Learning From Our Forebears...

This post may seem clumsy and out of place. In many ways it probably is. Yesterday I had conversation with a member of my church family who felt as though my plea for the use of gender inclusive language when we are referring to the entire congregation was a sign that I wanted to reject and abandon both the heritage of the Churches of Christ and Scripture. After much thought and reflection, though likely not enough (as I am sure you will see below), I penned these thoughts earlier this morning. Before you even begin reading, I ask for your forgiveness, for in writing things as weighty as this, I surely do not know what I am doing.:

Learning from Our Forebears:

New Learning and Transformation in the Churches of Christ

Sixty-four years ago, nearly one hundred years after the Civil War, the Churches of Christ were still trapped in the confines of racism and social injustice. Many in the contemporary secular world were crying out against the racial injustices, crying for a new and truer understanding of the phrase from the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal.” (At the time of its drafting, the Fathers of what would become the United States did not mean to include those of African descent, but those of white, European descent. Also notice that they only included “men.” The use of male plural language was supposed to be inclusive in its day, but the reality was that women had few rights and were considered second class in society, being excluded from rights afforded men, such as the right to vote.) The institutional and corporate sin of racism was perpetuated and empowered in American society by churches.

In March of 1941, Foy E. Wallace, Jr., a prominent leader in the Churches of Christ and a conservative doctrinal champion of many to this day, penned an article in the Bible Banner regarding “negro meetings for white people.” The article was a full frontal assault on the mixing of the races and shaking hands as a “violation of Christianity itself, and of all common decency.” He concludes his (racist?) tirade with the following:

“I am very much in favor of negro meetings for the negroes, but I am just as much opposed to negro meetings for white people, and I am against white brethren taking the meetings away from the negroes and the general mixing that has become entirely too much of a practice in these negro meetings. Such a thing not only lowers the church in the eyes of the world but it is definitely against the interest of the negroes. If any negro preacher says that this is not true, that will be the evidence that it is true…”

It is sad and deplorable that the Churches of Christ were so far behind many secular humanists of the day. (One of the reasons for the split between Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ was actually our respective stances during the Civil War. The Churches of Christ sided with the Confederacy; while, the Disciples primarily sided with the abolitionists.) What is possibly even more deplorable is how far behind the world in we continue to be in race relations today. In fact, Detroit is one shining example of how our old sin of institutional racism continues to permeate through the church today. We have black churches and white churches that are just miles from one another, but rarely communicate and often do not even know that the other exists.

Yet, there is hope. Recently theologians and church leaders have realized the depth of our sin and have tried to make a new effort to build a bridge across the deep, insurmountable canyon created by the raging river of our racist past in the Churches of Christ. I have been blessed to be asked to join a group of women and men from both black and white Churches of Christ who are working together to engineer and construct that bridge. These are women and men who are informed by our tradition’s past and convicted not to abandon it but to correct some of our past mistakes, mistakes that were brought to light by the secular culture more so than they were by the church. (Christians actually used Scripture to defend the institution of slavery, their abuse of African Americans, and the inferior status of those of African descent through the “Hamite myth”, a popular way to read the biblical story of Noah’s sons at the time.)

Today, our churches are once again sitting as students of our secular culture. It has taught us the value and importance of women. To continue in rote patriarchalism through the use of gender exclusive language when gender inclusive would be appropriate is, I believe, a sin on the order of our racism in the past. Is this a rejection of our past or our heritage? I do not think so. Are there things from our past from which we can honor, learn from, and still change? I pray that there are, and I think that at times God demands it. (Think of Acts 15 and the need for the church leaders in Jerusalem to change their understanding of the place of Gentile believers in the church in light of Paul’s and Barnabas’s testimony of their experiences with the Gentiles. Were they rejecting their past heritage or transforming it in light of new experiences and needs that they realized through the leading of the Holy Spirit?) Will those in our past be condemned to hell for their support of institutional racism? I pray that God’s mercy and the blood of Christ will cover them for the sins that they did not realize they were committing, just as I pray that it will cover me and the contemporary church for the individual and institutional sins that we do not realize we are committing.

By using gender inclusive language when appropriate, I think that we are correcting something that has been wrong in the past, though not necessarily culturally inappropriate or understood as such at that time. Yet, today we have to look at the world through different lenses. As our understanding of race relations and what the Word of God says about them has changed over the past fifty and one hundred years, we cannot look back through those old lenses again. Likewise, as the culture has helped us understand the need to respect and show sensitivity to those of both genders, I pray that we try to use language that takes that sensitivity to heart when appropriate.