Strange fruit – or good?

The Church’s broken history with race needs to be acknowledged before we can move forward. Our legacy of privilege and injustice has very real consequence for the Kingdom. It is time to prune the branches of our own indifference, so we can bear good fruit for Christ in our witness to the world.

Yes. Yes. Yes! My heart echoes these statements from “Ye Shall Know Them By Their Fruits,” on Katelin’s blog, By Their Strange Fruit. I discovered Katelin and her blog by way of Jody’s Between Worlds blog post, 101 Culturally Diverse Christian Voices.

With eyes wide, I read and reread, “The Church’s broken history with race needs to be acknowledged before we can move forward.” That sentence captures the reason for my writing, We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church.

The unusual name, By Their Strange Fruit, comes from the 1939 Billie Holiday song, “Strange Fruit.” The song’s haunting lyrics capture the chilling paradox of the lynching trees of the Bible Belt. (To see Holiday perform the song, click here and scroll down.)

The blog’s mission? “To promote justice and understanding across racial divides. We examine Christianity’s often bungled history with race/racism, and facilitate reconciliation as we move toward the future.”

Contributors to By Their Strange Fruit do two things essential to accomplishing this purpose:

• Expose the strange fruit – calling us to face and acknowledge the stark reality of the part the church has played in bungled and broken race relations, past and present.
• Cultivate the good fruit – sounding a message of good hope in the Lord Jesus Christ, who died and rose again, who is the Head of his Body and who will not rest until he has accomplished, in us and through us, all that he has declared he will do.

Katelin writes,

Despite our history, the Church has tremendous potential to usher racial justice and reconciliation on earth. It is the hope in Christ’s promise of redemption and holy partnership that is at the heart of By Their Strange Fruit’s mission. The Gospel is powerful in its capacity to affect hearts and mind, if we would only show the world that it is possible in Him.

I believe in the power of Cross to bring redemption to a broken world, to make allies of oppressors, and saints of sinners. This is the transforming image of Christ that we can present to a hurting world.

This is the good fruit that we can bear.

Prayer for the Body

I would like to share this prayer with you and ask you to pray with me that, as the Bride of Christ, we will continue to learn to “walk in beauty” with our fellow man and God.

Mark Charles

In May 2013, Mark Charles wrote those words in an email sent to a group I had just joined. I didn’t know Mark, but deeply agreed with the prayer, prayed it and kept it in my Inbox.

Last week, Jodi who blogs at Between Worlds, posted a list of 101 Culturally Diverse Christian Voices. Recognizing Mark’s name on the list, I clicked through and puttered around his blog, Reflections from the Hogan.

“I do not lead an organization nor do I work solely for a specific group, ministry or church,” Mark writes. “I am merely the son of an American woman (of Dutch heritage) and a Navajo man, who is living on our Navajo Reservation and trying to understand the complexities of our country’s history regarding race, culture and faith so that I can help forge a path of healing and reconciliation for our people.”

Thank you, Mark, for pursuing such a crucial and challenging calling.

Last year, when Mark sent out A Prayer for the Church by email, he wrote, “This prayer is found on page 270 of the hymnal Lift Up Your Hearts; published and copyright by Faith Alive, 2013.”

Only now have I realized: Mark also posted this prayer on his blog. What’s more, he helped write the prayer, at the request of “a friend and colleague” who edited the new hymnal.

And now, at last, I see what God wants me to do with what he first put in front of me 10 months ago. With deep thanks to Mark Charles and to the editors of the Lift Up Your Hearts hymnal, I join the prayer and reprint it – and echo Mark’s invitation for you to join in too.

A Prayer of Indigenous Peoples, Refugees, Immigrants, and Pilgrims

Triune God
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
We come before you as many parts of a single body.
You have called us together.
From different cultures, languages, customs, and histories…
Some of us indigenous – peoples of the land.
Some of us refugees, immigrants, pilgrims – people on the move.
Some of us hosts, some of us guests, some of us both hosts and guests
All of us searching for an eternal place where we can belong.

Creator, forgive us.
The earth is yours and everything that is in it.
But we forget…
In our arrogance we think we own it.
In our greed we think we can steal it.
In our ignorance we worship it.
In our thoughtlessness we destroy it.
We forget that you created it to bring praise and joy to you,
and you gave it as a gift,
for us to steward,
for us to enjoy,
for us to see more clearly your beauty and your majesty.

Jesus, save us.
We wait for your kingdom.
We long for your throne.
We hunger for your reconciliation,
for that day where people, from every tribe and every tongue
will gather around you and sing your praises.

Holy Spirit, teach us.
Help us to remember
that the body is made up of many parts.
Each one unique and every one necessary…
Teach us to embrace the discomfort that comes from our diversity
and to celebrate the fact that we are unified, not through our sameness,
but through the blood of our LORD and savior, Jesus Christ.

Triune God. We love you.
Your creation is beautiful.
Your salvation is merciful.
And your wisdom is beyond compare.

We pray this all in Jesus’ name.
Amen.

Faith Alive Christian Resources, 2013, © Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike
About Mark Charles

Listen to the whole Body

“I’m just tired of only hearing white, mainstream evangelical voices,” a good friend lamented to me recently. “Why aren’t voices from other backgrounds listened to in the same way as the white voices?” I heard the weariness of consistent exclusion in his question, and frankly, wondered the same thing myself.

So begins the Between Worlds blog post titled, 101 Culturally Diverse Christian Voices. The post continues:

When I saw Rachel Held Evans’ list of 101 Christian Women Speakers a few months ago, I was struck most by their lack of representation and recognition in the mainstream white evangelical Christian culture. Looking at the speakers at so many Christian conferences and gatherings, it would appear that white males are the only people qualified to speak from a place of faith. Rachel’s list showed us that this was not so.

As I researched this list, I was struck by how many great voices from diverse backgrounds are speaking in the public sphere through all sorts of mediums – writing, music, art, speaking. It is my hope that this list will broaden the conversation even further and be a resource to help distribute the collective voice beyond only one dominant cultural perspective in the public Christian sphere.

Thank you for your amazing list, Jodi. Scanning it, I knew: GOD wants the change this blog post invites. He wants us white people to sit at the feet of other people, to listen and learn. He isn’t asking us to agree with everything we hear, but he is calling us to let people have their say, without rejecting out-of-hand viewpoints that differ from ours – that challenge our beliefs and/or put us in the hot seat. He’s calling us to dare to hear one another. He’s calling us to dare to hear his heart.

The God who reveals himself as Father, Son and Spirit speaks to each of his children individually. He also speaks to us through one another. “One another” does not only include ordained white men. “One another” includes the breadth of the Body of Christ.

When we listen only to one voice (such as the white, predominantly male, US evangelical voice), we come to equate true Christianity solely with that voice. We fear any other voice, for it might lead us into error. We disdain any other voice as inferior. We become so convinced that this one voice speaks for God, we will ultimately accuse the Lord himself of error when he speaks up to challenge what we’ve been told.

Yet no one human voice, nor even one culture’s voice, comes close to grasping the whole of truth. White preachers – like all other Christian voices – speak the truth in part. And all of us tend to see the truth through the grid of our own cultural biases and norms.

In a fallen world created by a holy God, every culture illuminates some aspects of truth, and every culture obscures some aspects of truth. Since my culture is like the air I breathe, I can rarely see where it’s clouding or clarifying my perception of truth, without help from someone “outside.” I won’t believe I need that help, or be able to receive it, except as I humble myself before the Spirit of Christ.

Humbling myself, I can open myself to embrace truth more fully in two ways:

1. Learn to listen to the Lord.
The ability to hear God proceeds from a heart wholly yielded to him – continually willing to let him point out sins and missteps, as well as to guide, encourage, affirm and provide. Only as I practice hearing and obeying God, Spirit-to-spirit, only as I receive and walk in his living Word, can I begin to discern when I am or am not hearing him speak through others.

2. Learn to listen to the Body of Christ.
For us who have been reared in the white evangelical church culture, this is a lot harder than it sounds. Having been trained from birth to trust only those voices that teach the exact brand of Christianity we’ve always been taught, we do not know: This actually makes us more susceptible to error, not less so.

It’s crucial that we quit letting pride and fear, busyness and disrespect stop us from humbly receiving what the Lord Jesus wants to pour into our lives through others who love him but look and think differently from us. It’s crucial that we quit putting our fingers in our ears at the first statement that offends us or seems to contradict what we’ve previously believed. Those very statements provide us important opportunities to run to our Lord, seeking clarity and waiting before him until he gives it.

I’m writing all this because I believe it. I’m writing all this to hold myself accountable to live it. For today, God is saying to me: “You know this, Deborah. I don’t have to convince you of it. Now I want you to follow through. Regularly, resolutely, I want you to go out of your way to listen to voices that, until now, you didn’t even know were speaking.”

Aha. Jodi, the blogger who went to great lengths to give names and contact information for 101 Culturally Diverse Christian Voices, has provided a treasure I’m now responsible to mine. I accept that responsibility with joy, and with trembling, crying out to God for grace to follow through. You’ll know if I do, for I will share with you some exquisite gems I uncover along the way.