Editor’s Note: This panel discussion is from SOLA Conference 2021. Find more resources and videos here.
Most of us work and work for a lifetime. In fact, the majority of Americans spend the most number of their waking hours at work. Christian workers witnessing well in their workplaces can surely make a difference for Jesus. But what does that look like? Why should I bother? What does witnessing mean in the Bible, and how can we do that at our work without being labeled weird, feeling awkward, and getting in unnecessary trouble?
Below is a transcript of the panel discussion. It has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the audio here.
Michael Lee: Welcome to our SOLA Network panel on the topic of “Race, Gospel, and the Local Church.” During our time together, we want to have an honest and thoughtful discussion on how the church can be a compelling witness when it comes to addressing issues of race and justice in America. My name is Michael Lee, and I serve on the SOLA Council and as the lead pastor of All Nations Community Church. It’s my privilege to introduce our three panelists today.
First, to my left, we have Pastor Bobby Scott. He’s the pastor of discipleship at Community of Faith Bible Church in Los Angeles, California. Next, we have P.J. Tibayan. He is the lead pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Bellflower, California, and he also serves on the editorial board of the SOLA Network. And finally, we have Scott Sauls, the lead pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee. Thank you guys so much for joining us. I appreciate your time, your friendship, and partnership in ministry.
Well, here we go. Just as we’ve seen this past year, addressing issues of race and justice can be difficult and very divisive in the local church. Whether we gave a sermon, a talk, a seminar, or series on it, those are some of our most divisive and difficult series. Here’s the question, and I want to ask Bobby first: Why is it important for the church to actually have the courage to talk about these issues? And what makes it so difficult? Are these distractions from the gospel or for the implications from the gospel? What are your first thoughts on this?
Bobby Scott: Thanks, Mike. Let me just address the first part of your question. Why is this important for the church to address? Because the Bible does. We are the pillar for the truth, and light and salt in any society. So, in order for us to be that, we need to be agents of truth—truth speakers. And when we see problems in our society, especially sin, we need to recognize that we have a unique voice, unique stewardship, and a unique opportunity to help.
I think of Jeremiah 29:7, where it says, “Pursue the well being of the city, I have deported you to. Pray to the Lord and his behalf, for when it thrives, you will thrive.” And so here we are: Americans. We have a unique history as Americans where racism radically affected our nation with slavery and then Jim Crow laws for some 350 years. So how dare we as the church—knowing that we’ve all been made in the image and likeness of God and seeing our nation racialized and various populations oppressed—not raise our voices? In a famous quote by Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.”
The church knows what sin is, and so we need to uniquely speak up and say something. We didn’t have enough William Wilberforces in our society. We’ve had abolitionists and we’ve had the Quakers, but for 350 years, the voices that wanted to radically racialize our society won those conversations so much. So you have Martin Luther King, who reminds us in his Birmingham jail letter of this fact that united we stand, divided we fall, so to speak. He said this, “Moreover, I’m cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” If we stay divided, we will not do well and thrive as a nation. We have been mandated to be a light, to be salt, and to pray for and pursue the well-being of our society. So as Christians, we need to speak up.
Secondly, are issues of race and justice distractions for the gospel implications? Depending on how we define all of our terms—I think clearly the Bible tells us to love our neighbors. To love our neighbors, love them well, and we need to show fruit bearing our sanctification.
So the last question is, where might these concerns lie and our gospel framework? If I’m a missionary in Haiti, and people are dying because of the water, and I have all the means in the world to build wells with fresh water, how am I going to not destroy my testimony and close doors? When I say, “I’m only going to preach the gospel,” and people are dying all around me physically, I think we need to do what Jesus did.
Acts 10:38 is pretty clear. Jesus went around doing good. He heals a blind man, and the guy didn’t even know who he was. But it opens up the door for him to share the gospel. So we see blighted communities because it’s been affected by systemic racism or oppression, and we’ve been charged, as a church in Acts 1:8, to cross all these boundaries to help. But if we drive by those communities, roll up our windows, then how are we showing them the love of Christ? They can open up doors—for us to preach the gospel, to save souls.
Michael Lee: Bobby, you said so many good things. But you talked about how our society has been racialized. We are all part of the human race, but there’s something that has been done, over centuries, here in our country, that has racialized our communities. What do you mean by that? How can our viewers understand that dynamic?
Bobby Scott: When we talk about race—and we’ve got to define our terms over and over again—if I say basically, what is race? Well, we’re talking about the descendants of the one Adam and Eve. She is the mother of all the living. So there was only one race.
But in our American foundation, we created subhuman categories, and it was defined by skin color. We had to do that in order to allow slavery to flourish. And when we did that, we racialized not only our society but then the church. If we baptized him, that means that he’s really a Christian—he has all the rights of a Christian in the church, and we didn’t want that either. So we had a subcategory within a church where Blacks couldn’t be allowed to be full members. So we racialized society, we racialized the church.
Now, it’s such a part of our society, the big melting pot that we claim that we are. Just look across America. People choose where they live based upon color, people choose their friends based on color, we choose who they merit based upon color—we’ve racialized all kinds of aspects of our society. And now as the church, we’ve got to openly recognize that—as a one people of God—show the remedy to overcome that. And that’s Christ.
P.J. Tibayan: If I could add one other thing, just historically, to the whole idea of being racialized, 1 Timothy 6 says that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And really, it comes from greed with the slave trade originally. Once the economic system got built on it, people who wanted to hold on to their possessions and their economic flourishing had to come up with justification for why they’re legitimately property rather than people, and so forth. So anyone who wanted to overturn that or work against it had to face that. And so even underneath that racial division, it’s really the justification of greed that took over societies.
Bobby Scott: Yeah, I hear you P.J. My mom and my uncle do a lot of family research, and we found my great-great-great grandfather, Steven Scott, to bank records. Because labor is so valuable, they kept records. And so I now know I am a descendant of a slave, Steven Scott, because of bank records.
Michael Lee: I don’t know about you, brothers, but there were not a few times I heard this year, “Stop talking about race, stop talking about cultural issues, just preach the gospel.” How do we respond? The question is, is talking about race and justice, the sin of racism, even though it’s not an actual doctrinal gospel issue, is that something that flows from it as a gospel implication? So if we think about the gospel primarily as the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, being saved by grace through faith, then they can say, “Just talk about that, don’t talk about race, politics, justice, social issues.” I think Bobby started to talk about that—why is there a need for us to talk about these issues in the church, as the church?
Scott Sauls: Last I checked, “love your neighbor” is part of the gospel. It is doctrinal. To love your neighbor as yourself is based on a doctrine that we must love our neighbor as ourselves. And there is no integrity in our preached gospel if there is a lack of a social dynamic that emphasizes the dignity of every person, from every background, from every nation, every tribe, tongue, people group.
In the Great Commission, the phrase Jesus used was, we have it translated as “all nations,” the Greek reads “ta ethne”—all ethnic groups. Go into all the world to every ethnic group, and preach the gospel. So you cannot separate the gospel from leveling the ground, for ta ethne, for all ethnic groups, for all people groups.
The second command is just like the first one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, love your neighbor as yourself. When I hear, “Just preach the gospel,” when it’s used as an occasion to dismiss, particularly the cries that are coming from injured people groups who feel marginalized because they have been—it’s not just a feeling. It’s actually an existential reality that there are certain skin colors, certain ethnicities, certain Eurocentric origins that have had the advantage economically, as P.J. was saying, socially, in terms of who has access to leadership and power, decision making, and culture-shaping for organizations, businesses, communities, cities, municipalities, the whole nation.
So as the church, you can’t “just preach the gospel” while leaving your neighbor out. You’re actually preaching a sub-gospel, a substandard gospel, an incomplete gospel when you only preach, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul strength in mind.”
You know, C.S. Lewis said that next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object that will ever be presented to your senses. And so there’s the sacredness of other human beings. And I think that it’s important to remember as well, in this conversation, that when Jesus said to preach the gospel, when he gave the Great Commission and said, “Go into all the world, to all ethnic groups,” he was doing so from the center of the earth, and was talking about, in part, us, who now reside at the ends of the earth.
So, it’s a very arrogant thing to behave as if we are the center of the Christian story and everybody else gets to be grafted in. In fact, we are on the periphery, and we have been lovingly and graciously grafted in by our Savior who hails from, from the Middle East, and with, in all likelihood, brown skin—probably more like your skin P.J. than then than mine or Bobby’s, which is a wonderful conglomerate of dark and light skin. You look at the Middle East, and you see in that particular ethnicity what it might look like to put us all together as one. And so there’s just such a great symbolism there even in the likely skin color of Christ Himself. It was an inclusive copper.
So I just I don’t know how you can preach the gospel without loving people, and loving people includes being quick to listen and slow to speak and to be teachable to be humble, to be ready at all times to repent of our own blind spots when those blind spots are exposed, rather than getting defensive and testy about it.
P.J. Tibayan: Thanks, Scott. If I could sympathize with the sentiment first before I agree with these brothers here: If you’re speaking about eternity, people are going to heaven and hell. New heavens, New Earth, like a fire in the end. So if we’re talking about eternal good without the gospel of Jesus Christ coming, living the life we should have lived, perfect righteousness, dying on the cross for our sins and rising from the dead, and trusting in Him and repenting from our sins and receiving him as Savior, Lord, and treasure, then yes, that is the only thing that’s gonna bring eternal good. So in that sense, the gospel justification by faith alone, in Christ alone and what he’s done for us, and that is really going to lead to eternal life. And so in that regard, I want to sympathize with it.
But at the end of the day, I’m gonna agree with these brothers here, in the sense that nobody “just preaches the gospel.” Even the people who are telling us to just preach the gospel are not preaching the gospel when they’re telling us to just preach the gospel. You’re not preaching the gospel to me, when you’re telling me to just preach the gospel. Unless “just preach the gospel” is the gospel, and it’s not. And I can sympathize with that.
I get that you’re trying to grow me and challenge me and you want to, because the Great Commission, so if I could—I don’t know if there’s a Bible verse—Scott was referring to Mark 16, with preaching the gospel after Mark 16:9 . But the prime thing is that there’s no verse that says, “Just preach the gospel” that I could think of. But there are verses where it says, “Go therefore and disciple, all ethnic people groups, baptizing them in the name of the Father, sending the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything, or all, that I commanded.”
So what’s commanded is we’re to hold on to the Bible, to teach the whole Bible, we’re to obey everything that Christ commands, including preaching the gospel, and then the implications of the gospel. And Scott was highlighting “love your neighbor as yourself,” which is one of the commands that we’re to teach people to observe, as an expression of loving God with all that we are. So we can’t obey the Great Commission, we can’t obey Jesus who embodies the gospel, who is the gospel, if we don’t obey the Great Commission. So “just preach the gospel” is reductionistic. And it’s inconsistent with the person who’s saying it.
Bobby Scott: Let me empathize, and then I want to ask you a follow-up question, Scott. Like P.J. said, if we’re talking about, “just preach the gospel,” I hear the warning behind that. Because there’s a vertical and a horizontal dimension to the gospel. And when I’m using the word “gospel,” I’m specifically saying what Jesus accomplished through His death and resurrection. So a lot of times, we talked about how gospel is what Jesus did, and Jesus through His death and resurrection, secured reconciliation between sinners and God—he did that. But he also, in doing that, he secured the reconciled people together, that he was saving it to one new family. So there’s a horizontal dimension and the vertical dimension.
But when we cut out the vertical dimension and talk about getting people together, then we are sliding into a social gospel. And in history, we’ve seen that happen. The hero, culturally,—now I’m saying culturally, specifically—Martin Luther King brought about radical changes horizontally to America, which is for all of our good, but he didn’t emphasize as much the vertical dimension where sin had to be atoned for through a substitutionary sacrifice that Jesus alone made. And if he dropped that, then you need to say, “No, we need to preach that.” Not only, but we need to preach that vertical dimension.
So I want to ask, Scott—and I’ve heard you say this before, and it’s so helpful—when we are called to reach and love these people, they’re people who are uniquely vulnerable given society’s quadrant of them. So can you help us understand why it is important for us to uniquely reach some of them, the poor, the others that the Bible lumps together that we need to uniquely love in our gospel effort?
Scott Sauls: Well, what Jesus said to His disciples and continues to say to us is “Follow me.” And everywhere that he went, everywhere that people followed him, it was directly into those places where people on the margins, people who were disadvantaged, who didn’t have the networks, resided—probably the better word is survived or were trying to survive. You look at the people that Jesus gave special attention to, even from the people that he chose to be his disciples, they were predominantly blue-collar people.
Of course, there was Saul of Tarsus, who was more of an elite, but he had to knock him down at a significant peg or two or three in order to get him to the humble place, so Paul could see himself as an equal with those who he used to despise. You see Jesus choosing women who were marginalized, dismissed, disrespected, and disregarded. You see Jesus choosing particularly Mary Magdalene, who had been previously possessed by a demon, to be the first eyewitness of the resurrection, which is an empowerment to make them the first witnesses. It’s a statement. We see Jesus constantly healing the sick, touching contagious lepers who were regarded as unclean and not fit for the worship of God. It’s everywhere you turn. If you’re gonna follow Jesus, that’s where you’re going to go.
He wasn’t trying to make it into the green room. He was going to the places that most people wanted to avoid because there were image bearers there being overlooked. And then you could say Zacchaeus, as well. There’s a rich man, but he was also an outcast. He was socially outcast, despised and rejected by men, Zacchaeus was, by virtue of his profession and his behavior. And yet, Jesus even saw an unjust man as one who would be a beneficiary of the justice that he satisfied, to your point, on the cross on his death, and then his burial, and his resurrection. And so, it’s pretty amazing how far across the aisle—if we talk when I talk about partisanship—how far across the aisle, Jesus was constantly reaching in all directions, not just one.
Michael Lee: Yeah, that’s good. Well, P.J., next question for you. As you’ve been the lead pastor of your church now, through this very difficult and explosive last year, what challenges have you faced, as you have a pretty diverse congregation, as you’ve tried to teach and lead through these issues of race, injustice, and things like that? What challenges have you faced, and any word of encouragement for leaders who want to leave their churches to be more gospel reflecting?
P.J. Tibayan: Yeah, that one’s really loaded, we could go all day on that one. As far as the challenges I faced at Bethany Baptist Church in southeast Los Angeles, being a diverse church, our challenges are always going to be our own sins. So sins, individually, culturally, or even demographically, in our church. And the biggest challenge for us during this season was having humility to admit we have blind spots and then to really listen to each other.
Hebrews 3:12-13 talks about the sin that deceives us. So we need brothers and sisters to exhort us daily, while it’s still called “today” that we’re not hardened by sins of deception. So the challenge for us has been to humbly realize we have blind spots, to listen to each other, then to think through how to move forward. I’m sure all of us faced this past pastors: We have members who are on cable news all the time, on social media, and on the internet. And so there’s a lot of, them looking for their hobby horses or their chords to be struck in the church. And that’s been the challenge.
But to be honest, Bobby and I work in the same area, and God’s put us in the same harvest patch here in Los Angeles, but we have mutual friends who’ve had huge hits to their churches, where people have left—a quarter, a third of their church leaving and losing all kinds of money and financial support. And that’s been really difficult for those types of churches.
My encouragement to leaders is, in a situation like this—a few different thoughts are coming to my mind—but one of them would be James 4:1-2. It talks about where does conflict arise from among you? This sin arises from our desires in our hearts, our evil desires. Then he calls us—if you’re in love with the world—you’re an adulterer because we’re trying to love God with all our hearts but we’re actually loving some other idols at the same time. And when I have an idol, and you step on my idol, we’re gonna fight. Right? Or if you’re not petting my idol, we’re gonna fight.
So I think as leaders, we need to want to humble ourselves through examining our own hearts, taking the logs out of our own eyes, and teaching our people that there is sin in our lives. So getting to the root.
And this might be a good thought experiment here. I don’t know if you guys want to do this. What would be the root sin that’s causing all of this division in our churches regarding the race issue? That might be a good thought experiment here, in terms of answering that question as best we can from James 4:1-2. But I think, as pastors we know what to do with sin: we preach the gospel. We invite people to Christ, we invite them to repent from their sins, to trust in Christ, and to experience the gospel afresh. So we know what to do with sin. The question or challenge for us as leaders is actually identifying sin, calling it out, and then loving people through it as fellow sinners who are trying to restore other sinners with the gospel. I think that’s the challenge as a leader.
Michael Lee: That’s good.
Bobby Scott: So what is the James 4:1-2 root sin that our different groups are struggling with? I know you’ve thought about it a lot.
P.J. Tibayan: I get in trouble when I say this. So I think, this might be a little—I’m not sure if it’s controversial. But as I’ve thought about James 4:1-2 in relation to the race issue, I think that the divisive sin amongst Christians and churches in America is the unintentional, yet inevitable, indifference toward our African American neighbors. The unintentional, yet inevitable, indifference toward our African American neighbors. I think that’s the core of it.
When I say that, it’s basically the same as a failure to love your neighbor as yourself, but I’m using a very American answer here in terms of our context. And when I say “failing to love your neighbor as yourself,” what I’m saying is, I’m using love here in the Philippians 1:9 sense, where Paul prays for our love to abound in knowledge and discernment.
So notice, I use the word “unintentional,” because I’m not going to charge my Christian brothers and sisters and fellow pastors of intentionally not loving their African American brothers and sisters as they love themselves. But it’s unintentional. There’s a lack of discernment that there actually is an ethnocentric oppression in our culture, in our society, that exists. So that’s an objective look.
I think the main ontological debate, disagreement is, does it actually exist or not? And I think we run too much with the divisions to start fighting over solutions that we haven’t even agreed on the problem. Does it exist or does it not exist? Okay, so now, we have to argue for that. I’m gonna say it does just for the sake of this conversation. It does exist.
Now, if it does exist, the brothers and sisters and Christians who don’t see that it exists are not intentionally trying to oppress others with ethnocentrism. But because they haven’t reckoned with the fact that it actually exists, it’s an inevitable, and unintentional, indifference, a lack of Christian love, and that’s sinful. And because of that sin, that’s causing all kinds of division.
And so when we start talking about and start pointing at it, I’m defensive. If you confront me with my sin, we’re gonna get defensive. Then you start talking about solutions, then there’s a thousand different ways that Satan is going to take this powder keg and get us derailed from actually making headway in terms of acknowledging sin, repenting from sin, and to being restored in Christ.
Michael Lee: Scott, you’re in Nashville, I’m from Atlanta. It’s the Bible Belt, but I know you guys have a lot of members who are Vanderbilt University. That’s a pretty liberal, progressive university as well. How has it been difficult for you, leading your church, and keeping the church united, loving one another, loving their neighbors, and speaking prophetically into some of these issues?
Scott Sauls: So Nashville, many might be surprised to hear, is no longer a Bible Belt city. It’s very much a Coastal city now. The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, both referred to Nashville as the Third Coast. I’ve got more New York City friends in Nashville than I do in New York City, having come to Nashville from New York because of the migration. A lot of people from West Coast as well.
But I did come in nine years ago to a church that had historically been Bible Belt—Southern, white, traditional, and Republican. And over the course of the last nine years, it’s become much more diverse. It started with generational diversity, then we brought on an Asian American brother named Paul Lim to be the second most frequent preacher in our community, second only to me as the senior pastor. And that started slowly opening doors for people of color and minority brothers and sisters to find their way into our community.
Of course, Paul is also a Vanderbilt professor, and, yes, we have lots of Vanderbilt medical professionals, and also professors and admin folks. We’ve got this mix. We’re probably I’d say, as a church now, as a multi-site church now, we’ve got four different location—just brought on the first African American pastor that our presbytery has ever had, which is both bad news that it’s taken 40 years, and good news that some change is happening. Mika Edmondson and his wife, Christina, are doing a wonderful job in the Bordeaux neighborhood, which is 82% African American, as I understand it, and flanked by two historic Black universities. So there’s some really beautiful progress that we’re getting to participate in in that regard, of just the diversity, the slow diversification of the church.
But it has also brought to the surface some very important conversations, like the one we’re having right now, when you put together Caucasians, Asian Americans, African Americans, Indian Americans, Native Americans, and such under the same roof, still with a very much White majority, there’s a lot more of that prophetic speak and that prophetic voice in our midst that has rattled some people as some have left. It has energized some people, as some have repented and sought more awareness and learning from a humble place. And it’s starting to settle into this really meaningful dialogue of different voices and different perspectives coming to the table to decide, under the Lord and before the Lord, what it’s supposed to look like moving forward as what we’re hoping will become a true robust, multicultural church, across the city.
We’re still in the very early stages, and I wish Mika were here to answer the question because he might have a different perspective. I would imagine that it’s more challenging for him than it is for me to come into this situation that he has, and the history of these come into. It took a lot of courage, and a lot of bravery, and a deep reading of the gospel but, like I said, so far, doing a wonderful job stretching us and teaching us and look forward to whatever the future holds there.