Another Casualty of the Culture Wars
Leaders of the Lenses Institute, part of Cru, shut down their ministry of racial reconciliation and understanding due to backlash over CRT and related issues.
Today we see another casualty of the culture wars...
The Lenses Institute, part of Cru, works "towards a day when the ethnically and culturally diverse people of God are seeing, understanding, and acting in ways that display to the world that our God is one." But today leadership felt compelled to shut it down.
The fear-mongering over Critical Race Theory and resistance to racial justice, in general, apparently created a "climate of suspicion, mischaracterization, and in some cases direct intimidation."
You can read the full statement from the Executive Team here. (UPDATE: The link from Lenses Leadership has since disappeared.)
Part of the context is a statement issued by some in Cru called "Seeking Clarity and Unity"... they say efforts of the Lenses Institute and its personnel to foster diversity "have created distrust, discouragement, and a host of other problems.” This is an age-old objection--the people who point out racism are the source of division.
The deliberate and concerted effort on the part of some Christians to curtail efforts at biblical unity through racial awareness, justice, and equity is ungodly, spiritually immature, and frankly infuriating.
This is only the beginning. This marginalizing and silencing of Christians working for racial justice is happening in churches, denominations, and para-church ministries nationwide. It's also growing more common in the rest of society (cf. CRT bans in K-12 schools).
I’ve said this more and more lately…If you want to understand race, you have to start with the church.
People who habitually beat the drum of racism, will always see it around every corner. All societies have and have had dark areas in their history that they're not proud of. But, if we continue to relive them through honest but misguided attempts to quell, heal, correct, or overemphasize them, then we will continue to relive any and all the past sins of our forefathers. LETS MOVE ON! Christ loved he didn't dwell on past sins, just the for givens. All these entities, CRT,social injustice, inequality, racial equity, systemic racism, diversity, affirmative action etc., may on their face seem ordinary harmless solutions to problems, especially to the secular community. However, they are extremely polarizing terms and ideas for the un-wok. Christ didn't go about explaining how their sins were sins. He went about loving and telling them to "sin no more", end of sentence! We are all people of color. I've never seen an opaque person. We need to love Christ, love ourselves and love others. All these other "programs" and remedies will be totally unnecessary. To love is not to ignore that problems, (sin) exist but it is time to let this nation and world heal, get on with life and pray, pray, pray. Let's try it God's way.