Christianity and the Church play a big part in racial reconciliation and promoting it. Renowned author, Rev. Mark Crear discusses the topic in his book, Peace Be Still 978-1-950088-90-4. Crear also provides his readers with solutions to help promote racial reconciliation and racial unity. The book’s main purpose is to help normalize the discussion on this topic of reconciliation among different communities in the U.S. Additionally; Crear mentions first-hand experiences and statistical facts to support his stance. Joy J. Moore, assistant professor at Fuller Pasadena and ad ordained elder in The United Methodist Church, speaks on how the churches can work toward Racial Reconciliation. Here is what Moore had to say:
“Christian Scripture sets forth an agenda premised on neighborly love. Followers of Christ, said Jesus, is to be recognized by how they love one another. In the first century, Jews and Gentiles together with bearing witness to the lordship of Jesus Christ demonstrated the presence and peace of God. Ultimately, the promise of the peaceful future of God will be realized when every nation worships together saying, “Jesus is Lord.” This is our ministry of reconciliation.
The church is the only institution whose chartering concept requires reconciliation across the most estranged of human chasms: captive and captor, male and female, our cultural group, and theirs. Yet the most persistent transgression of a nation confident to claim itself founded on biblical principles is cultural fragmentation. Church gatherings perfectly display America’s flagrant scandal: division by the socially constructed categories of race. Nowhere is this more evident than the segregation of blacks and whites.
Tony Evans, in the introduction of his book Oneness Embraced, submits that the reason there remains a problem with race in America is because the church fails to understand the issues from a biblical perspective. The lingering reality of racial division offers the quintessential exhibit of the effects of perpetuating a false idea. For Christians, it is evidence of allowing a cultural philosophy to be read into the biblical narrative. No human thought, with the exceptions of mathematics and parts of the natural sciences, is immune to the ideologizing influences of its social context, yet knowledge of the construction of the idea of race in modern Western thinking eludes contemporary imaginations. Unaware of how this false ideology originated, we regularly digest well-crafted lies in the guise of channeled entertainment, cultural enlightenment, and communicated education. It then becomes how we read the events recorded in the ancient text. Rather than being called into a different community by Scripture, we see our broken communities as justified by Scripture.
Unaware of the philosophical narratives that have shaped our theological imaginations, our conversations and actions collapse under the weight of headlines that reveal the depth of the racial chasm within the United States. Sanford. Ferguson. Staten Island. Baltimore. Charleston. As the suffering continues, Christians must ask, “If we say we love a wonder-working God whom we have not seen, is it possible to love our neighbors whom we do see?” This question becomes more poignant when we remember the alternative story Jesus told when asked by someone well-intentioned, “Who is my neighbor?” More than asking the question, we need an alternative narrative to talk ourselves out of the fictions we have been told.”
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