Letter to the 7 Largest Churches in America
Dear White Evangelical Pastors representing the 7 Largest Churches in America,
Imagine if I told you that a dark, insidious creature is living underneath your house.
It's been there for centuries. Growing and eating away at the deepest layers of the ground, and unbeknownst to you, you've built your big beautiful house on its system of tunnels and nests where this silent creature lives. The ground you thought was sturdy, dependable, and solid, is full of gaping holes. Meanwhile, the creature continues to slowly eat away at what remains: the ground, the foundation, and soon...the whole house.
Imagine now if I told you, that the dark creature I speak of is buried deep within the foundation of Christendom, has been there since its founding, and has been slowly destroying the movement that Jesus started from the inside out. Ignored, it’s allowed to grow. Ignored, it’s allowed to destroy. Ignored, it will turn what's left of the house to rubble if not rooted and excavated out.
That dark creature, the social ill, the unspoken wound that is eating away at the body of Christ has a name.
It's called White Supremacy. It also goes by the name of White Christian Nationalism.
Christian Nationalism appropriates the name of Jesus and the language and imagery of scripture to promote the ideology of supremacy and superiority. It denies the imago Dei in every human being and seeks to diminish, control, subjugate, and even erase persons and points of view that do not agree with their ideology.
And your seats are probably full of people who subscribe to it.
I'm writing this to the 7 largest churches in America, where every single one is pastored by a white male.
In fact, out of the 7 largest churches in America (Outreach Magazine), 86% of the teaching staff, leadership, and campus pastors are all White Males.
Out of 141 pastors:
119 are white males
12 are people of color
10 are female
If you look at the list of 100 largest churches in America, only 18 are people of color and only 1 is a female.
White males have a predominant place within Evangelical churches, and consequently, power and influence.
What's missing in the body of Christ in the U.S.? Women's voices. Black and brown people's voices. And they have been tirelessly sounding the alarm on Christian Nationalism for a long time. People like
, , & - people like Dante Stewart, Esau McCaulley, and Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis.American Christianity has been swimming in the shallow pool for far too long, and is missing the richness, depth, and wisdom from diverse voices, theological perspectives, and scholarly work from those not in the spotlight.
I am calling for the pastors of the 7 largest churches in the U.S. to use their platform and pulpit to:
Learn about White Supremacy & Christian Nationalism (read the Roots of White Supremacy by
or Unsettling Truths by )Unequivocally renounce the insidious evil of Christian Nationalism
Renounce the culture superiority, domination and control
Renounce violence
Resist demonization of others (labeling others as demonic or evil)
Alleviate the real fears of your congregations
Return to the ethic of love and compassion for neighbor and a culture of peacemaking and building trust in each other again. (Early Christians were known for their radical love ethic and welcomed diversity of thought and practice.)
Listen to and amplify the voices that are being harmed by the damaging rhetoric of Christian Nationalism
Your seats are likely filled with people who come to worship on Sunday and harbor violence, bias, and hostility towards their neighbors who don't look like them, believe like them, and think like them.
How are you rooting out these harmful thought patterns and behaviors? Because they won't go away on their own.
Many of the wealthiest White Evangelical Christians in America are using their money to fortify the heresy of Christendom. Trump exacerbated the church’s fears of persecution, in order to tempt the faithful away from the difficult teachings of Christ, and towards the ease of temporal safety, found in the heresy of Christian empire.
It’s time to use your power and influence to renounce these distortions, even at great cost. If not, are we to assume you are more interested in maintaining the status quo and creating messages that are a diversion from the work of dismantling this insidious cancer that is poisoning our communities and families?
You may think that the people in your congregations can’t handle a hard truth such as this. But I believe they can. They need shepherding. They need care. They need to be reminded who they are. They don’t have to be afraid. They are more than capable of engaging with reality. Their capacity for belief, love, and goodness is real.
You have to name the insidious ills within the institution. It won't be enough to use vague terms, cloaked or over-spiritualized language. We have to be very specific when fighting illnesses within the body. Overgeneralization does nothing to target the problem.
This culture of White Supremacy stretches from sea to shining sea across our globe. If America truly wants to be a city on a hill, we need to imagine a better way modeled by the radical love ethic of Jesus.
The Gospel is about right relationship with everyone and a reordering of human systems that oppress people (Luke 4:18, Romans 1:20). Does the Christianity you preach form in your people the awe of the sanctity of all life? The worthiness of all humans?
The Kingdom is built through love, not power. Christians transformed the Roman empire not by demanding but by loving, not by angrily shouting about their rights in the public square but by serving even the people who persecuted them. But once Christians gained political power under Constantine, that beautiful loving, sacrificing, giving, transforming Church became the angry, persecuting, killing Church. And so here we are.
“The historic fusing of Christianity and white supremacy is a moral and spiritual cancer, eating at the body and soul of the American church. If there is any hope that Christianity is going to find its way to health in this country, it’s only going to be by white Christian churches facing the root causes of its ill health, which includes its complicity in the idea that this entire continent was a divinely promised land for exploitation by European Christians — by white Christians.
The willingness of so many white Christians to embrace little lies everywhere stems from the necessity of protecting the big lie that is everything. The only path to health, for both our faith and our democracy, is for white Christians to embrace a terrifying but saving truth: what we have taken to be the bedrock of our faith and a biblical worldview—that we alone are God’s chosen people to bring salvation and civilization to the world—is not an eternal truth grounded in the Bible but rather a self-serving lie rooted in white supremacy.”
The idea of Christendom, an earthly Christian empire, is an extra-biblical concept that is not aligned with the teachings of Jesus.
@BarnaGroup's top reason why young people are leaving the church is Overprotectiveness and Defensiveness:
the demonizing of "the world," ignoring real-world problems, & obsession with culture wars.
The 7 Largest Churches
Life.Church
Craig Groeschel
85,000 people
Church of the Highlands
Chris Hodges
60,000 people
Lakewood Church
Joel Osteen
45,000 people / $89 million a year in revenue with 1% going to charitable causes
CCV (Christ's Church of the Valley)
Ashley Wooldridge
37,000 people
Crossroads Church
Brian Tome
35,000 people
Christ Fellowship Church
Todd Mullins, Todd and Julie Mullins
32,000 people
To join me in holding the American church accountable, comment, share, and let’s use our voices to speak about difficult truths that need to be spoken and find a path forward that actually looks more like the type of Good News that Jesus spoke about.
In the Chosen One there are no longer Insiders or Outsiders...there is one Chosen One. All are in him, and he is in all!
Colossians 3:11, First Nations Version