by | Oct 16, 2024 | Uncategorized
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Every few years, someone makes the point that, “actually,” the “least of these” passage from the Gospel of Matthew doesn’t really have anything to do with how we treat the poor or the stranger or the hungry.
The “brothers” to which Jesus refers, the argument goes, are the messengers he sent out—meaning that the way one responds to the bearers of Jesus’ word signifies the way one responds to him. It’s not about the poor, the argument goes, but about mistreated fellow Christians.
A friend told me last week that some social media controversy dusted up for a bit over just this question. He needn’t tell me who posted it, because it doesn’t matter in this ephemeral medium—the players always change and the game remains the same.
Anybody who’s ever been a youth pastor knows that there’s a certain kind of question—like “How far is too far?” or “Actually, Jesus wasn’t talking about the kind of sex I want to have”—that’s less about “just asking questions” of the text than about doing what one wants to do.
The text in question here, of course, is a familiar one to those who’ve been in the orbit of the Bible for any time at all. After a series of parables about the kingdom of God, Jesus portrays for his disciples a haunting description of Judgment Day, in which the nations are gathered before Christ the shepherd, who divides the sheep of the redeemed from the goats of the damned.
To both groups, Jesus notes that he had been among them—as hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned, a stranger. The sheep, Jesus said, had fed him, given him water and clothing, welcomed him in, visited him in his distress. The goats, Jesus said, had ignored him. Both groups are shocked and ask, “When did we do this?” Jesus responds, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40, ESV throughout).
Even those who believe that “brothers” refers to those whom Jesus sent out with the gospel are quick to say that the point of his teaching is hardly “Which vulnerable people can we safely ignore?” As a matter of fact, under any reading of Jesus’ words, the application is the exact opposite, and it’s hard to imagine how Jesus could have worded it to make the point any stronger.
Suppose, for a moment, that the “brothers” here are, in fact, those whom Jesus sent out. The scene is of the gathering of all the nations—very few of whom would have encountered this relatively small group of people. As a matter of fact, all of those originally sent out are now dead. Are the nations of people outside that small circle now exempt? Of course not.
More to the point, the entire teaching centers on the surprise of both groups—sheep and goats—as to when, in fact, they ever encountered Jesus. The sheep do not respond, “Yes, we know. That’s why we did it. We had the chart telling us which strangers to welcome and which to ignore.” The goats could not have said, “If we’d known they were with you, we, of course, would have given them some porridge!”
The question is about conformity to Jesus himself. This is the one charged, repeatedly, with eating and drinking with those outside the approved definition of “brothers” (Matt. 9:9–13; Luke 19:1–10; John 4:5–26). This is the Jesus who told us that the “friend/enemy” distinction—love those who are “with” you, and hate those who aren’t—is contrary to the kingdom he is announcing. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’” he said. “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:43–44).
The question raised by these sorts of “actually” arguments, about parsing out who fits in the “least of these” and who does not, is not a new one. It is, quite literally, the question Jesus answered from a lawyer seeking to parse out how he was within the bounds of “love God and love your neighbor” with the question, “Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29). One can almost hear the equivocating “Actually, neighbor in the context of the Torah refers to those within the household of Israel, so …”
Jesus deconstructs all of that with a story, choosing the most hated possible example of negative identity politics—a Samaritan—to make the point that the question is not about figuring out how to categorize “neighbor” but about how to be a neighbor, by showing mercy and compassion (vv. 36–37).
The entire canon makes the case that our response to the poor does indeed tell us something about our response to God. “Whoever is generous to the poor lends to the Lord, and he will repay him for his deed,” and “whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered,” the Bible says (Prov. 19:17; 21:13).
The Psalms repeatedly argue that the fatherless, the widows, the strangers, those deemed too powerless to matter, have a God who knows and hears them and who will plead their case (Ps. 68:5). The prophets make the point that the ill treatment of the vulnerable—the poor, orphans, widows—makes worship noxious in the presence of God (Isa.1:14–17).
Jesus’ own brother, James of Jerusalem, likewise argues that landowners robbing their workers of wages is an offense to God because “the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts” (James 5:4).
Why else have Christians—from the first century—cared for unwanted children and opposed abortion and infanticide? Our treatment of the vulnerable reveals what we think about God, for the vulnerable are made in his image too. The idea that some people are disposable because of their lack of value by the world’s categories of power and wisdom is directly opposed to Christ and the meaning of the Cross. An assault on human dignity is an assault on the image of God (James 3:9).
And the image of God is no abstraction. The exact image of the radiance of God has a name: Jesus of Nazareth (Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3). As we do to those who bear that image—even the “least” of them—we have done unto him.
Does that resolve all of our prudential arguments about how best to care for the poor when it comes to governmental systems and policies? Of course not. It does not answer every question about how best for you, personally, to address the needs of those around you. It does mean, however, that when you confront the need of a vulnerable person in need of help, your response is not to ask for their papers. Those who welcome strangers have, at times, entertained angels unaware, the Bible tells us (Heb. 13:2). And the key word there is unaware.
If one is embarrassed by the miracles or morality of Jesus, one can always demythologize him with all the fervor of a 19th-century German scholar. If one is embarrassed by the compassion or empathy of Jesus, one can demythologize him there too, with all the frenzy of a 20th-century German soldier. None of that will change, not one iota, that Jesus is ultimately seated on the throne. Before him, “Has God really said?” is a terrible question to ask. So is “Who is my neighbor?”
And when confronted with the suffering of human beings around you, making the point that those who are suffering are less than the “least of these” is no argument at all.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
The post The ‘Least of These’ and the Quest for a Post-Christian Conscience appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 16, 2024 | Uncategorized
As a pastor, I’ve found one of the main difficulties in leading faithfully and living as good neighbors is that we can’t always choose our neighbors or the context and circumstances in which we lead and live. And in a time of tense divisiveness, global conflicts, natural disasters, and other complex crises, this sense of helplessness is nearly universal.
We have all experienced the reality of a world beyond our control—not least during the COVID-19 pandemic, when life changed for all of us. Many of us were shuttering in place and scrambling to find masks, sanitizers, and so forth, grappling with a staggering amount of uncertainty about what we could and could not do. For me personally, the pandemic was a crucible for my leadership, and one I find instructive for ministry to this day.
As a multigenerational, multisite African American congregation in Charlotte, North Carolina—one of the earliest cities to issue stay-in-place mandates—we faced multiple challenges and points of tension during the initial years of the pandemic. Our staff wrestled with the same questions many Christians did as we sought to balance our individual and congregational freedom with community responsibility.
How do we honor the value of embodied, collective public worship while simultaneously protecting our congregation, especially those most vulnerable with comorbidities? How do I negotiate concerns about the budget and potential loss of income considering my responsibility to protect the livelihood of my staff and their families? How does a congregation of our size and influence set a good example in how we operate during a public health emergency, including in our rhetoric?
Above all, I believe the pandemic—as any major crisis facing our community can—created a unique opportunity for us to demonstrate our confidence in God when every aspect of life as we know it seems threatened and compromised. And as I’ve reflected on this truth since then, I’ve gleaned insights from the life and ministry of Ezekiel about what it means to lead faithfully and live as good neighbors in a world beyond our control.
In the first verse of the book, the 30-year-old prophet Ezekiel identifies himself as being among the Israelite exiles by the Kebar River in the land of Babylon for seven days, “deeply distressed” (1:1; 3:14–15).
The first step for us as leaders guiding our people through times of turmoil is to absorb the reality in which we find ourselves. Rather than being in denial, withdrawing from the world, or detaching from our emotions, we are called to stay present in moments of crisis and experience life alongside those we lead. Ezekiel himself was among the people of Israel who were being exiled, and he remained in their midst.
This kind of presence cultivates the necessary empathy to know where our people are and what they need. Part of leadership in general and pastoral leadership in particular is the work of giving language to whatever our churches are facing and feeling. Leaders mustname the tension in those they lead, just as Ezekiel named the emotion of the exiles, who were “deeply distressed.” Identifying a traumatic event and the feelings it causes can help people come to terms with their reality—which in turn helps them understand and transcend it.
One way our staff tried to absorb the reality of the pandemic was by reading surveys provided by Gloo, which helped us identify trends and gave us snapshots of how people were doing in real time. We tried to name the disruption, dislocation, displacement, and disappointment people were facing, along with their losses, grief, frustration, and fear.
In the book’s opening, Ezekiel also described the experience of receiving a vision of God (1:4–28). It is here that we get the next aspect of leadership during crises, which is reframing—that is, placing people’s experience and feelings within a larger framework.
Providing your people with the bigger picture often involves seeing and showing how God is at work in any given situation.Ezekiel’s vision of God’s glory did not take him away from where he was but happened while he was seated among his fellow exiles. This vision broadened his frame of reference and showed him God was at work in their midst. Likewise, it is crucial for faith leaders to identify God’s presence in situations that are out of our control.
With the pandemic, reframing moved me from asking why it happened to seeing how God was at work. It prompted our church to look for God sightings in the lives of our fellow congregants, in our neighborhoods, and in our own families. Some might call this attunement—the practice of attuning ourselves to the personal presence of God. Reframing can move a person from a posture of frustration or blame into one of curiosity and empowered expectation.
The next aspect of biblical leadership is discerning purpose.In the book’s second chapter, Ezekiel received God’s call to be a prophet. Having absorbed his people’s reality, identified their tension, and seen God at work in their midst, he learned of God’s purpose. Part of living faithfully is discerning the purpose to which we are called. How is God calling us to live, and what is God calling us to do? Whom has he placed near us, and how can we serve them?
In the case of our church not being able to meet during the pandemic, we found ways to volunteer in our community and distribute food to people in need. We chose to see our virtual worship as honoring our city and assisting our health-care system by avoiding super-spreading events. And while our gathering function was removed from the equation, we leaned heavily into our serving function.
This leads to another aspect of leadership in crisis, which is embracing opportunity. While there were restrictions during the pandemic, there were also a host of opportunities. Seeing them required a liberated imagination, intensified curiosity, and out-of-the-box creativity. It necessitated us letting go of how things used to be and embracing what might be—asking questions like “What could we do and what would it look like if … ?” and “Where might we meet people if … ?”
In the process, we came up with an idea to help our unhoused neighbors by developing a mobile unit that provides showers, washers, and dryers—named M25:40 after the famous passage Matthew 25:40 (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”). We also developed our virtual presence and resources, which broke down barriers in terms of who we could reach, where we could interact with them, and how we could reach and engage them. As a result, our numbers did not shrink after the pandemic but grew.
The next aspect isclinging to hope.What we initially thought would last two weeks or even couple months ended up persisting for far longer than we anticipated. In the meantime, our church suffered tragic and unexpected losses. The length of displacement—when our services stayed online only—tempted many in our congregation to despair. Those who grew fatigued with virtual services began attending churches that opened earlier, producing another point of tension.
The encouragement of Psalm 27:13–14 comes to mind: “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”
The final aspect is encouraging our people to look toward the future.In the case of the pandemic, after having gone completely virtual for so long, we could not assume our congregation’s attending habits would immediately return to what they were before the pandemic. That change caused us to ask how our future might look.
With some people remaining virtual, some showing up primarily in person, and others opting for hybrid attendance, did we really need to keep our three campuses? After praying about whether having three campuses was the highest and best use of our resources, we discerned that it wasn’t and eventually sold one of our buildings to another ministry.
We continued gathering Sunday mornings at the main campus location, and we are redeveloping our second campus into a 30-acre hybrid site with residential, office, retail, hotel, and conference spaces. We also opened an affordable senior living project and are in the process of developing another 30 acres to build a combination of market-rate homes and independent living. All these ventures meet critical needs in our community.
While many see the pandemic as a net loss, the decisions our church made in that time allowed us to pursue other opportunities which ultimately redefined our vision for the future. As a people of faith, we are called to be forward-thinking. Whatever the present may bring, there is a future reality which we can anticipate and pursue. Chasing that future assumes a degree of risk and ambiguity, which calls for faith, discernment, and courage.
Bishop Claude R. Alexander Jr. is the lead pastor of The Park Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and author of Becoming the Church and Necessary Christianity. He also serves on the board of Christianity Today.
Learn more about Evangelicals in a Diverse Democracy.
The post Pastors and Public Servants: Lead Your Neighbor as Yourself appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 16, 2024 | Uncategorized
In the past 50 years, the center of Christianity has shifted from the West to the Majority World. As Zambian mission leader Lazarus Phiri told me during a recent interview, “Those who were once a mission field are now looking like a mission force.”
Yet all too often, well-meaning mission partners in the West operate as if this shift has not occurred. The reason, in part, is that the centers of power (including money, education, institution, passport privileges, etc.) remains in the West.
This power gap in mission partnerships between Western and Majority World members, if it is not acknowledged, can result in wasted resources, discouraged missionaries, decreased engagement, and broken relationships.
Author and missiologist Miriam Adeney relates a story she once heard from an African Christian leader:
Elephant and Mouse were best friends. One day Elephant said, “Mouse, let’s have a party!” Animals gathered from far and near. They ate, and drank, and sang, and danced. And nobody celebrated more exuberantly than Elephant.
After it was over, Elephant exclaimed, “Mouse, did you ever go to a better party? What a blast!” But Mouse didn’t answer. “Where are you?” Elephant called. Then he shrank back in horror. There at his feet lay the Mouse, his body ground into the dirt—smashed by the exuberance of his friend, Elephant.
“Sometimes that is what it is like to do mission with you Americans,” the African storyteller concluded. “It’s like dancing with an elephant.”
When I first read this story, it felt like a gut punch. I mentally scrolled through my 25 years of cross-cultural mission engagement and wondered if anyone would say this of me. Have I been an elephant? In my exuberance for the mission, have I ever crushed my friends and partners?
Of course, no one enters global missions with a plan to stomp on their partners. But if you speak with missions leaders from around the world, as my colleagues and I have in researching for the Mission Shift podcast, you will discover many unwitting elephants dancing across mission fields.
Considering the power differential in missions, how can we Westerners work with others in a way that lifts our partners rather than grinding them into the dirt?
First, we need to recognize the power of money. Mary Lederleitner, author of Cross-Cultural Partnerships: Navigating the Complexities of Money and Mission, writes of the distorting power of wealth, “The person coming from the more affluent or developed country assumes he or she knows what is best.” She adds, “It is very counterintuitive to learn from people that have less wealth and less education than you.” But a failure to do so can lead to a sense of superiority that, when played out in partnership, becomes a patriarchal relationship.
As Layo Leiva, who has developed partnerships between Latin America and the United States through his regional role with Cru, said succinctly in an interview for our podcast, “The role of money is the role of power—who has the money has the power.” This is not to say that money should not be involved in missions. The sharing of resources within the body of Christ is central to gospel transformation. But we need to recognize the challenges to partnership it creates.
We also need to recognize the power of choice. Brian Virtue, who researched hundreds of cross-cultural partnerships for his PhD work, describes a scenario he saw multiple times:
People [on the lower side of the power difference] were granted access to the initial conversations, but when it came time for the decision-making and the implementation, they were no longer part of the process. It’s almost like they heard, “We’re going to go to the adult’s table and talk about it. And we’ll get back to you.”
Who is at the adult table in a partnership? If the table is populated exclusively by those from the West, or with the highest degrees, or with the biggest budgets, then your partnership is probably affected by power disparities.
There are many more powers in a mission partnership we need to recognize: education, nationality, organizational size, language, and history, to name a few. If we have eyes to see them, then we have a chance to use them for the benefit of the mission. You have money? Great! Invest it in God’s mission. You have education? Great! Use it to uplift your brothers and sisters. “Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them” (Rom. 12:6, ESV throughout).
But also, if we recognize the effect power has on partnerships, we can heed Paul’s warning: “I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment” (v. 3). Elephant could have done so much good with his size if only he had recognized the potential dangers it presented.
Once we recognize the presence of power, we need to learn to walk softly in our partnerships. Slavko Hadžić, an evangelist in Bosnia and Herzegovina and associate regional director with Langham Preaching, advises, “If you come for the first time to a country or region, don’t come with an agenda. Come to observe. Don’t rush with promises. Wait, learn, be open to hear. Let the Lord lead the steps.”
Part of walking softly is recognizing that God is already at work on every continent and in every corner of the earth. What if we entered every cross-cultural situation looking for the signs of God’s work rather than a place to plant our flag or insert our own agendas? Too often we use the urgency of the mission as an excuse for injuring our partners in the mission. To walk softly, we must walk slowly.
Milan Michalko, a local pastor in the Czech Republic, also encourages a slow pace. “Partnership without relationship? I have no time for that,” he says. Relationships take time to build. Michalko has a theory as to why this is often hard for American organizations: “Because they have money, they have no time.” The abundance of money demands an abundance of quick results, but healthy partnerships demand more than a 30-minute lunch and a shared Google spreadsheet. “If you want a quality partner, that’s time consuming. You have to be here. You have to invest time. You have to build trust,” Michalko says. To walk softly, we must walk in relationship.
Forrest Inslee, coauthor of the book Re-Imagining Short-Term Missions, shared of a moment in Haiti when a team learned how to walk more softly in partnership. On the island of Haiti, the history of colonialism and inequality have embedded the idea that, because of their superior resources, the West always knows best. The actions of Western teams have only confirmed this conclusion.
Once, when a team was participating in some community performances, the American visitors took center stage, as if they were compensating for a program that was deficient or incomplete. But this time, the Haitian leaders spoke up. “Would you please stand in the back of the room instead of on stage?” they asked.
By speaking up, these leaders risked offending their guests and jeopardizing the flow of resources from their American partners. And some were offended. But the majority learned from the challenge. They stood in the back. Over time, the partnership grew in mutuality, trust, and health. To walk softly, we must sometimes stand in the back.
Leiva shares one nonintuitive way of walking slowly. In mission partnerships, the higher-power partner often shares the products of their system (money, books, programs) but rarely lets the lower-power partner behind the curtain to see how the products are made.
Money is sent, but no one shares how to raise money. Books are translated, but no one shares how to write a book. One partner maintains control, and the other becomes dependent.
Layo now asks his partners to not only send the product but also “transfer the technology” that produced it. This way, instead of creating endless dependency, we contribute our strength to grow our partners’ strength. As we walk softly, our power lifts our partners rather than crushing them.
When we recognize our power and learn to walk slowly, we have an opportunity to make the most important discovery in partnerships. The principle is found in another story of a mouse, this one from Aesop:
A Lion lay asleep in the forest, his great head resting on his paws. A timid little Mouse came upon him unexpectedly, and in her fright and haste to get away, ran across the Lion’s nose. Roused from his nap, the Lion laid his huge paw angrily on the tiny creature to kill her.
“Spare me!” begged the poor Mouse. “Please let me go and some day I will surely repay you.”
The Lion was much amused to think that a Mouse could ever help him. But he was generous and finally let the Mouse go.
Some days later, while stalking his prey in the forest, the Lion was caught in the toils of a hunter’s net. Unable to free himself, he filled the forest with his angry roaring. The Mouse knew the voice and quickly found the Lion struggling in the net. Running to one of the great ropes that bound him, she gnawed it until it parted, and soon the Lion was free.
“You laughed when I said I would repay you,” said the Mouse. “Now you see that even a Mouse can help a Lion.”
Too often, we in the West define power by the ways we are powerful: money, education, passport privileges, and other resources. Like the Lion, we laugh at the idea of being helped by a Mouse. But other powers are at play than those that can be measured: cross-cultural flexibility and understanding, dependence on God, willingness to suffer, and missional ingenuity.
Every follower of Christ—even the one who appears small—is powerful. Every believer is filled with the Spirit. Every believer is a part of the body with a crucial role to play. Every believer is formed by God for his mission. And as Paul reminds us, those who seem the weakest are indispensable (1 Cor. 12:22–27).
Even lions and elephants have needs. In fact, sometimes our strengths are the sources of our needs. Because of our abundant resources, we can be slow to pray. Because of our efficient systems, we can be slow to improvise. Because of our set plans, we can often miss what God is doing in the margins. More than ever, the West needs the many strengths of the Majority World.
Even Jesus, whom Lederleitner calls “the ultimate high-power partner,” positioned himself to rely on the strengths of others. He made himself nothing, taking the form of a man. He walked softly among us. He invited the disciples “behind the curtain” of his life and shared everything with them. He entrusted them with the mission.
The Lion of Judah did not laugh at the contribution of common men and women from the villages of Galilee. He called them friends and gave them the keys of his kingdom. Likewise, our Lord has commissioned and empowered us with his Spirit. And whenever we follow his example, our mission partnerships will give us all a reason to truly celebrate.
Josh Irby is Cru City Global’s partnership director for Europe and a cohost of the Mission Shift podcast. He is a former missionary and coauthor of Cross on a Hill: A Personal, Historical, and Biblical Search for the True Meaning of a Controversial Symbol.
The post Mind the Power Gap in Missions appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 15, 2024 | Uncategorized
Bill Pannell, a Black evangelical who pushed white evangelicals to recognize their captivity to the culture of American racism, died on October 11 at age 95.
The evangelist and seminary professor argued that the Good News is all about reconciliation—between God and humanity, but also horizontally, between people—and Christians are called to the ministry of reconciliation. But white Christians who claimed the name evangel, he said, could only seem to muster occasional interest in racism, even though it was the most acute division in American society, the area in the greatest need of reconciliation.
And then they mostly asked Black people to do the reconciling.
“It’s like inviting someone to comment on the quality of the dinner when you haven’t [invited them] to the table,” Pannell said in the 2024 documentary The Gospel According to Bill Pannell. “Most of the evangelical movement could only go so far. They could only go so far.”
Pannell wrote about his experience of racism in My Friend, The Enemy, published in 1968. He described how pervasive assumptions of white supremacy impacted him and his sense of dignity and worth, growing up. He found his dignity restored by the gospel, but then discovered, to his dismay, that the people who preached it to him were not interested in addressing the social problems caused by that sort of sin.
Twenty-five years later, he wrote about racism again. Watching the city of Los Angeles consumed by six days of riots following the acquittal of four police officers who severely beat a Black man named Rodney King, Pannell warned white evangelicals about the possibility of a coming race war. Americans could not afford to keep ignoring the problems caused by racism, he argued, and Christians are uniquely called to reconciliation.
The book was republished 28 years after that, in 2021, as four more officers in another city appeared in another court to face more charges of “unreasonable force” following the death of a Black man named George Floyd. Pannell couldn’t help but notice that while the names and dates had changed, the problem persisted. And white evangelicals still seemed captive to a culture deeply invested in ignoring the issue.
“Somehow or other in my lifetime,” Pannell said, “the evangelical movement became more and more American and less and less Christian.”
Pannell was born on June 25, 1929, to William and Olive Davison Pannell. He was the eldest of eight children and was raised as part of a tiny Black minority in Sturgis, Michigan. The census counted fewer than 200 Black people in Sturgis in 1930, which was less than half a percent of the population of St. Joseph County. Some of the Black people, like Pannell’s stepfather, Joseph Perkins, wouldn’t have lived there at all, but they had jobs just across the border in Indiana in towns where they weren’t allowed to stay after dark.
Pannell recalled later he never heard the word racism as a child, and yet the sense of it pervaded everything.
“I was aware that I was different and that the difference made a difference in a white world,” he said. “You belong and yet you don’t. You are embraced—but not really.”
Pannell excelled in sports and was a high-scoring shooting guard for the basketball team. And yet off the court, he was not accepted as an equal by his peers or their parents. He was not made to feel welcome.
The one significant exception was Eunice Randall. A pastor’s daughter, she invited Pannell to a party for young people at Sturgis Missionary Church. He went and found a community of people eager to embrace him. Pannell started attending the church, went forward during an altar call, and accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior.
The church gave Pannell a Bible and told him to read it. He did—and discovered a sense of worth and dignity he’d never known before. He was peeling potatoes at a segregated country club and reading Ephesians 1:4–14 when it hit him.
“To think that God has chosen me before the foundations of the world—had his eye on me, chose me, picked me out, plucked me out of the tribe as it were, made me his own. If that’s true, whew! Lord have mercy,” Pannell later said. “I really am somebody, no matter what anybody else says.”
After high school, Pannell went to Fort Wayne Bible College with the encouragement and financial support of a Black housekeeper, or “domestic,” named Mildred Bedford. She had somehow saved $500 and gave it to him, he recalled in the 2024 documentary, telling him he needed to “strike while the iron’s hot.”
In Fort Wayne, he learned he needed to go out into “all the world” to preach the gospel, but received very little education about that world, Pannell later recalled.
“I didn’t know from beans,” he said.
Nevertheless, the young Black man became an evangelist, traveling around the country with white classmates to lead revivals and crusades, calling people to come forward, confess their sins, and accept Jesus. It gave Pannell another perspective on American racism. Christians across the country were happy to have him lead the singing as people got saved, he noticed, but they wouldn’t want him to live in their communities.
“A singing Negro has always been welcome,” he wrote in My Friend, The Enemy, “as long as he is a vagabond.”
Pannell said evangelicals in the north were not fighting to maintain segregation—but he noticed they wouldn’t speak out against it either. Their silence seemed to handcuff him to his suitcase, he wrote, making sure he never unpacked, never made himself at home.
Pannell decided he needed to learn more from Black Christians. At 25, he moved to Detroit to work under B. M. Nottage, a Plymouth Brethren minister from the Bahamas who evangelized in Black communities across the US. Nottage and his two older brothers started gospel halls and Brethren assemblies in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit. In the Detroit alone, they founded Gospel Chapel, Grace Gospel Chapel, Berean Bible Chapel, River Rouge Bible Chapel, the Open Door Rescue Mission, and Bethany Tabernacle, where Pannell joined Nottage as an associate pastor in 1954.
The young evangelist considered Nottage a mentor and a father figure. Pannell lived with him in a back room and in 1955 married his secretary, Hazel Scott, who was from Memphis.
After a decade, Pannell went back to working with white evangelicals. In 1964, he joined Youth For Christ, the evangelistic ministry that launched Billy Graham’s career.
He quickly found himself unsettled, however, by the way white evangelicals cared about Black people’s souls but not their civil rights, economic conditions, educational opportunities, or housing. When practical issues impacting the well being of Black people came up, Pannell said, the white evangelicals objected that they didn’t want to get distracted by politics. Other issues, however, did not seem like a distraction: prayer in schools, liberals on the Supreme Court, and communism around the globe.
Some problems seemed to merit social and political action, “but mention the inhumanity of a society which with unbelievable indifference imprisons ‘the souls of black folks,’” Pannell wrote, “and these crusaders begin mumbling about sin.” He tried to argue the impact of racism couldn’t just be waved away like that but was mostly unsuccessful.
Much of white evangelicalism seemed to be captured by the culture of the suburbs, Pannell said. As white people fled cities following desegregation, white evangelicals went with them. Born-again Christians came to identify so strongly with their white, middle-class, family-focused, conservative communities, Pannell said, that they found it impossible to understand or even consider the concerns of their minority brothers and sisters.
In the 1990s he pointed to Christianity Today as an example.
“It ought to be called Suburban Christianity Today,” he wrote in The Coming Race Wars. “Its board of directors comes from suburbia, as do most of its writers, most of its editors, and all of its management elite. Not surprisingly, this is reflected in the values espoused in the magazine.”
There were some white evangelicals, of course, who did want to address the problem of American racism. Pannell said they expressed hope for racial reconciliation and encouraged him and other Black evangelicals to work on the issue. But their focus would quickly wander, their interest fade. Few seemed committed to anything that would require change.
“Long after all the coffee was drunk and the little sandwiches eaten, the uneasy smiles were retracted and it became clear that reconciliation with most of these saints was still a ways off,” Pannell said. “In fact, it was a long ways off.”
He came to believe that, in the meantime, white evangelicals didn’t have the moral authority to evangelize Black people. Ignoring the reality of racism undermined their ability to proclaim the gospel.
“Don’t preach love to me. Especially if you intend I do all the loving,” Pannell wrote. “What right has the oppressor to demand that his victim be saved from sin? You may be scripturally and evangelistically correct, but you are ethically wrong. You have the right message, but your timing is off.”
Pannell wrote his book on racism, and it came out in 1968, the same year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and it seemed like hope for peaceful change vanished in America. Pannell left Youth For Christ and joined a group of Black evangelists led by Tom Skinner. Pannell thought he was done with white evangelicals.
A few years later, however, he was approached by David Allan Hubbard, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, and asked to join the board of trustees. Pannell wasn’t interested. But Hubbard argued the evangelical school was not interested in affirmative action of symbolic representations of diversity. Fuller believed Black leadership was essential to its mission.
“Almost everybody needed one of us,” Pannell said. “He didn’t seem to be playing that game. He said, ‘We don’t think we can model the kingdom of God well monoculturally.’ Whoa!”
Pannell joined the board in 1971, becoming the first Black board member. He left the board to join the faculty in ’74, becoming the first Black professor. He ran an innovative program for the theological education of Black pastors, which later became the African American Church Studies Program and in 2015 was renamed the William E. Pannel Center for Black Church Studies.
Pannell spent the rest of his career teaching and mentoring Black ministers. He was, on occasion, drawn back to the task of challenging white evangelicals to take racism seriously but noted that despite “some paroxysms of curiosity” about the theology of racial reconciliation, little seemed to change.
And yet he continued to believe that white evangelicals could change.
“The evangelical movement could be born again,” Pannell said. “I would issue a call back to the cross, back to repentance, and I would ask that God would, somehow or other, save us from our cultural captivity.”
Pannell’s eldest son, Philip, died in 2015; his wife, Hazel, died in 2021. He is survived by his son Peter.
The post Died: Bill Pannell, Black Evangelical Who Raised the Issue of Racism appeared first on Christianity Today.
by | Oct 15, 2024 | Uncategorized
As the sirens wailed on October 1, Nirit Bar-David took refuge in her familiar safe room. Iran had just launched another 180 missiles at Israel, and she had about a minute to take cover. So did the other 350 residents of Israel’s only Messianic Jewish moshav.
Sitting on a pine-covered ridge about ten miles west of Jerusalem, the Yad HaShmona community has lived in steady tension over the past year of war with Hamas in Gaza—now extended against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Thirty members of the community have served with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on both fronts, severely disrupting their families’ lives.
Yad HaShmona’s sirens did not sound on April 14, when Iran first launched drones and missiles at Israel, because the projectiles did not come within range of the village. But Bar-David, a financial manager who has lived at Yad HaShmona since she was seven years old, took cover in her bomb shelter anyway. Intelligence reports indicated that the unprecedented Iranian attack would arrive at night, so she decided to play it safe. She slept in the shelter attached to her home—an enclave with thick cement walls and a heavy metal door—and all the while, surrendering herself to God’s sovereign care.
“A bomb can ruin my whole house—not only this room,” she said. “I really believe that God is here and will protect me—and if not, it will be his decision, not a mistake.”
Since October 7, members of the moshav—a community resembling a kibbutz but with more individual autonomy—have had to make similar decisions over and over again: how to act quickly while trusting God.
At 6:30 a.m. that morning, Ayelet Ronen, chair of Yad HaShmona’s management committee, turned on the radio and heard the initial reports of a security breach on the border with Gaza. One of her sons, a member of IDF, wanted to ride her husband’s motorcycle south to help. Ronen and her husband convinced him to stay, but two hours later, he and around two dozen others from the community were officially called up to serve.
That was a Saturday, the morning after the moshav celebrated the end of Sukkot, the Jewish Festival of Booths. As a leader in the village, Ronen worked to soothe shock and panic in those who remained. While older men patrolled the village’s perimeter, she and the staff of the moshav’s Logos Hotel started to receive calls from Israelis fleeing the towns and kibbutzim near the Gaza Strip.
“By Tuesday we were fully booked,” Ronen recalled. “To all of them, we just said, ‘Come, we’ll figure out the funds later.’”
Yad HaShmona—which in Hebrew means “memory of the eight”—was founded in 1971 by a group of Finnish Christians who wanted to atone for the sins of their country in a tangible way; during World War II, Finland had surrendered to the Nazis eight Jews, seven of whom died in Auschwitz. Miraculously, Israel granted land to this group of Gentiles, who envisioned building up the Jewish state alongside Jewish believers in Jesus, known in Hebrew as Yeshua.
Fifty years later, Yad HaShmona is home to around 60 families. A member of the moshav must be a believer in Jesus, an Israeli citizen for at least 10 years, and willing to serve beyond his or her immediate family for the collective success of the village.
“Yad HaShmona has played an essential role in the formation of the Messianic community’s identity in Israel,” said Danny Kopp, general secretary of Evangelical Alliance Israel. Not only does the moshav host national gatherings for believers, he elaborated, but also it models communal life while remaining integrated with the broader society.
Within a week after Hamas’s attack on Israel, Yad HaShmona had welcomed around 200 evacuees—a fraction of the 200,000 Israelis displaced in the conflict’s early months. Since evacuees were housed in small hotel rooms without kitchens, the moshav’s management decided to convert a large hall into a common area for them. Between piles of donated clothes and toys, observant Jews gathered to pray. Sometimes men of the moshav would join them to make a minyan—the quorum of ten Jewish men needed for prayer.
“The religious people didn’t want to talk about [faith],” Ronen says, “but whenever we had an opportunity, we would tell them.”
Evacuees learned about the Christian organizations that helped pay for their room and board before Israeli government aid kicked in, a month and a half after the start of the conflict. And as they were able, moshav residents testified to their belief in Yeshua as Messiah.
Ronen recounted the story of an ultra-Orthodox woman who was driving to stay at Yad HaShmona when she received a phone call.
“Don’t go there,” her caller warned. “Those people are dangerous; they will change your faith.”
She immediately purposed to reverse her course. But Highway 1, a major road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, had no place for a U-Turn. She ended up at the moshav, and sometime during her stay, expressed her appreciation for the community’s welcoming members.
“You’re nothing like what people told me,” Ronen said the woman concluded.
Historically, Israel’s Messianic community has been maligned, especially by ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are estimated at 10 percent of Israel’s Jewish population. But with conservative estimates of 30,000 believers in Israel worshiping in at least 75 congregations, Ronen thinks secular Israelis increasingly consider Messianic Jews an acceptable stream of society.
When the first group of evacuees was able to return to their homes after a three-month stay at Yad HaShmona, the moshav received a new group of 25 families, who stayed in temporary housing until the end of August. And since Israel’s offensive in Lebanon began in late September, in response to near-daily rocket exchanges with Hezbollah, more than a dozen families from northern towns have taken refuge at Yad HaShmona.
Mona Pelled, a guide with the Messianic Jewish travel agency Sar-El Tours, has lived at Yad HaShmona since 2017. Last fall, she interacted with her displaced neighbors at a sandwich bar opened in the moshav parking lot by the Christian Broadcasting Network. When anyone asked questions about Jesus, she shared the gospel in ways appropriate to each person’s background.
“We need to respect everyone,” Pelled said, “and if they see Yeshua in you, they will discover the truth.”
Pelled’s friendships extend beyond her Jewish circles as well. For 12 years, she has regularly met with Arab Israeli Christian women for fellowship and prayer. Most of these women are pacifists, she said, and she wishes she could be one too. But her parents and grandparents were Libyan Jews sent to a work camp in Italy at the end of World War II. As a Jew living in a state facing hostile extremist groups, her instinct for self-protection runs high.
Hamas’s massacre was a mini-Holocaust, she said. Though Israel must maintain a strong military because of its many outspoken enemies, she lamented the isolation Jews feel now that international opinion has turned against them.
“People in the world do not understand that this is the only land we have,” Pelled said.
Ronen’s background also informs her position on politics; in 1948, her grandfather came to Palestine during the British Mandate with an Auschwitz ID tattooed on his arm. Within a month, he enlisted with the Haganah—the early Jewish paramilitary organization—to fight for Israel’s independence.
Since October 7, Ronen said the people of Yad HaShmona have spent many hours studying the Bible and considering the meaning, in light of their new reality, of the Messiah’s command to love one’s enemies—a complex discussion, she admits. Distinguishing between armed militants and Palestinian civilians who are suffering the consequences of war, her community agrees that Hamas is not the enemy Jesus meant for them to love.
Believers are called to love enemies in close proximity to them, Ronen said, individuals who spitefully use and hate them. Jesus commanded love and prayer for these because he knows it is human nature to despise people who wrong them. To these people, she said, Jesus’ followers are called to “turn to them the other cheek” (Matt. 5:39), to do good (Rom. 12:20), and to share God’s transforming message of salvation.
But as an evil organization that opposes God’s plan for the Jewish people in their covenant land, Ronen said, Hamas differs from these individual, personal enemies. Citing Psalm 83:1–4, she said that any group set on Israel’s annihilation is in fact an enemy of God. As such, war can be waged against these groups without transgressing Jesus’ command.
“You can actually fight an enemy—fight a just war—and not develop hatred in your heart for the individual person before you,” Ronen said.
In agreement, Pelled added that Jesus does not intend for believers to love the “demonic,” which is how she characterizes Hamas.
“If the enemy comes against you, you have to protect yourself,” Pelled said. “It doesn’t mean I don’t love them or that I don’t pray for them. We do pray for them … we pray for the Gazan people, for those that are innocent. We pray for the children. We pray for a future for them.”
Nirit Bar-David also mentioned wicked spiritual forces at work, calling Hamas’s animosity toward Israelis “the work of the devil.” But even in the face of attacks against her people, she said she turns to God and prays that everyone—including her nation’s enemies—will find salvation in Jesus. Their repentance is necessary, she said, to halt the evil Hamas perpetuates.
“We need this change,” Bar-David said. “And having this attitude which Hamas has toward Israel, I think it comes from a very deep, wrong place that really needs healing—if they would choose that.”
The post How Messianic Jews Are Serving Israelis Displaced by Hamas and Hezbollah appeared first on Christianity Today.
