I started this space a little over a year ago. A voice for the marginalized in the church. Today, I want to challenge my fellow Christ followers to see the most marginalized. And the most in danger because of our refusal to stand up for them.

Over the last few months there have been several deaths, that we have been made acutely aware of, at the hands of the systemic racism in this country – Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. There has also been unacceptable silence from the Christian sphere.

I have been grateful for the higher than usual number of Christians speaking out against these injustices, and others, but the number is still too low. Because it’s not every single one of us.

I have lead Bible studies at my church for the last several years, and over the last two I became involved in a social justice group in my town. As I, a young white woman, began to inform myself and listen to the stories of the people of color I began to meet, I began to see the hole in the gospel that those in my Bible studies often lamented over.

The gospel has lost power in the US. But it is not because God has lost power, or because his Spirit has stopped moving. It’s because our sinful pride has clouded over what should be a message of hope and freedom. When Christians stay silent on the issue of racism, the gospel loses its hope. What person of color has any reason to believe that we care for their eternal hope when we can hardly take the time to hear, let alone acknowledge, their daily hope. The daily hope to simply stay alive when they are in constant danger only because of the color of their skin.

I watched as just weeks ago, white protestors with guns and explosive anger were allowed to stand on capitol steps around the country to demand their state reopen from COVID-caused lockdown. And now I watch as people silently ignore a man dead—dead because he was black—and, yet, continue to wonder loudly why Christianity seems to be fading.

If you are one of those people, wondering why the gospel seems to need so much dressing up these days to get attention, take a moment to count the number of Christians that you know that said anything against the death of George Floyd, and then count the ones who took a stand against the death of Ahmaud Arbery, and then count the ones that spoke against the death of Breonna Taylor. I could keep naming, but we would be here for years.

This soil is flooded with the blood of people of color, and even in the days people point to now as the end of racism, our silence was deafening.

I say our even though most of my family is second or third generation immigrants. I don’t get a pass because my family wasn’t here. My family is here now. I am here now. And I have learned much over the last few years about my privilege, but there is much more for me to learn. And there is much need for me to use it in defense of all those at risk. For no other reason than because I love a God who loves them beyond what I can comprehend.

I leave you with Dr. King’s words, because they speak deeply to my soul and speak clearly the pain of white Christian silence on our brothers and sisters.

“I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say that as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say it as a minister of the gospel who loves the church, who was nurtured in its bosom, who has been sustained by its Spiritual blessings, and who will remain true to it a long as the cord of life shall lengthen.”

“In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, “Those are social issues which the gospel has nothing to do with,” and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between bodies and souls, the sacred and the secular.”

“If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I meet young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour.”

 King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The Atlantic Monthly, August 1963, http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/letter_birmingham_jail.pdf