Insider Outsider: My Journey As a Stranger In White Evangelicalism and My Hope for Us All by Bryan Loritts

Author:Bryan Loritts [Loritts, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2020-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

The Cost of Discipleship

It was the pastor-theologian Karl Barth who, when asked about his philosophy of preaching, stated that he merely takes the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Barth was concerned not only with exegeting a text but also with exegeting the culture and showing how the former came to bear on the latter. Faithful preaching is never satisfied with a sermonic lecture in which the pastor in some form or fashion shouts, “It means! It means! It means! Let’s pray.” Who cares about a twenty-minute history lesson on the Jebusites if one cannot show how it connects to the single dad whose heart is broken over the demise of his marriage and family. It is the preacher who bears the joyful burden of connecting the roads of ancient Jebus to the streets of modern Memphis.

In some sense, my work of mining the truths of Scripture and exposing our mostly white church to the magnetism between the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the gospel was the easy part. What was hard was mustering up the courage to show them how that truth played out in the lives of early twenty-first-century Memphians. That was where I ran the risk of getting “Kaepernicked.”

As I mentioned earlier, there exists within the city of Memphis a country club that does not allow African Americans to join. Well, to be fair, they do have one member who lives in another state, but we all know what that’s about. I was invited to play there, and against my senses, I gave in. When the round was over, I felt as if my soul needed a ladle full of hand sanitizer—I felt that gross. I vowed never to play there again.

Sure enough, many of our church members had grown up at the club and still enjoyed their memberships there. What would Paul and the Scriptures say to this? So taking my Bible and my “newspaper” with me, I gathered up all the prophetic courage I could muster and used by way of application the social implications of the gospel. “If you are merely using your membership at this restrictive club as a means of enjoyment and do not see it as an opportunity for reformation, this is sin,” I sermonically implored one Sunday. My words caused a bit of a stir among the white parishioners, and I spent the better part of the next couple of weeks meeting with several of them, who expressed their frustration over my “careless remarks.” Mind you, these were thirty-somethings who had grown up in churches in Memphis but had never been challenged by those churches over the injustices they were nursing.

Prophetic courage must never be wielded in discrimination to induce white guilt. Preachers must be equitable in their pleas for justice. Jesus called out sin in both the woman caught in adultery and “that fox” Herod, one of the rulers of his day. I had to be careful to not turn my Memphian pulpit into a pep rally for blacks.

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