Show Notes
In this episode of Nuance, Case is joined by historian Dr. Karen Johnson of Wheaton College to explore how Christian public witness has often taken shape through everyday faithfulness practiced in local communities. Drawing from her book Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice, Dr. Johnson shows how meaningful change has frequently emerged through believers who acted with courage and conviction within their vocations, churches, classrooms, and neighborhoods.
The conversation reframes racial justice as a matter of Christian discipleship formed over time through Scripture, historical memory, and love of neighbor. Dr. Johnson helps listeners see how sin can become embedded in social systems, why attention to history is essential for faithful engagement, and how ordinary Christians have responded to injustice without seeking prominence or control. By recovering stories from across racial and cultural lines, this episode expands the Christian imagination for what public faithfulness can look like in complex social contexts.
Throughout the discussion, Dr. Johnson reflects on figures such as Clarence Jordan and the witness of Koinonia Farm, as well as the enduring legacy of Ida B. Wells. These examples invite Christians to consider how patient faithfulness, moral courage, and communal commitment have shaped public life in lasting ways. The episode encourages listeners to think carefully about how historical formation can guide faithful action today.
This conversation offers a historically grounded vision of public witness, rooted in the life of the church and expressed through ordinary acts of obedience, compassion, and perseverance.
Episode Resources:
Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice: A History of Christians in Action: https://www.ivpress.com/ordinary-heroes-of-racial-justice
Karen Johnson’s website: https://www.karenjohnsonhistory.com/
Learn more about John M. Perkins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Perkins
Learn more about Koinonia Farm: https://koinoniafarm.org/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
What does it take for ordinary Christians to mend a fractured society? Well, certainly not celebrity platforms and not even national movements per se, but something much older and deeper. Disciples who choose compassion and neighborly love, neighborly love every day in and through their vocations. Well, today we explore the quiet, faithful work of racial justice, how believers across history have joined God’s renewing work in their communities. I’m Case Thorp, and welcome to Nuance where we seek to be faithful in the public square. Well, today I’m speaking with Dr. Karen J. Johnson, historian at Wheaton College and author of a powerful new book, Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice. She helps us to see that cultural renewal often begins in the small places, in a church basement, a classroom, a kitchen table. And her research shows that everyday believers shaped by scripture and animated by the Holy Spirit confront injustice and help to transform their own community. So Karen, welcome so much to Nuance.
Karen J. Johnson
Thank you so much, Case. It’s great to be here.
Case Thorp
Yeah, I really appreciate your time, especially as we’re recording this in the holiday season. So extra kudos to you.
Karen J. Johnson
And to you as well.
Case Thorp
Well, before we dive in, friends, I want to encourage you to remember to like or share this episode. Leave a comment. Your engagement really helps us to bring these thoughtful conversations to more and more people who may be struggling with their own faith and public life. Well, let me tell you about Karen. Dr. Johnson is a history professor and the award-winning author of a book called One in Christ. And now she’s written Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice published by InterVarsity Press. Now her work uncovers the stories of Christians, black, white, Latino and immigrant who refuse to accept the cultural norms that contradict the gospel. Johnson shows how their ordinary acts of courage and extraordinary moments of justice do belong in the public square and do lead to civic renewal. Her book isn’t just history, it’s an invitation.
She argues that racial justice is not the calling of a few activists, but the vocation of every believer seeking to love God and neighbor in concrete ways. Well, Karen, I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation. Let’s start with: where did you get the idea? What moved you to sit down and write this book?
Karen J. Johnson
Thanks for asking. I think the book in some ways comes out of my own biography and my own experience. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago as a white evangelical Christian who had little understanding that race really mattered. This was in the 1980s and the 1990s. And when I was in seminary, I actually discovered that race had shaped American history and continued to affect brothers and sisters in Christ living in the United States today, and I have since learned as well. It also has global implications. And I wrote my first book as an academic text written to other historians. And this book is also academic in that it is original research. I did oral history interviews, archival work, but I wanted to really tell stories that invited everyday readers into the work of history, both in terms of understanding the content, the stories of the people who I was able to explore, but also to really understand their contexts and to see the systemic developments of race, ways that it became embedded in American society in ways that sometimes we can’t even see unless we know some of the history. And then I also wanted to do what I get to do as a teacher here at Wheaton, which was to invite people into the process of doing history, to practice the discipline of history, which shapes us and forms us as people and can make us more into the likeness of Christ. So I tried to do those three things in this book.
Case Thorp
Now you say practice the discipline of history. Tell me what is that?
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, well, as we know, no discipline is pleasant at the time, but it can shape us. And so I wanted to in our classes here at Wheaton, we don’t just tell students what happened, we invite them to be historians, much the way many people study science or something like that. You go into the laboratory, you conduct experiments, you do the scientific method, but we don’t, we can’t predict what’s going to happen in the future. We study the past.
So we invite students into the process of doing history, of discerning, of trying to find evidence and then discern meaning from that evidence to situate a source in its context. If someone is writing a letter to someone, is that private correspondence or public? How is that going to shape what they’re saying? These sorts of questions. And then from there to piece together a narrative that is inherently incomplete.
History is different from the past. The past is everything that has ever happened and only God knows all of the past. Our privilege and gift that we get to do is we get to study history. So that’s the remembered past or the true stories that we tell about the past. And so I try to make clear some of the ways that historians think in each of the chapters. And I think that those habits of mind can help us in the public square and in the lives of our church, in our families, and in other relationships.
Case Thorp
For sure. Now a minute ago you used the phrase that’s so, electric I guess at this time, systemic racism. Now, you know, I see it, I understand, because I mean we as Christians believe in brokenness, that all of creation is broken in some way or another, but there might be some folks listening that go, that’s something that bothers them. How would you define that?
Karen J. Johnson
Thank you so much. I would define it as the ways that sin becomes embedded in the broader structures of society. So whether it’s education or housing or how wealth is distributed. Theologically, sort of the move that you have to make, and I think this is consistent with scripture, is we have to understand that sin is not just individual and personal. It is that it runs through my own heart, but it also becomes part of the culture that humans create. So that culture is both beautiful, but there’s fallen parts of it. C.S. Lewis would say bent parts.
Case Thorp
I love that bit. Well, and I think about family systems. So the way in which generations before used terms and cast aspersions and taught intentionally or unintentionally future generations about other types of people. And there’s in that system those broken pieces being passed down. And then I think about very concrete realities like redlining, when the federal government would define which parts of a town could get certain interest rates. And so I see that it is systemic in that way, but I think too, it would not, it’s not an excuse per se for moving forward in life or trying to mend such divides, but I find it just an important reality to acknowledge and not to be intimidated by it, but to respect it in a way that helps us to lean in in a gospel-centered way.
Karen J. Johnson
I absolutely agree. I think that studying history, just a plug for history here, it helps you actually see how the things that become normal in our lives, that they have a history and that they came to be. And they weren’t always intentional, even with the case of redlining. I don’t think it’s a story of some “gotcha,” like the government was trying to hurt people of color. It used a racialized logic that hurt people of color. But I don’t know that the intention was there across the board.
Case Thorp
Well, and there were economists measuring risk and measuring that poorer communities had more risk that they were for higher interest rates, but it eventually led to keeping people of color trapped and unable to build wealth. I think about the problems that many of the interstates have caused in urban context where they’re built right through the middle of certain communities and dividing them.
I spent five years at First Presbyterian Baton Rouge in ministry, and there the interstate was put right through the middle of a thriving middle-class black community. And in doing so, they tore down the 10-year-old, beautiful black high school. And after that was put through, overall, the poverty rate in the African-American community, you know, tripled or quadrupled because it took out so much of the community structures and the professional working class, the professional class and the working class. And so you look back on that, and I’m sure interstate highway people were thinking, oh, where’s the affordable land? And how do we avoid the white neighborhoods? Well, they don’t know the 50-year or 100-year impact of such a thing.
Karen J. Johnson
And the people of color there probably didn’t have access or the same sort of power and clout in the government. So their voices are not being heard. And then on the flip side, when you think about the interstate highway system and suburbanization and post-World War II America, it enabled much of the suburbanization because people could live out in the suburbs and hop on the highway and drive into the city. So that lifestyle, which I mean, I live in a suburb, I’m benefiting from this, the lifestyle is enabled by the federal government, both in terms of loans and mortgages and which mortgages are insured and not, but also in terms of access to work.
Case Thorp
I think some that might be intimidated by that phrase, systemic racism, may assume that this term implies there’s someone or some group sitting in a smoky room somewhere going, ha ha ha, let’s destroy communities this way. Now, there are such people, but overall it’s like you say, more of decisions have been with people in power that aren’t thinking through all the impacts. Here in Orlando, it’s funny if you look at a map, Interstate 4, which runs from Daytona Beach sort of diagonal down towards Tampa. As it comes into Orlando, it does this massive curve and then picks up and goes again. And it’s basically going around Lake Killarney. And that’s in Winter Park, which is a higher end community and has been historically…Well, the story is the interstate was supposed to run on the east side of Lake Kalarney, but the elders of the Winter Park community realized that would be way too close to a number of our treasured spaces and places. And so they called their buddies in the legislature and said, move it on the other side of the lake. And so they did. But you know, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, and they knew them for sure.
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah. And there’s different kinds of, even just to complicate it a little bit more, Chicago has its own interstate. And if you come in from the North, I-94, it does this strange curve around a large Catholic church, and it’s a Polish Catholic church. And the Irish were in control of a lot of the government in the 50s and 60s when the interstates were being built. But the Poles were also Catholic, and they had clout. So all this to say, it’s not just white suburbanites who are influencing where highways go, but those have deep consequences, as you pointed out, for the fabric of a community and its viability.
Case Thorp
Now, what’s particularly special to me with your book is certainly there are the power brokers as we have discussed, but you also get down to everyday folks, people like you and me and then those listening here, school teachers, homemakers, pastors, factory workers. Tell us a story about someone you came across in writing this that really stood out to you.
Karen J. Johnson
Thank you. I’ll tell a story about Clarence Jordan, who’s a Southerner, a white man from Georgia.
Case Thorp
Hey, my home state, woohoo.
Karen J. Johnson
Okay, he’s from, well, he ended up in Americus. Talbotton is where he was born. But he grew up in the first part of the 20th century in Georgia, and his family lived right across from the county jail. And most of the people who were imprisoned were African-American. And he was deeply concerned by the torture that was actually happening at the jail. And there was, he tells the story of the warden who was at a revival and singing in the choir. And then the next night he heard someone being abused. And Clarence didn’t know what to do because he thought this is like, this doesn’t seem Christian. And so he had a lot of questions.
He went to college and he wanted to study agriculture, which is what he got a degree in because he wanted to help poor farmers and teach them sort of scientific farming. And while in college, he had a few experiences that drew him back to the faith and he decided to get an MDiv and then a PhD in New Testament Greek. And he would joke that he needed to understand the Bible because he was in such a Bible-steeped culture, but no one really wanted to do what the Bible actually said. Because as he read scripture, he began trying to, as many as pastors do, right? You’re trying to apply the scripture to your context. And he’s trying to understand what was going on. And he had the gift of working alongside African-American pastors. He was part of a mission in Louisville and he went to a black church and he listened to them and he developed some of these relationships and it helped him to see ways that he thought his fellow white southerners had corrupted scripture and had missed scripture’s call to unity in the body of Christ. He also read Acts 2 where the Christians are sharing everything in common as normative.
So he thought we should, like Christians should share what they have. So he went back to Georgia and through a series of events was able to purchase land. It seemed like God had opened the door, a donor gave them just what the amount that they needed. And he and Martin England and Martin’s wife, Mabel, and then his wife, Florence founded this farm and they were going to be committed to trying to live out what they saw in scripture, which for them meant, and this was 1942, so the US has just entered World War II. And he was counterintuitive in many ways for Christians of his time. He had read in scripture, turn the other cheek, thou shall not kill. And he thought like, I can’t, he had been part of ROTC and he quit doing that because he didn’t think that that was following God. He wanted to hold everything in common and he wanted to treat all people equally. So they hired black farm workers on the farm and they paid them the same amount that they would pay white workers.
Well, this is where it becomes interesting. People were like, oh, that’s a little weird. And they ate together, which white Southerners were like, that’s a little weird. But they kind of bracketed Clarence, and he called it Koinonia Farm based on the Koinonia, the community. And they bracketed him off until after 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown versus Board of Education that separate education was inherently unequal. And white Southerners at that point felt under attack. And when Clarence, he never wanted to be a civil rights agitator would be sort of how in some ways he would think about it. He wanted to just sort of live his life. And if he got in trouble, he’s going to live life and scorn the consequences. So if I get in trouble, if he got in trouble for eating with African Americans, so be it, but he wasn’t going to press the issue. But he ended up supporting, sponsoring an African American student to enroll at the University of Georgia. News got back to Americus where he was and they started experiencing violence from the Klan, bombing of their roadside station, drive-by shootings, various threats. But the other real challenge for him was a boycott against their farm. No white people would sell them supplies or purchase anything. So they had to shift their model.
They started selling pecans out of state. But Clarence really, rather than becoming embittered, he thought that God continued to care for these white brothers and sisters. And so he was preaching and speaking and he would hold his New Testament Greek Bible and he would always be transposing it to the 20th century South. So he made Jesus a white man who came to the church, the good white Christians of the South. And Jesus is troubling their lives because he’s talking about the unity that there can be among his followers. And he’s treating black people the same as white people. So he gained some national prominence.
You can read his translation. He finished most of the New Testament before he passed away. People were asking him to write it down. So he started writing it instead of just preaching from the word and translating in his head. But he continued to love the people who were persecuting him. And he also, because of his persistent witness, became a deep and important source of encouragement for Black civil rights activists in rural Georgia, who would go to the farm. It was a place where they could feel relatively safe and they could just have respite and relax. It was very hard in the 1960s to be a civil rights activist in the rural South. And they just found Clarence’s farm to be a place of respite. So he’s someone who just lived in his context and sought to make a change by living faithfully. And it brought all sorts of frustration from others and had really difficult consequences. people in the end, people in America’s now will say that they were changed by Clarence and by his witness. Koinonia Farm gave birth to Habitat for Humanity.
Case Thorp
Well, I was going to say, didn’t Jimmy Carter highlight their work? And Millard Fuller was connected in some way.
Karen J. Johnson
Yep, yeah, so Millard Fuller stopped by Koinonia to visit a friend. He and his wife had just reconciled, they’d had marital problems. He was very much pursuing a life of wealth and they had decided to give away much of their wealth and they stopped by Koinonia. They thought for a couple hours and they ended up staying and becoming a part of the community. And Millard ended up founding Habitat for Humanity, which is very much in line with Koinonia’s vision. After Jimmy Carter finished his term as president, he came back to Georgia and he began to become involved with Koinonia. This was after Clarence had died. He became a big supporter. But as I talk about in the book, at the time when Koinonia Farm was being persecuted, which lasted like through the mid 60s or so. Jimmy Carter, it doesn’t appear that he was actually a supporter. When people asked him about it during the campaigning for the 1976 election, he said, I shelled their peanuts. But there’s no archival evidence that he did. And people who were at the farm wrote Jimmy’s mom letters saying like, we have no evidence. Reporters are asking about this. We would love for him to be president, but we’ve lived by him for how many years and he hasn’t come to the farm. So I think his is a case of the testimony of Koinonia and Clarence’s cotton patch gospel, which Jimmy said in the introduction to it, I believe, that was the translation of scripture that he kept on his desk at the Carter Center and that he read regularly. Clarence was writing for people like Jimmy Carter. He was someone who cared about racial issues. He worked to advance black education, but he also didn’t stick his neck out very far in the 1950s and 60s in Georgia, or he would have been persecuted in the same way that Koinonia had been.
Case Thorp
Well, that story reminds me, I’ve just gotten a thing for Ida B. Wells lately. Are you familiar with her story?
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, a little bit, but feel free to fill in.
Case Thorp
Well, I’ve actually, I have her bust here on my desk. Hold on a second. Yeah. So Ida and I sit here and do work during the day. Speaking of racial diversity. So our Reformation Chapel here on our church grounds is beautiful and it’s in honor of the Reformation and they have the names of the great reformers around the top of the room in the molding painted in gold and it’s all dead white guys and I thought to myself, you know, who were people of color that made big impact in the reform movement and so I began to Google search. Well Ida B. Wells was a Presbyterian when she moved to Chicago.
And she was an everyday school teacher in Memphis and was a good writer and the local black newspapers would use her work. And then she became a newspaper editor and printer. And on a trip one time, because she became very involved in national African-American organizations and such, and she had gone somewhere to speak. And while she was gone, a white mob burned her shop and destroyed her press.
And a friend wrote her and said, do not come home. So she moved to Chicago and continued her work. And she was known for uncovering lynching and really bringing it to the national conversation. And I’m reading a biography on her right now. And my goodness, just a great everyday person.
Karen J. Johnson
And with tremendous courage to speak out against lynching. And then she had to leave her home. And even on that subject, I know I started with Clarence. The book is not just about the South and race. It’s also, there’s two stories that take place in the North, one in New York and one in Chicago. just even with anti-lynching legislation, it was all of the Senate and the House of Representatives that’s implicated in not passing legislation until, what was it, 1990s or later that the US finally had anti-lynching legislation. And so all of us, that’s a question I really grapple with is what do we do with stories when they’re not necessarily our story? Like I’m not from the South, I’m from the North, you know, these sorts of questions, but also with that, kind of what you’re doing with Ida B. Wells is how do we all expand our sense of who the Communion of Saints is? When I think about history and sort of who matters, am I just talking about Martin Luther? Am I also talking about Ida B. Wells or John Perkins, someone I write about, or Catherine de Hewick or Clarence Jordan?
Case Thorp
Yes. Well, in reading this biography, I’m embarrassed, and I’ll share with you, I’m embarrassed that I did not know how many African Americans were in the Tennessee legislature, on the Memphis City Council. The Tennessee Attorney General was black, and this is, of course, in the days of Reconstruction, and immediately after the war.
Ida B. Wells was born during the war, so the biography is taking us through her childhood and early adult years, but then she’s prime, she’s situated right there as Reconstruction ends, and within a few years, all of those black legislators and leaders were pushed out and not allowed back in. And the way in which there was such a thriving African American middle class and even upper class in Memphis. But then, the lynchings began and also I’m embarrassed to say I thought lynching was just by hanging. No, lynching means mob justice and around racial issues. And I should have known that, right? With all my silly degrees and my journey, I should have known that before.
Karen J. Johnson
Yes and no. I mean, it’s good that you’re learning now. At the same time, you’re modeling a lifelong quest to understand and to grow and to learn more. And I think we all can do that. And we all can learn and grow. And also, why didn’t you know? Part of that has to do with narratives about reconstruction and its significance. And I think I talk about this a little bit in the book. But in 1915, I use in my teaching often, the highest grossing film in America was The Birth of a Nation. And the story of A Birth of a Nation is a story about civil war and reconstruction. It portrays the people that save the nation is the Klu Klux Klan, which drives black voters away from the polls and restores order by having white people be in charge. And it portrays black Congressmen as totally incompetent buffoons, which is your, as you’ve read, like the historical record does not suggest that actually. But that, I mean, just popular culture, that was a highly controversial film. The NAACP national association for the advancement of colored people resisted it being shown. They conducted their first national campaign, but it’s also popular culture. People loved it. It’s an engaging story. And do you know what was, what replaced Birth of a Nation as the highest grossing film?
Case Thorp
Gone with the wind.
Karen J. Johnson
Yes, 1939.
Case Thorp
And let me tell you, in my family of origin and generations back, there is Jesus and Rhett Butler. There is the Bible and Gone with the Wind. My grandmother went to the premiere in Atlanta, and I have just feet from me an original program from that night in the 30s in Atlanta.
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, that was one of my favorite books and movies as a kid. Similarly from my grandmother, she loved it. I’ve read the book so many times and it was one of those, it wasn’t really until graduate school when I studied race that I thought, boy, the narrative that I thought about reconstruction of Gone With The Wind is not the narrative. It’s more complicated.
Case Thorp
Well, in my household, Grant was a drunk, a sorry old drunk who stumbled his way through the presidency. And then I read Brett Baer’s biography and his opposition purposefully planted those ideas in the press in order to fight him because he was so successful and powerful as a president.
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah.
Case Thorp
Okay, well this, maybe this relates to a term you use, a theme in your book is moral imagination. So what does moral imagination mean?
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, the idea behind moral imagination is what we can conceive as possible for us. And I think part of it comes from having historical consciousness, which is, I mentioned this earlier, but it’s the realization that the way things are is not necessarily natural or inevitable, or this is the way it’s always been. There’s a history and God is certainly sovereign over that history, but it’s been shaped.
Case Thorp
There’s broken history. There’s evil at work in history.
Karen J. Johnson
It absolutely is. Yeah, so like to give an example that we’ve talked about a couple of times, but I’ll circle back to it, like housing to see or to think about, well, housing is, especially in the North, it’s just segregated. Like where I live now is a suburb of Chicago and it’s mostly white. Where we used to live was a neighborhood on the West side of Chicago and it was mostly African-American.
And if you don’t think about it too deeply, it just seems like, this is how it is. But if we can start to, what I wanted to do in the book was to show people who are pushing against these trends, these dynamics, and who saw a different way forward, who saw even, I think, glimpses of the fullness of the gospel, and were trying to embody it. And so we can look to them, and we don’t need to act just like them. Like, they had a different context than we did.
It’s different here outside of Chicago than it is in Orlando, but there’s also commonalities and there’s themes that we can draw from and think about. And so trying to give people examples that we can learn from while also recognizing this is not, historians will use the term hagiography. This is not just sort of like a veneration of the saints, this is how great they were. These are regular people who are imperfect, who made mistakes, who upset one another.
Case Thorp
Thank you.
Karen J. Johnson
And so they’re by no means perfect, but we can learn from them. And so I’m trying to help us sort of see beyond what is in front of us to see the water that we’re swimming in.
Case Thorp
I like how you put it to imagine things can be different. So as an evangelical Christian who’s pro-life, I never dreamed or imagined in my lifetime Roe v. Wade would be voted down. And that woke me up to, wow, there is a different future that can be. And am I perhaps just settling too much or feeling helpless in the midst of certain cultural narratives or situations?
Karen J. Johnson
I think that’s a powerful example. And then also the things that we think that are more positive that will always continue, we have to also seek to protect those in, I think, in some ways that are consistent with scripture. Because how we go about advocacy, whether it’s just interrelational or if it’s on a governmental level, is very important too.
Case Thorp
Well, Martin Luther King said, I believe the arc of justice. What is it?
Karen J. Johnson
It is, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice, I believe.
Case Thorp
That’s right. That’s right. And I recently heard someone quote that and then follow it right up with, but it requires faithful men and women to keep bending that arc. It’s not a natural inevitability.
Karen J. Johnson
Yes.
Case Thorp
So apply that idea of moral imagination to everyday folks at work in their neighborhoods. How does that play out?
Karen J. Johnson
I think it can play out, I can use church as an example. So there’s certainly a place for churches that are just one ethnic group or one class group. And that’s, of course, conversations about the church growth movement have been definitely part of American history, at least since the 1970s. But at the same time, I’ve come to believe through my study of race, that it is a gift to have diversity in the church. As someone who grew up in my own white suburban American cultural context, I need people who are African-American Christians living in the North, living in the South. I need brothers and sisters from South Africa and from the Philippines. We all have our own blind spots and we all have our own gifts that we can offer one another. So, given that, how interracial churches often operate, this is based on sociological literature, is white people tend to leave if they’re not comfortable. And evangelicals, especially white evangelicals like myself, don’t necessarily want to talk about race. They want to be colorblind, which in some ways comes out of a genuine desire to not be prejudiced, but also can ignore some of the things that have led to inequality in the United States.
Case Thorp
And I think too, I know at times I have bitten my lip because of the fear of retribution from those with opposing views. And so it’s more of a, I’m not gonna talk about race because I’m uncomfortable with it and if I do, I risk stepping on a landmine and then all of a sudden being accused of racist.
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, doing this work requires stepping into something that’s messy. One of the case studies is Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church, led by, 1980s and 1990s, led by Pastor Raleigh Washington. And then chair of the elder board was Glenn K. Rine, who had, this was in Chicago on the West side in the Austin neighborhood. We actually were members there, but after the time period that I write about. And Glenn and Raleigh developed this ministry partnership and they were deeply, they both had come from situations where they had been burned by others. Raleigh was African-American, Glenn was white. And they had sort of racial challenges, difficulties, even to the level of trauma. And they wanted to center their church on relationship, because it was this church that was in this black neighborhood, but there were white people there who were doing ministry in the community. And Glenn had come from a church that had a split along the lines over racial conflict. And so they assumed if there was any conflict between the two of them, race was a factor. And they talked about race all the time to the point where, and they taught the church to talk about race all the time, but not where you could essentialize someone. And this was a black and a white church where you would just say, so and so is black, so they’re gonna think this, so and so is white, so they’re gonna think this. But you would account for how their race had shaped their experience and their perspectives. So what they did as this church was they built reconciliation and conversation into the liturgy of the church. So four times a year, once a quarter, they had fudge ripple meetings. And so they’re playing on all these racial stereotypes. And the chocolates would meet with Pastor Raleigh for a little bit, and they’d talk about their concerns. And then the vanillas, the white people, would meet with Pastor Raleigh separately.
Case Thorp
Just getting it out there and saying, y’all, we’re going to name it and claim it and redefine it. Yeah.
Karen J. Johnson
Exactly. And then they would come together. They’d put their questions in a giant ceramic Oreo, and they would eat fudge, ripple ice cream and Oreo cookies. And what Raleigh would say, and I conducted several oral history interviews with people who’ve been members of the church at the time. And what they returned to again and again was, we need to talk about these things together. And it’s not sin to raise issues, to be frustrated, mad. I don’t know. And they always coached them to ask, help me understand, help me understand. And they talk about an issue sometimes for hours and not come to the same, to be able to see eye to eye, but they could understand where the other person was coming from. So that was fine. But the sin, Raleigh said, is if you leave the Fudge ripple meeting and you turn to like you’re black and you turn to another black person or you’re white, you turn to another white person, you’re like, so and so said, like you’re talking about it just with another person after they’re like, we have to break that down. Come together, talk through things, work through things sort of let off steam regularly. So it doesn’t lead to a church split. And they were also deeply concerned to not always have white people and leadership. We found this. Yeah. And sort of like promote others is, and it was, it’s in a poor neighborhood where not everybody had an education, not everybody even knew how to read, but people can still have leadership gifts and abilities. And so they worked hard to promote people from the community into positions of leadership in the church and to not just give it to the person who’s got the college degree or the graduate degree.
Case Thorp
Well, that reminds me of a church I’m working with. I do consulting and Hope Church in Memphis, outside of Memphis in Cordova. It is a mega church. It’s actually the largest Presbyterian church of any kind of Presbyterian denomination in the country. And I’m glad to claim it is an evangelical Presbyterian church, EPC, which I and my church are in. But it was started in the maybe late 80s, early 90s by a white church planter with an intentional multi-ethnic vision. And today it has a black senior pastor, Rufus Smith, who’s a dear friend. And I love the fact that the largest Presbyterian church in America has a black senior pastor. That really breaks down some stereotypes from the Waspie, frozen, chosen in their wool suit, right? Well, I was there leading a couple of several days of workshops and there was just this refreshing openness about race and a joy and a laughter that went along with saying awkward and weird things. Now I wasn’t there to do racial work, but I was just watching the dynamic between members. Well, today it is a 60% Anglo as they’ll say, or 40% black church and they have very diverse leadership, very intentional about such things, it was a, they weren’t afraid to deal with it and to name it and claim it and forgive one another. That was the thing like, come on now you’re drifting here and there. And it was okay, but because we love each other enough to correct things.
Karen J. Johnson
Yeah, that was a characteristic of Rock too, was forgiveness. And a community of grace where you could ask difficult questions or questions that seemed stupid or like, I’m going to offend someone. But the assumption on the recipient’s part was you genuinely want to learn and we’re in a relationship. And this is what a brother and sister in Christ does, is we maintain the relationship and we fight for that.
Case Thorp
So interesting. Well, Karen, this is the first of two episodes where we’re going to talk about such things. So let’s pause here. Really appreciate the history and the theology, the picture of Christian faith that you give us. Before we close this episode, I want listeners to know how they can connect with you and your work.
Karen J. Johnson
Thank you for asking. I have a website, karenjohnsonhistory.com, and I’m also on Instagram and Facebook. And I would love to continue the conversation.
Case Thorp
Well, we will have those links in our show notes. Let me encourage everyone to go out and get Dr. Johnson’s book, Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice. It’s deeply researched, deeply personal, and just fantastic. You can find it wherever books are sold. We will also have a link to her book in the show notes. Well, friends, thank you for inviting us into your day. If this conversation broadened your vision for a faithful presence, share it with a colleague. Leave us a review. It truly helps.
Visit our website at wecolabor.com. That’s wecolabor.com. Drop us your email and I’ll send you the latest issue of Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist is a little journal full of essays that look at the intersection of faith, work, and culture. I want to thank our guest and the Magruder Foundation for supporting today’s episode. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessing’s on you.
