For Those Earnestly Seeking Unity in the Church, Part 2

The racial unity journey leads straight to one place: the cross. And it’s not a one-time thing. You will find yourself there again and again, as Christ bids you come and die to your opinions, your politics, your presumptions, your preferences, and your privileges. No wonder it’s not such a popular journey. Who wants to die these days? In the American church, it seems, very few do. If you put your personal comfort before racial unity, you will not get there. If you place your political idols before racial unity, you will quickly get sidetracked. If you place your desire

For Those Earnestly Seeking Unity in the Church, Part 1

It’s a story I hesitate to tell today, because 33 years after the fact, it almost seems surreal. But in 1990, I was doing my job as a crime reporter for the Dallas Times Herald. On a particular Thursday night, I was driving around South Dallas, looking for story material. That part of the city was hopping. Jamaican gangsters ran the crack cocaine trade, and awful stuff was happening all the time. On this night, I got totally lost. I hadn’t lived in Dallas very long, and for some bizarre reason I thought that a church whose name started with

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Sorry to Break the News, but There Is No Middle Ground

I’ve been thinking about how to write this post for days. On October 20, I had the most horrifying prophetic dream I’ve ever had, and it concerned former President Donald Trump and his Christian followers. I am certain the dream was an urgent warning from God. But I also know that many of my readers come from traditions that dismiss or at least downplay the possibility of God speaking to us through dreams. I get that. That is why I am going to write this post from two angles: What I see and hear with my natural eyes and ears,

The Terrorists Are in the House

You might have noticed that I have been quiet for several months, and that was not entirely intentional. I’ve had a heavy workload with seminary and freelance assignments and just couldn’t locate time to write outside of that. (Those first few weeks of Hebrew—whew.) I also felt a need to step back and regroup. Watching The New York Times’ outstanding documentary on the Kyle Rittenhouse killings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, reminded me of something the Lord showed me in a dream exactly one week after the Capitol Riot. The gist of it was this: The terrorists are in the house. I

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The CRT Smackdown

Everyone is talking about Critical Race Theory. Never mind that most of us hadn’t even heard about it till, like, last week. Folks are talking and pontificating and bloviating about this complex subject as though they’ve been experts all their lives. White evangelical leaders, in fact, are stumbling over themselves to denounce it. Consider this: • The Southern Baptist Convention teed up CRT as a subject of debate during this week’s annual meeting, and some white pastors made plans to assail it, going so far as to rally under a pirate banner with the slogan “Take the Ship!” (I couldn’t

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Derek Chauvin’s Eyes

Derek Chauvin’s eyes flashed, cutting through the judge’s bland intonation of guilty…guilty…guilty. That moment in a Minneapolis courtroom on April 20 signaled what I believe to be a historic shift: Twelve ordinary Americans—six people of color, six white—reached unanimous agreement about what they saw in the killing of George Floyd. They called it murder. These everyday folks, with a decidedly mixed bag of preconceptions about race, were able to process two weeks of testimony from 45 witnesses, reason together face to face, and arrive at the same conclusion. This happened in a nation with a history of aggressively denying the

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Learning from a Racial Unity Fail, Pt. 3: It’s All About the Heart

You saw it. The defense attorney’s opening statement in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who planted his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. Not once did the attorney acknowledge that a tragedy had taken place, that a man’s life had been snuffed out. You heard the excuses. That Chauvin was a little guy, and Floyd was very big. Illegal drugs were found in Floyd’s system. The onlookers made the officers feel stressed and anxious. Now it’s time for a heart check. Do you lean toward the excuses, or do you lean

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The Crime Without a Face

Three days after the horrific murders in Atlanta, we still haven’t seen the faces of four of the six women of Asian descent gunned down by Robert Aaron Long. As someone who covered crime for many years as a print journalist, I remember the scramble to locate photos and bios of victims in the immediate aftermath of a multiple murder or mass-casualty event. Journalists are incredibly resourceful in tracking down this information, but all the firepower of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other esteemed news outlets hasn’t managed to bring the faces of these

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Learning from a Racial Unity Fail, Pt. 2: No More Crumbs

Starting in December, the Lord repeatedly brought me to a passage in Ezekiel 9. The prophet was recounting a vision from God in which he was carried in the Spirit to Jerusalem. Here in the holy city, Ezekiel witnessed something that would have horrified any devout Jew of his time: The glory of God lifted from the Temple and paused at its threshold. Then poof—it was gone. Before the glory departed entirely, however, the prophet saw a “man clothed in linen” holding a writing kit. The Lord commanded this man to “Go throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a

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Learning from a Racial Unity Fail, Pt. 1: It’s Deep, Y’all

The Black South African singer possessed a rich, nuanced voice. Mature in her faith and gracious in manner, she repeatedly yielded the mic to the white South African woman with a thin, average-quality voice who kept asserting a front-and-center role during worship. I watched this dynamic unfold at a small, interracial Christian healing service in Johannesburg, South Africa, several years ago, growing increasingly frustrated. The Black singer was a recording artist with a powerful presence, and she could have blown the white woman off the stage. Yet she honored the sacredness of the moment by refusing to engage in a

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