As colleagues in campus ministry with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Rick Richardson and Brenda Salter McNeil gained some hard-won insights about multi-ethnic partnership, one of the most dramatic yet elusive signs of the Kingdom in our racialized culture. But what they gained most of all was a rich friendship. As soon as they sit down for an interview at Wheaton College, where Rick directs the M.A. program in evangelism and leadership, laughter spills out of the room and down the hallway, and they spend much of the next two hours completing each other's sentences.
Indeed, the best way to describe what both Rick and Brenda bring wherever they go (in Brenda's case, all over North America as a speaker and consultant to churches) is good news. In their 2004 book The Heart of Racial Justice, and in Brenda's latest book A Credible Witness, they have applied their evangelists' attention to a tough topic—racial reconciliation—and discovered the gospel is at its heart.
As part of the Christian Vision Project's big question for 2008, "Is our gospel too small?" Andy Crouch and Marshall Shelley sat down with Brenda and Rick to ask about the relationship of the gospel to issues of race and justice.
You worked together for many years, but your collaboration took a further step when you wrote The Heart of Racial Justice together. What did you learn from each other in the course of writing that book?
Brenda: Well, I learned a lot about Scripture. Rick was the first person that pointed out to me that Abram was called to leave home in order to fulfill the original cultural mandate in Genesis 1, that people fill the earth. In Genesis 11, at the Tower of Babel, humanity had decided to stay homogenous—all one language and one speech in one place. But the desire of God had been that the earth be filled. The call to Abram was to restart that process afresh, to call him out of his own country to become a father of many nations.
If we don't renounce the ways of the world and the power of Satan, we get one-third of a conversion.
Now, in evangelical circles, we've turned that into a mission mindset that basically says we go to help other people. Those people out there need the gospel. But if we understand that God's purpose requires me to encounter people who are unlike me, people who see what I don't see, then it's not just those other people who need me—
I need them, to help me see what I can't see in isolation. So mission is as much for my own benefit as those to whom I go.
Rick: In a similar way, Brenda changed the way I saw Pentecost and the book of Acts. As a good evangelical, I'd always seen Pentecost as a strategic sign: the beginning of God's plan to get the gospel to the nations. But Brenda didn't think my interpretation went far enough. No, she said, Pentecost isn't just a means to the end of getting the gospel to the whole earth; it's a picture of what the gospel is intended to accomplish. That first Pentecost is an example of the gospel enfleshed in community.
As we worked together, I realized that the church often functions with a reduced gospel. When I finally got what she was saying, I realized that God was picturing the gospel for us as he launched the church. The multi-cultural symphony of Pentecost isn't just a delivery mechanism for a message—it is the embodiment of the message. Without Brenda's being with me on that journey, I don't know if I would have seen that so clearly.
So the gospel isn't just an announcement …
Rick: In the end I think the gospel is about God's dream for the world. In the Old Testament, it's called shalom. In the synoptic Gospels, it's called the kingdom. In John's Gospel, it's eternal life. In Paul's Epistles, it's called salvation. And in Revelation, it's the City of God. But all of those signify God's dream for the world: shalom, kingdom, salvation—brought about by the birth, life, death, resurrection, and return of Christ and the gift of the Spirit. It's not human effort. It's not our building; it's God's building. It even goes beyond a common illustration we use, that the gospel has horizontal and vertical dimensions. True, it has those dimensions, but it's also cosmic.
Brenda: Oh yeah. It's cosmic, not just vertical and horizontal. That's good!
Rick: So the gospel is about how God set out to bring that dream to fulfillment through a people—most of all, through Jesus and through the people of Jesus. And it's not just about Jesus' death. The cross is critical to the gospel. But so is Jesus' life. So is his teaching about the kingdom. We have often left out the way he lived his life. We've left out the "love your enemy." Yet that's how Jesus brought the kingdom, right?
And somehow that side of the gospel has gotten lost.
Rick: So then I have to go back and ask, Why did we reduce it? As Marva Dawn asks, how did the principalities and powers manage to leave us with a gospel that does not challenge their power? We have ended up with a gospel that does not challenge the power of those things that claim to rule us. We've lost our sense of the gospel challenging systems, structures, ideologies.
If people are not challenged with God's plan to cross barriers, they're not getting the whole gospel.
At the end of The Heart of Racial Justice, we quote the ancient church's prayer of conversion: "I renounce the powers of Satan and the ways of the world and the sins of the flesh." Evangelicals have largely focused on the sins of the flesh in their conversion prayer. But if we don't ask people to renounce the ways of the world or the power of Satan, we get one-third of a conversion.
I think most Christians would agree that reconciliation with one another is part of the gospel—reconciliation within families, neighborhoods, and of course our own churches. But why do you place such an emphasis on racial reconciliation?
Rick: You can't just ask, What's going on in my individual life? You also have to ask, What does salvation look like? What does the gospel do in our lives? The gospel certainly reconciles us to God, certainly reconciles us to people we're close to, but it also frees us from the power of sin and Satan and death. And if racism is indeed a sort of disease that our society has had, a power that has ruled us for great damage until we have renounced and come out from under it, until we claim the gospel's freedom in application to it, we will remain under its power.
Brenda: After his resurrection Jesus told his disciples, You will receive power when my Spirit comes upon you, and you're going to receive the power to be my witnesses not just in your local geographic area where people look like you, have the same culture that you do, speak the language you do. That's Jerusalem, and you will start there, but that's not where this is supposed to end for you. I don't think that was something said just to those twelve.
When we stay isolated like the disciples initially did, in our Jerusalem, wherever that might be—our Presbyterianism, my Pentecostalism, my suburb or my city, my Black church or your Latino church or your Chinese Christian church—when we stay too long in Jerusalem, we start to think that reconciliation begins and ends there.
But God has a much bigger plan, and he's willing to shake us up if necessary to get us out of Jerusalem! For the first disciples, it was persecution that made them move.
In what ways does God prod Christians today to "get out of Jerusalem"?
Brenda: The dominant culture of the United States is experiencing some major wake-up calls. I don't think you have to be one political party or another to say that right now we're having some very difficult times economically, politically, socially, militarily. And I think that when we get to the end of our rope, it's often those things that make us stretch to Samaria.
So now even the military is saying we need people who are culturally competent. Cultural awareness is no longer just a nice bonus. Our adversaries are less likely to blow us up if they find us here understanding who they are and the situations they face. We are realizing we've got to go to Samaria—we've got to figure Samaria out and learn how to honor this place. It's as important to our well being as it is to theirs.
So Jesus says, you've got to get to the ends of the earth, but before you get all the way there, you might want to venture into Samaria and see how you do, before you find yourself someplace more distant.
It's going to become your kingdom training, cultivating the skills and competencies to be in this family that's made of people from every tribe and every nation. The first disciples didn't necessarily have any more skills than we do to be a part of this new family. They knew how to be with Jews—and they probably needed reconciliation just among themselves! But Jesus asks them to move beyond that.
The kingdom he's building is going to require movement. Ultimately it will get to the ends of the earth, and they will be changed in the process of taking it there.
Sometimes racial reconciliation can seem like an introspective process that just doesn't sound very missional. But what you're saying is that, in a sense, the reconciliation we're called to is set in a larger context of our call to mission.
Rick: In his book, One Body One Spirit, George Yancey talks about how churches that have made racial reconciliation their primary mission get stuck. Their mission gets off track. What I've seen in those churches is they get so focused on pain that they freeze. We start trading stories about, well, my pain is greater than yours. And with all that focus on making reconciliation, within the body of Christ, the mission can end up in paralysis and guilt. It can lead to a breakdown of the mission of the church.
Instead we need to be committed to God's mission, and understand that racial reconciliation is crucial to mission. We need each other for the mission. We need each other to accomplish the mission. We need each other in order to reach across barriers and divides and be faithful to where God has placed us. Once you get missional about that, then you can get your eyes off the pain. You still have to deal with that, obviously, but you can also go beyond it. You can also live with the frustrating reality that we're never fully going to understand each other or fully be reconciled. But we have a greater calling.
I do think racial reconciliation within the body of Christ needs symbolic moments of fulfillment along the way, where it does become the focus for events, for study, for a small group. We do need to pay attention to the unpaid debts and the pain—but always in the context of a larger focus on how we need each other in order to fulfill what God has called us to fulfill.
Many churches that seem to be dramatically succeeding in their mission are actually quite homogenous in their leadership. You may have four white guys, each with between one and three tattoos, between the ages of 28 and 43, and they make things happen! What would happen to their effectiveness if they tried to add a black guy, or an Asian woman, or a Latino teenager?
Brenda: I think it goes back to the question of God's dream for the world, and what we're trying to build. If we're trying to build bigger, better, faster, then find a team as similar to one another as you can. A matched set of horses! But if we are doing that, haven't we become conformed to the world in what we're trying to build and just calling it the church?
But if the church is the called-out community that reflects God's dream for the world, then I'd say, you might want to get that Asian sister involved. Homogenous leadership can clearly be efficient, but I wouldn't call that an embodiment of the gospel.
Their rebuttal: people are still remarkably homogenous in their preferences. And shouldn't we work with that rather than against the grain?
Rick: I may think a little differently from Brenda here, in the sense that I think the "church growth" folks helped us in a very significant way by documenting the fact that the gospel travels along relational bridges. And because it travels along relational bridges, like tends to reach like.
We see this in these significant movements among some of the scheduled castes in India where many people are coming to Christ. Part of why they're turning to Christ is because in Christianity they're not less human because they're in a lower caste. It's a very powerful message. But that message is traveling along relational bridges, and most of the churches form along caste lines, not across them.
The gospel traveled that way in Acts, too. But the problem is when we turn that reality into a principle—because if people are not getting challenged right from the beginning with the very nature of the gospel, which is God's plan to cross barriers, they are not getting the whole gospel.
So even when you're traveling along relational bridges and even when you still have a predominantly homogenous church, if you haven't addressed the reality of the gospel's breaking down barriers, the reality of the gospel freeing us from the things that divide us and are trying to rule us and split us, you have not proclaimed the full gospel. You haven't begun to plant the seeds for the ways God will use these folks in crossing those barriers.
It seems that we are living through a transition in what people mean by "the gospel." For a generation of evangelicals—wellrepresented in the photographs of evangelists on the halls at the Graham Center here at Wheaton—the gospel was to be proclaimed verbally. But you are describing a gospel that must be both proclaimed and demonstrated by the way we live.
Brenda: Think of yourself as taking the witness stand in order to give your testimony. "You are to be my witnesses," said Jesus. But if your life and your experience don't corroborate your testimony, you won't persuade the jury. The words we say may be completely accurate. But if the prosecuting attorney can poke holes in our testimony, into our lifestyle, into our credibility as witnesses, then we won't be very effective on the witness stand.
My eighteen-year-old son and I work with college students, and they don't trust a presentation without an experiential, lived component. They want to see the power of God at work.
How does that usually happen?
Brenda: One way is through the growing practice of urban projects for college students. We pack them into small apartments in underserved neighborhoods—Christian students who are black, white, Asian, Hispanic—students from all over the country, students with various political beliefs. And then they get to live together for the summer.
Well, with a group like that, the whole neighborhood notices you. You become the curiosity of the neighborhood. Of course people may or may not come right out and ask why they're there.
I'm thinking about a recent urban project connected with Rock Church here in Chicago. Only one habitually drunk guy in the neighborhood actually came up to ask, "What are you all doing here? And why do you all live together in the same house?"
And these students, because of this embodiment of the gospel and the credibility of living this thing, they get asked the question that compels them to proclaim the gospel: "Oh yeah, we're all the family of God, here to serve Jesus." So they give their witness. But their witness is believable because their lifestyle has set them up to take the witness stand. They give it all they got. They tell it, man! They give their story. And they keep living it out.
What's the effect in the neighborhood?
Brenda: This particular year, the sponsoring church held a revival toward the end of the summer. Now in my church growing up, revivals were all about proclamation. You would bring in the best preacher you could find and he would just preach his brains out with the hope that someone would come under conviction. And there used to be a day when they did. Jesus would show up in the proclamation, and the Spirit of God would be magnified.
Well, we had that; the preaching was going, so we had proclamation, but the students had already taken the witness stand. They'd already given their credible witness. They'd already lived this thing.
So when the invitation to become a Christian was given, guess who responded? Yep, the drunk guy from the street. He gave his life to Christ that night at that revival.
I suggest to you that his conversion happened when he started asking those kids, "What are you all doing here? Why you all live in the same house like that?" See, that's what I think the gospel is supposed to do. It's supposed to be so countercultural, so incredibly unusual and intriguing that it makes people question their own reality, and ultimately it leads them to God.
If the gospel is something that we must embody as well as proclaim, then it has to be by word, deed, and signs. For us to become people who embody the gospel, in ways that people come into contact with it, we have to go to Samaria. As Peter experienced in Acts 10, we too have to meet Cornelius—because there's a Cornelius out there who needs the gospel. But Cornelius will change your life, too, and your understanding of God and your understanding of yourself.
You're going to get changed because of Cornelius, and Cornelius is going to get changed because of you.
