Racial Wounds and the Cross — What 'One Blood' Doesn't Settle
Acts 17:26 says God made every nation 'from one blood.' That truth is essential, but it is not enough. The American church has had a long, ugly relationship with race — slavery, segregation, the silence of evangelical leaders during the civil rights movement, and the more recent fracturing over critical theory and 'wokeness.' This plan picks up where the basic biblical case for unity ends and walks into the harder territory: history, repentance, the limits of color-blindness, and what reconciliation actually requires when the wound is generational.
There is a kind of Christian conversation about race that ends as soon as it begins. Someone quotes Galatians 3:28 ("there is neither Jew nor Greek"), someone else quotes Acts 17:26 ("from one man he made every nation"), the heads nod, the verse is correct, and the actual subject is dropped. This plan exists because that conversation is not enough — and because the church's failures on race have not been failures of theory but of nerve.
In 1845 American Baptists split over whether a slave-holder could be a missionary. In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" not to civic leaders but to white clergy who had told him to slow down. In 2020 American evangelicals fractured again over the very vocabulary used to discuss racial injustice. None of this happened because pastors did not know Galatians 3:28. It happened because Christians have repeatedly preferred theological abstraction to costly obedience — and because the temptation to mistake comfort for peace is older than the country.
What to Expect
Ten days walking through the texts that the church has often handled too quickly — Philemon, Galatians 2-3, James 2, Amos 5, Revelation 7 — and through episodes the church has often skipped: the abolitionist debate, the Civil Rights movement, the silence of much of white evangelicalism, the modern fight over reparations and critical race theory, and the persistent reality that 11 a.m. Sunday remains one of the most segregated hours in American life. Bonhoeffer on costly grace, Augustine on the City of God across nations, Tim Keller on idolatry and on systemic sin, Charles Spurgeon on slavery (he was unequivocally against it and lost American invitations for it), and a hard, honest reckoning with Jonathan Edwards's contradictions — a brilliant theologian of revival who himself owned slaves.
Who This Plan Is For
For believers — of any race — who suspect both the political left and the political right have flattened this conversation into a slogan and want to think about it more biblically, more historically, and more honestly. Hard questions are welcome. Easy answers are not the goal.