Four pieces of advice for pastors pursuing antiracism
I’ve led and participated in antiracist work in churches. Here are four lessons I’ve learned.
For many years, I was engaged in helping a predominantly white church become more antiracist. That is to say, I have done work with predominantly white congregations to confront racism in themselves, their institutions, and in the world around them. There’s so much to be said about the successes and failures of our project, but recently I was asked to elaborate on antiracist spirituality for a church member’s book and I came away with four takeaways I want to offer.
1. Expect racist microaggressions as an occupational hazard.
If you’re a pastor of color leading a predominantly white group, I think you should expect racist microagressions even from the most well-meaning group. White folks, especially those versed in antiracist literature, want to be antiracist. But perhaps more than that, they don’t want to be called racist. As they navigate their own unconscious biases and their defensiveness, I think pastors of color should expect the occasional, or maybe often, slip-up.
If you are called to minister to white folks as a person of color, I think you should expect to experience racism. It’s part of the job. It’s not something we should settle for; in fact, we should talk about it with trusted leaders and pastoral support committees, as well as friends, mentors, and helpers like therapists and spiritual directors outside of our congregation. But we should not, no matter how equipped we think our congregation is, expect to get off without harm.
Certainly, this is not something we should be required to tolerate. And the fact that we will experience racism as white folks recover from racism may well be a reason for you not to pursue opportunities leading white folks. For some of us, it will be just too painful. But if we feel a call from God to do this work—as I do—I think we should expect microaggressions and have safety and healing plans that follow to address them.
2. Our healing needs to come outside of the church, not within it.
Our pain and healing as pastors of color is not the responsibility of those we serve. In tight-knit communities, such enmeshment might be common or even encouraged, but I think it leads to unhealthy dynamics and can center the pastor and their experience as the church’s focus. Frankly, I learned this the hard way, and too often centered my own pain as my motive for moving a church to be antiracist. I meet myself with compassion, even as I repent of this mistake, because it is entirely understandable to expect our friends and family to want to grow to prevent harm.
And while pastors of color will personally benefit from the antiracist progress of their churches, our healing cannot be incumbent upon our congregation’s growth. One reason it can’t be is that the journey toward antiracism is long and sometimes very slow. It is unreasonable to expect a congregation to grow in antiracism for the health and safety of their pastor. Further, it is unreasonable for a pastor to have to wait for healing as the congregation sorts through all the tensions and difficulty of antiracist growth. Our healing cannot be incumbent upon their progress.
What’s more, we bring scars with us. Those scars and injuries are not just a byproduct of our congregation’s actions. We come with them because of our own lived experiences and are affected by forces outside of our congregation, too. As a result, we need to have practices and methods for our healing that exceed our congregations. This means we need to care for ourselves by both seeking mentorship and help from coaches and therapists, as well as taking time off, resting, and balancing our life outside of our work for the church.
Helpful to this is making sure that our identity and livelihood are not based on our labor as pastors. Seeing our work as a calling is truly wonderful, but forgetting that it’s labor and sacrificing ourselves for our congregation’s antiracist progress is unhealthy and counterproductive. That posture simply doesn’t offer the grace and space needed to lead through antiracism.
3. Get full buy-in before starting
Similar to the last point, antiracism cannot be the pet project of a pastor or a few leaders, and can’t merely be an opt-in option for members. You need full buy-in from a critical mass to get started, hopefully in a genuine process of gathering consensus.
If only members who opt in engage, it can sometimes result in a false sense of consensus (or even progress). Programs or workshops that are opt-in can often gather like-minded progressives to wax philosophically about antiracism in a fashion that sort of pats everyone on the back, but it leaves people who are less inclined to join (and thus more inclined to ignore their unconscious biases) in the dark. The consensus of a small group will likely be met with strong resistance from unsuspecting church members that may be suspicious of “wokeness” and may be caught off guard by the forgone conclusions about antiracism coming from that self-selecting group.
Further, if a particularly passionate and convicted group of leaders is leading the congregation to change, I think they will encounter resistance that is deflating and discouraging. The opportunity for harm may even increase and racist grievances may increase. Inadvertently, well-meaning members may in fact put the most vulnerable in harm's way if there is not full buy-in not just from a leadership team, but from the whole church.
Before beginning, I think the whole church needs to be ready to engage in the often grueling and gut-wrenching process of antiracism. Until that time, I think training leaders in antiracism is a good step, so long as they understand that the progress of the church may lag compared to its leaders. The congregation may eventually follow, but leaders and pastors being trained need to exercise a lot of patience as they lead their congregations.
4. Address interpersonal racism, but major on structural reform
After the racial reckonings that followed George Floyd’s murder, many influencers and thinkers such as Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi focused on interpersonal aspects of racism, addressing the sociology of racism, and too often ignoring structural and material racism.
While it is laudable to make sure that congregations are addressing interpersonal racism, we mustn’t reduce racism to individuals or local communities. Certainly, in many ways, those types of racism are easiest to observe by their victims, but racism is about institutional power more than it is about interpersonal relationships.
As such, our antiracist work needs to address racism within our congregations, but more importantly outside of our congregations and in the world. That means we need to move from merely addressing sociological and anthropological racism and toward structural and material racism. Corporate DEI trainings and organizational audits do not address these forms of racism, but rather, through organized political action that agitates power structures like the state and market (which function by using racism).
Antiracist efforts need to address how free market liberal democracy profits off of racism and address racist structural inequalities. Not only will this expand our sense of what racism is, it will help unburden individuals of their egoist self-reflection, and move them toward decentering themselves and their experiences as the heart of racism in our churches. The United States is racist and the sin of racism is the water we swim in. Addressing it in our churches is essential, but mobilizing our churches toward political action that brings healing and liberation to our neighborhoods, city, country, and world is imperative if you want to be an antiracist body.
In sum, pastors leading antiracism in their churches need to expect to experience racism along the way, need to find their healing outside of their church, they must collect consensus for the action, and then make sure their action exceeds the walls of their congregations and addresses their structural racism in their communities and nation.