Being white and following Jesus

Reflections on anti-racism and the kingdom of God

I was asked to reflect on anti-racism as a tie-in with the sermon this past Sunday at Madison Square CRC on racial reconciliation. Here is what I shared:

My name is Kent Hendricks and my wife Shelly and I and our three girls have been at Madison since late 2020.

My first real interaction at Madison was through an email from Paul Hewitt, who, at the time, I had never met. He said he and Mark DeNooyer, who I had also never met, were forming a Listen and Learn group for an 11-week study of the book, White Awake. The goal was to—and I quote from his email—“more deeply understand what it means to be white in our world today and to look at this issue through a Christian lens.” We have been meeting ever since.

This group has been transformative for me in many ways. During the first 18 years of my life, I grew up in the small town of Lynden, Washington. When I was a kid, the town had a population of 5000, of whom five were black.¹ There were also migrant workers from Mexico, Texas, and California who came every summer to work in Lynden’s berry fields and processing plants, but they lived outside of town. I could count on one hand the number of people of color I interacted with during the entire first eighteen years of my life. In school, what we learned about race was that racism was mostly a problem in the south, and that it was mostly a problem that was solved with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the passage of the Civil Rights Act. It was never talked about at church.

So I grew up in a context of ignorance.

When I was eighteen, I came to Grand Rapids. I took a sociology class with Michelle Lloyd-Paige, where I first heard the phrase “systemic racism.” I met and developed friendships with people from all over the world. I began moving from ignorance to awareness, but not much further.

Fast forward twenty years, during the summer of 2020, after George Floyd, during the pandemic, Shelly and I had a lot of conversation about what we ought to do and how we ought to respond. It’s one thing to be aware of racism. It’s another thing to be actively anti-racist.

A few months later, I got Paul’s email, and our group started meeting. 

We still meet every other Monday. There are eleven of us. We come from across the political and theological and denominational spectrum. We are intergenerational: we have people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s.

“Our long-term working objective” – and I’m reading from Paul’s original email – “is to listen and learn in order to: 

seek shalom and be agents of renewal,

grow in awareness of the biases and ideologies we have internalized,

recognize the grave injustices in society, 

see that our human experience is interconnected,

understand privilege and oppression institutionally, 

understand our role in deconstructing racial inequalities, 

and understand the verb ally.”

So what do we do when we meet? We read books and watch documentaries. We have tried to learn about housing policy, voting rights, reparations, Black Lives Matter, police brutality. We have tried to reflect on how our worldview has been impaired because of what we were not taught, and how to DO better now that we KNOW better.²

We have spent a lot of time in the Bible. We’ve studied what it means to be created in the image of God. To live in community as a people reconciled to God and reconciled to each other. We’ve learned about the diversity of God’s kingdom, and about God’s desire for his people.

And we’ve learned a lot about suffering and pain—what it means to lament, to confess, to mourn.

We have talked a lot about the history of the church. 

We have talked about ways the white church has enabled and perpetuated and sometimes actively promoted racism in this country and in this neighborhood. We have talked a lot about this church, Madison, about painful moments in our history, not only decades ago but also in our very recent history. 

So we have done a lot of listening, and arguing, and reading, and learning.

But what does this all mean?

For me—and I don’t want to speak for anyone else in the group, though all of us have had similar journeys. For me, personally, there have been three main things I have learned or been forced to wrestle with.

1. 

I have learned that it is very important that I discern what it means to be a follower of Jesus, while also being a white, upper-middle class male, with all the benefits and privileges that come from that, in this cultural moment, and in this moment in the history of our church.

What does it mean to follow Jesus, who showed a clear preference for those at the margins, when I come from a place of incredible privilege? That’s a hard question to ask. Especially because when a rich man once asked Jesus a similar question, Jesus told him he couldn’t enter the kingdom of heaven. You could say that Jesus was just talking about sin and grace and not wealth and privilege. Maybe he was.

But maybe he wasn’t.

So what does this mean?

It means giving up a seat at the table—at tables where decisions are made, where rewards are handed out. Sometimes these are literal tables in conference rooms.

It means using the privilege and influence and abilities that I did not earn to empower others, and to amplify the voices of others, and—most often—to get out of the way of others. 

So that’s the first thing I’ve been forced to think through—how do I follow Jesus as a white, upper-middle class man in the United States of America in 2024.

2. 

The second thing this Listen and Learn group has made me aware of is how much of my life takes place in completely white spaces. Or, to put it differently, I am virtually never in a situation where I am the only white person.

Because, honestly, that’s uncomfortable.

A few months ago, our group was challenged to visit a Black Church, alone. And I confess that I have not yet had the courage to do this.

Because that’s uncomfortable.

Yet, this is something that I—that we—expect many of our black brothers and sisters to do all the time, at work, at school, and at church. To operate as the only or the minority in a white space.

And we have made similar expectations of leaders here at Madison. Of our staff and council over the years. And while I don’t presume to speak for them, or pretend to know our history as well as I should, I have to think it hasn’t been easy.

If we want to truly be a Reach Across congregation, I need to do the reaching. We all need to be doing the reaching, not just because it’s part of the mission of Madison, but because it’s part of the mission of the kingdom of God.

3. 

The third thing I have been reflecting on is the need to listen and to be quiet, which is why it’s kind of awkward to be up here right now talking about this.

When I see a problem, my first instinct is to try to solve it. To fix it. To come up with a plan. We need a spreadsheet, a slide deck, a timeline, and when it’s done we’ll have a postmortem.

But the work of the kingdom doesn’t function that way, and the work of anti-racism doesn’t function that way.

This Listen and Learn group—our conversations and wrestling with these issues—has taught me, and I think others in the group, too, that we need to be quicker to lament than to fix, quicker to confess than to explain, and be quicker to be quiet and try to understand the experiences of our brothers and sisters of color who have endured real hardship, either directly or indirectly, because of us.

I think that’s our calling.

Concluding thoughts:

I don’t take very good sermon notes, but a few weeks ago, Pastor Andrea reminded us that we each have a small sphere of influence, at work, at school, in our neighborhood, wherever God has called us.

It’s true that sometimes we are in place where we can bring about change in big, public ways. Marches, activism, legislation.

But more often, it’s the compounding effect of small acts of faithfulness and small moments of reconciliation and relationship that happen over and over again wherever God has already called us. 

So if there’s hope, I think that’s where it is.

I think that’s the authentic community God wants.

That’s what it means to Reach Across.

1. I probably should have fact-checked this stat, but didn’t. It was common knowledge, but I can’t verify it. Fortunately, Lynden is much more diverse today than it was in the 1980s. Here is the most recent census data. As of 2020, Lynden’s population is now 15,749, of whom 139 are Black.

2. This phrase is similar to a quote by Maya Angelou: “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”