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Twenty years after you went to Jackson, Mississippi, what is the state of racial reconciliation?

I think that it's on the map in the evangelical church. I think it's great progress that we are talking about it.

At the same time, we still have not imagined what it really means to become a new people. We ought to question "normality" and to allow our theology to interrogate the way things are. In the book that I wrote ten years ago with Spencer Perkins, our own language accepted black and white as categories. I've come to see that it accepted "normality" too much.

Certainly there are distinct cultural groups that would be categorized by the words black and white.

I believe in history. I don't believe in language that turns history into creation. In our language of black and white, we can accept black and white almost like it becomes creation—as if there is a black church and a white church that just dropped out of the sky. Black church and white church are categories that come to us through a history—a history of terror, a history of separation. For the most part, we still accept those as normal. And if we just do a little bit of adjustment here and there, do a choir swap here and there, have a meeting once a year in a stadium, and make a confession, have a hug, that somehow that's enough and we can return to our separate worlds. I would like us to be more disturbed by the fact that we still have very little of a common world as church.

What would it look like if we let our theology interrogate our practice?

We would find ourselves in shared spaces studying Scripture together. We'd find ourselves in common mission together tackling poverty. The gap between the haves and the have nots has grown enormously over the last 20 years. The African American church has become as much caught up in that growing gap as the so-called white church has. In our neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi, African American churches were often no better allies for the poor than white churches. Abandonment crosses racial lines.

How have friends reacted to your book?

I think people identify with my transparency about my dark side. For example, my unveiling my jealousy with such rawness. I've had people say, "You know, I wrestle with that, too."

You say our theology needs to interrogate our practice. What beliefs are essential for racial reconciliation?

That God created one church. That we really believe in the one holy catholic church. Is that just a theological pronouncement? Or is that supposed to become visible on the ground? That's central.

What does somebody really have to believe strongly in order to make intentional community work?

I'm not a believer in ending up in intentional community. The story of our journey into community is the story of a journey. And if we had known that we were going there, we would have never started.

The theology that undergirds community is opening our lives up to be interrogated by the Sermon on the Mount. That defines what it means to be a church that follows Jesus Christ faithfully. Allowing ourselves to study Scripture without justifying the way our lives already exist and allowing ourselves to go on a journey whereby we will be interrupted. And to be listening together in friendship with others for those interruptions.

It takes a big commitment just to get Christians within our typical middle-class world in the same place every week on a regular basis, reading the same Scripture, and saying, What does this mean for our lives? That is very difficult.

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December (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46