Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: 

Welcome to The Unfinished Church. I’m LaTrelle Miller Easterling. 

Bishop Mike McKee: 

I’m Mike McKee. 

Bishop Gregory Palmer: 

And I’m Gregory Palmer. Thank you for joining us for The Unfinished Church. The Unfinished Church is a place for brave conversations, to build a world in which racial prejudice has no power. God is not finished with us.  

As I reflect on our conversation with Willie Jennings, I’m struck by this notion of cultural humility, and the idea that we’re all in one sense living in somebody else’s house. And what does that do to help us to act more humbly, and may I say generously, toward those who are around us, thinking about not only what we have to give and making sure our story is known and our tune is heard, but understanding that other folks have a story and they’re singing a song and that what makes the world hum, as it were, and function in a more healthy way, is that somehow or another that’s brought into a different kind of harmony. 

So this cultural humility thing is something that I think we’re always working on. The other thing I walked away from Dr. Jennings’ presentation was around this notion of hope as a discipline, hope as a discipline, not as some, let me say pie in the sky, but as a discipline that I practice on an ongoing basis. 

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: 

I was right there with you because that phrase has stuck with me. And so often when we think about the church and even going on to perfection, there’s some aspects of it that I think we relegate to an eschatological phenomenon. But hope being a discipline is real. We rise every day if we embrace it as such, ready to repent, ready to forgive, and ready to reconcile. And that will help us to really be able to embody heaven on earth. The other thing that struck me so much with Dr. Jennings is yes, this notion of lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, and that if we open our life with openness, we also set a great stage for being able to talk across the aisle, across cultures, across genders, across all of these human demarcations of difference. 

Bishop Mike McKee: 

I’m glad you said that, Bishop Easterling, because I have also been thinking about lifelong learning, that phrase, which has been used a lot in the last several years. But those of us who are in the business of preaching and teaching all the time, think that we probably don’t have anything else to learn, or we may function that way. And so this continual journey on learning more and more and more has to do with more than just what we’re particularly dealing with at a given time, but this whole breadth of knowledge that could be very important in terms of our openness to other people and about what they’re passionate about, how they are culturally formed. And it is a way then that we can realize there’s some ways in which we can actually use that lifelong learning from other people to begin to frame an idea or a notion of what a person really is like, or who this person is, and understand their unique giftedness they bring to any conversation. 

Bishop Gregory Palmer: 

So friends, hang on to your seats, because our next guest is likely to make you squirm just a little bit. Willie James Jennings is a scholar, author, lecturer, a master teacher, and someone who is wise beyond his years, a pastor, a friend, a lover of jazz. Join us as we listen and learn with Dr. Willie Jennings. 

Dr. Willie James Jennings: 

I am so glad to be here with you, Bishop, and the other esteemed bishops for this wonderful conversation. 

Bishop Gregory Palmer: 

So I want to begin on this wise, what does authentic cultural humility mean to you and how does it appear differently depending on one’s racial slash cultural identity? 

Dr. Willie James Jennings: 

Well, Bishop, thank you first of all for inviting me to this conversation. And that is such a crucial question. For me, what cultural humility means can be summed by really one crucial word, and that is learner, to be a learner, and to approach one’s life with the openness of being a learner. And this of course has been one of the missing elements, the missing enzyme, if you will, of so much of Christianity in the west and all the various cultures that have formed inside that Christianity of the west. 

What that means is that the kind of humility that should have been a part of what it means to become a Christian, has been missing from so many walks of faith for so many peoples. So that in point of fact, the Christianity that so many of us have inherited, begins with us imagining ourselves as teachers to the world, instructors of all flesh. And then later on, somewhere down the line, maybe a bit of a learner. And so cultural humility has to begin with not only understanding ourselves as learners, but rethinking what it means to understand the faith inside the ongoing legacy, inside the ongoing journey of someone learning. 

Bishop Gregory Palmer: 

Wow. Wow. Thank you. In the Hebrew Bible, and of course in the Bible of the Hebrew and Christian tradition together that we sometimes call the Holy Bible, Route 66, et cetera, in Micah 6 and 8, there is the invitation and the call for the fully formed person in God to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with one’s God. What does it look like from your perspective to put legs under that and how if more people were living in that way, formed by that notion of Micah 6 and 8, how might the world be different? 

Dr. Willie James Jennings: 

Well that’s a fabulous question, Bishop, and I think it begins for us as Christians by situating ourselves in relationship to that story. What I mean by that, is that is a Jewish story. It’s the story deeply inside of Israel, Micah speaking to God’s people, Israel; and we, those of us who are Gentile, those of us not born within the Jewish community, are those listening in on this instruction. And then for us to take it as an instruction to ourselves already positions us differently as we live our life of faith. The walking humbly, the doing justice is first something that we receive as those who’ve been brought into a story that was not ours. That there was a humility that allowed us to even enter into this story. 

That is, there were those who were followers of this God of Israel, that when this God became embodied and said, I am now including Gentiles, they humbly accepted that fact. And when that same God said, love them, those who have been your enemies, do justice unto them, show mercy unto them, even though they had not showed you mercy. They did that. And so as Christians, we echo, we enter into a echo of those who did precisely that in making real the doorway for our entrance into faith. So what that means for us, is that the very shape of our Christian life ought to be characterized by those three elements you name so beautifully. 

So it begins with a recognition that we have entered into the story of another people, a story that was not ours, which requires an ongoing humility. If I’m eating dinner at a table not set for me, but I have been invited to it, then I would be foolish to start to act as though that this is my table. If I am now enjoying recipes for beautiful food that I did not create, it would be the height of hubris for me to say, I created this. This is my recipe. 

And if I have been prayed over by others and received that blessing, as we began to eat that meal, it would be the height of arrogance for me to think that I was the one hosting the dinner. So it begins, the humility, begins there. And so what flows from that kind of humility? A sense of mercy, a sense of justice that I have what I don’t deserve and no one, no one should be treated as though they don’t deserve what they have, because I know I didn’t deserve what I had. 

Bishop Gregory Palmer: 

It sounds like also bubbling up in there is this whole notion of what does it mean to live with gratitude? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the inheritances that we’ve all received from … We all are eating from trees we didn’t plant and drinking from wells we didn’t dig. Thank you for walking us down that.  

So in your writings and along the line here, Bishops Easterling and McKee are going to leap in with some questions of their own, but let me put this one out to you. In your writings, and we all reframe it through our own lenses, but one of the things that you have written about explicitly and implicitly is this notion of at some point, the goal of being American was to become white. Whiteness got centered in a way as it was normative and therefore, it was good. Therefore, everything else was certainly not as good, if not indeed evil and bad. And some of us have lived that narrative of what that’s like and internalized it in tragic ways. So I want to ask you what is required of Christian leaders, if we are in our work and ministry, to stop promoting or centering whiteness, and why is that critical for all disciples of Jesus Christ? 

Dr. Willie James Jennings: 

Bishop, this is a really important question you’re asking me, and this is why I’ve begun some of my comments by again reminding the listeners of the importance of how we enter the story. We enter the Christian story, recognizing that this was not our story. We entered from the margins. We were not at the center, but we were brought in by grace. The tragic history of Christianity, especially moving into the 14th and 15th centuries, is that Christians began to imagine that from the very beginning we were at the center, that we replaced Israel as God’s people. And we moved to the very center of God’s concern, God’s attention and most importantly, God’s plan for the salvation of the world, that we were at the very center of it. Now here’s what most people need to understand. Historically, that sick sense of centeredness, let’s call it that, that sick sense of centeredness became the ground on which whiteness comes to be. 

Whiteness is that sick sense of centeredness that the whole world revolves around the way I see the true, the good, the beautiful, the noble, and I have been charged by God to bring the entire world to maturity. God is counting on me to do this. Now, this is the legacy that we as Christians in the West inherited from what’s known as modern colonialism. We inherited this vision of a Christianity centered in the West, executed by those who we would call Europeans, charged with the task of bringing the whole world to maturity. 

That’s what’s at the very center of whiteness. So let’s give a quick definition of whiteness for your listeners so that they won’t be confused by this. Whiteness is not phenotype. Whiteness is not appearance. Whiteness is not culture, and whiteness is not even a part of creation. Whiteness is a way of seeing the world and a way of being in the world at the same time. 

Whiteness is a way of imagining though how the world should be, organizing the world, how the world should be shaped. And whiteness is having the power to realize that organization. And one other little element-whiteness is also a way of feeling comfort, safety, and normalcy, based on that reality, based on a world organized in the way I think it should be organized. 

So whiteness is a framing of life and a framing of existence that starts with a sick sense of centeredness. But here’s the problem for us. It is all rooted deeply in a Christian mistake. And what is that Christian mistake? That we replaced Israel as God’s people, and God does everything only, exclusively, through the Christian. Therefore, historically, the European started to imagine himself, and primarily we’re talking about men, but women as well, imagined himself as the very center of what God is doing. 

So the first thing that we have to do as Christian leaders, the very first thing Bishop, is give people the Christian story that many people have never gotten a memo that they were Gentiles brought into the faith, brought into another people’s story. That is to say, many Christians have never gotten a memo that’s in Ephesians two. Remember you Gentiles, you were outside. You were without God and without hope in the world, but through Christ you were brought in. And so many people have been taught to read the Bible, think their faith as though they were always the point, which means this humility you asked me about earlier, this humility that is so crucial to being a Christian, is missing from so many Christians. Because they don’t understand what it means to come from the margins. 

The great woman Catholic theologian, M. Shawn Copeland, talks about a thinking margin, what it means to be a thinking margin. There she’s thinking primarily, talking primarily about African American women and their important work as Christian women, their important work in thinking the faith from the margins. But what she’s also pointing to is the reality of Christianity itself, that we are thinking margins. We come in from the margins, so we know what it’s like to be at the margins, but to be brought in by grace. And so we carry that humility. So the first thing that has to happen is that Christians have to be introduced to their story. And so many have never been introduced to their own story of a people formed to join another people. That’s the beginning. 

Bishop Gregory Palmer: 

And you do this so masterfully in multiple places. But remind us, you remind us of this in what I refer to as your Magnum Opus, The Christian Imagination, and of our amnesia and our misreading. And it sounds and feels in my head and heart like what you’ve been describing is what became the fertile soil for white supremacy, for, let me say, American exceptionalism. Am I off base here, or? 

Dr. Willie James Jennings: 

It’s moving right in that direction, because this vision of centeredness is a distortion of what’s present in scripture. So when we read scripture, start to finish, we read the story of God’s involvement with God’s own people. Israel. We read that involvement intensifying with the life of Jesus and Jesus’ ministry. And so the story of the world, and in fact, the story of the universe, opens out through Israel. So what happens is when Israel’s pulled out, you drop something else in there. And once you drop something else in there, if you try to take that out, for so many people, the whole thing falls apart. So for so many people, whiteness and their Christianity, whiteness and a certain kind of evangelical vision, are so intertwined that they cannot imagine the one without the other. And because whiteness was presented in this way, it was presented as always positive. 

And so when somebody like me comes along and starts to say things like this, for some people, this sounds like hate speech. They will be upset with you, because what you’re saying sounds like hate speech. Why do you hate white people so much? And it’s because they have never seen a distinction between that way of being in the world and who they actually are. Now for all people of color, for the most part, all of us have gone through some process of seeing the difference between the vision of what we are, of who we are, and who we actually are. All of us have gone through that important and painful process of pushing away the derogatory vision of being Black or being Asian or being Filipino or being Hispanic or Latinx or Native American. We’ve pushed away the negative vision, pulled out from it the little slivers of truth that speak to who we are. 

And we’ve tried to weave together a vision of who we truly are apart from that image, because that image has brought so much hell and destruction to us. And for most of us, we’ve done it inside of our Christianity. Our Christian faith has helped us do that, helped us do that sifting and pulling. But whiteness has been always presented as positive. And so people have used their Christianity to weave it even more tightly onto themselves. Why would I want to separate myself from something that’s always positive? That always centers me at the very heart of everything good and positive, everything that God wants? So for some people, the very idea of trying to see who they are apart from whiteness, makes no sense. They’re like, what are you talking about? I don’t understand what you’ve been saying, Dr. Jennings. And the reason it’s so challenging is because it feels so painful. 

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: 

Now there you’ve touched on something, Dr. Jennings, something that is part of why I think so many won’t address it is because of how painful it is. But as I hear you talk, you know, Bonhoeffer is synonymous with cheap grace. Now, when I think of Dr. Willie Jennings, I think about cheap Christianity. And I think that for so long is what we’ve been offering, peddling in the public square. 

So how do we encourage pastors, Christian leaders, to engage this kind of painful process? And some might even say that to ask folks to engage in this or to even promote it is the very antithesis of humility, because they’ll say, well, isn’t it pretty heady for you to say that we have to go back to the beginning and reimagine our understanding of Christianity. But tell us what we risk if we don’t live into this pain, if we’re not willing to do this work, what are we perpetuating by allowing this narrative to continue? 

Dr. Willie James Jennings: 

Bishop, that’s a wonderful, wonderful question. And I tell you, at the heart of it is precisely the warning that your question is putting on the table for us. And that is, if we as Christians in the West, refuse to face the important work of extracting our Christianity from whiteness, then what will happen is that our witness, our witness will suffer profoundly such that people will say back to us, you’re right. There is no difference between your Christianity and whiteness. And so therefore, as far as I’m concerned, your Christianity is already at an end. It has no future for the world I want to live in. 

And so for many people right now, especially young people in their twenties and early thirties, the jury is out, friends. The jury is out whether Christianity is a good idea, set of ideas, or a good way of living. The jury is out. And it has not returned yet. And I tell you right now, it doesn’t look good. And it’s because so many people are refusing this work. Now what would be required? And you mentioned Bonhoeffer and the German Christians. And we must always take a lesson from that, the German Christians, what was so damnable about the behavior. It’s not what they did- 

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: 

Indeed. 

Dr. Willie James Jennings: 

It’s what they didn’t do. What they refused to do that made it so horrible. It’s not what they did. It’s what they refused to do. They saw the concentration camps. We now know that so many of the Jews who were in concentration camps were released into the communities to go do yard work and housework. So they saw what was going on, and they did nothing. And in like manner, what we have to understand is that this is a straightforward step. What is the step? 

For so many Christians who identify as white to join hands, join arms with their BIPOC sisters and brothers, who every day, every day are working to extract the racial horror from who they are, trying to claim who they are, apart from the racial, and who could be exquisite teachers, wonderful collaborators, great partners in helping them do this work, not doing it for them, not doing it for them, but working beside and watching and saying, how can I follow you just as you are renouncing the negative images of blackness and of black people, the negative stereotypes of Asian people, the negative stereotypes of indigenous peoples, I too will renounce the abundant positive, overly aggressive centered visions of whiteness. 

I will renounce that, I will step away from that. I will lock hands with you. I will enter fully into your ways of life so that I might know my own life, free from that foolishness. Yes. But now obviously, we have to remember, this is a crucial step. There’s that famous passage in Hebrews, I think is always important for us to remember, where it says that Moses, when he came of age and knew who he was, he rejected the ways of Egypt and followed the ways of Israel. And the passage says, and in this way, followed the Christ. In this way followed the Christ. But so crucial I want to say that again, when he realized who he was- 

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: 

Who he was. 

Dr. Willie James Jennings: 

That’s when he said, no, I’m going here. I’m not going there. And in that way, followed the Christ. 

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: 

Amen. 

Bishop Mike McKee: 

So, Dr. Jennings, I really appreciate what you’ve been offering us today. I want to circle back on the sins of omission. It is so easy for all of us to condemn the sense of commission, because they’re right there in front of us. And to be honest, it just would not be culturally cool to do anything but. You would strike at that. But the most dangerous thing, I know you alluded to it, are these sins of omission, that we just sit idly by, or we do not pay enough attention to things. So give us a word, I think a prophetic word for the church that many of our clergy probably should be saying, or find a way to say in their own way to the church about our future. 

Dr. Willie James Jennings: 

And Bishop, thank you so much. That’s a wonderful question for me to be thinking about with you all about this. What I always say to pastors is that, especially if you’re in this country, the place you live, the shape of the place you live, is never shaped by accident. For so many people, the reason that they are inside sins of omission is because the very built environment, the neighborhood, the shape of their community, constitutes the sin of omission. It shields them. It protects them. It hides them. It creates ignorance for them in terms of what’s going on around them, beyond their immediate neighborhood, beyond the 10 minutes from the mall or the 15 minutes from downtown. It shields them from a world, a racial world that is full of the pain and suffering of their community. And so, as I always say to pastors, do a geographic reality check of your church and your community. 

Where is your church? Where is your church located? Where are the communities of color located in relationship to your church? Where are your people located? Where are the communities of color in relationship to where your people are located? Where are the resources? Where’s the stores? How are goods and services flowing in and out of the communities around your church and around where your people live? 

And if you do that kind of geographic analysis, that kind of geographic check, that kind of geographic work, what you’ll see are the ways in which race continues to be nurtured. And the racial antagonisms of this country continue to be nurtured by the very shape of the communities that our churches are in and that where we live. And so what has to happen? Pastors have to invite their churches into deep discernment and prayer, praying one crucial question. Lord, who should I be? 

Who should we be in this place? And that place means three things. Where this church is, who should we be in this place? And then individually, who should I be in the place where I live? Who should I be? And then there’s a third element to that. If I’m learning that the very place I am in is contrary to the discipleship I claim to be living, then I have to discern what is the spirit of God saying to me about where I should be? Remember, in the book of Acts, my dear brothers and sister, remember in the book of Acts, the sign of the spirits coming is almost everybody in the book of Acts is doing something they don’t want to do. 

And in most cases, they’re being asked to go someplace that they would prefer not to go. And so we have to do that work because race and place in the West are intricately woven together. And so the omission that we see, it’s not simply in people’s heads and hearts, because if we think about omission, simply in people not wanting to do right, most folks would react very quickly and say, well, I want to do right. I try to treat everybody I meet kind. I speak kind. That’s not where we want to have people focus their attention. Focus their attention, where do you live? Where’s your neighborhood? Where’s the church at? What are you doing? Who do you drive by? Who do you ignore as you’re driving? Where is your attention being turned by the very shape of your living? That’s where the omission starts to show itself most profoundly. 

Bishop Gregory Palmer: 

Well, listen, we are needing to get ready to go, and it feels like we are just warming up. And I know it’s frustrating to all of us, but you have fed us and given us a rich conversation. One question we ask of all of our guests in some way, shape or form, in this work of dismantling racism and participating in the power of the Holy Spirit in building God’s beloved community, how do you, Dr. Willie Jennings, care for your soul? 

Dr. Willie James Jennings: 

You know, these days, the most important thing I do is that I sit and talk with other sisters and brothers and we laugh together and we enjoy the small things. And we remind each other that we are in a great work of hope. And as I like to say, Bishop, hope is not a sentiment. It’s a mistake to ever understand hope as a sentiment. And it’s even greater mistake to understand hope as a feeling. As I like to say, hope is a discipline. And so I get with sisters and brothers to discipline myself in hope. We are commanded in scripture to hope, we aren’t invited. Would you like to hope? No, hope, hope in God, and it’s a discipline to live in that hope. And so I feed my soul by being with folks who understand that we are in this shared work of the practice of hope, disciplining ourself in hope. 

Bishop Gregory Palmer: 

Wow. What a fabulous way to end. And thank you. Thank you.  

Friends, thank you for joining us. We pray our time together has been helpful to you and we pray God’s blessings on your continued work. 

Bishop LaTrelle Easterling: 

Episodes are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Bishop Mike McKee: 

Connect with us and find related resources on our website, theunfinishedchurch.org. The Unfinished Church, conversations that transform.