(From left to right:) Darrin Patrick, Thabiti Anyabwile, Matt Chandler, Voddie Baucham, and Bryan Loritts engaged in conversation during the first half of "A Time to Speak," a panel which was moderated by Ed Stetzer (way right).
Though it’s been close to four months since the time that Michael Brown was killed during a confrontation with former police officer Darren Wilson, the effect of the incident still remains a sensitive, open wound to many, especially with the subsequent grand jury decisions not to indict Wilson and Officer Daniel Pantaleo, the latter of whom was involved in the death of Eric Garner. And this sensitivity only manifests the fact that, almost fifty years after the end of the Civil Rights Movement, tensions, hurts, misunderstandings, and bitterness in race relations are still unresolved.
A group of eleven pastors gathered on Tuesday evening with hopes to hash out these issues in a two-hour panel session which they called “A Time to Speak,” which took place at the Lorraine Motel and National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. The first hour consisted of panelists Bryan Loritts, Thabiti Anyabwile, Voddie Baucham, Matt Chandler, and Darrin Patrick, and panelists for the second hour included Albert Tate, Derwin Gray, John Piper, Eric Mason, and Trillia Newbell. The panel was moderated by Ed Stetzer from LifeWay Research.
Though there were no given quick-fix solutions, that didn’t seem to be the purpose of the panel. Rather, the panel itself seemed to portray the very difficulty of having conversations about race, systemic injustice, privilege, and the other issues that have been brought up as a result of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. There were two points that the panelists agreed upon, however: conversations like the ones within the panel need to be continued in everyday lives; and despite differences, the gospel offers hope for reconciliation.
During the first hour, there was some initial debate on the panelists’ perspectives on the Michael Brown and Eric Garner incidents. Thabiti Anyabwile and Voddie Baucham, both who are part of the Gospel Coalition council, came to different conclusions regarding the incident.
“For me, when I look at this, regardless of all the other issues surrounding it and the facts that are being debated and disputed, one of the things that we have to keep in mind is the fact that Eric Garner and Mike Brown were not Martin Luther King Jr.,” said Baucham. “There is a difference. There is a distinction between individuals who are living lives that represent what we are fighting for and individuals who are living lives that represent what we are trying to rise above. For me, that was the note that was important to hit that wasn’t being hit.”
Baucham recently published an article on the Gospel Coalition that allegedly received more than a million hits, and for which he was requested to come on Fox News to comment. In the piece, he argues that perhaps the focus should not be on systemic injustice, police brutality, or Michael Brown, but the epidemic of fatherlessness in African American homes that leads to violence and criminality, noting that “moments before his death, Michael Brown had violently robbed a man in a store.”
“The point of my article is … why do we lionize certain individuals who are not to be lionized?” Baucham said during the panel.
Anyabwile, who was wearing a shirt with names including Eric, Mike, and Trayvon printed on it, rebutted, “Remembering someone isn’t necessarily lionizing someone,” and added that it’s “ahistorical and is very close to willfully ignorant to argue that there are no systemic injustices in this country … Racism is just a species of alienation from the fall. It is a particular kind of alienation that operates systematically along the lines of ethnicity, skin color, and so on.”
Anyabwile's perspective on the recent cases focused much more on the individual.
“When I look at Mike Brown, I feel like I’m looking at myself when I was 18,” he said, adding that he himself has changed dramatically since his youth, and said that his change was due to the grace that he has received since then.
Trillia Newbell, who spoke during the second hour of the panel, expressed similar emotions.
“What affected me about [the Eric Garner case] is the fact that he is a human,” said Newbell, who is an author and writes frequently on the topic of diversity. “Someone commented on my blog … as though he deserved it. But he’s still a person. Shouldn’t we mourn if someone dies?”
The panelists agreed that this disagreement and emotion are all the more reason for people, especially Christians, to take time to get to know others better and listen to others’ stories.
Matt Chandler, the lead pastor of The Village Church, said his perspective regarding the incidents changed and became much more impassioned after developing more intimate relationships with African Americans around him.
He cited instances during which his African American friends were stopped, or given looks of disgust, and said, “If things like these are happening to my friends, people who I pray for, who I’m in the trenches with—then, man, I want to fight.”
Some of the white women in Albert Tate's congregation at Fellowship Monrovia experienced similar phenomena when Tate’s wife shared her stories and perspective in light of the Ferguson incident during a recent women’s group meeting. He said that just a 5 to 10 minute conversation with his wife changed the way that the white women in the group saw comments regarding Ferguson on social media, and the way they saw this incident in general became more personal.
“Imagine what the church can do if we can [have these conversations] on a more regular basis,” Tate added.
“Think of it like a marriage,” John Piper, author and founder of Desiring God ministries, said, describing the way that these issues should be handled. He added that in marriage, when brokenness or problems arise, it is worked upon throughout the lifetime of the marriage. “You keep [these issues] at the table, and keep hammering at it.”
These conversations, however, must be “drenched in grace,” Tate emphasized. And when carried out in grace, there is hope for reconciliation in the midst of hurt.
“Let’s live out Ephesians chapter two – all of it. Don’t just stop at verse 10,” Bryan Loritts from Kainos urged. “Let’s not just offer sympathy, but offer true hope in the gospel.”
“The church itself has allowed racialized culture to influence us more than Christ,” said Derwin Gray, pastor of Transformation Church in Indian Land, South Carolina. “What I want to hear is a blood-soaked solution that Christ is our peace, that He broke down dividing walls. That’s what I want to get to because I believe there is a resurrected king who is the solution … My blackness does not define me—my Christ-likeness defines me … The beauty of it is that when we bring all of our differences together under the lordship of Christ, that’s what the world wants to see. From that we become ambassadors and agents of reconciliation.”
“A Time to Speak” was organized by Kainos, a ministry to create a norm of multi-ethnic churches, and was co-sponsored by the Gospel Coalition and Ministry Grid. For an archived video of the event, visit live.kainos.is.
