*This post is written from thoughts I jotted in my journal during a class I’m taking. Some of my readers may think I’m coming down a little hard on the white church in America, and it could probably be argued that I’m perhaps generalizing too much. But I would like to respond with a plea for repentance and humility rather than argument. 

This past week Canon Stephen Gauthier was talking about the unity of the Body of Christ. “There is unity in diversity,” he said. “United does not mean identical, yet it is impossible to separate the body without irreparable harm.”

Scripture does not present disdain for the Church as an optional attitude. The Church is the family of God, the Body and Bride of Christ. These are truths now; they are not ideals, and we are called to understand this as the truest of truths. When we are baptized into Christ, we automatically enter into the deepest of family relations with every other Christian on the planet and throughout time. These are bonds that will never be severed; they are permanent, existing throughout eternity.

Martin Luther King Jr’s well-known words about the most segregated hour in America take on new, deeply sorrowful meaning when we grasp this truth. The white church in American (of which I am a part) went far beyond saying to the African American or Chinese American church what the eye said to the hand in I Corinthians 12. “I don’t need you,” said the eye to the hand, but the white church literally tried to cut off the ethnic church in the States. It tried to kill it, to completely sever it from the body of Christ at large.

Today many in the white church have acknowledged a certain level of sin against minority brothers and sisters, yet, in my view, a form of the same sin continues, for though the white church is no longer trying to kill off minority churches, there is a very pervasive eye-to-hand sentiment. “We don’t need you,” the white church subtly but essentially says.

The attempted murder of the past and the current, pervasive, don’t-need-you attitude has caused and is causing irreparable harm, and it must be acknowledged that this harm is far greater than its political or legal ramifications. We—the unified Church—are the Body of Christ, and the actions and attitudes of the white members toward those they considered “less honorable” have done incredible, spiritual harm. The white church so often sees itself as superior, as holding greater knowledge, as having been the sending church of many, many missionaries, as the founder of seminaries and higher places of theological learning…

Yet the white church is responsible for great harm to the very Body of Christ.

What the white church has not realized is this: in thinking of the minority church as something like an extra, unneeded toe and in attempts to cut off this extra toe, it has misunderstood reality. Together the church in America—of all ethnicities—is a member, connected to the rest of the Body and joined with the Body to the Head—Christ. Though the historic white church did what it did believing it was cutting off a less necessary member (pushing that member away), what the white church has in actuality been doing is cutting itself off. The tourniquet applied strangled the white church. It cut off blood flow to itself, and until this tourniquet is loosened, the white church dangles apart from the rest of the member.

Belonging to the Church entire is not optional in the Body of Christ. The Body, whole and integrally connected is fact, is reality. We must live into this reality—or we will continue to do great harm.