City, Eldin Villafane

The Forgotten Ways, Alan Hirsch

The Hole in Our Gospel, Richard Stearns

Let Justice Roll Down, John Perkins

The Irresistible Revolution and Jesus for President, Shane Claiborne

Not to be overlooked, of course, are the multiple and sometimes controversial writings of Jim Wallis of Sojourners.

President Bush joined the movement by establishing the White House Council on Faith-based and Community Initiatives, based on the well-known but often underrated fact that faith-based organizations actually help people, often in more significant ways than non-faith based non-profits and government agencies.

As a result of President Bush’s faith-based initiatives, thirty-seven states established governor’s councils on faith-based and community initiatives, and most recently, here in Arizona, our Department of Economic Security (DES) has embraced an extraordinary department -wide effort to work with the faith community.

In my experience, however, conservative, evangelical churches have been slow to recognizing the opportunities. When I became Chairman of Governor Napolitano’s Council on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, I was stunned by the relative absence of the influence of local Christ-centered, Bible-believing churches. Thankfully, this is changing.

A little Bible and theology

The focus of ministry in the evangelical world has been to bring people to Christ, to disciple them in the teachings of the Bible, and to obey the Great Commission to reach the nations with the Gospel.

Mainline, liberal churches, on the other hand, have stood by the “social gospel,” the belief that the primary purpose of the local church is to help the helpless, to make a difference in the lives of the poor and economically oppressed, and to be a voice for social justice,

Evangelicals have generally rejected the idea of the social gospel, because it’s been associated with liberal churches who hold a less literal and orthodox view of the Bible and generally embrace left-leaning political and social causes.

Recently, for example, radio and television personality Glenn Beck warned people about “social justice.” Regrettably, he told his listeners to search the mission statements of their churches for the term “social justice,” and if they find it, to leave their church immediately.

Whatever we call it–the social gospel, or social justice–helping the poor and justice for the oppressed are important biblical themes. The Hebrew term for righteousness, for example, may be closer in meaning to the English word “justice.” In the Bible, righteousness is not just a matter of personal holiness, but turning the wrong-ness of the world into right-ness. This is inherent in the Lord’s prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”

I like to define the kingdom of God, simply, as everything-that’s- wrong-made-right. Every time a teenager says, “That’s not fair,” or an older person cries out about what’s wrong at work, or a wife sobs because her husband is unfaithful, it’s an appeal for God’s kingdom to come. Without a lick of religion, everyone knows when there’s something about our world that should be different, that should be changed.

For me, this isn’t just the social gospel. It’s the other side of the Gospel. Most Bible-believing Christians stand firm on this essential element of the Gospel in John 3:16, “For God For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

We cannot, however, set aside the Gospel as it’s given in Luke 4:16-19,

16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. 17 The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Two things about this passage are important for our concerns in this article: (1) Faith-based ministry is anchored in the phrase “the Spirit of the Lord is on me.” Those of us who follow Christ aren’t just called to be good people who do good things. It’s that and so much more. We have the transforming power of God’s presence to make an immediate and eternal difference in people lives. We Christians believe that people-in-need need love and practical help. But that’s not all they need. They need transformation.

In another place Jesus said, ” ‘Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.’ By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive” (John 7:38-39). In other words, we have the life-giving power of God’s Spirit in us and on us, not for us, but for others.

Ministry Ideas That Work

Every year at Word of Grace, our calendar included a Heart for the World month (global outreach) and a Heart for Others month (local outreach). My goal during our world missions focus was to raise awareness of global challenges for the church and especially to get people to give financial support monthly to a specific missionary or project.

Our church gave 10% of our general fund offering to outreach, but we felt that let people off the hook. They just gave to the church and didn’t have to think about the Great Commission. So we asked them to pledge to give a sacrificial amount, over and above their tithe, to get them engaged personally in missions and to supplement the large amount we were already giving from our general fund.

We rolled out our Heart for the World each year in the spring. In the fall, we focused on local outreach. We set aside the three or four weeks just before Thanksgiving, because that’s when people naturally think in terms of helping the poor.

My goal during Heart for Others was simply to get as many people in our church as possible to give several hours of volunteer work in the community, not on a single day, but as their schedules allowed. We also required every small group to take on some kind of community project together–and to invite friends and neighbors to join them. We believed that people who wouldn’t go to church would agree to help out in the community, and as a result hear the gospel preached without words.

To help our folks connect, we presented videos each week of local organizations working in our community, and the last week of the focus, we invited representatives from dozens of human service agencies to set up tables and provide information about their work in a grand ministry fair on our main plaza.

Through the years, thousands of our people gave thousands of hours of community service to both faith-based and non-faith-based organizations. It was our way to sow kingdom seeds everywhere people were hurting in our city, and we became known as a church that cares.

I told our people, Share your faith when you have an mistakably clear opportunity to do that, but don’t go out there with a pocket full of God-pamphlets looking for every little chance to convert people to Christ.

One other element of our local outreach strategy is important to mention. Just about every church tries to create it’s own local outreach ministries, like a food pantry, or prison work. We did that to some degree, but not much. Our goal was to come alongside organizations already doing the work who (1) needed volunteers and (2) knew what they were doing!

So we didn’t just do our thing. We loved and helped what other people were already doing in our communities.