Paul grew up being aware of both his ethnic culture and the oppression his people had faced for centuries. From his earliest childhood days, he was taught to be proud of who he was and to value his people’s culture and traditions.
Born Saul Paullus, Paul was a self-proclaimed Hebrew of Hebrews, from the tribe of Benjamin, circumcised on the eighth day, a Pharisee whose “righteousness based on the law [was] faultless” (Philippians 3:5-6). He was a symbol of the Jewish people’s refusal to deny their heritage or view themselves as inferior amid the forced Hellenization imposed by Greeks and Romans. Rome was a multicultural empire whose ethnic diversity and tension mirrored our own world today. The empire grew through military conquest, oppression, and execution by crucifixion of anyone who opposed Roman rule, including many Jews.
Saul grew up in the ashes of such defeat and was part of a people who were struggling with what it meant to be a good Jewish person amid Rome-occupied Israel. The Pharisees emphasized Jewish laws of ritual piety, seeing holy living in everyday life as the best way of honoring the Torah in a troubled and changing world.1 They were the popular and respected leaders among the people, and Saul learned from the best of them. The Pharisees firmly believed in resurrection, as did Saul. They saw Jesus’ teachings as an affront and attack on their heritage and way of life, and they viewed Jesus’ followers as traitors to their people. In ethnic, religious zeal, Saul led an all-out attack on Christ’s followers:
I persecuted the followers of this Way to their death, arresting both men and women and throwing them into prison, as the high priest and all the Council can themselves testify. I even obtained letters from them to their associates in Damascus, and went there to bring these people as prisoners to Jerusalem to be punished. (Acts 22:4-5)
It’s on the road to Damascus that Saul is blinded by a bright light from heaven, as Jesus asks, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:1-9). This leads to his conversion, the recovery of his sight, and a striking transformation in Saul, who starts to go by Paul.
Before his encounter with Christ, Paul represented a broken, oppressed people full of resentment toward every ethnicity that was not their own. But now his mission was to reach all, which meant crossing cultures, reconciling with ethnic enemies, caring for the poor, confronting injustice, and proclaiming Jesus as Lord. New life in Jesus brought healing to Paul’s ethnic identity. Jesus took all of Paul’s great knowledge and zeal for the Jewish Scriptures and turned that ethnic story into one that invited all into the kingdom of God. Instead of trying to destroy lives in order to preserve a broken human Jewishness, Paul was sent out to heal.
In Paul’s life of mission, the beauty of Jesus’ healing gleams in the former cracks of his ethnicity. Paul embraces his Jewish ethnic heritage and people and is committed to preaching to the Jews in his journey. His ethnic story is a canvas for telling Jesus’ story to a broken world. As Jesus heals our cracks with his beauty, he makes us ready, individually and communally, to share his living water with others. We share his story of healing us with the world and call them to the same Healer.
When Brent, a black man who grew up in the church, got to college, he was heartbroken when his relationship with his girlfriend came crashing down. He contemplated taking his own life, and he realized that he needed Jesus’ help to heal. Brent found a loving college fellowship where the campus minister, Andrew—a white man—insisted that there could be no gospel without racial reconciliation and multiethnic witness. Brent had grown up in the South, where he and his family endured many racist experiences. He was floored by the deep friendship, real conversation, and reconciliation embodied by Andrew and several other white student leaders. In experiencing real love and intentional community, Brent was able to forgive his enemies who had been white. He grew as a follower of Jesus and as a gifted leader and preacher.
Several months later, Brent, who was captain of the track team, was practicing on the field. A truck full of white men drove up and yelled threats at him and said, “What are you doing at our school, you f---ing [N-word]? Get out or we’ll kill you.”
Round and round they drove, yelling racial epithets and death threats. One of the guys stuck his head out the window and yelled his own name, as if he were challenging Brent to take action.
Afterward, Brent and his friends were angry and gathered to pray. The university administration heard about the incident and told Brent, “We will not tolerate people like that at our school. We will expel them and prosecute them. We don’t need those people on our campus.”
But Brent’s gentle response shocked them when he said, “Those people? Don’t you get it? You’re one of those people. I’m one of those people. Don’t act like they’re some outside force. Because those guys were taught and encouraged to hate in their schools, churches, and maybe even on this campus. How can you say you want to educate when you don’t want to embrace?” Brent told the administration, “If there should be a punishment, it should be forcing them to sit down with me over dinner to get to know me for the next several weeks.” He refused to release the name of the student in the truck. When a CNN reporter asked why he was defending the assailant, Brent responded, “Because I love him. And you protect those you love.” Brent was taking the call to love his enemies seriously.
Brent’s witness powerfully called the campus to know the love of Jesus that is strong enough to break down racial walls. Brent, Andrew, and several other faithful women and men were willing to confront racial silence and colorblindness in their community. Their fellowship saw almost forty conversions happen in their group of eighty that year.
Brent’s story has been used many times in sharing the gospel with non-Christians.2 There is something powerful about it—about how he was loved by the ethnic other so that then he too could love his enemy—that brings people to repentance and healing. His story has helped white Southerners realize places of racism in their hearts; his story of loving the enemy has helped people of color realize where they have nursed hate for those who have wronged them. Jesus’ story of healing gleams in the places of his scars.
We tend to think of Paul as the ideal evangelist and of his missionary endeavors being only about evangelism. But this does a disservice to Paul’s story of reconciling mission. It reinforces a false belief that Christians should only care about spiritual salvation and personal piety.
Too often, evangelism and justice have been separated in the church. Evangelicals who emphasize personal piety and evangelism often regard social justice as a secular liberal agenda. But this is a false dichotomy! Matthew 6:33 reads, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (emphasis mine). Christians often assume this mean personal righteousness, with an emphasis on personal salvation. This reveals our own human bias. Justice and righteousness are translated from the same Greek word dikaiosune, showing that righteousness isn’t just about personal pious living. It means both personal and corporate righteousness: personal piety as well as seeking justice for others. Martin Luther King Jr. writes, “Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.”3
This doesn’t mean Christians should pursue social justice at the expense of letting go of evangelism. But when Jesus said to “go and make disciples of all nations,” he was talking about raising up Christ-followers who embody the kingdom of God in both word and deed. The hope found in Christ compels Christians to pursue justice and ethnic reconciliation alongside evangelism.
When Charlene, a black woman, walked into a meeting of Christian black students at the University of Virginia, she sat in the back of the room and thought, “I like you, but I don’t like your Jesus.” She wasn’t religious and had been raised by her father, who told her, “You can be anything in college. Just not a Christian.” But Charlene was outraged and hurting. Hate crimes and racist rhetoric had recently exploded on campus. The N-word had been scratched into the hood of her friend’s car. Black students had been told, “Get off of our campus. You don’t deserve to be here.” So she was surprised when, after the prayer meeting, the group went out to peacefully protest what was happening on campus. Nonblack Christian students also joined them. Through their actions, Charlene saw that Jesus cared about ethnic injustice on campus. They told her that her black life mattered and was precious to God. Because Jesus followers engaged in combating racism and injustice, bathed in prayer, Charlene became a Christian.
Ethnic reconciliation is not separate from evangelism; it’s not an extracurricular activity for Christians. When Jesus reaches out to the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, he is doing reconciliation and evangelism at the same time. Jesus embodies a redeemed Jewish ethnic identity as he begins to challenge and heal the history of broken interactions with women, sinners, and Samaritans. As a Jewish man, he is sharing the story of God with non-Jews—the way it was always supposed to be. When the woman says yes to Jesus, she shares the good news with the village of her own people—a village she had avoided because of the shame of her broken past. Her ethnicity, and Jesus’ ethnicity, no longer prevent mission. They become vehicles of mission.
When Jesus invites us into new life, he redefines all of who we are: our notions of manhood, womanhood, family, calling, purpose, histories, and ethnicities. Instead of throwing away our ethnicities, he calls us to steward them for kingdom purposes and use our power for good.
Jesus sanctifies power and shows us that our dominion is to help the flourishing of all. As we tap into Christ’s resurrection power, we find strength to forgive, repent, pursue justice, lament, intercede, and advocate. We have the power to help the poor, love enemies, proclaim the kingdom, and to practice healing, restoration, and justice through lives of prayer and righteous obedience. As we anticipate the heavenly city and submit to Jesus as king, we are called to fundamentally challenge our broken notions of power, whether we are rich or poor, privileged or oppressed. We don’t use power only for self-gain or only for our people but instead to care for others. Power for self-gain separates, but power used to love others unites without obliterating differences in personality, ethnicity, or gender. The church needs united, not uniform, witness.
The Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC) denomination started with Swedish immigrants to America in the 1800s. The heritage of its Swedish immigrants and commitment to mission are hallmarks of the ECC. As the denomination grew in size and wealth, they wanted to steward their resources for the sake of kingdom mission. Swedish Americans recognized their ethnic heritage and sought to help support the heritage of others. Connecting their story of immigration to the diverse churches around them, they chose to embrace Latino, black, Asian, and multiethnic congregations by offering training, fellowship, and spiritual and financial support. More than 20 percent of the ECC’s congregations today are classified as ethnic (nonwhite, the largest being African American) or multiethnic. Recognizing that strength comes from diversity, the ECC now has a robust commitment to justice and missions overseas as well as church programs to engage racial reconciliation stateside. The ECC regularly assesses the authenticity of its ethnic ministry and diversity, including a commitment to share power, increasing ethnic participation in leadership, and sharing diverse stories.4
Mellody Hobson, an affluent investor who is black, gave a TED talk where she challenged listeners to have real conversations about race in order to pursue equal rights and opportunity in America.5 She believes that instead of being colorblind, we have to be color brave. As an investor, she has seen that sound investments are best made with a diversity of people. In one example of color bravery, Hobson tells the story of John Skipper, a white Southerner who is the president of ESPN. He insists that every open position have a diverse pool of applicants. When asked, “Do you want me to hire the minority or the best person for the job?” he responds, “Yes.” Hobson credits John Skipper’s willingness to diversify as one reason for ESPN’s success. Likewise, we as Christians can be better leaders, teachers, business leaders, and healthcare practitioners when we welcome diverse perspectives and learn from them.
My church was organizing a public forum on race and privilege with partnering churches and organizations. My white pastor, Dave—an accomplished speaker and the head of our large church-planting network—asked me to represent our church at the event instead of him. He said, “Our guest speaker is an older white guy, so if I’m also a speaker, we’re just adding to the problem of white privilege that we’re trying to address! We want your perspective as an Asian American woman who represents a good portion of our church.” Dave was yielding the floor to me and trusting me, someone almost two decades his junior, because he knew that our community needed more than white and black male voices.
We are called to steward who we are for good. When Jesus heals our ethnic identities, he uses that experience to better reach and serve those who look like us (our own people) and those who don’t (those outside the village of our ethnic people). Many times, this means preaching and living out the gospel in ways that confront idols, ethnic barriers, racial scars, and unjust systems. But instead of this seeming like an impossibly difficult task, we should see it as a remarkable opportunity to share and live out the gospel.
A diverse array of more than one hundred Baltimore-area InterVarsity students gathered at a retreat about ethnic identity and the gospel. As we talked about how Jesus redeems our ethnic identities and calls us to care for those who are hurt on the side of the road like the Good Samaritan, the conversation and trust in each other deepened. People of every ethnicity invited Jesus into their ethnic stories and journeys. I had sweet dialogue with young white men who were grateful to reflect on their own stories and learn about others. They said, “I really didn’t know that things were still so bad. And I realize I can’t be a true friend to my friends of color if I don’t engage, don’t try to learn, or don’t speak up.”
The retreat took place two months before the 2015 Baltimore protests in response to the death of Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old black man who was taken into police custody and then sustained spinal injuries in a police van, slipped into a coma, and died days later. Tension between the neighborhood and the police boiled over and led to civil unrest. While many people pleaded for peaceful protest, others resorted to violence and destruction of property.
The InterVarsity student groups in Baltimore responded to the situation almost immediately by creating spaces of prayer and peaceful protest and by holding panels about race where students shared about their experiences and called people to follow Jesus. InterVarsity students also went to areas where the public schools were closed due to the unrest to help clean up, serve lunch to students, and care for the community. Judi, who oversees Baltimore’s InterVarsity campus chapters, said, “I think it was God’s timing that we talked about this at our retreat right before things blew up. There was no question whether we should respond, whether we should care.” The compassionate actions of the InterVarsity groups got the attention of many non-Christians on campus. As more students were drawn to conversations about ethnic brokenness, they were surprised to hear that there was hope. Many students became part of a Christian community and started going to church to learn more about Jesus.
We must be willing to listen to each other’s ethnic stories and truly love and view each other as sacred. In a world that prizes images on social media instead of real conversation and depth of relationship, the ethnically aware community can be a prophetic witness.
One of the challenges in sharing the gospel with people of color is the perception that Christianity is a white, Western religion. Many Asian Americans trying to share the gospel with family and friends hear that response. It’s similar for those trying to share the gospel with black Americans who are suspicious of Christianity because of the ways it was used to justify slavery, and for Native Americans who see Christianity as a poison that destroyed their culture and people. Even white atheists and agnostics are suspicious of the muddled history of the white American church. Unfortunately, instead of having the gospel transform ethnic culture, the gospel was often conformed to cultural idolatries and prejudices.
But the gospel is not powerless against such brokenness. When we can both talk about the power of the gospel to bring healing between ethnic enemies and help someone live fully in their ethnic identity, Christianity becomes more credible. Jesus brings out the beauty of our cultures and brings healing into the best parts of our culture’s ideals.
Julia is a Korean American woman. She loved her father, but they had a very complex relationship because he resented the primary role her Christian faith had in her life. One night, Julia’s father asked her, “Who leads this household?” and she boldly answered “Jesus.” Her answer caused so much anger in him that he repeatedly struck her. The pain from that event boiled over in Julia’s life. As Julia and I prayed together about the incident, she asked Jesus to help her forgive her father, fully acknowledging that what he did was wrong but also realizing that her bitterness was carving her hollow. As Julia was praying, Jesus was there with her that night, covering her and holding back her father from hitting her. Afterward, Julia felt released from her numbing resentment.
Over time, Julia prayed for reconciliation with her father. Jesus began to show her how to honor and love her father, and they were able to reconnect. During one of their conversations, he unexpectedly asked for forgiveness for that terrible night. Jesus was transforming Julia’s deepest wounds with her father, and when she shared that story with a close friend, that friend became a Christian. And because Jesus was leading Julia in honoring her father and forgiving him, her once antagonistic father was willing to listen to how Jesus was helping her to love him.
As Jesus restores us, and we live out that healing and share it, we have a powerful witness! As we share our faith and invite people to love God and love neighbor more deeply, we help turn people’s attention to new places where Jesus can shape us into his image. We can encourage people to pursue lives of restoration, justice, and reconciliation. Evangelism doesn’t need to be separate from the call to forgive others, reconcile, care for the poor, or stand up for the oppressed. In fact, evangelism that includes such stories makes the gospel even more compelling.
It’s one thing to be captivated by this picture. It’s quite another to live it out day by day. Given the prevalence of everyday racial tension as well as the histories of our people groups, we don’t know what will happen in conversations and interactions. Even our best attempts may end up causing pain to others or receiving pain from others. Shame, fear, and anxiety can often come up as a result.
A seminary professor once said to me, “God never uses fear, shame, or anxiety to motivate us.” These are the unholy motivators, and Jesus does not use them to heal us, including our ethnicities. Fear (to be differentiated from reverence or fear of the Lord) is not how Jesus motivates his listeners. God doesn’t motive us through shame (the sense that one is irreparably broken) or anxiety (the sense that one has not done enough). Shame, fear, and anxiety are used to uphold cultural idols and leak out in many of our conversations about race and ethnicity. But these are not God’s motivators, and they can’t be used to invite people to the kingdom.
Instead, God uses hope, faith, and love to invite us into his story and to heal our ethnic identities. Love is the fullest presence of trust, the antithesis of fear—for “perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18). Instead of feeling shame about what we or our people have done or about what was done to us, we have hope in the power of the gospel to heal. Instead of anxiety about performing perfectly in multiethnic spaces and in growing in our ethnic identities, we have faith that God will lead us and provide the people, community, and experiences to help us grow in pursuing restoration.
Carol Dweck is known for her research on growth mindset psychology. She talks about the powerful impact of giving children a grade of “not yet” instead of Ds and Fs. Encouraging children to grow, and affirming their capability to grow, enabled elementary school students in underperforming inner city and Native reservation schools to outperform their peers. They stopped seeing themselves by their failing grades and realized they could be more.6
Likewise, we live in a world where we are defined by our earthly realities. We’re told to bow to cultural idols, explicitly or silently taught to dismiss or hate certain people, or are the recipients of racism and prejudice. These deep scars make us either despise ourselves, our people, or other people. It makes us poor witnesses of the gospel, poor evangelists, and uncompassionate responders to ethnic pain and injustice.
In Jesus, we hold firm to what God sees when he looks at us. He sees what he made us to be, what he is calling us to be. Yes, we slip and fall, and we encounter incredibly difficult experiences of sin and brokenness, but Jesus says, “Remember who I made you to be, who I am healing you to be.”
As you hear about the scars of others, sometimes you will represent the people who caused that person’s wounds. The worst thing to do in that moment is to become defensive and try to excuse yourself or your people—because in doing so you’re actually denying the person’s pain. How can you extend shalom in such a space?
When you hear about ways Christians have hurt non-Christians, the proper response isn’t to say, “I wish I weren’t a Christian!” The response of sorrow and hope is to say, “On behalf of Christians, I’m so sorry for what was done or said to you. This doesn’t reflect the heart of Jesus. Please forgive us.” Without that apology, someone who was hurt by the church may not be willing to give Jesus a chance.
Stewarding your ethnic identity means owning your people, and acting as a reconciling representative of your people in extending shalom. When you hear about the way someone was hurt by your people, even if you don’t know them, shalom is the best response.
My church, where the majority of attenders are people of color, went through a “Forgive Us” series where the pastors preached about ways the church had contributed to racism against minorities, sexism against women, hatred against the LGBTQ community, distrust of science, and more. Dave, a white pastor, listed ways the church had used the Bible to argue for support of slavery and the racist ideology of white superiority. On behalf of white Christians, he said, “I am so sorry.” John, a biracial white and Korean pastor, listed ways the church and men had contributed to sexist and demeaning attitudes toward women. On behalf of Christian men, he said, “I am so sorry.” When these men asked for forgiveness, some congregants were stunned while others wept. Many people of color said, “I have never heard a white man, a white pastor, so directly confront white supremacy and apologize before.” Many women said, “I had never heard a male pastor apologize so specifically for pain caused to women.”
This powerful experience spoke not just to the Christians but also to the non-Christians in attendance. Iranian and Chinese people were stunned to see leaders with power owning the sins of the past and asking for forgiveness. For them, such humility communicated something different about Christianity, compelling them to seek Jesus. It was beautiful to see them come closer to becoming Christians, and in the months after, we saw new believers and committed seekers say yes to following Christ.
Dave and John owned their people, be it white people, men, or Christians in general. They saw that it was important to do this if they wanted to extend shalom to those who had been hurt. This is an intercessional apology. Offering an intercessional apology goes a long way in building trust with people who have had ethnic tension with your people. You stand in the gap of the pain and offer shalom. In conversations about race, white people need to avoid the temptation to resort to the shame-based “we’re terrible people” apology because it’s actually a response of self-hatred and shame that’s selfish rather than showing care for others. It’s not a good witness.
For example, I’m aware that some Korean business owners take advantage of Latino and Southeast Asian immigrants. As a result, when I’m leading a conversation about ethnicity, I apologize in advance, saying something like, “On behalf of my people, I’m so sorry for the ways we hurt you. This was not what Jesus intended for your people or mine. Please forgive us. Could we work toward something new?” This intentional gesture helps build trust and the beginnings of reconciliation.
Jesus invites you to live your kingdom reality intentionally, in the vehicle of your ethnic identities. You’re called to evangelism, reconciliation, justice, and a righteousness that declares the kingdom of God to a broken world. Here are some ways to live out that kingdom mission.
Share your story as God heals you. The story of how God shapes and heals our ethnic identities is a powerful way to share the gospel. I’ve had conversations with friends and strangers, sharing about my own ethnic journey or the journey of others. Those conversations can quietly stir things in people, like letting light into a dusty room. People start to explore their own ethnic heritages. As God works in their stories, they then share with family and friends, who then also start to reflect on their ethnic heritage and stories. When you share the gospel with non-Christian friends, include the story of how Jesus is transforming your ethnic journey. Sharing your story invites both Christians and non-Christians into deeper healing with Jesus. Evangelism and discipleship deepen as a result.
Walk with those who are hurting around you. In order to understand how to pursue justice, we need to get close enough to the stories and experiences of suffering and injustice, just as the Good Samaritan did at the side of the road. Too often, churches care about the poor who live overseas while failing to address the needs of black and brown brothers and sisters that live nearby. We need to do both. Instead of trying to be “enlightened” people, we need to be compassionately aware people who are willing to address our pain and the pain of others. When Jesus heals our ethnicities, we don’t need to fear the wounds we encounter. Jesus heals us so that we can step compassionately into those spaces. And when we can really listen to others, we are moved to compassion and action, to care for the poor, to offer friendship, and to speak up about unjust practices. If a racist incident happens on campus, at work, or in our neighborhoods, the worst thing to do is to pretend like nothing happened. The best thing to do is to show up, be present, hear their pain, and then pray and speak up together.
Continue to forgive as you proclaim the kingdom in word and deed. Forgive, whether it be your ethnic enemy, a people who have harmed you, or even your own people. I have met many Asian, white, Haitian, Nigerian, and Latino women and men who have a hard time owning their ethnic identity because of what their own people did to them or their families. But if they do not own their people, they cannot extend shalom on behalf of those people.
The more people you get to know outside of your ethnic experiences, the more you will hear about the pain and injustice done to them. You will likely feel the righteous anger of “This should not be!” But if you leap into action without first asking Jesus to heal that anger, it can become a destructive force. You may resort to shame, fear, and anxiety to motivate action.
I regularly meet with white men and women like Stella, who was looking for ways to help her white friends and family engage in conversations about race and ethnicity. She was frustrated and wrestling with the injustices and blindness she saw in her own people. And she was exhausted. I asked her, “Have you forgiven your people? For the things that are wrong, the things they do and are deaf to?” She was a little stunned and mumbled, “I don’t think so.” As we prayed together, she saw that she was using shame to motivate those around her, often with little success. But with a new understanding and a deeper commitment to racial reconciliation, she is now more able to engage family and friends in conversation without resorting to frustration and anger.
If you allow Jesus to help you forgive those who hurt you and your loved ones, you stand a much greater chance at resisting injustice and prophetically declaring Jesus’ kingdom. Nonviolent resistance is the prophetic act of loving your enemy while refusing to settle for the world’s standards. Nonviolent resistance was the foundational principle behind the civil rights movement. Protestors refused to fight evil with evil.
Unredeemed ethnic identities will perpetuate unredeemed ethnic identities. Jesus calls us to be healed and to declare his kingdom in how we live out and steward our ethnic identities. As we become ethnicity aware, we need to learn how to live out the reality of that redemption. Ethnicity-aware behavior requires not just a mindset but the willingness to learn and embody the skills that help you build trust, learn others’ stories, and share your story with Christians and non-Christians alike. It’s essential to our witness and also how we care for each other and pursue justice.
1.What is the story of Jesus’ redemption of your ethnic identity that you might want to share with non-Christian friends? What is compelling about your story?
2.Who might Jesus be calling you to reach out to with the story of his healing in your ethnicity?
3.Where might Jesus be calling you to show up, listen, and pursue justice?
4.Where might Jesus be calling you to forgive an ethnic enemy or your own people?
5.In learning about ethnic identity and race, where have you experienced fear, shame, or anxiety or used it with others? Where is God calling you to use hope, love, and faith as motivators instead?
A Credible Witness: Reflections on Power, Evangelism and Race by Brenda Salter McNeil
Forgiving as We’ve Been Forgiven: Community Practices for Making Peace by L. Gregory Jones and Célestin Musekura
Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier
Living Without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence by Samuel Wells and Marcia A. Owen
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship has a Beyond Colorblind video series about ethnic identity. For a video about how Jesus sends us out to heal in our ethnic identities, go here: http://2100.intervarsity.org/resources/beyond-colorblind-restoration.