Introduction - Into the Fullness
I’m a white farm boy from a place called Bumpville, PA and now I live in the Black Mecca of the US and have given my life to Christ’s work of reconciliation within the church. Almost every single day I drive through the connector in Atlanta. The connector is the merging of two large interstates, I 75 and I 85. As I drive around Grady corner I pray for the church in Atlanta to be reconciled.
How did God call me to this work?It all started when I heard a sermon from a Pastor who was black and spoke on Isaiah 58 of God’s heart to loosen the chains of injustice. As he read these verses, “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen, to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?” Pastor Marvin talked about race in America, his own experience of being called, “boy” at a restaurant by an older white man. My heart was broken at that incident but also at the reality that I had learned none of this growing up. But, as Latasha Morrison from Be the Bridge says, “The system was designed this way to cover up the truth about our dark history.”
I clearly remember the Holy Spirit speaking to my soul and saying, “This is what you're going to give your life to, reconciliation work in the church.” When Pastor Marvin talked about race and the culture that I had come from, I remember thinking;
Hold up, I came from what culture?
My ancestors did what?
Systemic racism is in my DNA?
Pastor Marvin had been invited to preach to our all white mega church in the suburbs of Grand Rapids, MI. The church was trying to align themselves with “God of the oppressed” theology, as it is clear from the Scriptures that God holds a special place for those who have been marginalized. They did a whole sermon series on the book of Exodus. They invited Pastor Marvin to preach from Isaiah 58 about God’s heart for a certain kind of fasting that, “looses the chains of injustice and unties the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke.”
Pastor Marvin shared about race, racism and the deep and dark history of our country and the complicity of the church. I couldn’t believe that I came from this culture of whiteness that has oppressed, marginalized, and brutally murdered those that don’t have white skin. I get angry, frustrated, and deeply agitated knowing that it was my own culture that erected things like the Confederate Monument in Stone Mountain, GA.
I had breakfast with Pastor Marvin a few weeks later and he was gracious enough to answer all of the questions I had for him as a white man who was clueless to his reality. He recommended I read a few books and start educating myself on the racial history of our country and the complicity of the church.
This was the beginning of the journey the Heavenly Father has had me on since 2006 taking me from being a white farm boy from Bumpville, PA (yes, a real place), to now live in the black Mecca of the US and giving my life to Christ’s work of racial reconciliation within the church.
I changed my degree in seminary to a Masters of Intercultural Ministries because my wife and I knew God was calling us into this work. An African Pastor and adjunct professor at the Seminary, Dr. Reggie Smith began to mentor me in this work as he was pastoring a church in inner-city Grand Rapids and was the adjunct professor at the seminary.
Dr. Reggie pointed me to Divided by Faith, the work of Dr. John Perkins, Christianity Development Association, and many other resources. I did a research paper on how Christ broke down the dividing wall of hostility between the Jews and the Gentiles from Ephesians 2, and as I did, I fell deeply in love with a God that longs to reconcile all things in his son, Jesus Christ.
In 2008, we spent a month living in an African-American community in Historic South Atlanta, interning with a non-profit that was doing community development. My wife and I fell in love with the neighborhood and the people living here doing the hard work of justice for their community. After the month was over, we were invited to move back into that community, but at the time we weren’t ready to raise funds and fully move into a community experiencing distress, plus we felt like we had more to learn.
I was really wrestling with whether or not God was calling us to this work and in August of 2008 I asked the Father for a dream or vision as I went to sleep one night. This is abnormal for me as I typically don’t do this, but was sensing the Father’s leading in that way, so I asked. I woke up the next morning and was amazed at the dream I had just had. In this dream I was sitting on a set of bleachers next to a football field with four young black men. The key thing is that I was sitting with them, I was not in a position of power, but in a position of learning and humility.
At that moment we weren’t ready to move to Atlanta and so we moved back to Orlando. In Orlando, we were exposed to Polis Institute’s “Serving with Dignity” and the need to live out a dignified interdependent relationship with those different from us. It was through this training that Christ made it very clear as a white man coming from majority culture that I was to be a learner more than a teacher, particularly in the world of racial reconciliation. The words of author Donald Miller resonated with what God was doing in my heart, “Be careful of a white guy with a masters degree, because he thinks he knows it all.” This was deeply convicting to me as I met all three criteria; I was a white guy. I had a Master’s degree. And I really did think I knew it all.
I was so deeply impacted by the Serving with Dignity training that I began to raise funds under Polis and we moved to Atlanta in May 2011, to live in historic South Atlanta, work at a small church in the neighborhood under leaders of color, and begin to connect with and share with churches the message of Serving with Dignity. It was the Serving with Dignity training that opened up a lot of doors for me to talk about race within majority white churches, as one of the organization’s lessons pushes deeply into racial and cultural differences and how the Gospel breaks down these barriers. It was also the experience of sharing life with young black men in the neighborhood that deeply shaped the way I saw how little culture cared for their lives and how they were constantly harassed, profiled and accused simply for the color of their skin. These stories shaped me profoundly.
In 2015, I burned out from ministry and realized that was as a result of a lot of unhealed wounds in my soul, which Christ was inviting me to look into. The reality was that I was living a divided life and wasn’t facing the deep wounds of my past and that Christ was inviting me to reconcile the divided life inside of me. The result of this healing is the discipleship training, Loving Freely, which I have put together. I firmly believe that in order for us to be honest about reconciliation, we must allow this to happen in ourselves first and be honest about the ways in which culture has shaped us.
In 2018, a group of men journeyed deeply into the racial history of our country and its impact upon ourselves through Latasha Morrison’s curriculum at Be the Bridge. This training took the reality of the problem of race in our country and church from an intellectual level into my heart and soul. The journey with these men climaxed when we visited Bryan Stevenson’s work with the Equal Justice Initiative at the Memorial for Peace and Justice to honor the over 4,400 men and women lynched in our country because of white supremacy in Montgomery, AL.
I got connected to the OneRace Movement in late 2017 when I met with Josh Clemons. He shared the vision of what the OneRace Movement was trying to call churches to and from that moment, I was in. I had the honor of co-leading a Reconciler Group of Pastors and Leaders in the Southeast part of the city with Pastor Arthur Breland of United Church. At our first meeting around 40 pastors and leaders showed up to hear about the OneRace Stone Mountain event. In 2019, Pastor Arthur put together a march to commemorate the street name change from Confederate Ave. to United Ave. and we walked together with over three hundred fellow believers in a spirit of unity that was amazing. The Holy Spirit’s presence among us was palpable.
I joined the OneRace Movement as the Director of Groups and Mobilization in January 2020 to work under Josh Clemons as the Director of Groups and Mobilization, as my heart and passion has always been to do this work on the street level. Conferences and marches are beautiful and good, but if we’re not pursuing the new humanity in the norm of life, the structures will still be there and never change.
Then everything became real on a whole different level on May 14th, 2022. I couldn't believe what I was looking at as I sat on the steps in my house in Atlanta, GA. My second cousin, Peyton Gerndon had just driven to Buffalo, NY and shot and killed 10 black people who bear the image of God. He’s a distant cousin that I’ve never met, but we're still connected through family and culture. I had just gotten back from a trip called the “Sankofa Journey.” It was a trip that went from Birmingham to Montgomery, to Selma, to Jackson, MS, to Sumner, MS where Emmit Till was murdered and ended in Memphis, TN where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. In four days I witnessed the worst of what white supremacy had done and then it happened again, and this time in my own culture and my own family.
I was sick and my heart broke for the families in Buffalo.
The days following that incident I had a hard time getting my bearings because of the journey that I have been on since 2007 and getting exposed to racism and God’s call for his body to be unified. I had been giving my life to doing the exact opposite of what my second cousin had just done. Peyton Gerndon had been shaped by a culture of white supremacy that led him to such an atrocious act.
My culture did this. Our culture did this. A culture of comfort and lack of compassion from the white church allowed this to happen.
It’s always been my heart to equip people to read the Scriptures through the lens of racial reconciliation, pray deeply about the demonic forces of racism in our city, read books written by leaders of color that dive deep into the history of our country and church, and make small, spirit-led, intentionally organic steps towards being the church God intends it to be.
I get asked a lot as a white man, why do you do this when you don’t have to? First, it is God's heart. It’s his heart that his body here on earth is one and we are not, as Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise documents well. This is modeled in Jesus’ prayer in John 17 and manifested in the book of Acts, where we see what happened as a result of the Gospel changing people’s hearts.
Second, God has hard wired me for diversity. I have loved seeing things from a different perspective. I have close friends of color who I have given them permission to point out my cultural blindspots of whiteness. I really value what other people teach me from the way they’ve walked with Jesus and read the Scriptures. God’s redeeming all of creation to what’s revealed in Revelation 7 as, “and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before eat throne and in from of the Lamb.” Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” God wants us to live his future reality here and now.
Third, I firmly believe I am the one laying half-dead in the middle of the ditch in Luke 10, in need of Jesus. This was the point of Jesus sharing the story of the good Samaritan, pointing out the rich young ruler’s need for a savior. Being shaped by the majority culture to have all of the answers has made me aware that the more I learn, the more I don’t know, particularly around race. It’s not that I don’t have certain knowledge of the Scriptures and theology, it’s just that I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface on the deep knowledge of God when it comes to race and culture. This is why I love to consult the majority white church on these issues and help them to see their blindspots when it comes to race, culture and class.
Fourth, I am a more complete and better follower of Jesus because I’ve been mentored and impacted by people who look nothing like me. I am a firm believer that in order to live out the fullness of God’s kingdom and live the vision of Revelation 7 here and now, we must be willing to be influenced by people of other races, cultures and classes. Reading Howard Thurman’s “Jesus and the Disinherited” in Seminary shaped me in deeply profound ways. Fifth, after being exposed to the racial history of our country and church back in 2006, as documented in the seminal book, Divided by Faith, I felt the Spirit lead me to move against the stream of racism that the church and culture swims in. This has been something we’ve committed our lives to by the grace of God.
It has been a journey out of my native culture into embracing the beauty of all cultures. When we remain in our own homogeneous units, we’re missing out on the beauty and diversity of the kingdom reflected in Revelation 7:9. It is my belief that this is what God is doing through the story of the Bible, uniting his body here on earth. I don’t believe that this is just my personal calling, but I believe that it’s what God is calling the whole church too, calling us into the fullness of all that he has for the church.
So why am I writing a book called Cultural Sanctification?
This is my letter to lovingly confront the white church that has been complicit in the culture of whiteness and white supremacy resulting in the mess we are currently in.
I want to center the black and brown church and their lived experiences in a culture of whiteness. We don’t need another book on reconciliation from a white man who’s never been traumatized by racism. Whiteness centers those in power and our feelings, insights and even how we interpret the Bible. But, the gospel tells a different story. Paul’s words in Philippians 2 is that if we are truly rooted in Christ, “We consider the interests of others more than our own.”
I so desperately want the white church to see the beauty and diversity of the bride of Christ and not remain in their own culture.
I want people to experience the peace and forgiveness of Christ as they see Christ’s kingdom lived out here and now on earth.
I want followers of Jesus to have the cultural humility to allow our brothers and sisters of color to lovingly point our our cultural blindspots, exactly like what Paul did to Peter in Antioch.
Welcome the journey of Cultural Sanctification. I hope you are blessed by what the Holy Spirit can do in your life as you open yourself to its leading.