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Racial Reconciliation:
A Social Issue
or Gospel Imperative?
by Major
Katherine Clausell
Every January, when Martin Luther King,
Jr.’s birthday is celebrated I consider the state of relations
between marginalized ethnic minority cultures and white
majority cultures in the USA and around the world. Many of our
communities are plagued by racial strife and filled with
people who long for racial reconciliation but feel powerless
to achieve it. I am guilty of thinking about racial
reconciliation as an idealistic notion...something to seek and
even strive for, but doubtful that it can ever be achieved.
Despite the too numerous incidences of
hate-motivated violence, I find hope when I see acts of
forgiveness despite the violence.
We must take seriously Jesus’ instructions that unity
must be our distinctive.
Having worked most of my life in the
social services sector, I have been conditioned to view the
problems of society as primarily social in nature.
As such, their resolution will come through
interventions by social services workers.
However, when I view society from a Biblical Social
Justice lens, I no longer see most of the challenges we
experience in today’s society as primarily a breakdown in
society, but also as a failure of the church to live out
Jesus’ reconciliation in the world and before the world.
I believe that racial reconciliation
is, first and foremost, a gospel imperative, not just a social
issue for society to wrestle with.
Although there is little-to-no
consensus regarding the church’s role in the work of racial
reconciliation, unity and reconciliation is at the core of our
Christian faith and practice.
The Gospel tells us that racism exists due to sin.
The Biblical basis for racial unity and
reconciliation begins simply with the Bible’s statement of our
common humanity.
When Paul addressed the Athenians on Mars Hill, he appealed to
their common humanity.
The Athenians considered themselves to be superior
people. Wiser,
more noble, more blessed than any other people on the face of
the earth. But the Apostle Paul made it clear that we all have
a common origin and we all live, move and have our being in
God (Acts 17:26-28).
There are different nations and languages, different
people and tribes, but there is only one human race.
Throughout His earthly ministry, Jesus
demonstrated disregard for the sense of superiority of his
contemporaries.
Many Jews of His time saw God’s election of the people of
Israel as a mark of their superiority over the other nations
around them. They
accepted this view even though the Old Testament specifically
forbade this way of thinking.
When Jesus Christ came, He recognized the dignity of
each person whether Jew, Samaritan, Canaanite, or Greek.
Whatever the race, gender, culture, or sin, Jesus still
went to them.
Jesus went into their homes.
He ate with them, and they received Him gladly.
The Son of God showed us how we are to be.
John 17 records the passion, the
motivation, and the longing that fills Jesus’ heart as He
prepares Himself to go to the cross.
His passionate prayer was that all of us would
experience the kind of unity that the members of the Trinity
experience. The
longing of Jesus Christ is that we (black, white, yellow and
brown; male and female; young and old, from every people,
tribe, tongue, and nation) may be one.
Jesus prayed saying, “May they be
brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent
me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”
Christ’s desire is not differing ethnicities
worshipping in separate churches, but rather that all may be
brought to complete unity.
Before this can be achieved, Christians
must be honest about our racist past.
If we don’t, we will never be able to adequately
address the complicated questions in our racist present.
Progress will be difficult, if not impossible if we
deny that racism still exists - individually and
systematically - in home, church and society.
Racism is an evil ideology of hate, which shows itself
most clearly through violent or prejudicial actions, as well
as in more subtle ways.
For example, the church growth movement
promoted homogeneous congregations ... just one group, one
race, one culture or one economic class.
Such a plan for the growth of the church is a rejection
of His final prayer for us before He died.
God is building one temple. Not a white, black, poor or
rich temple, but one temple.
The Church must become the place where
people from all walks of life are united by their love for
Christ and their need for grace.
Pride of heritage, security in our cultural identity or
comfort in our color cannot stand in the way of racial
reconciliation.
Imagine if the church, working
intentionally to model diversity, became the one place where
what is envisioned in Revelation 5 and 7 starts happening now,
not just when Christ returns.
What a glorious sight that would be.
Jesus said that the world will know
that the Father has sent the Son, because of
the witness of the
unity that we have with one another.
We can be sure that the prayer He
prayed then is the prayer He prays for us today.
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