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    Outsiders on the Inside: Understanding Racial Fatigue, Racial Resilience, and Racial Hospitality in Our Churches
    Outsiders on the Inside: Understanding Racial Fatigue, Racial Resilience, and Racial Hospitality in Our Churches
    Outsiders on the Inside: Understanding Racial Fatigue, Racial Resilience, and Racial Hospitality in Our Churches
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    Outsiders on the Inside: Understanding Racial Fatigue, Racial Resilience, and Racial Hospitality in Our Churches

    By William E. Boyce and Carl F. Ellis, Jr.

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    Can Christian community be racially exclusive and still call itself faithful?
    In the United States, the story of Christianity has been intertwined with the story of race since the beginning. All too often, Christian leaders have fostered cultures that wound minority members instead of creating cultures that heal division. With this history of exclusion, all Christians must ask whether our churches practice the racial hospitality envisioned in the Scriptures. In this necessary conversation, minority pastors voice fatigue, signaling that church cultures are not as welcoming as they often claim to be. Outsiders on the Inside explores the history of race in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), comparing the denomination's core theological convictions with the experiences of Black PCA pastors. This is a story of racial fatigue and resilience, of learning to thrive in the midst of challenging environments. This study reveals areas for growth and opens up possibilities for Christians of all races and confessions to come together, creating a diverse, hospitable, and healing community.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWipf and Stock
    Release dateMay 4, 2022
    ISBN9781666719406
    Outsiders on the Inside: Understanding Racial Fatigue, Racial Resilience, and Racial Hospitality in Our Churches
    Author

    William E. Boyce

    William E. Boyce pastors Christ Church of Arlington (PCA) in Arlington, Virginia. He received his doctor of ministry from Trinity School for Ministry, in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, studying the intersection of race, Reformed theology, and pastoral ministry.

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      Outsiders on the Inside - William E. Boyce

      Part I

      Racial Hospitality in Scripture and Tradition

      1

      All Races Welcome?

      What is it like to be Black in the PCA? After asking this question multiple times, the most common answer was, It’s complicated. For Black pastors, their ministry is marked by tension. As an ultra-minority in the denomination, they experience what W. E. B. du Bois calls double consciousness.¹ They are fully aware of their identity as Black Presbyterians—Presbyterians, yes, but specifically Black Presbyterians. They have a right to be in this denomination—after all, Black Presbyterianism has existed in the United States since at least the year 1800.² And yet, these seminary-trained, biblically grounded, and theologically Reformed men often feel alienated within the denomination.³

      Statistically speaking, this might be expected. When one is an ultra-minority, a member of only 1 percent of the denomination’s pastors, it is likely—however lamentable—that a sense of alienation will be experienced.⁴ But statistics only tell part of the story. It is not simply a question of smaller numbers, but of cultural divides. Recent developments in the denomination have brought this division to light. For example, the PCA recently commissioned a study report on race and reconciliation in the denomination, but this report revealed that the denomination was divided on the very need to study the issue at all. According to the report, Those ages 50+, those living in Southern states and those with less education rated the need [for a study on race] significantly lower than other groups. Caucasians, Latino/Hispanic and Other ethnicities rated the need significantly lower than African Americans and Asian-Americans.⁵ In other words, the denomination’s leadership cannot agree on the need to have a conversation about race at all, let alone how to have it well. As a result, African American Teaching Elders in the PCA feel disconnected from the majority because of culture, not simply numbers. For a denomination that declared the church would welcome fellow believers in Christ regardless of race, this is lamentable.⁶ Given the historical roots of the denomination, however, it might not be unexpected. The story of the PCA has never been strictly doctrinal. For Presbyterians in the United States, culture often intersected with doctrine to oppose full racial inclusion.

      Civil War and Southern Presbyterian Racism

      To understand the PCA, we need to understand the PCA’s Southern heritage. The PCA traces its roots back to the Southern Presbyterian Church, which had a history of racial exclusion. Just months after the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, which included churches in both North and South, adopted the Gardiner-Spring Resolution. This resolution required all churches in the denomination to support the United States federal government—the Union—or face church censure. For churches in secessionist southern states, this created an inescapable dilemma: support what was, in their minds, a foreign power, or face discipline.⁷ These southern churches decided to sever ecclesial ties and form a new denomination rooted in the Confederacy: the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America (CSA).⁸

      These leaders attempted to rationalize their decision with an appeal to doctrine. For them, the Gardiner-Spring Resolution overstepped a fundamental doctrine: the spirituality of the church. This doctrine stated that the church as institution could only speak to spiritual matters, not political ones.⁹ To these leaders, an ecclesial decree requiring churches to take sides politically, pledging allegiance to a specific governing authority during a time of national fracturing, clearly transgressed the denomination’s limited authority. So, with their Address to All the Churches of Jesus Christ Throughout the Earth, the Confederates birthed their new church, founded upon the doctrine of the spirituality of the church.¹⁰ Yet, even within this document, it became clear that while the Confederates utilized doctrine to resist the encroachment of one culture, they equally utilized doctrine to protect the practices of their own culture.

      The newly founded denomination wasted no time declaring its stance on slavery. Having declared their grievances with the Northern Church on the first three pages of Address to All the Churches, the Southern Presbyterians spend the next four pages detailing their justification for slavery. First, God’s word does not explicitly condemn slavery, and so the church ought not as well: [The church] has planted itself upon the word of God, and utterly refused to make slaveholding a sin, or non-slave holding a term of communion.¹¹ Because, in their view, God’s word did not explicitly condemn slavery, it was a civil matter, not an ecclesial one; and as a civil matter, the church had no standing to comment on the institution: The policy of its existence or non-existence is a question which exclusively belongs to the State. We have no right, as a Church, to enjoin it as a duty, or to condemn it as a sin.¹²

      What the Confederate church could comment on, however, was the relationship between slaves and slave owners: Our business is with the duties which spring from the relation; the duties of the masters on the one hand, and of their slaves on the other. These duties we are to proclaim and enforce with spiritual sanctions.¹³ Condemning slavery as a sin ostensibly created a pastoral problem, as the Southerners would not be able to minister to the slaves in their midst: We feel that the souls of our slaves are a solemn trust, and we shall strive to present them faultless and complete before the presence of God.¹⁴ But this pastoral obligation was embedded in the racism of the South. These Southerners felt that slavery was God’s kindness to an inferior and pagan race. Through their enslavement, God allowed these Africans to have contact with Christianity and civilization:

      The general operation of the system [of slavery] is kindly and benevolent; it is a real and effective discipline, and without it, we are profoundly persuaded that the African race in the midst of us can never be elevated in the scale of being. As long as that race, in its comparative degradation, co-exists, side by side, with the White, bondage is its normal condition.¹⁵

      This final statement shows how cultural racism impacted their application of doctrine. Up to this point, one could argue that the Southern cause was legitimate. The American Presbyterians did hold to a separation of church and state, and on the surface, the biblical narrative is frequently unclear on its stance concerning slavery.¹⁶ The Old Testament community was allowed to have slaves, and the New Testament does not directly overturn the practice, so there could be theoretical grounds to place slavery within the realm of civil, rather than ecclesial authority. However, at this point in the document, the Confederate Presbyterians explicitly show that their resistance to the Gardiner-Spring Resolution and their commitment to slavery flow directly from a culture of racism. Indeed, many of the most influential Southern theologians demonstrate explicit racism in their personal work. Robert Lewis Dabney, possibly the most prominent Southern Presbyterian theologian, was a staunch defender of slavery, demonstrating an intense racial pride that led to fears of ‘blood-mixing.’¹⁷ Thus, the Confederate Presbyterians willingly used doctrine to protect their cultural, and sinful, concerns.

      After the Civil War, the Confederate church was renamed the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS), simply known as the Southern Church. But this was far from a fresh start. While the war ended the question of slavery, the church failed to end the question of racial equality:¹⁸ as many Whites sought to restore the racial hierarchy after the Thirteenth Amendment ended the peculiar institution, segregation became the slavery substitute.¹⁹ Just as they had used doctrine to protect the racist institution of slavery, the Southern Presbyterians now used doctrine to protect the racist institution of Jim Crow.²⁰ They crafted a theological case for segregation [with] four overlapping legs: the curse of Noah, divine approval for geographical segregation and disapproval of miscegenation, the biblically mandated cultural segregation, and Jesus’s implicit support for segregation.²¹ With a supposedly biblical justification for segregation, Southern Presbyterians again invoked the doctrine of the spirituality of the church, labeling these racist practices as civil concerns, not spiritual.²² According to them, the Gospel of Jesus Christ concerned sin and salvation, not ethics, morality, and social policies.²³

      Civil Rights and the Formation of the

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