SAVED TO COMMUNITY
In God’s economy, we are saved to community. We not only need to confess, but we need someone to listen to our confession. Picture the power of members of a White congregation taking the sin of racism so seriously that they are willing to sit before a Black congregation and speak of their own complicity in the sin of racism as well as listen intensely to the pain that their African American neighbors experience in their lives. As Dr. Tutu explains, “True forgiveness deals with the past, all of the past, to make the future possible.”
SAVED TO COMMUNITY
Such confession is not a single act but a process. We continue to need the dialogue made available through community. While individual congregations may be of predominantly one race, the Body of Christ is diverse. Thus, God’s gift of the church to humanity is to provide humanity with that community of faith that transcends human divisions and provides it a context for such a dialogue.
Try to picture what it might mean for you personally and for your church to respond to the world as if God’s kingdom has come.
