A "Must Read" For All Christians

George Floyd and Me

Shai Linne

Gospel Coalition

The Hip Hop Opportunity

As a Christian hip-hop artist, I’ve had the privilege of proclaiming Christ in my music for many years now. One of the encouraging and surprising aspects of that journey has been seeing how the Lord has used music to make connections across ethnic lines. Before the recent pandemic, a Christian hip-hop concert was often a beautiful picture of the diversity of the new earth, with people from many walks of life united around the message of Christ and him crucified. On many occasions, I’ve marveled at the reality of me, a black man from Philly who grew up steeped in hip-hop culture, united with brothers and sisters of different ethnicities, ages, and cultures as we fix our eyes on Jesus together.

Over the years, I’ve heard from many people that they were affected by the truth contained in my music, even though hip-hop wasn’t their natural cultural preference. Whenever I heard this, I was struck by the power and beauty of likemindedness. It was clear to me that we were likeminded concerning particular emphases in the music—the glory of God, the supremacy of Christ, the centrality of the cross, and the importance of biblical theology. By God’s grace, I will fight for all of those things until the Lord takes me home. 

But one of the painful things I’ve discovered over the last eight years or so since Trayvon Martin’s killing is that it’s possible to agree on those things and yet be in a completely different place when it comes to the issue of racial injustice. Just because I’ve made an intentional decision to focus on that which is “of first importance” (1 Cor. 15:3) doesn’t mean there aren’t other important things that need to be addressed in the church. It also doesn’t mean that being a Christian has exempted me from the reality of being a black man in America and all the stigma that comes with it.

Empathy, Understanding, Unity

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, my wife and I received an email from a white sister in Christ.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

The Jesus Fruit and the Jesus Tree

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

The central problem with the white supremacists in Charlottesville is not so much that they hate blacks and Jews. Their central problem is that they hate God, and hate Jesus Christ. And the same thing goes for the anitfa agitators on the other side of the street. Scripture tells us what the emotional weather is always like outside of Jesus Christ.

“For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another” (Tit. 3:3).

There is no way out of this apart from real repentance. God sent His Son into this world, in part, in order to solve the most intractable of problems—that of ethnic animosity. Christ was sent in order to overcome the division between Jew and Gentile, to create one new man out of two (Eph. 2:15), and the chasm between those two groups was a true chasm. But—liberal bromides notwithstanding—we cannot have the Jesus fruit apart from the Jesus tree. “And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent” (Acts 17:30). “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). We are commanded to repent, and we are commanded to repent by Jesus. We cannot do anything resembling this if we persist in our refusal to name His name. We must come to hate our sin, which means naming it, and we must come to love Jesus, which means naming Him.But—liberal bromides notwithstanding—we cannot have the Jesus fruit apart from the Jesus tree.

Refuse to do that and the only thing you have to look forward to is an ever-increasing cycle of hatreds, spilling out of hearts and into the streets. These racial animosities are not a sin against America, or democracy, or our social fabric. They are a sin against God.

So every form of race-hustling, independent of which race might be receiving the benefits of that hustle, is detestable to God.

Race in the United States

The Gospel Coalition's Recommended Reading List

Ivan Mesa
The Gospel Coalition

When social media demands immediate reaction, it’s easy in our polarized society to speak past each other, make wrong assumptions, and be misunderstood. And these dangers are nowhere more of reality than when addressing race-related questions in the United States.

In order to gain perspective on an often perplexing set of issues, I recently reached out to several TGC friends and asked for book recommendations—for essential books that illumine the cultural moment we’re in, explain how we got here, and encourage us forward.

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Jemar Tisby
President of the Reformed African American Network

Without exception, the first book I always recommend to people seeking to understand the dynamics of race and the church is Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford University Press, 2001). The authors—Michael Emerson and Christian Smith—take a sociological approach to discern exactly why the church in the United States is segregated along racial lines. A central concept of the book is the idea that we’re living in “racialized” society. A racialized society is one “wherein race matters profoundly for differences in life experiences, life opportunities, and social relationships.” Differing economic, educational, political, and social rewards are bestowed to groups based on racial categorizations. The authors’ exhaustive quantitative and qualitative study yields other important conclusions. They find that, despite stated convictions otherwise, white evangelicals may “do more to perpetuate the racial divide than they do to tear it down.”