The (Im)partial Church : Episode 11 | The Problem
February 04, 2023
Welcome back! Janine and Gerard discuss what to expect this season. We'll introduce some research that will help us discern the church's role in racial reconciliation efforts. This season promises to be a lot of fun and extremely informative. If this conversation inspires further questions feel free to reach out to us at theimpartialchurch@lhm.org.
The (Im)partial Church
Episode 02-01-11
Professor Janine Bolling:
And just like that, we're back for another season of The (Im)partial Church.
Rev. Dr. Gerard Bolling:
It feels so good to be back in the saddle.
Janine: So you're a cowboy now. Okay. Okay. Cowboy vibes.
Gerard: You know what I'm meant. You know what I'm meant. Anyhow, we are excited to continue this conversation with you, our listeners.
Janine: Yes, we are. But before we discuss where we're going, it's probably best to talk about where we've been. Season 1: there was a lot of getting everybody on the same page. We walked through some definitions; we shared some stories from our lives; and we looked to Scripture to color our perspectives on how we should think about race, inclusion, and our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Gerard: And we learned about why color blindness may not be such a great thing and how people in dominant groups often expect people in minority groups to assimilate.
Janine: We walked through ways to love your neighbor and learn that it is more than likely, going to cost you a little something.
Gerard: And then we talked about some people who are a part of the multi-ethnic families and how you can navigate through different things and tough conversations, tough spots.
Janine: Yes. And then finally, we took some questions, right? We interacted with you guys, the listeners. And you really did have some good ones.
Gerard: Season 1 was a lot of fun, but Season 2 is where that stops. Season 2 is what I'm calling, "The Reckoning."
Janine: Gerard.
Gerard: We're throwing everybody under the bus.
Janine: Gerard, Gerard.
Gerard: We're taking no prisoners.
Janine: Gerard, stop. None of that is true. We are bringing the same energy from last season. Fun, familial, conversational, gracious.
Gerard: Y'all know, I was just trying to give you a hard time.
Janine: Don't worry guys. A lot of stuff is staying the same. Same dynamic brother-sister duo.
Gerard: And most importantly, the same topic. I hate to say it, but partiality still exists in the church today, and we're honestly all guilty. I know, surprise. You can see it everywhere from the pews to the pulpit, all over.
Janine: No, seriously, it's true. And this season we've decided to invite some friends along to help us move forward. Barna, if you haven't heard of them, is an organization that researches trends in Christianity domestically. So, here at home. A few years back, they did a study on the current state of racial dynamics in the church, and it was extremely insightful. The study is called "Beyond Diversity" and you can find it, along with other studies, through the Barna Access Plus website. See, that sounds like you might have to pay for that. Do you think that the little plus makes me think you got to pay?
Gerard: I don't know, plus, minus, in between, I don't know. It's probably just a word choice thing.
Janine: But lucky for you guys, we won't be touching on the whole study, just parts that you can digest.
Gerard: But believe you me, it's worth taking a deep look into. Barna does really, really good work. If you haven't heard of them before, you'll really love their stuff. They conduct research with a large sample size and then they take time to collect some responses, and their studies are conducted with thought leaders in the space as well. There's a lot of cool things in the research that I knew, but there was so many other things in the research. There were so many things that just really surprised me and shocked me, and I'm excited to share that with you guys. Here at the (Im)partial Church, we appreciate qualitative and quantitative data alike.
Janine: But it's not all numbers and stories. We're inviting some other people along for the ride. We're going to talk to some pastors and some lay people who are living out all of the stuff we talk about on the show.
Gerard: It may get sticky, but like Janine promised earlier, we'll all get through it with just a little bit of grace. So buckle up. Season 2 of The (Im)partial Church starts now.
Gerard: Hey y'all. I'm Gerard.
Janine: And I'm Janine.
Gerard: I'm the big brother.
Janine: But I'm the older sister, and we are brother and sister in Christ.
Gerard: We grew up in Brooklyn, New York.
Janine: I'm still living in Brooklyn, but I serve in the Bronx.
Gerard: I'm a professor at Concordia University in Texas and a pastor at a congregation in St. Louis.
Janine: It's been said, "Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America."
Gerard: Issues with race and culture still plague our communities and our churches.
Janine: But what can we do about it? Should we see color?
Gerard: Or be colorblind?
Janine: What's our responsibility in bringing about unity in our neighborhoods and in our church pews?
Gerard: It's a delicate topic, but one we must tackle with grace.
Janine: So pull up your chair to the table as we bring Jesus to the center of this conversation of—
Gerard: The (Im)partial Church.
Janine: Let's start by saying, humanity has a sin problem. I think we all agree on this. The reason Jesus tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves is because we need to be told. And some of the ways that the sin problem manifests are through partiality. I'm not sure if we spelled it out yet, but partiality often manifests itself through prejudice. And that prejudice is often closely tied to racism.
Gerard: Exactly. And I know many of us don't like the term racism, because it feels too extreme. And a lot of people think that for an action to be considered racist, that it has to be somewhat intentional or it has to be malicious, but that's really not true. Racism is, at its core, a behavior. It's an attitude. It's a belief that one racial group inherently possesses characteristics that render the group superior to others. When the group of individuals holding these beliefs has access to power and influence, racism gets baked into systems and oppresses minority groups. We call that systemic racism. And because people are often myopic and shortsighted, we typically favor our own group, and that lands us right back where we started. The definition sounds a lot like partiality.
Janine: Racism isn't always wearing a hood, and we're not talking about the hood, we're talking about a hood. It's not always obvious. Sometimes racism shows up in the room, even when we really don't mean it to. But that's true of most sin.
Gerard: And as we look to remove things like pride or lust or envy from our hearts as those sins, we're trying to remove those things, we have to look at opportunities to remove partiality and racially insensitive behaviors as well.
Janine: Why? Because sin goes against God's plan for creation and His children. We are to act as ambassadors for His kingdom as well.
Gerard: As we ask God to remove things like pride or lust or envy from our hearts, we also need to look for opportunities where we can ask God to remove partiality or racially insensitive behaviors from our heart as well.
Janine: Yes, we ask Him to remove all those things from our heart. In fact, one of my favorite verses comes from Psalm 86, which talks about God giving us an undivided heart. And that's something that I prayed for a lot in my youth, but one that we also pray for in adulthood as we grow through all the different stages of Christianity—stages of Christianity, that sounds very theatrical. But we're continuously asking God to remove things from us and to fill us up with those gifts that He has and the fruit of the Spirit. Because it does go against His plan, right? In creation, that's not what He laid out and that's not what He imagined for His children. So as we are called to be His ambassadors in His kingdom, this is something we continuously must also call out, pray against, and fight against in our own lives.
Gerard: I really like how you mentioned the fruit of the Spirit. It reminds me of that song we learned at Sunday School. The fruit of the Spirit is—
Janine: Yes. God's love in you.
Gerard: Love, joy, peace, patient, kindness, goodness. Oh, we're singing two different songs.
Janine: This is awkward. I'm singing Grace Church circa 1996 version. And I feel like—
Gerard: I'm giving St. Matthew Lutheran Church circa 2001. So I don't know what we're doing.
Janine: This is so weird.
Gerard: Generational differences. But anyway, sin loses its grip in our hearts when we confess it. We know that the fruit of the Spirit, through faith, right, has taken root into our hearts and that as we confess our sins to God—as it's our tradition in the Lutheran church—we have this contemplative, corporate prayer that becomes our confession. When we can go to the Father and say, "We have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed by what we have done—the things we actually did—and by what we have left undone, the things that we didn't do that we should have done. We haven't loved You with our whole heart. We haven't loved our neighbors as ourselves. Amen. For the sake of Your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us."
When we say those words, we confess that we're failing to love our neighbors. And when we fail to love our neighbors, we fail to love God with our whole heart. Somebody oh, so good, right? I mean, it's the truth, right? In the Confession and Absolution, we're laying everything out there and we're putting everything forward and we get Christ's forgiveness from what we put forward, for every single sin.
Janine: Amen. I think about my prayer journey a lot, especially with the prayers that we talked about that you just mentioned. I remember it being explained back in confirmation class as sins of omission and sins of commission, right? Things that people see you do that's pretty clear. And then things where you could have done something but you really didn't. And really more often than not, that's where my prayer journey is centered around. It's what I could have done, but didn't. And we hear those words of forgiveness, which are so refreshing as they wash over us, but additionally, we also hear, when we pray, as we say things out loud, what we have really done.
It's so easy to keep things in our head and brush them off, because that's what our mind wants to do. Our mind wants us to feel comfortable. Our mind wants us to create patterns. Our mind wants us to coast. But God calls us into something else. And that's why I think it is so powerful to confess our sins together with one voice, but then also to have that little moment of silence that the pastors give, where it's like, "Now think about what you've done." And you're like, "Why is this moment so long?" And you call the things to mind.
Gerard: And sometimes those moments of silence, where you get to just contemplate and you get to think about what's happening, those are the most meaningful moments when things are not said, right? The things that remain unsaid out loud but are said with your heart. I think it's really cool that God can hear our heart. One of my favorite things that I learned in Sunday school with Cheryl Schultz at St. Matthew Lutheran in Brooklyn, New York, is I remember we were talking about prayer. And I said, "Well, sometimes I don't know what I'm supposed to pray or how I'm supposed to pray or what it's supposed to go like." And so many people have all these big lofty prayers they can create. And at that point in my life, I was like, what, 11 years old, I was like, "What am I supposed to say?" And so she said, "Sometimes you can just say, Holy Spirit, pray for us."
The Holy Spirit will pray for us, right? Because He's our Advocate. She said that that simple prayer means so many things. And I feel like that just opened up my world as a kid. But more than opening up my world as a kid, sometimes when I find myself speechless in today's world, in my prayer life, I just let there be that silence that I can contemplate, and I say, "Holy Spirit, pray for me." And it's sometimes more meaningful than any lofty prayer I could have spat out. And it's beautiful in that moment when I'm confessing, too.
Janine: When you really start to think about what you're confessing, you start to feel convicted. And what we're going to tackle, in a future episode, is exactly that. And part of that is what the Law does as well, is that commitment piece, is it not?
Gerard: Exactly. Yeah, because remember, the Scripture consists of two parts. You have the Law and you have the Gospel. The Law is made up of God's commands to us, and it has three main uses. Do you remember them, Janine?
Janine: Absolutely. Curb, mirror, and guide.
Gerard: And guide. You're doing the actions. I don't know if anybody sees those actions, but yeah, three uses.
Janine: It's a mnemonic device.
Gerard: It's a mnemonic device. It's good. You're learning. But the Law is made up of those commands to us, right? To curb, to mirror and to guide, and it helps us avoid different things, right? It helps us avoid sin. It helps us see where God is present, and it helps call us back to Him. But the Gospel, the Gospel is the Good News about Jesus Christ. And it shows that God is compassionate, that God is gracious, and that God is loving.
Janine: Absolutely. Now that we have identified racism as a sin, let us look at how God would have us deal with said sin through the words of one of His prophets. Do you know Joel, Gerard? Do you know Joel?
Gerard: I do know Joel, yeah. Some of my students in class call him Jo-el. But Joel is his name.
Janine: Right. So Joel is one of the books in the Old Testament, and the Old Testament is also referred to as the "Law and the Prophets." We're not sure where Joel fits chronologically, but there is evidence that he had knowledge of some of the other prophets. However, just because we don't know exactly when Joel was written, doesn't mean it doesn't have some wisdom for the people of God.
Gerard: Exactly. And here's what Joel, the prophet says of the Lord that God is calling us to do. Joel 2:12-14 says, "Even now, declares the Lord, return to Me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning. Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and He relents from sending calamity." See, God calls us to return to Him.
Janine: When God sees sin, He says, "This is not My design. Let's get back on track."
Gerard: He knows that our sin is a condition of our heart, and He knows that the way to get us back on track is for Him to turn back our whole hearts to Himself. We can't return to God halfheartedly. Instead, this requires all of us. And Jesus activates all of us in this Gospel work.
Janine: When we look a little bit further into this verse, he even gives us ways to do this, right? Fasting, very common, very spiritual practice. Fasting is a way that we remind ourselves of our dependence on God. Have you fasted recently, Gerard or—?
Gerard: I haven't, Janine.
Janine: Boycotting it? Okay.
Gerard: Have you fasted?
Janine: Not in the recent past. I tend to fast Thanksgiving before we eat. I just fast all day.
Gerard: Is that spiritual or—?
Janine: No, it's more of a physical hunger if I think about it.
Gerard: Gotcha. Gotcha.
Janine: But in these verses in Joel, fasting is a spiritual practice that people around the world do, including Christians, that reminds us of our dependence on God. It reorients our focus and puts us on notice that God is our one and only Source. We are not in control. He's the one in control.
Gerard: Amen. And that's not all either. We have to allow ourselves to feel that feeling of remorse in this condition that we have. This sin condition in our broken world. And our hearts begin to break in step with God's heart. That's what Joel means when he says, "Rend your hearts." It's not a word that we use a lot nowadays, rend, right? But rend means to tear or to break, right? Joel is asking, and he's telling us that God wants us to break our hearts in step with His. In 1 Samuel 15:22, we see another one of God's prophets echo the same sentiment when he says, and it says, "Samuel declared, does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obedience to His voice? Behold, obedience is better than sacrifice, and attentiveness is better than the fat of rams."
Janine: This is not superficial. We're talking about being deeply moved by the way our sin detracts us from God's intent. That's why Joel entreats us not only to tear our clothes or virtue signal, but to lament. And lament, that's defined as a passionate expression of grief or sorrow.
Gerard: But the verse doesn't just end here. It goes on to remind us of who our Father is. Joel calls us back, remember, to Exodus 34:6, "Ours is a God who is gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love."
Janine: Wow. All of that in just—
Gerard: All of that.
Janine: Two verses. Two short verses. See, I'm also struck by the ending. A lot of the time it seems that people are afraid to call out racism, because they don't want to ruffle feathers or maybe they feel a little guilty. And we will talk about the proper response to conviction later this season. But in this verse, we see that God is gracious and forgiving and we know that He's constant. His love doesn't change even though He sees our sin.
Gerard: One of my favorite philosophers from the turn of the century, put it this way, "I don't care who you are, where you're from. Don't care what you did, as long as you love me."
Janine: Wow. Going to go ahead and ... Was that Backstreet Boys?
Gerard: It doesn't matter where it's from, right? It doesn't matter, because the words are true.
Janine: Who knew that the Backstreet Boys had such solid exegesis. Who knew?
Gerard: Art. Art. Really art. I know, right? Admittedly, they probably weren't talking about the character of God, but the lyrics felt appropriate. The point is simple: racism is a problem and God wants His children to have no part of it. But we aren't the only ones who think so. Let's hear from someone who's researched this very topic.
Janine: This is Brooke Hempell. She's been a researcher for the past 20 years and was a part of an incredible team on this Beyond Diversity study. The study revealed all sorts of insights. Like over 60 percent of Christians in America believe that the church plays a major role in racial reconciliation work. But only around 30 percent of folks felt motivated to address the issue themselves. And that's just one of the many interesting takeaways.
Brooke Hempell: We put together a group of people in academia. We brought on Dr. Glenn Bracey. So he and Dr. Emerson are sociologists who studied race a lot, both really devoted Christians from different sort of backgrounds. And then we also had Chad Brennan, who was one of the leads of the project, who had been doing consulting to mostly colleges, Christian colleges, about diversity for many years, and we'd worked with him on a few studies. So that group, along with our Barna Group of researchers and our writers, we decided to kind of assemble this large-scale project to do more than just a survey, but to do a real deep dive on faith and race in the church today. And that involved interviews with experts like over a hundred interviews with experts. Lots of focus groups with people in church contexts in different settings around the country of different racial backgrounds. And then also two large surveys that helped us to dig in deeply on some of these topics.
Gerard: Like I said before, we really like qualitative and quantitative research. That means we are going to hear personal stories, as well as research in this season. But now let's hear what else Brooke has to say.
Brooke: I think we see a cultural narrative, and especially within the church, frankly, that says, "Hey, we got past that. We went through the civil rights era; we changed our laws; we opened things up. And so if we continue to focus on this topic, it's being overly divisive, and it's not being loving." And I would say our research discovered that's completely not the case. In fact, the more that we forget the past or forget to look at the past, the more hurt begins to fester. And so from a Christian perspective, the importance of looking at the past is twofold. One is, throughout Scripture, God just constantly says, "Remember, remember, remember." He doesn't want us to forget what's happened. He's always building upon the lessons of the past so that it'll stick in our minds. Those stories are formative to us and they're formative to our faith. So He doesn't want us to forget that.
But two is, this country, and the church especially hasn't really dealt with the reality of the harm that has been done in this country, especially specifically with regard to the impacts of slavery, but even more broadly, to many different racial groups. Injustices that have been done in the name of the country or in the name of the church, in many cases. And so by not looking at that, you are not going through the process that a Christian goes through of examining your heart and repenting and then seeking reconciliation. So the difference is, that's a concept and a practice that we adhere to individually, personally. Right? We know that that's important for our faith, but we don't always acknowledge that that's a concept or practice that needs to happen corporately.
But if you look in Scripture, you see God's people would do that, right? And so we would look at, for example, in Nehemiah and say, Nehemiah was called to rebuild the walls of the city in the temple and he was given all the access to do that. But in doing so, he discovered that his forefathers had kind of dropped their faith. They lost track of some important parts of their faith. And before he could continue the work, he had to stop and repent. And he genuinely lamented and cried out for that, for the wrong that had been done.
And so there is a lot of examples in Scripture of repenting for the sins of the past that might not be personal to us. But in our theology, we kind of think, "Well, if I say that I'm repenting of this, that means that I personally was guilty of it." That may not be the case. But somewhere in this world that I've grown up in, that I've been bred up in, that was the case. That there was sin done and it hasn't really been accounted for. And that's an important first step that I think connects really heavily to our faith.
Gerard: And when we look at our nation's past, we can see that while we haven't always gotten it right, the church oftentimes has been the epicenter of real positive social change.
Janine: That's true, that's true. But the church also still has some work to do. For instance, it doesn't seem like everyone understands just who the church is. Because while a majority of us agree that the church must play a role in the reconciliation efforts, between 2019 and 2020, the portion of Christians who were unmotivated to address racial injustice, increased by 13 percent. And let's think about what was happening in 2019, 2020.
Gerard: Ooh, yikes. What happened?
Janine: There's not just one answer, right? What a year. What years those were. There isn't a one singular answer, and I think we should take some time to digest what we've heard and reflect. And we will be doing just that over the course of the next few episodes.
Gerard: The very nature of these incongruencies may tell us something about how to move forward. This is just the beginning, and we hope you'll stick around as we discover our role in creating The (I'm)partial Church.
Janine: What I hope to take away from this season is just really understanding something that we talk about in a lot of my theology classes, the character of God. Who we think God is, and who God shows us who He actually is. One of the quotes that I love is "When someone shows you who they are, believe them." And as we think through what that looks like in light of sin, which is something we all do, something we can all identify, something that resonates with all of us, I'd like to understand better what the gifts God has to us from His character are. So when I think about being slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, I think about what that means for opportunities or really challenges in where God should be angry at me, but isn't. So I think that that would be helpful for people to see and to understand a little bit better. What about you?
Gerard: I'm also excited to take some of our old vocabulary that's good vocabulary from our word bank and then apply it over and against this topic, in this issue. The SOS that we've learned in Sunday School. How God sees our sin, but He also shows our Savior. And the uses of the Law and then the beauty of the Gospel. Thinking about vocation and what kinds of vocations we have. A vocation is something that you are not made to do, but that you get to do, right? A gift that God has given you as your piece of who you are—like being a sister or a brother or a mother or a father or a professor or an executive director or a pastor. All those things are vocations, but we also have a location vocation as well of where God has placed us and what we're to do in the place that God has placed us. So I'm really interested in that for this season.
Janine: I'm really interested to share the interviews we've done and hear some more research. And I know that I grew up reading these little statistics and studies, these huge statistics and studies, but I didn't get to dig in deep with those. So I'm excited for people to hear that.
Gerard: Brooke will be back to share more from the Beyond Diversity Survey, as we dig into these insights. But we'll also hear from church leaders and lay people working on the front lines of racial reconciliation. The church is engaging and with the overwhelming majority of practicing Christians saying, "Yes, we need to improve race relations," that's encouraging!
It was great talking to each and every one of you. Janine and I love spending time with you all, and all this and more in this season of The (Im)partial Church.