The Raceless Gospel

It is “faith seeking understanding”— without race and its progeny. It is faith practiced without hand- me- down hatreds and racialized categories too small for human being and belonging. The Raceless Gospel is rooted in the Christian’s baptismal identity, which transcends all fictitious binaries and failing dichotomies (Galatians 3:27-28; Colossians 3.10-11). It is not a color- blind prescription or a post- racial vision but an invitation to see race for what it is and as it is. Paul says it plainly to the believers in Corinth: “Not all flesh is alike, but there is one flesh for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish” (First Corinthians 15:39, NRSV).

The Black and White Church are literal and physical signs of segregation in the North American Church, hanging over it in judgement. Both are a byproduct of Enlightenment’s theory on human being, belonging and identity, here being the sociopolitical construct of race and American chattel slavery. The segregation of sacred space continues in part due to the racialization of the gospel of Jesus the Christ, which calls into question the efficacy of baptismal identity and what of our categorical, racialized selves truly dies with him. Race holds these structures and systems in place even though it has no biblical or biological basis.

The Raceless Gospel is a Pentecostal (that is, the experience– not the denomination named after it) expression of a baptismal ecclesiology that is embodied, that calls the racialized body of Christ heresy, that deconstructs race and decolonizes theology for the desegregation of the global church for an undivided “kin-dom” that is coming.