November is Lisa Sharon Harper month at The Community Table. We’ll spend more time with Brian McLaren in December, in advance of a live conversation I’ll be having with him shortly after the new year, but I just completed my second course with Freedom Road, Lisa Sharon Harper’s consulting org, and themes of identity, lineage, and ancestry are top of mind and heart. Especially in light of my film, True Believer, now being widely available (get your tickets here!), I’d like to introduce you more deeply to one of my favorite people and one of the most profound wisdom holders of our time. If you’d like to see Lisa and I in action together, please check out this interview we did about the film last year.

I met Lisa in 2018 and interviewed and filmed with her multiple times over the course of several months. Lisa opened up my world beyond the idea of deconstruction to the work of decolonization. Lisa challenged me to see beyond my own wounding from the church to also consider the harms done by me, simply by existing in a white body within a toxic system of faith. The harms done to people of color within the white evangelical subculture are just now getting properly acknowledged, and whether we’ve left the church or still reside in it, as white people in relationship to people of color, I believe we have a responsibility to examine the roots of the supremacy we inherited and were taught within white evangelicalism. Some of the voices I’m listening to in addition to Lisa’s are Jemar Tisby, PhD, Malynda Hale, and Tori Williams Douglass.

If you pay close attention while viewing True Believer, you’ll receive an invitation from Lisa to begin doing this work as well. About halfway through Lisa shares that we, “Have a responsibility to examine the stories we’ve been told about who we are and how we got here.” I took that urging to heart, and even though I no longer view my faith or the Bible as I did upon that meeting, I hope you will, too. Here’s part one of my time with Lisa Sharon Harper that didn’t make it into the film. This is an excerpt from a sermon she gave in Costa Mesa, CA, on April 29, 2019:

“A few years back, I think it was about 16 years ago, I took a journey, I took a pilgrimage. And this pilgrimage literally changed my life. I was working with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, I don’t know if anybody here has been a part of those fellowships. I was working with them as their director of racial reconciliation here in Los Angeles, actually. And I was invited by the national team to be on the advisory board, and then also, to help put together something called the pilgrimage for reconciliation. And this pilgrimage of reconciliation was meant to help us to figure out, how does this racial reconciliation stuff work? How does it work?

We did the pilgrimage and it took us across 10 states. The first was the northern south and then, the deep south. In the northern south, we retraced the Cherokee Trail of Tears. In the deep south, we retraced the African experience in America from slavery to civil rights. And the whole time we’re doing this, we were asking a critical question, what does the gospel have to say to this? That’s the question. What does the good news of Jesus Christ have to say about this? Now the thing is that in my own family, my family literally lived both of these histories. According to oral tradition in our family, we have family members who were on the trail of tears. And then, according to DNA evidence, census data, and family story, our family was most likely sold into slavery in every state in the south. Every state. Somebody say, family separation. Hello, somebody, right?

So I get to the end of this journey and I am rocked by this question, if I were to go up to my third great, great, grandmother, Leah Ballard, and I were to ask Leah or go knocking on her door and say, “Great, great, great grand mum, Leah, I have good news for you.” And I was to give her my understanding of the good news of Jesus Christ as it was then, which was, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, but you are sinful and therefore, separated from God. But Jesus died to pay the penalty for your sin. So all you need to do is to pray this little prayer at the back of the gold booklet and you get to go to heaven.” And I asked myself the question that rocked me, which was, would Leah receive this as good news? Leah who had 17 children, because she was most likely a breeder. It was her job that she did not get paid for, to breed money for her master. Would that news cause Leah to jump and shout, hallelujah? And the thing that rocked me was, when I was really just gut level honest, I knew that the answer was no. And the thing is, as an evangelical, my understanding of the gospel is the center of my world.

So, if my understanding of the good news of Jesus would not be received as good news by my own family, then what was it? You know what I mean? It’s kind of like, the way that I’ve come to put it is, if the good news of brown, colonized, indigenous Jesus is not good news to brown, colonized indigenous people, then maybe it’s not Jesus’ good news.”

Come back next week to receive more of Lisa’s sermon. And if you want to go deeper into her work, I highly recommend reading her books, The Very Good Gospel and Fortune.

In Solidarity,

Kristen

If you’d like to learn more about my work, please follow my documentary, True Believer, on Instagram and Facebook, and watch it now!