It did not occur to me that being different could be a bad or even dangerous thing until I was in second grade. We had moved from the north side of Chicago to as far out into the suburbs as my parents could afford. I had been assigned a buddy to show me around my new school, and as she was pointing out the important places like the washrooms and water fountains she stopped to look at me.

“What’s wrong with your nose and your eyes?” she asked. “Nothing. What’s wrong with yours?” I answered back.

We became best friends.

But further exchanges with classmates did not result in budding friendships. My family learned my younger sister and I were the first minority students in the school district, which would explain why I learned racial slurs and fear in the sprawling subdivisions of suburbia instead of in the city.

For years we found solace in the city by attending Sunday service at our “home” church, to worship God in Korean while pictures of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus stared down at our Korean hymnals and watched us drink barley tea and coffee for fellowship hour.

And then we would go back to our other “home” in the suburbs, where my family and I disrupted “normal.” I wasn’t just another new kid. I was the chink or the gook. My eyes were slanted and small, and my nose was flat. My last name was weird and unpronounceable. Walking home from school meant listening to the taunts and later physical threats by boys I would now describe as white. I learned to hate the way God had created me. I learned that my spirituality and daily life were divided and some- times at odds with each other. And I learned that race, ethnicity, and culture are beautiful and important in the privacy of home and threatening to the outside world.

The transition into adulthood, as for many of us, brings pain but also much healing, grace, context, and language. For me, it has helped integrate my ethnic identity journey with my Sunday spirituality and my Monday-through-Friday work ambitions with 24/7 home-front demands. It has helped me articulate how race and ethnicity shapes the way I connect with God differently from my white, black, Latino, and Native sisters and brothers. Our heart languages, the ways in which God has interacted with our histories and cultures, have common themes but sometimes very different embodiment. That is why I respond to the Eucharist differently when served a small ball of rice and tea rather than a chunk of white bread and grape juice. That is why images of a Jesus with darker skin and brown eyes connect with me. That is why I also need to sing hymns in English and Korean and Spanish and Swedish. I have learned that in order to truly love the way God has created my imago Dei—as an image bearer—so, too, have my sisters and brothers of different races, ethnicities, and cultures.

I tell you all of that because it explains my initial reluctance and fear in being a part of this issue of Conversations. When Tara Owens first approached me about guest editing an issue on race, all of the fears of being the disrupter rose to the surface. There is no easy way or right way to talk about racial and cultural differences, only that we, especially as believers who long to see God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, ought to be leading and leaning into those conversations. But let’s be honest. The current state of affairs internationally is one fraught with division, strife, war, and genocide. Why make it worse by trying to help shape an issue of a journal specifically designed to address race? Why open myself and other contributors of color to that kind of scrutiny and critique? Why risk making a mistake by missing something, leaving out a voice, forgetting to include a viewpoint?

But then God and I had a moment. Sometimes disrupting normal is necessary to bring new growth and change. Sometimes you have to risk some failure in order to learn. Sometimes it’s not about getting it right the first time but rather starting the conversation in order to effect real sustainable change. So here we are. This isn’t a perfect issue. We haven’t included all of the voices we wanted, but I am excited to invite you to listen. I truly believe the voices you will meet in this issue continue to die to themselves for the sake of Jesus.

§

01.  Risking Conversations about Race, cont’d

We are all being formed spiritually, whether we know it or not. And that spiritual formation happens in and through the contexts in which we live, work, play, and pray. Over the past few years in the United States, where this journal is published, people have been increasingly faced with the ways our racial and cultural differences have formed our experiences of God and of one another: white and black, Asian and Latino, Native and immigrant.

As a journal premised on the transformative power of Christ-empowered conversations, we knew it was time to take an honest and Jesus-centered approach to the topic of race and spiritual formation. We also knew this topic would and will push many of our readers into territory and talk about racial and cultural differences that might feel foreign, unfamiliar or uncomfortable.

Instead of relying on ourselves, in this issue we’ve sought to hand the micro-phone over to people who have not been given either the venue or the permission to speak boldly and authentically to their experiences and perspectives as people of color who are also Christian. As an editorial team we are comprised entirely of white people; it rang truer of our understanding of Christ’s heart for the world to step downward out of our positions of power and let those who have been marginalized speak.

We started by approaching Kathy Khang, who bravely took up our off er to guest edit this entire issue. Her voice for the voiceless, marginalized and ignored made the whole of this issue possible.

In Transformational Theology, you’ll find rich theological reflection from Patricia Rayborn in “A Crazy Li’l Thing Called Love,” and humbling reflections on forgiving as Christ has forgiven us in Felix Gilbert’s, “The Power of God’s Grace In Relationships.” Marlena Graves speaks to the experience of formation through poverty and cultural difference in “Race, Poverty, And Spiritual Formation” in our Honesty About The Journey section. “Caught Between Two Worlds” rounds out the section with an interview with Annamarie Guardado Dwyer, the wife of a prominent Vineyard pastor whose Mexican American experience formed her life with God in profound ways.

In Life Together, writer and speaker Austin Channing Brown shares courageously in “The Work of Reconciliation Within,” a deeply personal look and how being a black woman in the modern context shapes her spirituality and the complex tangle of her relationships with God and other believers—a piece we would all do well to pay attention to. New Orleans pastor Page Brooks embodies the practice of mutual submission and love in “A White Pastor’s Role In A Multicultural World,” a trenchant look at how those of us in places of financial, cultural and racial privilege can empty ourselves like Christ to bring God’s mercy and justice into the here and now.

Our Intentionality of the Heart section is subtitled “Willing To Change,” an invitation to submit our will to God’s in order to find the abundant life that He offers so freely. This section also hosts a stunning piece by Soon-Chan Rah called “An American Dirge: The Spiritual Practice of Lament” that is this issue’s primer on the necessity of corporate lament over the racial and cultural wrongs commit-ted in the West, both historically and currently. Susan Oh Cha then brings us along for an inside view on the kinds of practices and perspectives that bring about formation in a first generation Korean context in, “Saebyukghido, anyone?”

And finally in our Classical Spiritual Exercises: Habits That Transform section, Joshua du Bois, former spiritual advisor to the President of the United States, talks about why Christians need to pay attention to the Black Lives Matter movement in his piece, “Embracing Black Lives To Be Made Whole,” and Osheta Moore concludes with a thoughtful piece on shalom-making as a person of color titled, “The Practices of Facing the Storm.”

Our features in this issue are especially poignant and worth calling to your attention: spoken word performer Amena Brown brings both verse and prose in Join the Conversation and our Poetry feature. Defining Our Terms is back again, with a helpful look at the practice of lament, and our Conversations Guide prompts important questions and discussions for you to take to your small group or church setting. We’ve also got a very helpful piece by Jeff and Lisa Liou in As For Me And My House about talking to our children about race, and a beautiful, honest reflection on Henry Ossawa Tanner’s “Nicodemus Visiting Jesus” by author, speaker and multicultural pastor Deidra Riggs.

There is much to celebrate in the pages of this issue of Conversations: many new voices and perspectives that I hope will challenge all of us, no matter our cultural or racial background, to the practices of listening in humility, prayerful action, and pursuit of God’s mercy and justice. I do sorrow over the lack of Native voices in this issue—a population whose history and abuses continue to be ignored and marginalized by much of North American (and even global) culture. If you know of voices and authors who speak well to this experience, please contact me directly at tara@conversationsjournal.com.

Jesus has His most stern words for those who see the downtrodden, the abused and the naked and do nothing. I and all of the editors pray that this issue will awaken believers in Christ to the stories of our brothers and sisters whose racial, cultural and class histories have excluded them from the table—whether in our churches, in our governments, or in our homes. And we hope that new conversations, conversations of humility, hope and restoration will begin to take place as we journey together to see the Kingdom of God brought more fully to earth.

§

02.  Join the Conversation

Dear Readers

In this issue we’re unpacking themes of race relations, lament, reconciliation, redemption, and that crazy little thing called love. We want to invite you, our readers, to interact with these themes in your own life and community. One of the ways in which we can engage this topic is around a table. As Shauna Niequist writes in Bread and Wine, “When you offer peace instead of division, when you offer faith instead of fear, when you offer someone a place at your table instead of keeping them out because they’re different or messy or wrong somehow, you represent the heart of Christ.”Shauna Niequist, Bread & Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013) 250.

How often do you sit at a table with those who are different from you? What could it look like to open your home and your heart? We’d love for you to consider responding to this invitation. In this edition of Join the Conversation, Amena Brown shares with us her insight on the importance of having friends who are different. We would love to hear from you (via Facebook, Twitter, email, or old-fashioned letter) on how God is inviting you to respond. Maybe your response will end up in the next issue of Conversations!

—The Editors

§

03.  Why You Need Friends Who Are Different From You

Amena Brown

Recently I have had the honor of sitting at a table with a diverse group of women for the sole purpose of talking about racism, culture, privilege, and reconciliation. These words within the last year have filled social media posts and fueled world- wide trending hashtags. So a few of us gathered at a table to listen to each other’s stories, learn how these words affect us, and how can we personally and collectively heal, stand for justice, and live in peace.

As the headlines and viral news videos tell stories of beatings, deaths, riots, and protests, it can be over- whelming to know not only how to process the information and experiences there but how to find hope and peace in the midst of everything.

When I sit at the table with these women, it doesn’t solve racism, it doesn’t change discrimination or put an end to ignorance, but as we talk and get to know each other, it changes us. As we listen to each other, look into each other’s eyes, view the beauty of each other’s various skin tones, our biases and prejudices are forced to change. Through our time at the table, we learn to really see and hear each other, to empathize with each other’s experiences, to admit what we don’t know or don’t understand, to humble ourselves.

Ignorance, prejudice, and many societal ills in our world can begin to change through relationship. We ignore, prejudge, and assume a lot about people we don’t know or don’t understand. One of the ways we can change our own ignorance to knowledge and our prejudice to understanding is to build relationships with people who are different from us.

If we look in our community or circle of friends and only see people who look like us, think like us, or believe like us, we do ourselves, our families, and our communities a disservice. We leave ourselves vulnerable to becoming close-minded, ignorant, and unloving, online and in real life.

Changing the world starts with being willing to change ourselves. When we begin to expand our circle of friends, we will find ourselves less likely to hide behind “us and them” statements, because in our friendships with people who are different from us, we discover the beauty in our differences and the humanity in our similarities.

Think of one person in your life who is different from you. Take time to get to know them and listen to their story. Don’t make friendship a science project or a checklist of action items. Be humble. Be present. Be willing to be wrong. Take the time to listen, learn, and grow from the lessons and experiences of someone else.

—Amena Brown, December 2015
Used with permission from AmenaBrown.com.