By Matt Friedeman
January 19, 2006

(AgapePress) - I know of a church that recently interviewed a prospective pastor. The congregation was impressed with him and asked the superintendent to extend a job offer. The pastor declined, citing that church's obvious problems on the issue of race.

As in, we don't want them in here.

Martin Luther King, Jr., celebrations this week ought to spark, at the least, some questions in our minds about racial reconciliation in this country. As in -- do I really actively love persons of another race like God wants me to? When Jesus suggested that loving one's neighbor was one of the tandem commands that fulfilled the Law and the prophets, He illustrated that "neighborly" passage with a story about a man of a hated race (Luke 10:27-37).

Other questions: What am I proactively doing in my community to promote loving others of a different hue? What is my family doing? My church?

Typical answer -- not a thing.

And maybe that is fine. Maybe we should all be about our own business and just allow the racial chips to fall where they may in our towns and cities.

But maybe, just maybe, it is not fine, and those of us who cast ourselves as believers and followers of Jesus Christ ought to recognize that King's "Dream" speech has no way of becoming reality without a Church that is self-giving in love and compassionately embracing of all.

There is a racially inclusive tone that is cheap, of course. To get up in a church on King Day and say that the opposing political party treats its part of Congress like "a plantation," as Senator Hillary Clinton did this week to enthusiastic applause, is not the ticket. Eating lunch with a person of another race, which an organization in my town promotes as a major advance for racial unity, will hardly make significant progress, either. Retorting self-righteously during a heated argument on a racial matter that "Some of my best friends are black/Hispanic/Asian" proves little.

Whatever our race, as Christians we need to ask some soul-searching questions about our own race relations background, the real reasons our lives are so racially one-dimensional, the concrete action necessary to making relational headway for ourselves and our church and family, and what kind of soul surgery God needs to do in order to actualize that change.

Most of us read a column like this and flip it aside. We have no such problem. The vast majority of the readership is white and blissfully enlightened beyond the troubling aspects of not getting along with persons of color in our communities. But if the collective mass of Christians makes that assertion -- and the vast majority of that collective mass does -- then we will find no reason to adequately repent and begin making God's headway on any real racial issue in our lives.

God is probably not pleased that your life, your church, your Christian ministry, your day, your neighborhood, and your worldview are so vastly segregated -- and, considering the readership, so vastly white.

He wants us to do better. Our holiness is at stake.