By now everyone has most likely heard about the shooting and killing of unarmed 18-year-old African-American Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014. The story is intense and certainly a lot to digest. Stories like these can be tough to figure out because they often feel like a case of “he said, she […]
How Being “Color Blind” Whites Out Minorities
For most of my life, I never thought having a multiracial church mattered. I also thought racism didn’t really exist anymore. Slavery was over. Don’t use the “N word”, be nice to black people and racism is eliminated. As a rough summary, this is what a lot of white Christians think about race. If asked […]
Positioning White Privilege to Where We Actually Can Talk About it
When we hear the word “racist,” we think of KKK members, the “N-word”, or the recent comments made by Clippers owner Donald Sterling. A racist is someone who doesn’t like people of other races. Typically in America it has been seen as a white person who doesn’t like black people. When the topic of white […]
Why do we talk about race at our church?
I never heard a sermon that referenced race while growing up in church. What does race have to do with people coming to know Jesus, anyway? Or what does it have to do with the Bible? When I talk about race in sermons at Crossroads, I think these are thoughts that go through the minds […]
Is the Church unified in Jesus or layers of race, ethnicity & culture?
We began a sermon series in 1 Corinthians a couple of weeks ago. Week 1 on the first chapter went off fine. I talked about how the church at Corinth was a squabbling, quarreling church and that Paul was writing this letter to them to teach them to be united Christ and to get along […]
Homogeneous Churches are Mutated (& Crippled) Bodies of Christ
I preached on the Church as the body of Christ last Sunday, using 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 as my text. It’s a familiar text and familiar metaphor to many Christians and it typically leads to one of a few quick interpretations. One being how Christians play different roles in the local church, some being good at […]