Dear Church: A Love Letter from a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the US

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Introduction: How the Hell Did We Get Here?

Dear Church, how the hell did we get here? The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is the whitest denomination in the United States. Many of our congregations are in decline, and our society is becoming more and more divided. We don’t know what the future holds for this church, so how did we get here? It might be simpler for me to answer how I got here—because the story is just as surprising. I’m a pastor, but if you looked at my life story, I think we’d both agree I was more likely to end up in prison than the pulpit. In fact, it’s a miracle I’m still alive. I’m a former drug dealer, sex worker, homeless queer teen, and felon. How the hell did I get here? I got here because I met Jesus when I met you, Church. Whenever I think of my first experience in the ELCA, I get goosebumps. Rev. Tim Johansen at Temple Lutheran Church in Havertown, Pennsylvania, stood at the Communion table and declared, This is Jesus’s table; he made no restrictions, and neither do we. I was smitten immediately. There was no membership meeting, no checking my theology, no friendly talk with the pastor before I approached the table of grace. I was welcome, and this was revolutionary to me. You were everything I wanted, Church: unabashedly progressive in your theology and willing to proclaim it—from the pulpit no less. Your leaders were under the usual congregational siege—overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated—but they weren’t put on a deadly pedestal. They handled it all with a sense of grace I found edifying.

Tears welled up in my eyes as I walked up the aisle. I mean, you loved me, you really loved me. This welcome to the table was something I had never experienced before. I didn’t even know what it was. It awakened the shadow side of my relationship with God that I hadn’t had the courage to look under. It was like a knife that cut instantly through years of shame and brokenness and released me from those bonds. Grace is like a knife sometimes.

In one sentence, ELCA, you had done more for me than any church had ever done. I approached the table with my head held high and love in my heart. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t filled with the fear that I was dragging to the Communion rail everything that I had ever done. Of course, I still carried those things, but somehow you welcomed me anyway. You showed me that my past didn’t make me unworthy to receive the nearness of God in the elements. I could stand before the table of grace a whole person—deeply flawed and still incredibly valued, handmade by a loving God.

You loved me. I loved you.

You loved me first, too. It was amazing to me that I didn’t have to traverse an emotional, social, and theological minefield to get to you. There was a clear path. It was direct and wide open. I remember standing among these people who didn’t look anything like me and thinking I had never felt more at home.

I  was  standing  there  in  my  usual  Sunday  best— probably a T-shirt and jeans with about thirty tattoos littering my arm. I had on skate sneaks at thirty, because I had never worn anything else, so why start now? Stretch piercings in my ears. The only other black person in the sanctuary was a little girl who was clearly adopted. Everyone was welcoming, but not in that creepy way that reeks of desperation. You know exactly what I mean if you are under forty—the wild-eyed look of welcome because a young person hasn’t walked inside the church for months. I got quizzical looks, but I was used to that. I often went to different churches with a baseball cap on and sat up front and in my unique, tone-deaf way belted out tunes louder than anyone else. I would raise my hands and dance and squirm and snap at sermons like I was at a jazz club, listening to poetry in 1958. That’s just how I did church. I would do that at a Catholic mass or a nondenominational praise service. It didn’t matter to me. I was there to worship, and it’s what I did. I took pride in being a free-agent Christian—a worshipper without a permanent home. I would throw 10 percent of whatever I’d made for the week in the basket and didn’t much care where it went.

I have been told more than once that I needed to change who I was to be member of a church. I’ve heard a pious Young man, take that hat off as I sat down in a pew. I’ve been pulled aside after saying, Love is love is love, only to be reminded that sometimes real love is punitive and corrective—and then invited to a Bible study to improve my biblical knowledge. I’ve received blank stares when I sat and told a pastor my whole story. One woman clutched her purse at a small-group meeting when I shared about my incarceration, as if my whole plan in joining was to get to her checkbook. My wife was excommunicated from her church for dating me.

When I first met you, ELCA, I was loosely affiliated with a church-planting movement of Evangelical-style free churches. They had a don’t ask, don’t tell policy about most of the marginalized identities I carried with me, and that was cool with me. When I did share, most people received it in the way most Christians do: What great testimony. Whatever the hell that means.

But not you, ELCA. You took it all in stride—my story, my tattoos, my brokenness. You embraced the whole me, even my passion for radical black liberation. At the time, I had a burning desire to serve the church, which you would later help me figure out was a call to ministry. I had to walk in discernment with others to uncover that call. I said I was hearing God; you said let’s listen together.

That is your raw beauty . You have one foot firmly planted in an 1,800-year-old apostolic tradition and the other one tentatively searching for the firm ground to step on in God’s future. You are amazing, Church.

So how the hell did we get here? How did we become the whitest denomination in America, despite every attempt to be otherwise? Why is the anxiety about the death of the ELCA so palpable you could almost wade through it like the waters of the Jordan?

We stand at the edge of a theological civil war. I don’t say that lightly. The Christian church in America, in its slow and often lurching way, is taking its cues from its members. Right now, its members are at their most divided in modern political history. Right now, the gospel of Jesus Christ is being called fake news by one person, while another calls that same person a Nazi. No one is calling each other sibling.

Don’t get me wrong.

I don’t want a church of false unity. And some fundamental truths are worth fighting over. I don’t want a church of false unity. And some fundamental truths are worth fighting over.I don’t think we need to apologize for formally widening the tent for our LGBTQIA siblings in Christ. Nor do we have to justify welcoming sojourners from distant lands. I will never apologize for feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, or calling for the abolition of prisons. I’d rather stand with the prisoner outside, thank you.

I shouldn’t have to apologize for or tone down the fierce declaration you made to me when I fell in love with you, ELCA: Jesus made no restrictions on this table, so neither do we.

The fact that anyone among us feels like we should apologize is heartbreaking to me. Let me be clear, the church should be all about bringing people further and further along the arc toward justice. But the work of bringing congregations along this journey is difficult, and leadership isn’t about blindly walking into the future. An elder in the black Lutheran community once said, If you are a leader in this church and no one is following, you are just out for a walk. We must meet our communities where they are, but the God of Jesus of Nazareth has never shied away from the proclamation of truth. The gospel is always a call for liberation. It infects the hearts of those it has been presented to like wildfire that scorches away hatred. When did we become so damn afraid of it?

Dear Church, we are cowards.

We have allowed the narrative of death that has fallen over the Protestant church in America to become our new lectionary.

We have allowed the narrative of death that has fallen over the Protestant church in America to become our new lectionary. We bemoan the old times in the first reading. We then sing a Psalm of endowment lament. We take to social media to write epistles at each other that are more weapon than correction, after which we pour the stagnant waters of respectability we keep hidden in the narthex over the Holy Spirit fire of the gospel. We are in a lectionary cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy and death spiral of our own making. The truth is we are afraid of this strange new world the church has been cast into. The twenty-first century hasn’t been great for us. Well, it hasn’t been great for you, Church.

In a century marked by increased diversity in the United States and increased global awareness, the ELCA remains the whitest denomination in the country. But here’s the truth: The reason the ELCA has remained so white is a theological problem, not a sociological one. We as church have declared racism a sin. But the demonic system that keeps racist structures in place is where our real work will need to begin. We need to name evil for what it is, and we won’t overcome it until we do.

Nevertheless, I believe this is a time of great hope.

The church is a human system, full of human people trying to emulate the divine. We do this haphazardly and in a very broken way, but you, Church, seemed to be doing better than any other denomination I had come across. You were gathered around the table, which meant your leaders couldn’t become the center of attention. You perfectly balanced the importance of the word with the other sacraments. Think about that. In a time when the church catholic is full of examples of what happens when leaders are allowed to go rogue and become more important than the gospel message, you have a built-in fail-safe: the liturgy.

The liturgy reminds us in every worship of the basics of the Christian tradition. It centers us in our baptismal promises. It tells us at the start of worship just how fucked we are. I don’t curse just for shock value. If we were to boil down the confession and forgiveness to its very essence and take that distilled message to a stranger on the street, it would read simply, I am fucked without God. We proclaim a message of grace. This world is desperately hungry for a message that isn’t a rewrite of the holiness codes in Leviticus. It is starving for mercy with a jaundiced belly and empty eyes. The reality is that we have something so damn incredible to share.

But we can’t get anyone to listen to it. I have heard my peers’ excuses. They blame the megachurch down the street or the fact that the synod doesn’t support them or their people don’t know how to evangelize. I’ve made these excuses, too. But the truth is much more insidious. The truth is that evil still stalks the world and our call together as church. And this evil is much vaster than we could have ever imagined. We have lost the ability to name evil for what it is. We don’t believe demons are real. Ask any person of color or LGBTQIA person in this church, and they