Let me step out and apply this specifically to the notion of white privilege. Though language can be redeemed in its use, I don’t think this term is helpful for the church. It gains its currency within a larger critical, deconstructive ideology that has the aim of conflict, not conciliation. Anecdotally speaking, I’ve never seen “white privilege” function as a conversation-starter, but only as a conversation-stopper. When Christians uncritically embrace it, they have a difficult time extricating the term from the God-hating narrative in which it is embedded. The notion does have a trace of truth in it.

I’m happy this conference is happening. Yet, I hate talking about race. It has become so polarizing! We talk about it today the way that C. S. Lewis, in his day, said that Christians talked about demons: either with a disbelief in their existence or with an excessive and unhealthy preoccupation with them.

Given the current climate in the evangelical church, one may easily succumb to a kind of racial reconciliation fatigue. And yet, I talk about race because it is directly tied to redemptive history—to God’s plan in Christ to procure his elect from every nation and make one new man out of the many, to gather together one multiethnic family out of every nation, tribe, people, and tongue. So, here are four theses on reforming race relationships in the church.

1. Reforming racial relationships must be cruciform from beginning to end.

When Paul says, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18), he is telling us that the cross—shorthand for God’s plan of redemption in Christ—divides us all into two groups, those who are “perishing” and those who are “being saved.” But not only does the cross divide us, it also defines us. It structures our identity and story. Our lives are cruciform—cross-shaped. Like Paul, we have been “crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20) and know ourselves as ones who were “buried with him by baptism” (Rom. 6:4).

The message of the cross is on a collision course not only with the ideologies of the world, but with our own pride as well. The cross is nothing if it doesn’t humble us about human ability. In Luther’s “A Meditation on Christ’s Passion,” he writes that we haven’t understood the cross if we only note how bad were the Jews and soldiers, how terrible was Jesus’s experience of injustice. No, we aren’t truly “getting it” until we see the cross and feel its conviction and stinging indictment of us. “When you see the nails piercing Christ’s hands, you can be certain that it is your work. When you behold his crown of thorns, you may rest assured that these are your evil thoughts.” The cross has to kill us before it comforts and consoles us.

Now, consider this in light of Jesus’s second great commandment—which is what we’re really talking about when we talk about race issues in the church. To love our neighbor means that we can and must admit that we’ve failed to love our neighbor as we ought. All of us. Own it. And we don’t just fail at loving people who don’t look like us—we fail at loving those who look just like us! This searing indictment is good news that drives us back to the cross. The ground really is level at the foot of the cross. There is no race privilege there. The stinging conviction of cross-shaped neighbor-loving is no respecter of persons. It doesn’t leave room for one-sided, selective, race-based grief and guilt. We can and should engage each other from places of mutual humility and fearless love, not prickliness, self-defensiveness, and suspicion.

2. We must unrelentingly emphasize matters more foundational than race.

The real issues have always revolved, and will always revolve, around matters of sin and grace, not skin and race. We can say in Pauline fashion, “And sin, seizing an opportunity through differences in melanin content, produces among us all kinds of divisions” (see Rom. 7:8). Our difficulties arise because Adam is our father, not because our skin is colored.

I am not advocating for the misguided approach of a blissful “colorblind” church and society. Arguably the most memorable phrase from the most well-known speech of the most noted black American makes this very point: Martin Luther King dreamed of a time when our children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Of course these words were not intended to say color or difference doesn’t matter, but that other things matter more. (Yes, I quoted King, and yes, I am aware of his failings. The Lord can draw straight lines with crooked sticks!)

3. Reforming race issues in the church calls for wise engagement with the wider race discourse.
4. Reforming racial relationships in the church calls for an informed understanding of justice.

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