My heart, all of our hearts at
Dare 2 Share,
were deeply saddened by the killing of five police officers (and
wounding of seven more) in Dallas a few weeks ago. All of this took
place at the hands of a sniper who reportedly said that he wanted to
kill white people. My heart is also broken for Philando Castile being
shot and killed by police officers in Minnesota and Alton Sterline being
shot by two white police officers, both in the same week.
Two of these incidents were caught on cell phone videos and streamed
online. It has helped to accelerate the anger among people of all
ethnicities across this nation. From #BlackLivesMatter to
#AllLivesMatter, emotions are running hot in the not-so-United States of
America.
So what can a youth leader do about it? More than you might
think! Whether you’re in the cities, the suburbs or the farmlands, you
can make a difference…and so can your teenagers. You can help to
eradicate racism in this nation, one teenager at a time.
Before I share with you four ways you can do this, let me give you just a little background as to why I believe this can happen.
I was raised in one of the highest crime rate areas of my city, in a
largely Latino part of town. I felt racial tensions every day walking to
and home from school, at my school, and in my own neighborhood. My
family was a white family full of body-building, tatted thugs who were
known for their willingness (and even desire) to fight the Hispanics in
and around our neighborhood. Witnessing bloody fights and hearing racial
slurs was commonplace growing up.
But then a church from the suburbs reached out to my part of the city
and one-by-one began to reach my uncles and aunts and cousins for
Christ…and to disciple them. As a little kid in Northern Denver, I
witnessed a slow and steady transformation in my family members.
Although the church and youth ministry that reached my family for
Jesus was in a pasty white part of a mostly middle- and upper-middle
class town, they had an unusual amount of racially diverse young people
in key leadership positions. I was equipped to share my faith, grow in
my faith and preach the Word by Latino brothers and sisters. And, over
the course of time, God replaced the rampant racism in my
family’s hearts with massive love for everyone! At the center of it all
was a youth ministry that wanted to reach everyone everywhere with the
hope of Jesus.
With all of that as a backdrop, here are the four things you can do to #StopRacism in your students and community:
1. Pray! Pray! Pray!
“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message,
that
all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.
May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent
me.” John 17:20,21
In Christ’s high priestly prayer, he interceded for us, believers
from all ages and races, to “be one” as the Father and Son are one! He
asked God for unity in the church!
As we join him in prayer for a united church, we will intuitively
begin to take steps to make sure we are a diverse youth group. Our
teenagers will begin to pray for teenagers of all races at their schools
to put their faith in Jesus and reach out to them with the gospel. It
all starts with prayer!
Why not spend time praying for God to break down the racial barriers
in your youth group and city together as a group this week? This issue
is trending on Twitter and saturating our news channels so much it
should be impossible for us to ignore.
2. Get your theology straight.
Where did racism come from? We all know that ultimately all sin
started in the Garden when Adam took a bite of the forbidden fruit on
our behalf on passed on to us that selfish seed. But, more specifically,
we see its etymology when God confused the language of a once-united,
same-language people and scattered them over the earth (
Genesis 11:1-8.) The people clustered then collided. Racism became rampant after that.
What’s the solution? Salvation! The red blood of Jesus is color
blind. It can save the lost souls from any ethnicity. Galatians 3:28
makes it clear that, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave
nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ
Jesus.”
What should the practical outworking of all this be? Fully integrated
churches and youth groups! As my friend Derwin L. Gray wrote,
“In all of human history, there has never been so much animosity,
hatred and violence between two groups of people as there has been
between the Jew and the Gentile. But God birthed a group of people on
the planet who He recreated in His eternal Son, Jesus, to transcend this
racial hostility, injustice and oppression. He did this by means of
Jesus’ death on the cross so that our hostility toward each other was
put to death.”
Derwin L Gray (Pastor of Transformation Church and Author of
High Definition Leadership…Building Multiethnic Churches in a Multiethnic World)
3. Teach this theology interactively.
Don’t just blurt these truths out to students and then wrap up in
prayer! Use questions to get the real issues in your teenagers’ hearts
to surface and then deal with them. At
Dare 2 Share we use a strategy called ALTernative Teaching. It basically stands for:
Ask great questions. This is what Jesus did and we should do with our teenagers.
Listen deeply to their answers.
Teach the truth from God’s Word.
Using this style of teaching will allow teenagers to have a dialogue
with you and not just hear a monologue from you. But be warned, this can
get a little messy. Teenagers may have strong feelings and some sinful
perspectives that need to be gently corrected. So bring a mop—it will be
worth cleaning up the mess and helping them to have a solid theology
when it comes to truly loving everyone!
4. Gospelize everyone.
True evangelism is color-blind. It only sees red (the blood of Jesus) and longs for everyone everywhere to be cleansed by it!
Jesus told his disciples in Acts 1:8, “But you will receive power
after the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in
Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the
earth.” In his now famous last words before he ascended into heaven,
Jesus gave the call for us to reach everyone of all nationalities. We
start where we are (Jerusalem) and move outward toward the
less-comfortable regions…like Samaria.
To the Jews of the time, Samaritans were considered lower than
Gentiles. They were half-breeds, half-Jew and half-Gentile. Many Jews
felt like they had sold out to the Assyrians during the fall of Israel
and had intermarried with them, producing what they considered to be
accursed offspring. But with one sentence Jesus rips that stereotype
from his disciples’ mind and challenges them to reach them all with the
hope that only he can offer!
In the same way we must reach our own “Jerusalems” with the Gospel,
but we must reach our “Samarias” too. I call it reaching across the
street and across the tracks!
That’s one of the things that made my youth ministry growing up so
special. They reached across the tracks to my neighborhood (30 minutes
away in the bad part of our city) to reach my family and other families
with the message of hope. They didn’t care about the color of your
skin but the condition of your heart. And, as long as you were willing
to grow, they would train you and give you key positions to lead in the
youth group. Although I was fatherless, I felt like I had brothers and
sisters of all types and races in my youth group.
So how do you build this brand of youth ministry? You have to choose to integrate
seven biblical values ripped
straight from the book of Acts into the meat and muscle of your
ministry. If you’d like to go deeper into these values, pick up my book
Gospelize and go through it with your youth ministry team.
Racism is a problem in America. We can play our part in helping to
solve it by building multi-ethnic, Gospel-Advancing ministries that are
making and multiplying disciples in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and
beyond.
Why do this? “That the world may believe” because they see in our
teenagers an other-worldly, Jesus-centered, unshakeable and unbreakable
unity.
