Dear Discipleship-first Friends,
We are witnessing what feels like a civil war in North America. This low-grade conflict is not being fought with bullets and guns, and the impact is not counted by the number of wounded and the casualties on the battlefield.
It is a battle fought with ideas, and those ideas form worldviews.
A worldview is a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world. Our worldview dictates how we think, feel, and act.
Jesus Christ teaches us a specific worldview, and our job as disciple makers is to disciple people into Jesus’ worldview. We are called to immerse people into Jesus’ way of thinking, believing, feeling, and acting. Jesus’ worldview guides us through money, marriage, hatred, anger, lust, and thousands of other topics.
But what is Jesus’ worldview on race?
That is a big topic today, with hundreds of thousands of publications—books, blogs, and videos—that come on the heels hundreds of years of debate about race in the United States alone. Can we just simplify things? you might think. Can we avoid all these words and pages? Can we find specific Scriptures and succinct guidance for disciples, disciple makers, and churches?
We need clear thinking.
Everyday disciples need help.
Disciple makers need to be able to share with others clear passages and succinct summaries of Jesus’ worldview.
We’ll call our target audience “Soccer-mom Sally” and “Truckdriver Ted.” Soccer-mom Sally and Truckdriver Ted need brevity and a clear perspective for conversations with the kids in the car and the mechanics in the coffee or lunch room. What would you tell them? What does the Bible say? What do you believe and feel? What should you do?
Be able to share it in ten minutes or less.
Again, make it short. Which passages in the Bible are guiding you? How do the passages influence your beliefs on race? And what are you doing to live out the way of Jesus in matters of race?
To help us with this, we have asked four different disciple makers to share their answers in four posts we are going to share during July.
We think a focus on specific scriptures and a succinct summary of Jesus’ worldview on these matters is the conversation needed in our country today.
So, we are asking these leaders to jump in and help us.
Maybe this is an exercise that you can work on too—what three passages would you use and what brief things would you personally say about race if you were writing these blogs?
Watch for our first post to come out soon.
For King Jesus,
Bobby Harrington, Point Leader, Discipleship.org