Racial issues have rightfully been at the forefront of Christian conversation for the past several years. Not that the racial is just now an issue but that, just now, the church in America is finally beginning to reckon with its history of racism and racial division. How do we overcome that division? Derwin Gray takes us back to the book of Acts and the ministry of Jesus for the answer.
The Conversation | Derwin Gray
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Josh Olds: One of the things that really struck me about How to Heal Our Racial Divide was how biblically grounded it is. Not that other books that have been written on this topic haven’t been, but you really get to the heart of the matter when you point out that the main challenge of the early church was also navigating racial division.
Derwin Gray: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, you can’t even understand the New Testament if you miss that reality. And I want to thank you for saying that because I am a pastor and a theologian—so I believe the answer is biblical. I believe the answer is Gospel. And what I’m trying to do is get people to return to the Scripture and actually learn to live it out by faith. But when you look at the early church, for example, let’s start with Jesus. So when Jesus goes to Samaria, that’s a statement to break down racial division and create unity. When Jesus tells a story about the Good Samaritan, it’s the same thing. When Jesus feeds 5000 Jews on one side of the Sea of Galilee and 4000 Gentiles on the other side of the Sea of Galilee—one side was Jews, the other side was Gentiles—that’s a portrait into the future of Abraham’s banquet.
And then when you look at the apostle Paul, every one of his letters was written to show how the gospel of Jesus Christ breaks down ethnic walls of sin and division to create the new people of God. I think that, deliberately, Satan has blinded the church’s eyes to that reality. And so it’s almost like we’ve created a gospel that says, “Yeah, God can forgive your sins. But you can dislike your brothers and sisters.” No. First John 4:20 says, “How can you say you love God whom you’ve never seen and say you love your brother and sister who you’ve seen.” To love God means to love our neighbors, our brothers and sisters. What I wanted people to see is that the Gospel—the Bible—is the answer. When people read this book, How to Heal Our Racial Divide, they will not see scripture the same and they will be the better for it.
Josh Olds: One of the things I want you to just take me through a little more in depth is Jesus, I’m thinking specifically of John chapter four and the interaction with the Samaritan woman. This is huge. Because Jesus is a Jewish rabbi, and even to go through some area was itself a major flaunting of the religious rules of the time. So there’s, there’s this division, and Jesus is working to bring that together. We might look at that and we say, well, yeah, that was 2000 years in the past. Context was different; culture was different. How is that relevant to the situations that we find ourselves in today?
Derwin Gray: Yeah, you know, the one thing that human beings have been able to do very well is to divide based on color, based on culture. We have been experts at doing that. And so the same principles that Jesus used to break down the barrier between Jews and Samaritans, he can do so today. And even if we just take a look around the world like…apartheid in South Africa was based on race. When we think about Bosnia and Croatia, that’s an ethnic feud. When we think about Jim Crow, and slavery in America, that’s on ethnicity. So this isn’t a problem that is simply an American problem. This is a human problem.