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Book Review: That They All May Be One

November 1st, 2008 at 04:33pm Zoe Mullery

Free To Be Bound: Church Beyond the Color Line – Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove NavPress Publishing Group (February 2008) Topic: Ethics, Morality, & the Christian Life Summary: Account of crossing the “color line” and reaching out to other Christians Rating:

“The miracle of the black church in America is that somehow, in a story told by oppressors, the oppressed heard good news—and believed it. …[S]laves were able to distinguish between the liberating truth of Christ’s message and the white man’s abuse of Holy Scripture for his own purposes.” The miracle of the black church in America, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove wants us to know, is not a miracle that is only for the black church in America, but a miracle that is for the capital C Church, a miracle that witnesses to the Kingdom on earth. Jonathan, a white boy from North Carolina now worshiping in a historically black church in Durham, has entered into that miracle himself, and has written a book to witness to the powerful signs of Christ’s kingdom he has encountered.

Towards the beginning of his book, Jonathan says that “If this story has any single point to make, it is the quiet gospel hope that says we are free to be bound together in Jesus Christ.” What does that really mean? The paradox of that blessed tie that binds and liberates is at the core of this book on the journey of finding identity in Christ beyond racial and cultural barriers and deep wounds of the past and present.

Jonathan starts out by saying this is not a how-to book on racial reconciliation, but rather a “how-it’s-been” book, a collection of stories “written along the way by a white boy who followed Jesus from Klan country to the black church, listening for the music that could teach his soul to sing.” Jonathan is not coming to the problem of racial division in the church with a fixed notion of what the outcome will look like, exactly, or Google-maps-style directions on how to get there. He pieces together some incidents, some milestones, some difficult moments and some hopes and longings and looks for how God makes a story of redemption and hope out of our broken and bumbling attempts to be faithful.

The topic of racial reconciliation and the “new humanity” we are called to in Christ has been a burning issue for me for a number of years now. One of my struggles has been in trying to frame the questions in kingdom language, and in ways that genuinely challenge us in the places we need to be challenged, rather than framing the issues to only affirm the distance we’ve already traveled, or elicit a punishing sense of guilt. Jonathan is not looking for how to nail white folks on racial sins—though he does name some deep and abiding sins of the “white church.” He is also not out to romanticize the “black church”—he knows that becoming one people will mean change and challenge for everyone. “Forsaking one’s people to become part of God’s people is an experience so radical that it tests the limits of human language. Maybe Jesus said it best: You must be born a second time.” However, the challenges are different for those with an inheritance of power, whether we have sought it or not, than for those with an inheritance of suffering at the hands of those with power. Jonathan gracefully seeks to describe a history of Jesus’ church in America that illuminates the issues we face in the light of truth. “Caught up in the story of America, we forget that the Bible reverses the story of Babel not with a melting pot but with Pentecost.” He argues a bigger vision than the popular American view that racism needs to be addressed on a person-by-person basis only and the inherent individualism from which that view arises, and instead reaches for a kingdom vision which binds our destinies together, our sins and our triumphs, as one people.

He writes, “We had tried to ask the questions, ‘What does it mean to be one in Christ Jesus?’ But we had asked the question in the language of the Enlightenment: ‘What does it mean for us to appreciate another cultural expression of Christianity?’ That way of asking the question not only kept us from facing racial division in the body of Christ as a fundamental problem with our Christianity; it also allowed us white folk to feel good about our efforts to appreciate gospel music and black preaching. Nothing about my church’s white theology and practice of Christianity had to change for us to appreciate Greenleaf [the black church they’d been relating to]. We simply assumed that we could move forward from a history of white supremacy to be rounded out by a friendly relationship with people whose lives had been marked by suffering at the hands of white Christians. … We knew we needed each other, but we didn’t know how to be a people together.”

Jonathan lives in the hope that American Christianity can learn to “draw deeply from the wisdom of the black church,” a church that has suffered and persevered. “[T]he second miracle is even more profound: that after centuries of oppression and disenfranchisement at the hands of white folks, black Christians would pray for us, love us, and invite us to come and learn from them what it means to plead the blood of Jesus. There are some things that nobody but God can do. … To plead the blood of Jesus in our racialized society is to confess that white Christians like me need to learn from the black church’s prophetic tradition of apocalyptic hope and racial love what it means to be the church.” Jonathan does not claim this miracle for himself or his small church alone, but for all of us on the Way.

Entry Filed under: Essential Books, Ethics, Morality, & the Christian Life