The Journey to Reconciliation
2018 was a deeply transformational year for me in my journey towards understanding race in our country. Just a few years earlier, Victor a close friend who is black told me graciously, “Dan, I perceive you as someone that has a heart for racial reconciliation, that’s why you moved your family into Historic South Atlanta, share resources, talk about the New Humanity in Christ, but I don’t know if you understand the depth of the issue.” This bothered me when I first heard it because I had been passionate about the church being one for almost ten years. But, I knew the Spirit had something deeper for me.
This set me on a journey to understand the depth of the issue of the sin of racism in our country, which led to a group of men going through Be the Bridge in 2019 and it climaxed with a trip to Montgomery in the summer of 2019 soon after Bryan Stevenson with the Equal Justice Initiative opened up the Legacy Museum and the Memorial for Peace and Justice. A group of diverse men dove deep into Latasha Morrison’s Be the Bridge study in 2018. We spent the first 6 months working through the first three steps of, “Awareness, Acknowledge and Lament, and Confession.” We immersed ourselves in the racial history of our country.
We decided as a group that we needed to visit the recently opened Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, AL, a two hour drive from Atlanta. We hopped in a rental van in July and made our way down Interstate 85. Nothing would prepare us for what we were about to experience that day.
We visited the Legacy Musuem, which provides a comprehensive history of the U.S. with a focus on the legacy of slavery. It’s situated on a site where enslaved Black people were forced to labor in bondage. We then went to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It’s the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved Black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.
I cannot adequately express how deeply moving the National Memorial for Peace and Justice is. Everything that we had been studying and reading about for six months was now directly in our faces as we saw the names of the over 4,400 image bearers of God who were lynched in our country.
As we walked around the memorial, we read quotes on the walls from the Equal Justice Initiative that said,
“Nearly two million people died during the voyage. The labor of enslaved black people spurred economic growth in the United States, where an ideology of white supremacy and racial difference was created to justify slavery and make it morally acceptable.”
“From 1877 to 1950, millison of black Americans were targeted by racial terror lynchings. Over 4,400 lynchings of AFrican Americans by group of two to over 10,000 white poeple have been documented. These lynchings, often conducted in broad daylight and sometimes “on the courthouse lawn,” were vicious acts of murder and their perpedtrators acted with impunity.”
The quote that impacted me the most was, “With no protection from the constant threat of death, nearly six millions black Americans fled the South between 1910 and 1970. Many left behind homes, families, and employment to flee racial terror as traumatized refugees. Lynching profoundly reshard the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans in ways still evident today.” Six million black Americans fled to the north because of the fear of being lynched. This is our collective history and we have to sit with this.
When you visit places like this, the reality of how the deep sin of racism has shaped everything sinks in. There’s something significant that only the Holy Spirit can do in you as you look at the evil of racism directly in its face. I’ll never forget what Cecil, my friend who’s black that went on the trip with us said to me on the van ride home as I sat in shock at what I had experienced. He looked at me and said, “I think you now get it.” By the grace of God I got the pain that he was in. I got the context of his past history.
Since then I’ve helped co-lead the Southern Justice Experience with OneRace and just went on a Sankofa Trip with Transform Minnesota. The Sankofa trip took my journey to a whole new understanding of the sin of white supremacy in our country and the complicity of the church as we went to Selma, Jackson and Sumner, MS, and Memphis, TN. In Jackson we had the honor to spend time learning from the forefather of the racial reconciliation movement in the church with Dr. John Perkins. In Sumner we sat at the courthouse where the murderers of Emmit Till were acquitted and we then visited the barn where Emitt Till was murdered by white supremacists. We then went to Memphis and visited the Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel.
As Nina Barnes, who helped the lead the trip, led us in a time of debrief Friday afternoon at a church just outside of Memphis, I sat next to a new friend who’s a black woman and I asked her how she was feeling about the week? She looked at me with exhaustion in her eyes and said, “I’m numb.” I told her I couldn’t agree with her more. This is what these trips and experiences do, particularly for white people, it helps us understand the depth of the issue, and so that the Holy Spirit lights a fire in our hearts to go back and change the structures that the sin of white supremacy have created with the gospel of Jesus Christ as our guide.
Then, literally a day after we got home from the trip, we saw and witnessed once again what the sin of white supremacy has done in our country and this one hit close to home (quite literally) with; Silence is Violence.
What happened on the trip and in Buffalo has shaped me in five distinct ways;
Reconciliation is not something that you “do” to merely appease people, but it becomes something you are. You’re not looking to merely have diversity for diversity's sake, but to really have true God-breathed and spirit led reconciliation.
The motivation to pursue the New Humanity in Christ is done out of purity of your heart once you see the depth of the issue. Once you see the depth of the issue, you realize the depth of commitment that needs to happen to change the story, and this all starts with an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ.
As an anglo man from majority culture who’s been given all sorts of privilege by culture, it aumotocially makes me want to give up that privilege after seeing the evil of racism.
I developed a sense of urgency for justice and reconciliation. My heart was set ablaze to go back and share everything that I had just experienced.
It helped me to understand the importance of taking the “long arc of reconciliation.” The evil sin of racism has so ravaged this country and the church that it’s going to take years of concerted effort to see the justice of God come to fruition.
Since I’ve been taking these trips, I’ve been asked a few times what do people need to do in order to properly prepare yourself for such a hard journey. Here are five ideas that have helped prepare me;
Educate yourself about what you are about to go and see. There as so many books, articles, videos, etc. about how the sin of racism has ravaged our country. Do your own work of understanding. A key verse that’s deeply challenged me as an Anglo man is Proverbs 19:2; “Passion without knowledge is not good, how much more will hasty feet miss the way.”
Prepare yourself spiritually, mentally, and particularly, emotionally for the exhaustion you are about to experience. Every time I’ve taken the trip, I come back exhausted from the amount of emotional energy it takes to be fully present at these places. I highly recommend doing your own Christian counseling beforehand to enter into your own pain. You cannot enter into the pain of others, until you’ve entered into your own pain!
Listen to the prompting of the Holy Spirit! There have been so many times on these trips that I have sensed the Father’s voice telling me to spend more time in front a sign or with someone. I have also sensed the Spirit do some deep work in me as I’ve sat at places like the Memorial for Peace and Justice.
Don’t go alone! Every time I’ve gone, I’ve gone with a community of people that I can process with, cry with, and lament with. God’s wired us for community, and particularly for places such as this.
Give yourself grace, listen to yourself, and draw appropriate boundaries. If you’re a person of color, be careful to open up to people coming from majority culture who haven’t done their work to understand the collective trauma of racism. Guard yourself. If you’re Anglo, understand the depth of the story to which you are entering, and how our ancestors created this system to which we continue to benefit from.