Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice

the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that

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people is to relate the story of our mothers’ and fathers’ struggles to our present struggles and thereby create a humane future for our children. We must take the speeches and tales, the blues and the spirituals, the prayers and the sermons of black people and incorporate them into our present existence, relating our parents’ strivings to our dail

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same for blacks and whites, because blacks and whites do not share the same life. The lives of a black slave and white slaveholder were radically different. It follows that their thoughts about things divine would also be different, even though they might sometimes use the same words about God. The life of the slaveholder and others of that culture

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But when blacks went to church and experienced the presence of Jesus’ Spirit among them, they realized that he bestowed a meaning upon their lives that could not be taken away by white folks. That's why folks at Macedonia sang: “A little talk with Jesus makes it right”—not that “white is right,” but that God had affirmed the rightness of their exis

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His concern was to state the primacy of faith in relation to reason on matters of theological discourse. We have another concern and thus must rephrase that question in the light of our cultural history, asking: “What has Africa to do with Jerusalem, and what difference does Jesus make for African people oppressed in North America?” As Gerard Bissa

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