Trailer: Shepherds for Sale, Anti-Racism, and...Women's Ministry?

Thoroughly Equipped

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By then, it was 2019, and some church staffers invited James to join a racial reconciliation study group titled

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Be the Bridge. We are desperately in need of a resource that teaches us how to confront our hearts, expose our thoughts, and re -evaluate everything that we've ever thought about race.

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To truly bridge the divide, Be the Bridge is that resource. Once there, he was told that new white members weren't allowed to speak for the first six months.

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They were only to do the work of listening and completing a Whiteness 101 reading list.

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Last year, Be the Bridge created a document called Whiteness 101 that's a free resource available for download on our website.

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It's for anyone wanting to better understand race and the concept of whiteness and how it shapes the conversation around race in our country.

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Well, primarily one comment you made that I hear a lot is that I need to divest myself of my whiteness.

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What they're saying, what they're doing is they're taking the idea of whiteness, which at one time was just the structures that continue to hold

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Black people down, and they've moved that into overlapping with the Judeo -Christian worldview.

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So now what you're going to soon see is that whiteness is going to be removed, and the Judeo -Christian worldview is going to be put in that place.

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So now, instead of people saying whiteness is wicked, they're going to say the Judeo -Christian framework is wicked.

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James abided by those rules for a few weeks, keeping notes on his now glaring concerns.

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Even more than the division this particular curriculum seemed sure to stoke, he was alarmed at how the instructors were applying it to broader areas of life.

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I started noticing that a lot of the discussion centered not just on racial justice, but on quite a lot of leftist causes.

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I also record courses for the academy. In the midst of right now recording a lot of courses on history and white supremacy, as well as teaching a couple live courses, one called

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Change Agents, and that is for white people who are, they've done a lot of our work, and they're wanting to really figure out what does it mean to be active in the work of dismantling whiteness.

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And so working within spheres of their own theology, and then also in structures. And then also right now, because it is 2024, and politics feels a little bit like it's on fire right now, myself and a longtime volunteer with Be the

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Bridge Corrigan Brown are co -teaching a politics as bridge builders class to help people figure out how in the world do we begin to navigate having bridge building style conversations, and how do we approach voting as bridge builders?

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The woman who led the group would frequently talk about oppressed oppressor dynamics.

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We are going to be talking about the trauma of white supremacy and white bodies and BIPOC bodies.

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And then how do we really embody being a bridge builder? How do we embody anti -oppressive practices?

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You know, depending on the day, you know, I could feel like I'm having a really great day trying to be work for those anti -oppressive practices.

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And then other days, I am just going along with the tide of white supremacy. At one point, they told us we needed to read more books from queer authors, because they were an oppressed group too.

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And that's when it really started to click for me that this was a slippery slope to all sorts of dynamics.

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So the book's been out a couple months. You know, as you've had time to kind of process and be away from the writing process, is there anything you wish you had included in the book, or if you could do it over, you would have added?

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Yeah, definitely. The big one is that I did not really spend time on women's ministries.

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You know, I touch on it a little bit here and there, but I think it deserved a long chapter on its own, just to talk about how so much of this tends to come in through popular women

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Bible teachers and these women's conferences and the books and curriculum that are coming in through women's ministries.

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I think that's a huge problem. And man, if I had it to do over again, I would have done at least one chapter that focused exclusively on that.