Antiracist Resources for Jesus Followers

Confession: I'm not the best at follow-through sometimes. There is a reason my blog posts are so few and far between. So please forgive me for promising to post resources "tomorrow" and then waiting over two weeks to actually complete the task. Though I've been doing a lot of my own research and sharing various resources & food-for-thought daily on my social media platforms, I promised to provide some specific resources specifically for friends who believe in Jesus, and must apologize for how long it's actually taken me to sit down and compile my resources.

Please also consider this disclaimer: THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST OF RESOURCES. If the past two weeks of internet rabbit holes have taught me anything, it's that there is SO MUCH INFORMATION OUT THERE if you are open and willing to seek it out, so please don't limit yourself to what I share. These are just a few personal recommendations that have been meaningful and helpful to me. As a white, Christian woman whose faith was formed in a variety of non-denominational evangelical churches and ministries, I am particularly invested in understanding and uprooting white supremacy as it exists within my understanding of theology and experiences within the church, and believe it is the greatest deception and distraction from the true gospel of Jesus. As an educator and theatre artist, I am interested in unlearning and uprooting racist patterns in these spaces, too, but for the purpose of this post, my focus is on the intersection of racism and Christianity.

There are several anti-racist google docs floating around the interwebs these days, but as an educator, I found this document to be one of the best, most comprehensive resources I have seen anywhere. It not only breaks up resources into scaffolded stages of learning around racism, but also differentiates types of resources (podcasts, articles, nonfiction, fiction, etc.), and provides resources for  and links to several other excellent lists of resources. It also provides articles specifically addressed at various religious ideologies. Here are its links to some resources directly related to Christianity:

The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism (Jemar Tisby)

Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the U.S. (Lenny Duncan)

Disunity in Christ (Christena Cleveland)

The Cross and the Lynching Tree (James Cone)

Reconciliation Blues (Edward Gilbreath)

Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America (Michael Eric Dyson)

Trouble I’ve Seen (Drew G. I. Hart)

I Bring the Voices of My People: A Womanist Vision for Racial Reconciliation (Chanequa Walker-Barnes)

Dear White Christians (Jennifer Harvey)

Divided by Faith (Michael Emerson and Christian Smith)

In addition to this list, here are a few more videos, podcasts, articles, and books I personally have found engaging and educational.

First of all, for anyone still trying to wrap their head around the idea of systemic racism this video narrated by none other than the voice of Bob the Tomato provides an insightful survey of the concept:

Want more? Phil's podcast / youtube channel has several other interviews and videos that further unpack these ideas. But while Bob the Tomato has proven to be a better resource than I ever could have imagined, and may be a great place to start for many, I also want to challenge my friends (and especially my white friends) in the church to make sure we are seeking out diverse voices and challenging our blind spots when it comes to race by listening to the stories of people of color, and especially Black people at this moment.

One of the most valuable voices I have listened to over the past few weeks has been Austin Channing Brown, whose book I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness is a powerful and challenging memoir about the experience of being a Black woman in predominantly white and male dominated evangelical spaces. Be forewarned: if you are a White Christian, this book will likely sting a little. It certainly did for me, as I was challenged to re-think more than a few past situations in which even my well-meaning attempts at growth may have still caused (and continue to cause) hurt for my black sisters in Christ. But it also challenged me to keep working through my fragility and recommit to listening better to the voices of those on the margins, which, I think, is exactly what Jesus was up to when he took a detour through Samaria,  healed the bleeding woman who reached out to him,  hushed his disciples when they tried to discredit the woman washing his feet with her tears, etc...

I love read-by-the-author audiobooks and really enjoyed listening to the Austin Channing Brown's narration of this title, which was a nice road-trip companion on my way to my family vacation this week (side note: if you're an Audible subscriber, did you know you can pay the same price and support a local bookstore by making the switch to Libro.fm!?),  but if you're not quite ready for a whole four hours with Ms. Brown,  no sweat. Just start with one of these podcast interviews:

The Art of The Sermon

Brene Brown's Unlocking Us Interview

Speaking of podcasts, I happen to be a big fan of learning via podcasts, so I started an antiracist playlist that I'm slowly working through on Spotify. Some podcasts specifically apply to Christian listeners, some are more secular, but all have been highly educational for me! Listen with me here.

Finally, here are some ministries and studies focused specifically on the concept of racial healing within Christian communities. Though I have not personally used all of these resources, they come highly recommended by christian leaders, friends, and organizations I know are actively working to dismantle racist systems and ideologies from within the church:

Arrabon: this is a ministry I support and love that has created some great, short resources to get folks started in understanding the need for racial reconcilliation and healing in the church. These short videos are a great a primer for anyone seeking to understand why this work is so urgently needed within the church. Arrabon also provides live trainings and an exceptional class called Race, Class, and the Kingdom of God.

Be The Bridge  This is a Christian Reconciliation ministry whose main focus is group studies designed for mixed race groups,  but they also have a whiteness intensive course designed to challenge & call white people to examine their privilege in order to be better ministers of the gospel in our racially divided culture. I have also been following their instagram and listening to their podcasts.

Road Map to Reconciliation this book is specifically designed for church leaders and I've heard my own pastors sing its praises. The author has also written several other books that look good! 

The Color of Compromise this is a book with a companion video study on Amazon prime that explores the history of racism within the church. I am currently reading it and learning so much! Join me.

Vernon Gordon / Mosaic this is a local pastor in Richmond who is leading a study / discussion series on race that I have found personally challenging and enriching lately. The website has some great videos on the history of racism in America! At the very least, follow @vernongordon on instagram!

Truth's Table this is a podcast featuring three black women discussing theology, culture, etc. As I said before, I think it is really important to listen to diverse voices in the church. Until a few years ago, I was largely only pastored by white men which limited my access to feminist and liberation focused theologies. This podcast, along with Proverbial, a podcast led by two incredible female leaders from within my own church, has widened the lens through which I read the bible and view the world and I'm so grateful that technology has allowed me to come to the digital table and learn from more black women.

I hope these resources will be helpful to anyone who is interested in learning and growing in their faith as it pertains to the work of antiracism. I will continue sharing resources on social media and on this blog and welcome your thoughts, questions, and dialogue. I am still very much a work in progress and do not wish to paint myself as any sort of expert. I am not a pastor, historian, or theologian by any means. Rather, I am simply a teacher, critical thinker, and lifelong learner who is trying to educate myself and those around me as we grow together. One of my mottos for the classroom is Keep going, Keep growing, and I think it especially applies here. I hope you'll join me in pressing on towards truth and unity in our churches, families, and communities!

Dear, white Christians: Loving your neighbor means repenting of your complicity in white supremacy.

On Wednesday, July 6, 2016 Philando Castile, a black man, was shot and killed by a police officer while reaching for his driver’s license. He bled to death in his car while his fiancee live-streamed the gruesome scene on Facebook. On July 7, at an otherwise peaceful protest, a gunman opened fire, shooting twelve police officers and killing five. On July 11, I went to church. In fact, I went to church twice that day. Not that I am particularly devout-- the truth is, I had recently moved and had started visiting the church my roommates attended in our neighborhood, but was still also attending the hip, young, and mostly white non-denominational church I had been going to before the move, mostly because there were more potentially single men my age in attendance there. But I digress…

On that Sunday, the news cycle was starting to calm down from the events of earlier in the week, the details of which, I’ll be honest, I had only gleaned from clicking and skimming through a few articles. Like many other white churchgoers that morning, I had been insulated from the gut-punch this week had been to the black community and would have stayed that way if I had only attended one church that day, but we’ll get to that. The lead pastor was actually out of town on summer vacation with his family, so the associate pastor took the pulpit. He opened with something like “Whew, what a week. Last time [Lead Pastor] was out of town [some other national crisis] happened, I need to tell him to stop traveling, am I right?” A few church members chuckled, a few seemed slightly uncomfortable. No matter. The pastor continued on with his sermon as planned, no more mention of the news, no pause to pray for the clear division in our nation. Just the regularly scheduled sermon series, communion, and a couple of worship songs to “close us out.”  In all honesty, I didn’t think too much of it either.  To me, this felt like a pretty normal Sunday morning response to the newsweek. Ultimately, the events of the week hadn’t made much of a direct impact on many of the mostly white, middle-class congregation, so what was there to lament?

That afternoon, I attended another church, East End Fellowship, which, though far from perfect, strives to be a multicultural church and place of unity in the east end of Richmond. I brought a commitment card with me that had been mailed out a few weeks earlier. The church had been asking its attendees to prayerfully consider what their financial, service, and attendance commitments to the church should be and was scheduled to have a special service that day. I hadn’t filled out my card yet, but as it turned out, I wouldn’t need to. “We’ve got to change gears today. This is a time for lament,” our worship pastor Erin Rose told us. The service that day was different than any I’d attended before. We sang songs that called out for justice, for the spirit of God to pour out and heal our land. Mics were set up for congregants to come forward and pray out loud. Young black men prayed against fear, begging God for protection and justice. Black mothers grieved for the futures of their teenage sons, crying out to Jesus with the opening lines of Psalm 13, “How long, O Lord?” It was a humbling moment for me. Why hadn’t I realized how heavy these events were weighing on the people I had been worshipping with for weeks? For the first time, I was face to face with the collective trauma and grief that black communities feel when they see black bodies being brutalized again and again without consequence. I was far from understanding the structures of systemic racism that lead to this oppression, but I was no longer able to look away from the emotional toll it was taking on my spiritual family.

I recognize that communities where black and white people can worship together are incredibly rare in our country. So rare, in fact, that my friend David & his ministry Arrabon made this documentary about our community (its title, 11AM, is based on a MLK Jr. quote which states that 11AM is “America’s most segregated hour”).  I should also say that even at East End, it takes hard, sometimes exhausting work to find unity in our worship as a multicultural community, and a greater load of that work almost always falls on black congregants, whose trauma is re-lived and re-activated every time they have to explain or justify it to a well-meaning white friend. That said, my experience attending a church (in case you haven’t figured out, East End is where I ended up spending the rest of my Sundays, and many other days, after that one) where not everyone looks like me has transformed my understanding and empathy for the lived experience of racism in this country, and has brought me deeper into my calling to live as a follower of Christ. Which brings me to my main point:

If you are a white person in America and you call yourself a follower of Jesus, listen closely: if you are not asking God to help you recognize, call out, and dismantle systemic racism and the lie of white supremacy in your heart, church, and country, you are ignoring Jesus' command to love your neighbor as yourself. Period. 

Let me help break it down a little more: we live in a country that from its inception has built social and economic systems that value and protect the majority culture while devaluing and brutalizing the lives of those in the minority. Nowhere is this more clear than in what we are watching play out on national news right now. Yet by and large, a majority of white Christians, myself included for many years, have ignored and minimized the trauma caused to minorities and their communities. I've been disheartened this week as I've watched the social media feeds of many of my non-believing friends as they've condemned racist policing and called for justice, but from former pastors, mentors, and friends who I constantly see posting bible verses and Jesus memes, crickets. Or worse, posts shaming rioters but not speaking a word against the systemic racism that led to the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. (for more context on the history and necessity of violent protest in America, read this).

In his letter to the Phillippians, Paul tells Christians : then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.  Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. How can Christians read this scripture and still continue to have a calloused hearts towards the pain and fury of those who don’t look like them? How can we celebrate God’s victory over slavery in the book of Exodus and not hear the voices of his children still crying out for freedom from oppressive systems? How can we read through the Psalms and ignore the laments of mothers crying out for their sons? Are we even reading the same bible?

Part of the problem for white American Christians is that our churches exist largely in communities that are already predominantly segregated by race and class. We spend our time reading our Bibles and working out our theology around other people who look like us and so it just doesn’t occur to us, like it didn’t fully occur to me four years ago, that there is another America processing the world very differently from us. But that ignorance, whether willful or not, is robbing us of our opportunity to bring the hope of unity in Christ into a broken world. Increasingly, Christianity is seen by outsiders as the religion not of the oppressed but of the oppressor. I don’t believe that has ever been God’s vision for his church, but I absolutely think the devil has made centuries long work of tying us (white Christians) institutionally with the chains of white supremacy. If we truly want to defeat “the principalities, powers, and rulers of the darkness of this world” (Ephesians 4)  we must ask God to reveal our blind spots and call us to repentance of both the individual and generational sin of racism. 

I hope this is getting to you. Maybe you’ve been reeling for the past few weeks already, but feel trapped and powerless to begin unpacking what you, as a white person can do about it. Maybe you’ve been standing on the edge of this conversation for years, afraid of the cost of jumping in fully. Maybe something I said offended you or made you uncomfortable. I would challenge you to lean into that discomfort. Instead of building up defenses, think about why this idea bothers you. Recognizing that systemic racism is a collective sin that all white people benefit from in some way is a really hard thing to swallow. But as Christians, rather than looking for ways we can justify or make excuses for our sin, we can find freedom in the knowledge that “the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit and a contrite heart.” My prayer for all white Christians in America right now is that we would continually be broken and called to repentance over the racism of our nation and that God would give us the humility and power to sacrifice our comfort as we learn to truly and actively love our neighbors as ourselves. 

Tomorrow I will be sharing a post with more resources for white Christians to engage better with their understanding of racism. In order to be a witness to our increasingly divided world, it is not enough for Christians to claim that we are not racist, we must learn to be antiracist, and there are many resources out there to equip us to do this work.