In this episode, Brandi talks with Sean Watkins as they explore the value of a sense of urgency. We talk about how we learn this sense, its implications, and some ways to step into different ways of being.
You can find Sean online at @seanisfearless and soon, you will find him doing with with Be The Bridge!
If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, and review. Thanks you so much to everyone who already has. You can join in financially supporting our work on Patreon (Patreon.com/brandinico), just $5/month gets you extra content and my gratitude (which probably isn't as good a stuff...but...who can know).
Taking our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress.
@reclaimingmytheology
In this episode, Brandi talks with Sean Watkins as they explore the value of a sense of urgency. We talk about how we learn this sense, its implications, and some ways to step into different ways of being.
You can find Sean online at @seanisfearless and soon, you will find him doing with with Be The Bridge!
If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, and review. Thanks you so much to everyone who already has. You can join in financially supporting our work on Patreon (Patreon.com/brandinico), just $5/month gets you extra content and my gratitude (which probably isn't as good a stuff...but...who can know).
Taking our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress.
@reclaimingmytheology
Reclaiming My Theology, Episode 8: A Sense of Urgency
Brandi: Heyo, and welcome to Reclaiming My Theology, a podcast seeking to take our theology back from ideas and systems that oppress. I’m your host, Brandi Miller, and in this episode, I sit down with Sean Watkins to talk about the value of urgency, or sense of urgency.
As we have this conversation, I want to name that we talk about specific organizations and people. We don’t do this to demonize specific organizations or people, but because the things that Sean talks about in his context are common in many, if not most, evangelical spaces. In other words, what we talk about isn’t unique but rather pervasive values, practices, and ideologies that exist in white institutions. I think it is also important to name that it is appropriate to critique and engage with communities and people that we love and that dissonance and discontent don’t undo the good and beautiful things that we’ve received even in spaces that are messed up. How we do that critique matters, but we critique because we believe that organizations can and should do better.
So with that, enjoy, and maybe manage your defensiveness, in my conversation with Brother Sean Watkins.
**
Brandi: Hey Sean. Thanks so much for being on the podcast today.
Sean: Brandi, as always, you know you are one of my dear friends and mentors and I love you to life, and so I am grateful for the opportunity to be on here and to see you and to talk with you, so.
Brandi: Ahh, it’s such a delight. We done been through some nonsense together, so it’s good to—
Sean: We have.
Brandi: —to get to be in a better place these days, you know? [Brandi laughs]
Sean: We have. I think we—
Brandi: Take that for what it’s worth.
Sean: —we knew of each other digitally and randomly at conferences. I think you and I really clicked when we went to Ferguson for the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death. We went to that conference, Lessons from Black Lives: A Black Scholars Gathering in Ferguson, and you and I were both like, “We need to be friends.” [Brandi and Sean laugh] And the rest has been history.
Brandi: Yeah, that’s a life-changing, life-changing time out there, so.
Sean: Absolutely.
Brandi: Well, so, in the broader scheme of things, for folks who don’t know you, I would love for people to get to know you a little bit. Sean, what does it mean to be you?
Sean: Sure, uh, from Houston, born and raised. I’ll give the sanitized version, then I’ll give like the real version.
So, from Houston, born and raised. Dad’s a lawyer, Mom’s a teacher, came to Austin to go to UT, graduated in ’04 with a Bachelors of Arts in African American Studies and History.
Let me pause there and fill in the gaps. Like I said, from Houston; Dad’s an alcoholic, never been a Christian, and I’m the product of both my parents’ second marriages. So he cheated on his first wife with my mom, divorced her, left before my sister was born, then married my mom within a month. Two years later, I was born, and he had an affair again, and, uh, divorced my mom, and that lady is still my stepmother.
It was really difficult for my mom, and so even though, you know, he’s a lawyer, he’s a partner of his own law firm and an alcoholic, we had a massive house in the suburbs. But when they divorced, my mom took it really hard, and so we moved out of the suburbs and into the hood with my grandmother, and my mom began an addiction to crack cocaine that lasted from the time I was five until the time I was thirty. I’m thirty-seven now.
And so, as you can tell, right, when I’m in a white space, and I am trying to gain acceptance and influence and just kind of ownership of the room: Dad’s a lawyer, Mom’s a teacher. When I am in a space, I think, that is ethnically and culturally diverse, and, to be honest, I’m talking to Black people about the realities of racism in America, I will give both versions.
I have upper middle-class Black parents, but the context in which those values got lived out was the hood. So I love wine; I love jazz; I like classical music. I like Hamilton. I can also spot a crack house a mile away, you know? [Brandi and Sean laugh] I have an internal radar when I’m on the freeway: “You know, we been driving about 75 miles per hour for a minute. I feel like there’s a cop somewhere. We should slow down.” And there go the police, you know? [Brandi laughs] Like, you just sense it. I know which lights you need to run; if you don’t run them in Houston, you will be shot. So I kinda have both of those worlds, but I didn’t have the language to articulate it.
And so I got to UT, became a Christian, Lordship wise. I’d kind of grown up in the church a little bit in Houston, but Jesus became Lord through the ministry of InterVarsity. And I’m an old-school IV kid. They grew us in love for God, God’s word, God’s people of every ethnicity, and God’s purposes in the world. And that shaped my life, my thinking, my theology, my ministry even now, my witness even now.
And, so, while I was becoming a Christian in this ministry that was planted to primarily serve Black students, I also started taking an African American studies class. And so you had this spiritual awakening for me at the same time I was having this cultural awakening. They happened concurrently, and it just shaped the course of my life.
Um, graduated, and ran from God for a year, didn’t want to come on staff, didn’t want to fundraise—wish I would have listened to myself!—went into some debt, but that’s okay. It’s not, but it’s – the Lord is working. So I came on staff with InterVarsity in ’05, led a ministry for Black students that I’d actually become a Christian in a couple years before. I led that for five years, left, came on staff at a Black church here in Austin, hated it, came back on staff, and I stepped into a role where I oversaw ministry to Black students in Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.
They said no to that role at first, because they thought we were doing well. And then, in the span of one year, they lost three Black male staff—myself, my best friend, and a Ugandan staff—and so they called me, asking me to come back. And, uh, the week that I said yes, Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida. So I went from being this, you know, random Black staff in Texas to someone who was like having to think nationally and deeply about individual, systemic, and structural racism in America. And God was faithful. Started writing some blog posts, got a following very quickly.
And then, perhaps one of the most brilliant presidents we’ve ever had in the history of the United States, uh, he is smarter than everybody else, he knows absolutely everything—[Brandi laughs]—he both knew that it wasn’t a virus and knew it was a pandemic before anyone else has said. He’s just absolutely fabulous, just, really, like the greatest president in the history of the nation. [Brandi laughs] He’s been attacked more than anybody else.
But really, um, when he came down that escalator and said all the racist things, and the misogyny started to come out, and we realized 45 was going to be president, and you just saw like the white evangelicals flip. I don’t know if they really flipped, is more like they were that and then, like, you know, there were no excuses anymore.
Brandi: Yeah, took the mask off.
Sean: We’d seen the shootings – you know? We’d seen the shootings; we saw the lack of responses; we, like, begged and pleaded for some type of a response, and we got blog posts, you know? [Sean laughs] So – and then 45 came in, and I just saw InterVarsity just kind of change in a lot of ways. Not the organization, but I think leadership. Because I love the organization as a whole, but, you know, every institution, it goes through changes based on whoever’s in leadership. And so I saw them not really deal with their funding issues, not really deal with advocating for women in leadership in a written capacity, and not really define multiethnicity but double down on Biblical sexuality.
And 81% of evangelicals – white evangelicals voted for Trump, and so, you know, I just sort of look around and realize, “Oh, God, I am – this is no longer the organization I thought it was. Or I’ve been deceived and they’ve withheld part of their thinking and theology.”
And so I left staff with InterVarsity in 2017. I had been going to Fuller seminary to work on my master’s degree, and like every student of color—[Brandi and Sean laugh]—in the midst of the unarmed shootings of Black people and in the midst of the election of Donald Trump, what was supposed to be a three year program turned into a five year program. I was taking off quarters like, I cannot do this, I haven’t had a professor of color, I haven’t read an author of color.
But graduated from Fuller 2019, with my MDiv, couldn’t find a job to save my life, so I’ve been at Amazon for the last year, in that warehouse, which is – kind of doubles as a plantation, depending on your thinking and theology, but this Saturday is my last day there.
Brandi: Praise God.
Sean: Yeah, August 3rd. Look here, won’t he do it. This Saturday’s my last day. August 3rd I will become the Director of Training and Strategy at Be the Bridge—
Brandi: Come on.
Sean: —a nonprofit that does racial reconciliation, diversity and inclusion training, under the superior leadership of Latasha Morrison. And so it’s just a new chapter and a new season.
Brandi: Ah, so good.
Sean: It’s – it’s been a journey. I think, uh, Brandi, you well know, trying to decolonize my own mind and my own theology, figuring out the internal work I need to do to be able to both heal and to recognize where I am on my own journey of healing, which will take a lifetime. And, you know, like James Baldwin said, I’m trying to vacillate between just being in a perpetual state of rage, all the time, as I look at this land that I know and love and sometimes want to slap upside the head, because the United States is the Florida of the world, and you really don’t know what to do with that. [Brandi laughs] So, you know, it’s like, “What is y’all doin’? This is embarrassing! Good God! Ugh!”
Brandi: I wasn’t prepared. [Brandi laughs]
Sean: I am – I am going to scream. [Sean laughs]
Brandi: It’s – it’s – it truly is a lot. Well, what it sounds like to me in your description of your story and your experiences is, while you may have an MDiv and be a highly educated Black man, it seems like the PhD that you have is in white evangelical Christianity, theology—
Sean: Yes.
Brandi: —and nonsense.
Sean: Absolutely.
Brandi: And so, as we’ve been walking through this podcast, we’ve been thinking about white supremacy and reclaiming our theology from white supremacy and looking at some of the embedded values that we have that we may not realize that we have.
I think that there are a few ideologies that white evangelicals or white Christians in general hold more closely than others. That some can be like, “Sure, individualism. In a pandemic, we can be collective; wear your mask.” [Sean laughs]
But I think there’s some—like, the worship of the written word, defensiveness, and this one that we’re going to do today—that I think are held a little more closely to the heart of white theology than others, because they’re things that seem life or death. And so today we’re going to talk about a little bit the sense of urgency, or a sense of urgency.
And so, having worked in what you’ve worked in and having the life experiences that you have, the reality of white supremacy is that it’s generally invisible for those who live in it and benefit from it. And so we’re trying to unmask some of those things.
And so could you help folks who don’t know exactly what this is? What does a sense of urgency look like? What is that?
Sean: I think when you look at this sense of urgency, it’s absolutely right. There’s a biblical sense of urgency that we need to be able to have, and I think in scripture we see the difference between chronos and kairos. Chronos is the passage of days, minutes, hours, weeks, months, and years, and kairos is when you have a confluence of events that come together that make for a unique time or season.
For the margins, for people of color, without question right now we’re in a kairos moment. I think for white evangelicalism, though, they really don’t – it doesn’t feel like kairos moments for them; it feels – it doesn’t even feel like chronos. It feels like their sense of urgency is they are losing the country. That this Anglo-Saxon white exceptionalism on which the nation was founded; it is embedded in all our foundational documents, that the pilgrims, puritans, and the Quakers all believed at different levels, when those convicts got off them boats and came over to America and killed everybody and said, “We’ve discovered this land, it’s wonderful.”
There’s a reality that that sense of urgency, they’re losing the nation. And that’s – the more you oppress people, the more babies are born. And so—[Sean laughs]—there’ll just be more children, more people in the United States that are not white by 2040. Because of corona, that may be 2025, right now, we gon’ have a ‘rona generation here in a little bit. [Brandi laughs]
So I think that’s the urgency that they feel, right? It’s not an urgency to respond to the times, to engage in which these social issues that the muck and mire of sin and racism have brought to the surface. It really is this, “If we don’t act now, we are going to be outnumbered.”
And I think, embedded in that, there is a fear in white culture that, even though white culture is always forward-thinking, they are not one to – to look backwards, right. When you talk to most white leaders, they’re like, “Oh, I’m really not aware of the past. I know that I want to hire more women, more people of color; I want to make sure that we don’t have a racist institution.” Do you have the historical knowledge of where you came from? “Nope, I don’t really want to deal with that. I just want to move forward.” I think because they are not rooted in the past, and they’re not aware of those things, typically what happens is they come in, and it’s cyclical, and they repeat the same practices they’re trying to stop and omit. And so I think there’s this sense of urgency that they’re going to be able to lose – they’re going to lose the country.
Brandi: Yes.
Sean: And there’s a fear that what their ancestors did that they won’t talk about at all, there’s a fear that once they’re outnumbered, that exact same injustice will happen to them. They’re afraid that they will be marginalized, they’re afraid that they will be pushed out of the mainstream. And they don’t realize that we all are in the mainstream. White people are, Black people are, women are, Asian, Latino peoples.
And so I think that’s the sense of urgency that I’m starting to really feel from them. That’s one sense, it’s – it’s kind of a anti-racist racism. They’re allergic – it’s an anti-Blackness racism that’s going on right now, where they just – they want to maintain the status quo, that’s one sense of it.
And then you have this other kind of strange kind of sense of urgency right now. And you know I – I – I call it like the – they’re like the bandwagon social justice activists. Like, something has happened in the last few months ’cause ’rona has hit, and outside was closed, and there was really only two things to do, and that was watch Tiger King on Netflix and see this cop with his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds—or, as some reports now are saying, the video was longer, it actually was nine and a half minutes.
And so this sense of urgency, like, “Oh my god, we had no idea this was happening. If we stand up and protest and march, we can eliminate this in two weeks! We thought that we solved this problem.” And so there’s this sense of urgency that racism can be solved if they do one or two protests in a couple of cities for a couple of months. “We can end this 800-year systemic evil that’s embedded in the foundations of our society.”
So I think when you put those things together, it’s very strange to watch the white responses to all of this that’s going on right now. There’s a lack of humility that says, “Other people have been engaging in this discussion for four centuries, and the correct posture is to take a listening and a learning one.” I love what our friend Erna put on Facebook a couple of weeks ago when she was like, “Hey, if you’re white and you just discovered that racism is real five minutes ago, don’t start a podcast.” Like…you know? [Brandi and Sean laugh] There’s that lack of humility, I think, that’s there. Or, there’s the humility that they want to be around people to listen and learn, but they also want to control the narrative the entire time.
And so that sense of urgency is just very strange to behold and – what do you think, though? What have you noticed?
Brandi: Well, when I think of a sense of urgency in white evangelicalism, or in white theology in general, things are urgent when white people feel like they should be urgent but they’re slow when they need to be slow.
Sean: Yes. Absolutely.
Brandi: So we can write a paper about whatever topic we think for whoever we feel like we need to oppress or get in line or manage their sin issues, but we need 500 listening posts and 10 new creedal statements to say that Black lives matter. [Sean laughs]
So we can be fast on some things but we are slow on things all related to justice. And to me, I feel like there’s a lot of proof for anyone who works in a church or evangelical organization right now: that we can change fast if we want to. But the reality is that our sense of urgency isn’t necessarily about right or wrong, if you want to use a binary, but it’s about what maintains white power, particularly in Christian spaces.
And so one of the things that I’ve been thinking about lately is how Christians learn a sense of urgency. Because to me, I think when I – even – I don’t – even loosely define a sense of urgency for my own perspective would just be the fear-based notion that what we do matters more than what God does, and so our speed means God’s success. And – and I grew up – I didn’t grow up in the church, but insofar as I did, I grew up right in the hotspot of Left Behind books.
Sean: Oh! Oooh.
Brandi: And so when I think about a sense of urgency, I think about those. Where we think that everyone is going to hell right now, so we need to translate as many Bibles as possible, as quickly as we can, and share the Bible and Jesus in the most efficient way as possible in the smallest Bible tract that we can. And that we need to do that because everything is life or death. And that if we don’t do that, then everyone will go to hell.
And we think that what we’re doing is saving people from hell, but what we’re doing is creating these new versions of hell where people are converted, but they’re not And so we have a sense of urgency when dealing with specific aspects of people’s sin or their engagement with God, but no long-term sense that – I don’t know, to be frank, Jesus walked everywhere. And he ate a lot of meals, and he was allowed for three years and was not super efficient in that time. And at the end of his life and death and the beginning of the resurrection, it looked like he had failed. And really, the guys who followed him didn’t make him look a lot better for quite some time. And we’re not making him look better now. So I just think there’s a lot to this sense of urgency that has clearly shown itself to be historically false in more ways than I can probably articulate well.
Sean: That was fantastic. He was here for three years and, let’s be honest, he wasn’t very efficient with his time. Yes! My god. Absolutely. Way to, like, summarize the Bible, and at the same time to just expose, like, how we all have been taught, like, with white evangelicalism. What’s that Oscar Muriu at Urbana 15 – if I were God, I would have been in a hurry to save humanity? He’s like, “The way God did it was too slow, too low tech, and too wasteful of time.”
Brandi: Yes.
Sean: God didn’t understand marketing or branding or product placement, like, he just wasted time with Jesus those thirty years.
Brandi: Yes.
Sean: And they didn’t even do it right with those three years. It feels like I harp on InterVarsity, these two and a half years after I’ve left, and I don’t mean to at all. For me it was just – I think when, you know, I was still on staff, and I mean, I was – I went into tremendous debt being on staff. My – my year – every year I was on staff, actually, with the exception of the last one, when I was in a national position. But I signed documents that I was willing to take a pay cut. And in hindsight, I realized I was 21, 22, and I drank the Kool Aid, you know? Suffer for the sake of the gospel.
Brandi: Mmhmm. Yes.
Sean: And it took me a decade to realize that I was suffering and living paycheck to paycheck, or me and my best friend were going into credit card debt—me, my best friend, and his now-wife—and my white colleagues, and a number of my Asian colleagues, they’re moving into houses and buying new cars. And so there’s this sense in which suffering looks different for us.
And so I’ve been kind of navigating all those, right. The realities of the funding issues; we had men leave because they didn’t think that a woman could be their supervisor. Not at a church, at a 501c3. We can have a theological discussion about your denominations. But at a 501c3 nonprofit in America? Seriously? They left because of that.
And so InterVarsity affirms women in leadership, they affirm multi-ethnicity, they affirm the fundraising model. But you can have someone who is a staunch Trump supporter or someone who is a quiet liberal, and they may sign a document that says they believe in the authority of scripture, but what are they doing to disciple their students is the flip of a coin, because we didn’t have anything centralized.
So, those three issues—multi-ethnicity, women in leadership, and the funding policies. But, like you said, right, what they did is they came out with a 20-page paper on biblical sexuality. Which we didn’t even know they were studying. We got an email one day and it was like, “We’ve been praying about this for four years. We have a document on biblical sexuality. By the way, the entire country needs to read it; we created a Bible study platform for all you guys, discussion questions, which we will do at every regional staff conference. And if you don’t believe and behave according to it, you have six months to leave staff.”
And so, for me, it shocked me, because it was confirmation that, precisely what you said, Brandi, right: we can choose if we want to, period. And I think that’s – that’s the galvanizing, that is the litmus test of the evangelical church. They could end all of their racist tendencies; I’ll give you six months to two years. Just like the Lord’s refining fire, we need to confess, we need to repent, we need to change. It’s going to be a long, arduous process, but we can get it done.
There is no desire to. There is a complete desire to integrate into a burning building. It is to say, it’s been wrong for 800 years; stick with us, and in time, if you’re patient on these things, because we’ve got some other things that we’re urgent about that we care about. We’re losing the country; women are having abortions; there’s too many immigrants coming in—that’s the urgency. This whole, like, racism, multi-ethnicity thing, that – that can – if you stick with us for a while, eventually you’ll get your turn.
One thing that comes to my mind, too is like when Barack, I think got elected. We gave George Bush a bad rap, because he was nuts, God bless him, but I feel like that was – that was a scenario in which a Black person got to be in power. Like, the economy was trash. Like, everything was a hot, horrible mess. There was no coming back, essentially, and they were like, “Eh, we’ll give the brother a shot.” You know?
Brandi: Yes.
Sean: And that’s the ways in which I think that white evangelicalism works. They have to do everything that they possibly can, and when they’re at their wits end, intellectually, theologically, economically, socially, politically, and they’re like, “We really don’t know what to do. Eh, we’ll give it to the people of color and see what happens. And if they can repair it, we’ll snatch power back. Because then, we’re not at the center of the story anymore.”
Brandi: Well, and to me, it feels like – the metaphor I think of is an old school Netflix queue, where you had to mail the DVDs in. And so, like, you put a DVD in, and then you put, like, ten before it, and then you’re like, “I’m going to get to it eventually.” And then it doesn’t move off your queue. Like, it’s not not important to you. It’s not so unimportant to you that you would get rid of it, and it’s nice to have it there in case you want to watch the movie someday, but as new movies come out, or as things change, or as you have something that you want to do more, something that’s more exciting, it just stays at the bottom of the queue.
And you can still say, “Hey, it’s in there! It’s in there, and I can see that it’s in there; like, can’t you see that it’s in there?” While all the while, prioritizing every other possible thing, every strategy, every ministry development, rather than doing the justice that we might say, especially in this political moment that we’re in, that we might want to do.
And it feels significant to me as I watch the current political moment we’re in and what a lot of people are just calling performative activism, especially from churches. That churches that four years ago would not have, if the Lord came down and told them Godself that it was happening, said, “Black lives matter.” But when it became financially and socially inappropriate to no longer say it, we became very urgent about how we wanted to speak about that. And so, I’m seeing, you know, churches putting black squares in their social media and deciding to have a four-week series on race, as though four weeks and a Gandalf staff of – of—[Brandi and Sean laugh]—anti-racism—
Sean: You shall not pass! [Brandi and Sean laugh]
Brandi: Thank God racism’s over now; we just needed Bethel to do it. [Brandi laughs]
Sean: That’s right, boy, that was fantastic, huh. Piper’s done another podcast. Now it’s solved.
Brandi: I just wished that Black people would’ve thought of Gandalf sooner huh? [Sean laughs] If only we had followed white male God in that way. But it does feel like there’s suddenly this sense of urgency, but it seems incredibly motivated by reputation and by money more so than by justice and righteousness and mercy and compassion.
Sean: Absolutely.
Brandi: And I think what it has revealed to me—which I think I already knew, but is now – I think it was a hypothesis, and now there’s a lot of data for it—is that a lot of white theology teaches us that surface-level behavior modification is the goal – like the end goal of discipleship. But it’s rarely about a deeper transformation that actually deals with the roots of our issues and the things that we’re dealing with. And I don’t think that’s just race; I think that applies to mental health and to family and to sex and dating, and to all of those things.
But we – if we can do the surface-level behavior modification, even of ourselves, if we can say, “Black lives matter,” then we feel like we’re good. Or if we can put in one Bible study or book group or read Austin Channing Brown, then, suddenly, we are – we are changing the world.
And so I think I just – I feel like some of the sense of urgency early in my life was used to scare me out of hell, and then the same fear was used to scare me out of sinning. And so I’m curious if you’ve thought about where do we pull this sense of urgency out? What are the things that you see that are used to make this happen?
Sean: So, without question, I think, in terms of conversion, I think of white theology focuses far more on Pauline’s experience on the Damascus road as opposed to the twelve, right. There’s this sense in which Jesus walked with them for three years, and it was a gradual transformation. And, like you said earlier, they still didn’t get it. Like, that brother fed five thousand people, he raised the dead, he did a bunch of stuff, healed everybody and their mama. Everywhere he went, like, sin did not contaminate him; like, he eradicated it everywhere, and they missed it the entire time. He dies; they miss it. He gets up; they miss it. He flies away; they miss it. [Brandi and Sean laugh] He pulls a superman off a cliff, you know; they miss it still. But that’s – that focus is not given in white evangelicalism, I don’t think. It’s given Paul’s perspective, right? If you have one conversation with someone, they can get saved. If you explain the Romans road, the bridge diagram, or the four circles, or whatever new ten-minute metaphor it is right now, they can get saved immediately. [Brandi laughs]
Brandi: Yeah.
Sean: And then like, you know, you send them back out into the missions field. It’s like, ah, I mean, you don’t even join a gym in ten minutes. Like, what are you talking about?
Brandi: [Brandi laughs] Yeah.
Sean: So, you want, like, a complete life transformation from somebody from one conversation with you? No, absolutely not! So, I think that’s – that’s definitely one element. I think it’s the way in which they try to – they don’t do it directly, but indirectly, how Paul is pit against Jesus.
I think you see Romans used as the basis of Paul’s theology and that we are saved by faith, not by works. And so that obviously is a very individualistic mindset. And so when you teach that we are saved by faith not by works, then that becomes, I think, the impetus for you to go out and evangelize and to be missional, and it feeds into that mediocre white man myth, right, the like, “You have all power and that you can go out and change the world in your lifetime, regardless of whose land it is, whose been here before, what issues are going on for the culture that is present.” You have—[Sean laughs]—you – what did Sarah Akutagawa say? Me plus Jesus equals “I can solve your problems.” That’s also the definition for imperialism, right? [Brandi and Sean laugh] Yeah, like, she’s a beast. Like, that’s white evangelicalism. And you know, saved by faith not by works, I don’t think that’s at the core of Paul’s theology. I think the core of Paul’s theology is unity in Christ.
Brandi: Yes.
Sean: And that, um, ’cause if it’s unity in Christ, that’s communal, that’s social, that’s culture—you have to deal with all of the problems, between ethnic groups, between men and women, again, I mean, with, uh, different classes. You deal with all of the issues in the western world they refuse to tackle. So I think if I had to guess, I would say that they are fascinated by Paul because Paul was a deep thinker, and the idol of the West is intellectualism. So they’re fascinated by his writings and, incorrectly, I think they’re fascinated by his conversion.
Brandi: Yes.
Sean: And there are some Paul exceptions, but he’s – he’s the exception; he’s not the norm.
Brandi: Yes.
Sean: And there’s this sense in which, like, if I can make my faith individualistic, then I can go to bed at night, because I’ve done my part to talk to one person about their personal life and internal work.
Brandi: Yes.
Sean: There was one guy that – I have a friend of mine here in Austin that was a missionary, was an InterVarsity alum, and happily married—went on a missionary trip to Mexico for four years, fell in love with this Mexican woman, got married, came back to the States, got three beautiful children. And, uh, he’s a white guy, loves the Lord, passionate about multiethnicity and racial reconciliation stuff, and uh, you know, we’ve just – most of us have either unfriended or unfollowed the conservative white evangelicals, for our own mental and emotional health, right?
Brandi: Yes. Yes.
Sean: Like the parking lot for white spaces is full, as Erna often says, in our lives. So Adam has been like – I said his name, whatever – Adam has been trying to still talk to many white people about these things, and there’s a friend of his and he’s like, “I’m trying to explain systemic and structural racism to him. Sean, would you come with me?” And I said, “No. I don’t have level one conversations with white people anymore.”
Brandi: Yup.
Sean: “And I most certainly don’t have them for free.” It is emotionally exhausting to pour out your heart and to share your life experience, and then someone to say, “Nah, I haven’t seen that so I don’t believe it’s true” and walk off.
Brandi: Yeah.
Sean: [Sean laughs] So I say, “We’re not doing this for free anymore.” And so I arbitrarily was like, “I charge $125 an hour to have these conversations.” Threw out a random number. He told his friend, friend talked to his wife, and they said yes. [Brandi laughs] And so I went over to this man’s house last week. Brandi, I talked to him for two hours.
Uh, and the first hour was just us kind of sharing our stories, and the second hour was like – he just like – he said, “I really just want to get to know you. I’m really not interested in like understanding systemic and structural racism. I have a couple questions; if we get to it, fine. If we don’t, that’s ok.”
Like, even knowing the reason why we were meeting, he still reduced it to, like, an individualistic level. And I felt myself getting upset on his couch. And then I realized, He’s paying for my time. If he chooses to have a heart-to-heart or to not be open to that, it’s okay. My time was not wasted because I got a seed sown into me for this.
Brandi: Yes.
Sean: And so it’s strange to witness and to behold, even when they say, “I want to learn about these things,” in that moment, you still see them opt into whiteness to say, “Nope, I wanna keep it at the individual level.” Both in our conversations, and when we look at issues that are fully systemic and structural. A police officer does something horrible, what is his police chief going to do, what is the district attorney going to do, what is the judge and the jury going to do? How is it going to be portrayed in mainstream media and politicians? Let’s not talk about that. I wanna know about you. Where do you come from? How many white friends do you have?
Brandi: Yup.
Sean: And it’s just – it’s very strange. So, what do you – what do you notice, though? What’s going on for you?
Brandi: Well, it feels like in that story that you’re sharing is a broader thing that I see happen all the time, which is that white folks want to learn to do anti-racism theoretically, but without abandoning whiteness as a concept. And so, in that story, he can be like, “I want to learn about systemic oppression,” but then his cultural values so lead the conversation that it collapses the conversation into something where it – it cannot do the thing.
And so it feels like every attribute of white supremacy buttresses the entire institution of whiteness to have those conversations, where you spend two hours that could be, to use a white value of efficiency, very productive or helpful. You have to wade through so many depths of whiteness to even get to, “How do we undo even a couple of these things?”
And, because there’s a sense of urgency to respond right now in this moment around racism specifically, white folks want to do that urgently and just get it over with, when, to undo 800 years of systemic oppression, violence, theology, and all of that, cannot be done in one conversation with a Black man, no matter how much you pay him.
And so it just feels like—and I think this is true for those of us folks of color who are in predominantly white spaces—we might be confused into believing that if a response doesn’t happen immediately, that it’s not holy or that it’s not spiritual or that it’s not Jesus, because God can blind Paul. And so I think that – that is really significant.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about how people have used, and how I’ve used—I say “people” but as a person who’s worked in whiteness for my whole life and was educated at an overly expensive private liberal arts college, I recognize the privilege in what I’m saying. And like, there are so many stories that we use in scripture that we don’t know are embedding a sense of urgency but are. I think about Matthew 25 and the parable of the virgin at the wedding, and where the metaphor is that like, “Don’t you know that the kingdom of God will come like thief in the night?” That’s even, I think, in First Thessalonians.
Sean: Ooh, ah, I read this in Luke 10 and 2—I didn’t mean to cut you off, I apologize. Luke 10 and 2: “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Send out workers in the harvest.” I feel like that was – that was like the mandate that we did for leaders every August when students were coming back on campus.
Brandi: Yes. In John 4, we have this story where Jesus – where the story tells us first that Jesus has to go through Samaria to get from Judea to Gal – or from Galilee to Judea. And, if you do any cultural work around that, that is inherently not true. Jesus does not have to go through Samaria. No Jewish person has to go through Samaria for nothin’. And people wouldn’t, right? In cleanliness laws, in ethnocentrism, in all of that, wouldn’t have to do that. And the text starts by going, “Jesus had to”—in quotes—“do this thing”—had to go through Samaria. And so you already know that Jesus is taking this inefficient for the cultural times route from one place to another. And then he stops at this place and he has this overly long conversation with this woman who was an outsider who the disciples are sitting from a distance judging, and then Jesus is like, “Why don’t y’all just go away and get some food?”
Sean: Pretty much.
Brandi: “Y’all walk away.”
Sean: “You’re too sexist for your own good. Y’all go away, go get some fried chicken. I’m actually going to talk to her, because I need to, like, have her in the kingdom.” Yes.
Brandi: And they’re like, “Come on, let’s go, let’s go, like, come on.” [Sean laughs] And Jesus has this transformative experience with this woman, where he reaffirms her dignity and does all of this stuff. And then he sends her back to her town, which is presumably relatively far away.
And on his, like, 200 kilometer walk from Judea to Galilee, he does this situation, where he sends her away and then waits. And the disciples are like, “Come on, come on, come on, let’s go.” And he waits for her to bring her whole town back. And when the disciples are asking about this, Jesus just seems unbothered.
It seems like his priority isn’t this urgent movement; it is to talk to a person long enough to see them healed, and to let their community be healed because they are healed. And so there is a systemic healing that is being brought as Jesus does this thing. But we use this thing where, “The harvest is plentiful, the workers are few; you think it’s four months until the harvest, but open your eyes and look up: they are ripe for harvest.” And I’m like, sure, something can be ripe for harvest; that doesn’t mean it’s yours to reap.
Sean: Yeah, I think as I’m listening to you, too, I remember, uh, Bishop Tony Warner, who’s on staff with InterVarsity and just really patriarchal BCM in many respects. And I was talking to him last week with the passing of John Lewis and trying to get his opinion and try to process what was going on in my own internal world. I am, like, in tears as I’m realizing this man has passed away, and I’m seeing just the flood of responses from every Black person. [Sean laughs] Everybody put up memes and photos of this man, and I’m like, “What is going on right now?” and so I called Bishop just to have a conversation with him.
And we were talking about all of that—but I said all to be able to say, I remember having a conversation with him about white evangelicalism and this – this – at the time I didn’t use that language, but the sense of urgency now, and just like what was going on, and like what you were saying too, um, wanting to see things change immediately in InterVarsity, and in white evangelicalism, and even in Fuller Seminary as well, too, and just not seeing those things happen.
And Bishop, you know him, he would just smile and nod and listen to me. And he said, “Sean, the evangelicals have taught us wrong.” He said, “They taught us that we can change all of it in three simple steps. If you do these three things, it’ll go away. You can change all of it in your lifetime.” And he said, “Israel waited 400 years for Moses. And we misunderstand the timing of God.”
We assume that, like you said, our timing is God’s timing. God doesn’t operate in our world; we operate in his. If intellectualism is one of the idols of white supremacy and Christianityism, as Carl Ellis calls it—like, this white supremacy that’s hiding inside of Christianity or a fake version of Christianity—I would say probably this false sense of urgency, or this mislabeled urgency on some things but not kingdom things, I think easily is the second one.
There is this notion that if they don’t do it in their lifetime, it cannot and it will not be done. But it’s all those things that are secondary, right. It’s not on issues of love and justice and reconciliation and bringing healing to the nation, right? It’s a sense of urgency, otherwise the economy will crash—or the church that you just built won’t have enough members so you’ll run out of money. Or we’ll lose the country because it’ll be overrun by immigrants.
It’s not – what are you talking about? These are not – they’re not biblical. It’s whiteness at work. It’s the idols of your own culture that, because y’all have never been displaced on purpose, you don’t even know that they’re idols. And you are discipling that into everyone when you go on these missions trips so that people come back and they’re colonized in their own theology and they’ve been educated out of their context, so when they get degrees and they go back home, their words and their theology, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s irrelevant.
Brandi: Yes. Irrelevant and alienating to every person who’s been around before them. And it’s almost always young people who are sent back with that sense of urgency, because I think that university context does that too, creates a sense of urgency that you must become what you’re going to be for the rest of your life right now. And I think that Christians do that by breaking salvation, or like the outer working of our faith, or our conversion, the outer working of our faith, moment by moment, into a single moment that encapsulates – that somehow is the most important moment of your life, instead of walking the journey with Jesus.
And so I think I see this play out in a lot of different ways. Because I think there’s ways that is plays out theologically, but I think that theology, when you truncate it down and put it, like, in a church office, plays out very specific ways that I think a lot of folks are probably more familiar with than maybe they’re aware of. Like, the idea that we would create unrealistic goals in the name of God’s bigness that are to be done in an unrealistic amount of time.
Sean: Oh yes.
Brandi: Like, that we can grow our church from thirty people to five hundred people in one year because we want to have a quote unquote revival. Like, I don’t know what y’all are trying to revive out here, but I think I’d rather leave it dead at this point. [Sean laughs]
What we end up doing is we glorify these one-off experiences of someone’s success and – or success or colonizing of a space in a really effective way, like a church plant that pulls all of the Black people from their church to create, like, a sexy new experience because there’s something – because we’ve been so indoctrinated into whiteness that we think that that’s the better thing, and it’s now available. We create unsustainable ministry methods; we try to reduce people’s gifts into something that can be efficiently white-manned.
And so I – one of the things that I’ve been thinking about lately as I consider this concept is what books were elevated in my early time in church and in ministry. And the ones that come to mind most quickly are Multiply by Francis Chan—say what you will about Francis Chan, but I think that whiteness almost always has one or two token folks of color who make it-make it, in like white Christianity, who then are the mouthpieces for whiteness in a particular way, so you can point to them as like, “Oh, this isn’t white; this is universal. This is Christ.” When it’s really just folks of color who’ve been embedded into whiteness.
But, all that said, his book Multiply, David Platt’s Radical, and then—what was that book? Oh!—Exponential. Everybody and their brother had a copy of the book Exponential. And what it said was that church growth, or, like, the growth of the kingdom, was about us indoctrinating people, do a little popcorn effect, to do more people, to get more people, and if you have ten million small groups in your church, then you have ten million people in your church. And you can do it in six weeks.
And so I think there’s just these unrealistic expectations that are put on human beings to pursue things in the world that were never meant for us to do! And so I’m thinking about all these ways – so I was wondering, are there any ways that you can think of that we see this play out really closely on the ground?
Sean: Brandi, I can’t follow that! That was… [Brandi and Sean laugh] I’m not gonna follow that at all, girl. That’s good.
How we see it play out on the ground, well I’m – um, I remember I went to – there’s a preacher’s conference in Dallas that I went to, and there’s a guy named Dr. James Earl Massey, who’s gone on to be with the Lord. But he was actually – we were having a random conversation about this – I think I was in his classroom, his class about preaching the doctrines of sin and grace, which at that time, knew nothing about doctrines at all, just hadn’t been to seminary yet. Greek and Hebrew was something I was trying to avoid, which is why I hadn’t been to seminary at all.
He picked – I will never forget – he picked a random passage, and it was like, “Jesus said, ‘If I be lifted up, I will draw all people to myself.’” And Dr. James Earl Massey, he just went on this tangent. He’s like, “Why are we doing all these conferences on, like, church growth and church planting? If we just preach Jesus, and not just preach Jesus but preach what Jesus preached, people will come to our churches. You don’t have to, like, build a big building and have all these fancy bells and whistles and strobe lights and compete with a movie theater. If we preach Jesus and preach what he preached, your church will grow.”
And the reasons why – yeah, somebody asked, like, “How do I get my church to grow?” He’s like, “If you’re not preaching what Jesus preached, that’s why your church is not growing. Because Jesus is attractive. Real Jesus is attractive.”
It’s interesting you mentioned those books. Like, I – we had Out of the Saltshaker and Into the World. We had Master Plan of Evangelism. But it was always this idea – I know I remember, like, when I was on staff, they were always pushing for us to be able to do small groups when I was a student. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a wonderful value of small group bible study. It’s biblical, it’s healthy, blah blah blah all those things.
But it was colonizing because I would – I was there, and I remember they were pushing for it when we were students, and it worked for one year, but you have to start all over. Because small groups is not just the model in the Black church. We are a communal culture, and you know, our church service is a giant small group. And so when I came on staff, like most of the discipleship models that were coming out, they were all small group oriented. And then the content and the information that was in there, it had to be contextualized for my students because Billy and Becky were going on a missions trip to, like, you know, Ghana, and my students were like, “What is this?”
Brandi: Well, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about is that – well, I’ve been thinking about how, in scripture, a message can be slow, but the action taken, we make very fast. Like, when I think about – I think about even like, really silly stories, like—well, it’s not a silly story, it’s a deeply tragic story, but we make it silly by putting it on felt board—of Noah and the ark. That Noah receives this message that has urgent implications, but it takes him a long-ass time to build that boat.
Sean: A year, in his front yard.
Brandi: Yes. And so people – I think what we do is we hear a message and we assume that that message is for us right now, in this moment, and, to me, it kills critical thinking. And so it becomes ironic, because, in a lot of white spaces, we might pride ourselves, or they might pride themselves, on being critical and intellectual. But a sense of urgency makes it almost impossible to be inclusive at all, to be thoughtful in our decision-making or thinking, and what it usually does is it just punts all important projects to one charismatic leader, or one new strategy or one new thing that we want to try to do. And we do that without considering the consequences to anybody, and then we feel suddenly very offended and upset when people don’t appreciate what we did or when it doesn’t go well or when we didn’t think about that one little thing, like the colonizing impacts of our work.
And so I’m just aware that there’s lots of things like that. Or even in any kind of church funding models, or fundraising models, that we have unrealistic funding proposals. That they promise a lot of work and a lot of numbers and a lot of conversions and are controlled by funders who feel the same sense of urgency. And then people expect – supervisors, staff, pastors, leaders expect way too much work for way too little funding, and, like in your case, impoverished people, and in my case, impoverished people, for the sake of the mission, that then doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to, because we over-promise and we under-deliver.
Because that, to me, feels like the primary consequence of a sense of urgency, is that we over-promise and under-deliver, and over and over and over again. Or we over-expect and then over-criticize, and then alienate. So, I don’t know, I’m just thinking about those things.
Sean: Yeah, no, I agree with you completely. And my brain turned back on to, like, I think, um, that sense of urgency, the things that we see on the ground. I remember when, um, I left staff and I’d been a member of this, uh, Black church here in Austin for six years. And I went to speak at InterVarsity student chapter, and totaled my car on the way back, and my funding was so bad, I couldn’t get reimbursed for the gas mileage. And I remember I called my pastor at the time, and I said, “How do you feel about interns?” and he said, “I love ’em.” And I said, “How do you feel about paid interns?” He said, “I’m not really sure.” I said, “Never mind.” And he said, “No, no, no, no. We’ll pay you. We’ll pay you. We’ll pay you. Wait, wait.”
So I came on staff at this church, and there’s a culture of burnout; he had a temper; he would curse us out at the staff meetings. You know, as a member, it’s great. You peek behind the curtain, you meet the Wonderful Wizard of Oz; in most spaces, if it’s not healthy, you’ll find out very quickly. And so – which is why I wasn’t there long.
But I remember he got burned out for, like, the third or fourth time, and when he came back from what was supposed to be a season of rest, he came back with these eight great causes that – there were eight things that he wanted to, um, a staff team of – three people had quit, so a staff team of nine, and there were eight great causes, including himself, his secretary, and the business administrator, or the accountant, for the church. Nine of us, eight great causes. And it was like, fatherlessness, poverty, um – uh – it’s been so long, I mean, it was just – it was just – but they all had, like, strategic plans under all of them.
And we were like, “How we – how are nine people gonna tackle homelessness in the city? How exactly do we tackle fatherlessness? How exactly do we tackle, um, economic empowerment and entrepreneurship? Like, these are all great ideas, um, can we have, like, one or two?”—[Brandi and Sean laugh]—“Are we gonna juggle all eight at the same time?” And we had to juggle all eight at the same time, which does what? Creates a culture of burnout.
Brandi: Yes.
Sean: When you don’t do those things, he’s angry and livid because he had two ideals in his head: one, the megachurch in Dallas that he came from and the really affluent white church in the suburbs, who also has eight great causes. But also, because of racism and gentrification and white flight, they’ve got 15,000 members or they’ve got 10,000 members, and white people tithe, so they’ve got 10,000 members and, you know, $30 million sitting in the bank, and they all have multiple properties. [Sean laughs]
Brandi: Yup, yup.
Sean: The church sits on, like, 25 acres of land. There’s a lake and a community center—[Sean laughs]—that they go and, like, reflect so they can hear from the Lord. Or the pastor goes on these retreats, and he’s writing books every six months. He’s got an income coming in. But that’s how – we were comparing ourselves to.
And I think that’s one way we see it on the ground. Like, you don’t just see these models of urgency and intellectualism, I think, in the white church. It’s also – it’s outsourced and it’s colonized to people of color, and the model in not all, but some churches from the margins, it is not a biblical model anymore. The model in the churches from the margins is white church, right. We take their resources, we take their books; we dip it in chocolate and say it’s contextualized, but the end result is still the same, right.
Brandi: Yes.
Sean: In the same way you got this white exodus from the white church right now with the kids saying, “We’re done”—the Black church doesn’t have exodus as bad, but definitely the numbers are starting to go down, because there’s, again, right, this sense of urgency around, “Oh, abortion, homosexuality.” And it’s like, we’ve got – we have school shootings here every ten minutes. And no one has done anything about that. Like, we – we’ve had the longest war that we’ve had in the history of the country. Nobody’s doing anything about that. These unarmed Black people have been killed – Black and brown men and women have been killed in the country for decades, and we have not solved this.
But y’all sense of urgency is around, “Go share the gospel. Uh, provide a hypodiegetical understanding of your theology, so that way you can demonstrate you – you’ve got a robust scholarship from an evangelical institution.” And it’s like, “No. we don’t care about this stuff!” So I think that’s one of the ways I think the urgency, um, plays out. It’s outsourced, and it’s contextualized, and I think Black churches are trying to do that exact same thing.
And I wish we would – I wish we would, like, know our church history, and we would, like, learn from Germany. Like we – we talk about Saint Augustine, and how great and how wonderful he was, and how he wrote all these things, and how he stood up, you know. And, uh, you’ve got all these different German theologians that came out of there in the 17, 1800s, and, like, you know, a century or two later, Germany gave us Hitler. And the world right now. But we still read their books.
And so, I think there’s some sense in which, if we had a true sense of urgency, it’s like where – where did Europe and these countries that they say we have to study, if we’re going to study them, let’s study them critically to say, “Where did they go off track?” That needs to be our sense of urgency. Because we’re on the same road that they were on, and that means that we are going to end up in the same place that we were, and that is – we don’t have a Christian nation, but we’re going to have a far more unchristian nation than we dreamed possible. I think from following that same line of thinking and reasoning.
Brandi: Well, and that feels inevitable when a sense of urgency makes our theology—or, maybe not our theology, but our practical theology, the thing that we live out—mitigate sin, pay the bills, convert, and get more people.
Sean: Yup.
Brandi: Because that’s kinda – that’s what – to me, that’s what it ends up boiling down to. And we might have, like, these glimpses of life transformation, and that’s great! I’m not going to shit on people’s lives being transformed.
Sean: Yeah.
Brandi: But I am very suspicious of a type of spirituality that produces all of the things that you’re talking about. And – and I think that what we’re seeing right now in our country – I ain’t even gonna say “our country.” I think what we’re seeing right now in the United States, because this ain’t never been our country. [Brandi laughs]
Sean: I’m from Wakanda. [Brandi and Sean laugh]
Brandi: What I’m seeing in the U.S. right now is the overflow of ministry that was born out of a sense of urgency.
Sean: Yep.
Brandi: When I think about Billy Graham revivals and the, quote unquote, revival movements of, really, the 60s through the mid-80s, it was all rallies and these giant events where you get a ton of people into a room, you create an emotional experience—
Sean: Altar calls.
Brandi: —in a couple of hours, you do an altar call, you count the numbers, and then all of those people consider themselves Christian. But the call that you’re doing isn’t necessarily just a call to follow Jesus; it’s a call to follow Jesus into whiteness. And if you don’t do that and you sin in the wrong way or you do the wrong things, then you’re no longer Christian.
And I think that Donald Trump, in my opinion, is a direct result – Donald Trump being elected by white evangelicals is a direct result of this sense of urgency that converts but doesn’t disciple, that calls people in but doesn’t do anything to keep them in, that exploits people like capitalism exploits everything, and then throws them out the door and then calls them unfaithful.
And so it sounds like what we’re saying – so a sense of urgency isn’t great. [Brandi laughs]. It hasn’t done a lot of good for us. It seems like it has sacrificed creativity for the sake of efficiency. That I think one of the things that I hear in the subtext of a lot of what we’re saying is that it ejects people who don’t fit into the models of leadership or strategy that we want to embody. It doesn’t create any space to do anything that doesn’t feel like it’s a part of the ultimate goal, and it makes everything that’s justice-related an elective side project rather than the center of what God is up to in the world.
And I just feel like we lose so much in that, and it just feels like we’re reliving Manifest Destiny in our churches over and over and over and over again, assuming that, like, God, glory, and gold are going to be the things that we get that will be the demonstration of our faithfulness.
And so, as we close up, what is the other way? Is there another way that isn’t just the sense of urgency?
Sean: I – I think that there is. I think that there is a sense of urgency, but I think it’s a sense of urgency that’s not rooted in whiteness. Like, I think when we first even started the conversation, you kinda sent me the notes of, “Hey, here’s what we’re going to talk about,” and it’s like the sense of urgency – I’ve been on this quest the last two years to decolonize my mind. And so I try to not default or to think immediately about white spaces or white evangelicalism or whiteness in any capacity.
I’m trying to get back to the time where I was before InterVarsity, right, that when John Piper wrote something racist or sexist, I didn’t know about it. [Brandi and Sean laugh] You know? And so you come to InterVarsity and he’s like – he writes something like, abysmally, just close-minded on racism, or just something that’s very misogynistic, and it’s like, “Oh, I can’t believe Piper’s having a discussion about this, he wrote a book.” And I’m just like, “I’m not gonna read it on here.” So I’m trying to get back there.
So I think a sense of urgency, again, you know John Lewis, um, just passed away, and I remember there’s a – there’s a picture of him and a quote – his quotes behind him, and he said, “If not us, then who? And if not now, then when?” And, um, Dr. King’s, “Now is the time,” or “Why we can’t wait.”
Right, like, you have these voices from the margins that say, “No, there is a sense of urgency. People are dying.” People are dying because of white supremacy, they’re dying because of their own sin issues, they’re committing suicide. I think we just had, um, Tamar Braxton, right, she just got rushed to the hospital a couple of days ago. This woman, she’s a beautiful woman, she is highly successful, she is in a wealthy family—what in the world is going on in her own internal world, her own self-worth that would say that the end result – or her own mental state, that says that the best option she has right now is to take her own life? What does the gospel have to say about that? Where is the church in the midst of those things?
Because she is not alone. We have seen an increase, I think, in the realities of, um, suicides taking place. The #MeToo movement is real. Like, the men are being called to account. We know patriarchy is real, and every place where there is patriarchy, women are oppressed in frightening numbers, including sexual assault. Um, and you had this monster in Jeffrey Epstein that went unchecked. Everybody knew about it for decades. There’s another Jeffrey Epstein right now. There’s another one right now. There’s multiple of them right now, on the earth, probably in this country and in different parts of the world, and we are not dealing with those issues.
And so I think there’s some sense of actual urgency that’s coming, but it’s not coming from white spaces. And I think what’s happening is we have these two competing or concurring waves, and they’re brushing up against each other. You have this urgency of whiteness and intellectualism, like you’ve been talking about – like we’ve been talking about this entire time, and then you have this urgency from the margins right, from Black people and from brown people, and from women, and from the LGBTQIA community, right. They’re saying, like, “No, there’s – we live in two different Americas.”
And the only urgency that I’m going to respond to with a sense of my time and my life and my energy and my mental focus, it’s around bringing justice to everybody else that white people have experienced overwhelmingly and have denied to everyone else.
And so I think the other way is – we have to decolonize our minds and we have to do what we have been asking white people to do. And that is sit up under authors of color, and especially women, women of color, authors of color. And I always start with indigenous people, because I’m like, “Everybody shut up. [Sean laughs] Indigenous peoples, they have diplomatic immunity. Like, if they are in the room, they are the captains. You sit down and shut up; Black rage is secondary to them.”
Brandi: Amen.
Sean: Like, we’re standing on their land, like, you know, so, let’s get that out of the way. I think we’ve got to be able to humble ourselves and listen to the voices at the margins, because as we’ve seen throughout history, from Africa and all the countries that exist in the motherland, and here as well, too, the Black community, the Black diaspora is the prophetic voice of the world. We’ve got to recognize, um, there are some things that are equally urgent and important, and it’s not coming out of white spaces. And so I think we’ve got to pull the ship over, humble ourselves, and listen to the ancestors and these voices from the margins.
Brandi: Yes.
Sean: Because they remind us that we’re not crazy.
Brandi: Yes.
Sean: We live in a world where men are sexually assaulting women; we live in a world where people are dying every day, and we’ve got a global pandemic that has not stopped. Those are urgent and important things that are worthy of our best mental energies and focuses. And—I’m not gonna say if—we know that white evangelicalism is refusing to acknowledge and address those things. Like, I’ve been trying the last two years – stop listening to them fools. Um, like I – like I – uh, this is where everybody’s gonna, like, laugh at me for days – I don’t know who Louie Giglio is. I – I just—
Brandi: Bless you.
Sean: —I have no idea who that man is. Like, I don’t – I ain’t never – I don’t know if his voice is high-pitched, I don’t know if it’s low, I don’t – I don’t know if he sings, preaches, whatever. I know nothing about this man. I didn’t even see the interview with him and – and Lecrae and old dude from Chick-Fil-A. I didn’t watch it. I woke up in my decolonized space. You didn’t, but just about every other person of color I know who navigates white spaces was like, “I cannot believe Louie Giglio would say these things. He called white privilege a white blessing, and the blessing of slavery, and blah blah blah blah blah.” And I was just – I wrote that Facebook post. I was like, “Y’all, stop being mad at this man. Or stop being surprised.” And I think that’s the gift that we give to ourselves. Stop – stop being surprised at the false narrative of urgency that is coming out of whiteness right now. We have got to recognize that and call a spade by what it is.
Brandi: Yes. Yes.
Sean: Uh, when someone shows you who they really are, you believe them.
Brandi: Believe them.
Sean: And – and I think it’s time that we believed white evangelicals for their value, the contributions that they give to the kingdom, but then also the foolishness that they’ve tried to inject in all of us and just say, “You can keep it. You can keep moving.” You know?
Brandi: Yes. Yeah, and I think circling back to the very beginning of our conversation, where you were talking about the difference between kairos and chronos time, it feels like we have to recognize and learn to recognize kairos time. That, in scripture, kairos time is almost always moments where people are being abysmally oppressed, and God is saying, “It is over. Something is happening and my people need to change.”
And I think part of my unlearning of this sense of urgency is unlearning the sense that I grew up with in white spaces that all time is kairos time. That any time we feel just a little prick in our heart for somebody across the world, or whatever, that that’s somehow kairos time. That kairos time is not an individualistic thing; it is a communal effort towards the good of the world, and, like, I don’t need someone – I don’t need, like, the Gails of the world telling me that it’s chronos time because she feels sad in her heart because someone’s houseless. Like, we need to deal with houselessness. Like, you know, we need to do it when it’s time.
It sounds like what you’re asking us to do, in some ways, is to know the difference between kairos and chronos time, and to not waste our time listening to white evangelicalism lie to itself over and over again and lie to us over and over again about who it is and who they are. Because if Donald Trump has taught us anything, it’s that white evangelical Christianity has no problem publicly being exactly who they are.
Sean: Exactly.
Brandi: And so maybe the goal is let’s believe them.
Sean: Yeah. And be free in Jesus name. Like, call it a day. I am not – I don’t lose sleep over it anymore. I’m like, “You have shown us who you are and what you value.” Like, I don’t – there’s – their witness is compromised, like, for the rest of my life. Without repentance. Like, there’s nothing that I think someone can say in that capacity.
There’s – I remember there’s this um – there’s this video of this drunk white family on Facebook—this is probably like six months after he got elected—and there’s a white lady. And the caption’s like, “My atheist aunt is like taking the family to task.” And she’s – she’s drunk, you can look at it and tell, like, her speech is slurred like the whole time, but she says, um, “Y’all are supposed to be Christians. Y’all been telling me to follow Jesus for years. And you voted for somebody who was endorsed by a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. You have to reconcile that for the rest of your life. I don’t, because I didn’t vote for him.”
And I’m like, yeah, yeah, that’s the rocks crying out. That’s the margins crying out, saying, “You have showed us who you are. And now we believe you. And now we know we have to drink from a different well, even if we have to dig it ourselves, there is a better way to live. We have read the books, we’ve gone to the conferences, we’ve listened to the sermons, and we have been ignored. Our parents were ignored, our grandparents were ignored, our ancestors were, and we will be ignored no longer. If we have to do it ourselves, we will.”
And that’s the – it’s a road that is not easily trodden. I’m – it’s – it’s the narrow gate, right? I mean, it’s the narrow path. But, um, we don’t have a choice. We’re not gonna survive, I think, in the 21st century if we don’t do it. We have got to do our own due diligence, and I think John the Baptist preached in the wilderness, and so we’ve got to be willing to leave the city and get away from everything and actually hear from the Lord, because I don’t know what’s going on, but this – this ain’t the kingdom.
Brandi: This is not it.
Sean: This is not the promised land. [Sean laughs]
Brandi: This is not it. Well Sean, I feel like we’ve probably sufficiently overwhelmed the vast majority of people in our world with uh… [Brandi and Sean laugh] But I – I think that we’ve given people a lot to think about. But Sean, I’ve so appreciated having you on today. Is there anything you want to plug? Where can people find ya on, you know, the internet, since we ain’t trying to find nobody in real life right now?
Sean: I know, right?
Brandi: Or, not real life, physical life.
Sean: You know.
Brandi: The life we live is real.
Sean: Yeah, just nobody breathe on you, ’cause covid is real. Um, I’m on Twitter, seanisfearless, s-e-a-n is fearless, and then, like I said, August 3rd I will join the Be the Bridge team, I will become their Director of Training and Strategy. So you can go to bethebridge.com and I probably will have a photo and a bio up there pretty soon, so you’ll definitely be able to find me and check me out on those spaces. So.
Brandi: Awesome.
Sean: Yeah.
Brandi: Thank you so much, Sean. Appreciate having you on.
Sean: Brandi. A joy and a privilege. I’m always grateful to listen with and learn from you, my friend.
Brandi: It is the same. It is a great honor.
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Brandi: Thanks for joining for another episode of Reclaiming My Theology. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, rate, and review. And if you like what you hear and want to contribute to making it happen, you can join us on Patreon. Just $5 a month gets you extra content, and there are other perks at different levels, too, but, you know, do whatever you want. I just appreciate you all believing in this project as much as I enjoy making it. So, with that, let’s do what we always do, and as we learn, try to do a little bit better together.