Racial Justice: A White Perspective (1964)

1st of 5 speakers on the topic
by Warren Webster

Warren Webster: Racial Justice (a white perspective)
Ruth Lewis: Racial Justice (a black perspective)
Clyde Taylor: Togetherness
Ruben Lores: Social Justice
Vernon Grounds: Religious Climate

Race prejudice and foreign missions are mutually exclusive. One or the other is going to have to go.

Warren Webster Perhaps no one is more conscious of the church's failure and inconsistency in the rapidly changing area of race relations than its missionaries, who for the most part are working and witnessing among the non-white peoples of the world. A former servant of Jesus Christ in the Orient reminds us that the modern missionary movement carries about its neck the mighty millstone of our inconsistency as it operates in the colored world, and it staggers more and more beneath that weight.*

* E. Luther. Copeland as quoted by T. B. Maston in Segregation and Desegregation: A Christian Approach (New York: Macmillan Co., 1959), p. 158.

Inconsistency? What did he mean? Recently we read about a Christian convention in Southern Rhodesia which had as its motto, "All One In Christ Jesus." But it excluded the Africans lest the whites should be outnumbered. That's inconsistency.

From India comes the story of an educated Muslim who became a Christian and began to attend an English-speaking congregation largely frequented by the foreign community. The Chaplain of the church, by way of friendly advice, suggested to him that it would be much better if. he attended the church where the local inhabitants went. The Indian convert was shocked by this and demanded to know why. The Chaplain had to tell him that there were people in that congregation who wouldn't like to have one of the local people sit by them in the same church. When the Indian heard that, he replied in these words: "I think your English audience can sacrifice everything, including their God and their Savior, Christ; but they will never sacrifice their national pride, even for Christ's sake." And with that he left the church literally and figuratively, and became a confirmed opponent of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Whenever he found a Muslim who had been attracted by the claims of Christ, he made it his mission to stop him and relate his own experience. These are some of the tragic results of inconsistency.

Here in the United States, a Christian student from Nigeria enrolled in a southern theological seminary and later was awarded its highest degree, a doctorate in Theology. During the course of his studies, his wife fell seriously ill and required surgery. But the irony was that, because she was a Negro, she was refused admission to the hospital operated by the very denomination to which that student and his wife belonged. More inconsistency.

But rather than multiply the illustrations, I think I can best convey to you something of the burden under which your missionaries labor if I ask you to suppose, just for a moment, that you are a missionary in almost any part of the world. Listen to some of the questions that people, especially students, are asking. Recently, a young Zulu student with genuine perplexity stated this case "The missionaries have taught us of God and the Bible, and how all men are equal and the same in God's sight. But they don't treat us as equals. Now what are we to believe, and what are we to do?"

Listen to the query of the African student who wants to know why he was refused admission to a church-related college, in the United States because of his color; but he is welcome in a Russian university. Or listen to the Pakistani student who, when confronted with the claims of Christ, replies, "For after all why should I leave the brotherhood of Islam, which knows no racial discrimination, in order to become merely a second-class citizen of the Christian community, like other colored peoples in the southern United States or in South Africa?"

Now I know that there are some answers that can be given to these questions. But I also know from experience that it's tremendously difficult to make the answers sound convincing halfway around the world to people who for so long have been the victims of racial injustice. There was a day when the people to whom the missionaries went considered only the validity of the gospel message itself. But now they demand to see it validated in the lives of the missionaries who bring it, and in the lives of the churches who send the message.

The day is past, I think, when Christians could expect to maintain world missions abroad and racial discrimination at home. Race prejudice and foreign missions are mutually exclusive. One or the other is going to have to go. The early missionaries who went out could possibly, by discreet silence, conceal the state of racial relations or racial prejudice in their homeland. But we know thus is no longer possible. Someone has said that what happens today in Brooklyn or Birmingham is tomorrow on the front page of the newspapers in Cairo, and Karachi, and Djakarta. And you need to remember that tomorrow comes anywhere from ten to twelve hours earlier there!

It has been said with considerable truth that here in the United States the most segregated hour of the week is 11 o'clock on Sunday morning. It will be a tragedy if the Church of Jesus Christ becomes the last great bulwark of segregation. Nowhere does the New Testament provide any sanction whatsoever for the segregation of Christians on a racial basis. On the contrary, it was the testimony of the early church that in Jesus Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female; for we are all one in Jesus Christ. The gospel does not deny distinctions and differentiations, but it does deny their use as the basis for segregation or separation within the fellowship of the Christian community.

In the light of Galatians 3:28, which I have just quoted, it would make just as much sense if we were to have a church for men only, as to try to have churches for white people only. Actually, in turning to Scripture for guidance, we find that the Bible is not a race-conscious book in the modern sense. In the Scriptures the only really significant lines that are drawn are not between races, but between believers and unbelievers. The Church as the body of Christ is not based on racial factors, but on faith. All who are the children of God by faith in Jesus Christ are brothers one of another - and it's time that we began to live that way. Membership in the Church of Christ must always be on the basis of faith, not race - Christ, not color. For the New Testament never lists membership in a particular race as a prerequisite for participation in the life of a redeemed community.

There are many discouraging things in this changing picture today. I take some slight encouragement from the fact that Christian churches have not always been segregated. Segregation is a comparatively recent phenomenon in the last century or two, and this gives us hope to believe it may be a passing phase. We know that in the churches of the New Testament as well as the churches of the first centuries of the Christian era, there was no hint of segregation along the lines of race or color. But we also know, particularly from Paul's epistles, that there was a tremendous cultural cleavage between Jew and Gentile which was as emotionally charged and as potentially explosive as any of our racial problems today. As we study those, I think it is extremely significant to note that Paul faced the issues head on, and resolved them without delay.

In his epistle to the Ephesians, chapter 2, Paul reminds us that Christ

has broken down the dividing wall of hostility ... that he might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross ... for through him we both [meaning Jews and Gentiles in that context] have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.
(Ephesians 2:14-19)

The cross not only broke down the age-old wall of partition between Jew and Gentile, but it goes on breaking down everything that can divide believers one from another. The cross of Jesus Christ is God's instrument of unity par excellence.

As Dr. Douglas Webster in his book In Debt To Christ reminds us,

Once we have begun to understand and translate into our own experience the truth that Christ has died for all men, whatever their race or color, because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, all grounds of boasting, racial superiority and prejudice begin to fall away. Because, the Cross is the place of universal reconciliation, because Christ died for the African and the Asian as well as for the European and American, we have no alternative but to accept them all as brothers, for whom Christ died ... To see a man in Christ, or even to see him as a potential Christian and one whom Christ loves, is to see him in a light which ignores the colour of his skin.
[ London (Highway Press, 1957), p. 148]

Ross Coggins, a fellow missionary in Indonesia, penned these lines which eloquently sum up the plea of Christian missionaries in many lands:

Would God that friends of segregation
For awhile could leave our nation,
Come with me across the seas,
Work by my side with Javanese.
Or, if not here, some other clime
Where Christ is preached - oh, just onetime!

In times of swift communication
Nation cannot hide from nation
What it does. Within brief hours
Headlines shout how hatred's powers
Close love's door with jarring thud
Because of race, because of blood.

A helpless, dark-skinned boy is slain,
His slayers freed to slay again.
No mark of Cain upon their brow,
They strut in triumph and avow
"If a nigger is my brother,
Let his keeper be another."

Is there no love that will transcend
Man's petty strife and condescend
To men of other creed and hue?
Forgive, they know not what they do!
Is it too much, we humbly ask,
Unchain our hands to do our task .*

* Abridged from Segregation and Desegregation: A Christian Approach, PP. 157-8. Used by permission of the publisher.

Another writer has said, "If the gospel of redemptive love has not transformed the lives and the relationships of the men who bear it, why should we be surprised if the men who hear it do not heed it?"*

* Charles E. Tilson,: Segregation and the Bible (New York: Abingdon Press, 1958), pp. 159-60.

On behalf of Christ's ambassadors in many lands, I plead with you as representatives of the Church in America and around the world: demonstrate the love of Christ which transcends all racial and cultural lines, not merely because it is imperative for us to do so in the light of world missions, but ultimately because this is the right thing, and that which God wills for His people, the Church.

Is it too much, we humbly ask,
Unchain our hands to do our task.

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Racial Justice: A White Perspective (1964)

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