Things I learned from the Race Matters discussions...

1. Individual racism exists in the year 2005. If you don't think that it does, ask someone different than you if they have ever experienced racism. You may be shocked at what they will tell you. Raising awareness of this will hopefully lead to an ongoing dialogue between people of different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds that will seek to break these dividing walls that keep us unaware.

2. Institutional or systematic racism exists in the year 2005. From segregated congregations to VBS curriculum that promote false stereotypes, the church is as guilty as any institution. Pastor Soong Chan Rah said, "The church has successfully picked up where the Jim Crow laws left off." There are plenty of sytems in place that separate us into categories. I hope the Church will begin to overcome this more and more.

3. What can I do about it? I can develop significant friendships with people who are not white. I can be mentored/discipled by an older man who is not white.

4. Due to the global migration of so many people groups, the barrier to fulfilling the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20) is no longer geographical, but rather it is cultural. Going to the nations no longer (necessarily) means crossing oceans and mountains; it means crossing the street and talking to the mainland Chinese UAMS student (for example).

The conversation has just begun. I hope that it will continue.

"Progressive preacher..."

Hey gang,
This was forwarded to me by a friend from seminary. I haven't heard from her in a while, but apparently she works for Sojourners. Cool!

The article below is an interesting one. Please read and comment.

Peace,
Rob <><
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Progressive preacher
As an activist, evangelical Christian, Jim Wallis challenges religious right

By JOHN BLAKE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/21/05

The Rev. Jim Wallis has been interrogated by South African secret police, jousted with Sunday morning talk-show hosts and personally chastised President Bush about his faith.

But his most paralyzing speaking moment came in Atlanta when he was invited to preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church on the birthday of his hero, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., in the late 1980s.

Wallis was so intimidated by preaching in King's former church that he was sweating heavily by the time he stammered into his opening. As he stumbled on incoherently, an elderly deacon in the front row suddenly barked at him, " 'C'mon young man, say what you think.' "

The man loosened Wallis up. As he settled into his sermon, the man shouted, " 'That's better. Keep it coming.' " After Wallis ended with a thunderous finish, he bolted from the pulpit to meet his cheerleader.

"I ran down to him and said, 'You just pulled that sermon out of me,' " Wallis recalled, chuckling.

"He put his arm on my shoulder and said, 'Son, I raised up many a preacher in my day.' "

Wallis can afford to laugh today. He's found his preaching voice and now he's being cheered by tens of thousands of readers. His book, "God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It," isn't just a New York Times best seller. It's become a battle manual for those who believe that politically conservative religious leaders have overreached.

The 57-year-old activist is returning to Ebenezer's pulpit at 7 p.m. Thursday, but he shouldn't sweat much this time. Wallis has become a symbol of hope to groups across the religious spectrum: progressives who want Democrats to talk more about faith; conservatives who don't want Republicans to talk only about gay marriage and abortion.

'On the political left'
Most of the attention directed at Wallis, however, has focused on his critique of the religious right.

It is encapsulated in one story he likes to tell. When he was in seminary, he said that he and a group of friends decided to methodically mark every Bible verse that protested against poverty. They discovered that defending the poor was the second most dominant theme in the Old Testament after idolatry. It surfaced in one of every 16 verses in the New Testament.

To seal their experiment, Wallis and his friends cut out every Scripture that talked about the poor. They ended up with a Bible full of holes.

Wallis says that the religious right is preaching a Christianity of holes. They have eviscerated Jesus' passion for justice and replaced it with a Gospel that has reduced Christianity to membership in the Republican Party, he said.

"How did the faith of Jesus come to be known as pro-rich, pro-war and only pro-American?" he asks in the beginning of his book.

Yet what distinguishes Wallis from others who attack the Republican Party's use of faith is his personal story. He describes himself as an evangelical Christian who was raised in a fundamentalist church. He agrees with conservative Christians on many issues concerning personal behavior.

The Democrats, he claims, lost last year's presidential election because they didn't know how to talk about faith. He also criticizes the left's "secular fundamentalists," leaders from groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union who attack all political figures who speak about their religious convictions in public.

Wallis argues that any approach to solving massive national problems such as poverty must combine the insights of both the left and the right.

"The conservatives are right when they say that cultural and moral issues of family breakdown, personal responsibility, sexual promiscuity and substance abuse are prime reasons for entrenched poverty," he writes in "God's Politics." "The liberals are right when they point to the critical need for adequate nutrition, health care, education, housing and good-paying jobs as keys to overcoming endemic poverty."

Some evangelicals, though, don't see Wallis as one of their own. They're suspicious because he's advised politicians such as Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the Senate minority leader. He also led campus protests in the 1960s and championed interfaith dialogue.

"Let's face it, Jim is an evangelical with a broad theological spirit who is clearly on the political left of the equation," said the Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs with the National Association of Evangelicals.

Cizik concedes that Wallis has aligned himself with evangelicals who support causes ranging from international religious freedom and peace in Sudan to efforts opposing sex trafficking.

"But let's be clear, the leadership on those human rights issues have not come from mainline Protestants or the political left," Cizik said. "It's come from conservative evangelicals."

But Wallis rejects the notion that he has become a spokesman for the religious left.

"When you say you care about the poor, or want to protect the environment, or challenge a nation's decision to go to war, they say you're left-wing, even if those convictions come right out of the Bible," he told one interviewer. "I care about poverty because the Bible requires an evangelical Christian like me to care about poverty."

He said blending calls for social justice and personal holiness may seem odd now, but that wasn't always the case.

"In the 19th century, evangelical Christians helped lead the fight against slavery. They were abolitionists and they fought for women's suffrage and child labor laws," he said.

Fundamentalist roots
Wallis was raised in a fundamentalist church in suburban Detroit. His father, Jim Sr., was one of its founding elders. Plymouth Brethren Church taught that Catholics and all mainline Protestant groups — except for Baptists — were going to hell.

But the church couldn't shield Wallis from the events raging outside its doors: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the race riots that erupted in Detroit. When he became 14, Wallis said he started asking questions. Why did blacks and whites live apart? Who was Martin Luther King Jr.?

"I was reading the paper, listening to the news," he said. "I started paying attention to the world around me. "

Wallis took his doubts to the dinner table, where he engaged in plenty of heated battles with his father, whom he described as an "Eisenhower Republican."

"They would battle about racism, Dr. King and the war in Vietnam," recalled Bill Weld-Wallis, Jim Wallis' younger brother. "This went on for years."

Wallis said his family's church kicked him out because of his questions. But he found acceptance in a black church in inner-city Detroit, where he would literally have to drive past a curious crowd of pimps and hookers to go to church.

"They thought I was looking for drugs," he said.

He was looking for another kind of faith. He glimpsed some of it when he entered the black church. The music was powerful and the sermons were steered toward helping people now, and not waiting for the last trumpet to sound. He made friends with blacks he admired whose lives taught him about the grip of racism and poverty.

"It was there that I learned about a more holistic Gospel that changes lives and feeds hungry people and shelters the homeless," Wallis said. "The black church has been the church in America that has most understood the connection between personal faith and social justice."

Power of Matthew 25
It wasn't enough, though. Wallis eventually lost his faith and enrolled in Michigan State University, where he led protests against war and the shootings of Kent State University students. He decided to read the New Testament one last time. He was riveted by Matthew 25, where Jesus concludes in a vivid parable that God will judge people by how they treat the poor, sick and those in prison.

"He doesn't ask them about their doctrine, or if they believe in the Virgin Birth or gay marriage," Wallis said. "His question is about how you treated the poor."

Matthew 25 became his conversion text. Wallis enrolled in Chicago's Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1970. He and six students started a magazine that was renamed Sojourners, the biblical term for religious searchers.

"I wanted to go to a place where the Bible was taken seriously," he said. "I wanted to have a battle for the Bible. I wanted to take on the evangelical world with Jesus and the Bible."

But he became so busy with his magazine that he left seminary and moved the magazine to Washington. Today, he's the executive director of Sojourners magazine. Now that he's thrust himself into the front lines of the battle for the Bible, he is exhausted. He speaks to at least 200 events a year. And he has to fight to spend more time with his wife, Joy Carroll, an ordained Anglican priest, and two sons, Luke and Jack.

But Wallis said his book tour rejuvenates him. His book signings have morphed into town meetings.

"A lot of people have looked at the way religion was used and abused during the election, the way it's been involved in the White House and they say, 'That's not my faith,' " Wallis said.

In his book, Wallis makes a bold prediction: "Moderate and progressive religious voices will ultimately shape politics in the coming decades far more significantly than the religious right will."

He's still holding to his message — and he no longer needs a front-pew cheerleader to urge him on.

"The monologue of the religious right is over," Wallis said. "For a long time, they've controlled the debate. Now that's not true. A new dialogue has begun."

This looks good!

Click here to see an online preview of

The Chronicles of Narnia -

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe