Which Jesus Do We Serve?

ON MAY 20, Christians around the world celebrate Pentecost, which commemorates the coming of the Holy Spirit to the earliest followers of Jesus on the 50th day following his resurrection on Easter Sunday. When I read Acts 2 and imagine the room filled with the small band of believers, a sound “like the rush of a violent wind” and tongues “as of fire” resting above each of their heads, my faith is excited, too.

While there were only 120 gathered in that room, 3,000 were added to their number that day. The power of Jesus, the identity of being a follower of Jesus Christ, and the catalyst of the Holy Spirit is such that in the years since, a tiny group of believers in 33 C.E. has blossomed to 2.2 billion who claim Jesus as Lord today.

Yet there have been times in the long history of Christianity when significant numbers of believers have gone astray, having lost the priorities of Jesus. Indeed, in some such times (the Crusades, the Inquisition, the colonization of Africa and the Americas, slavery, Jim Crow, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust all painfully come to mind), people claiming the mantle of Christianity have committed terrible atrocities in the name of their faith.

To bring errant followers of Jesus back to him and his teachings has often required the leadership of prophetic voices able and willing to remind the people of God who they really are. Christianity in the United States is now going through such a time, when racial and national idolatries have captivated Christians—white American Christians—who have lost their way. For captive Christians to find their way back to being “followers of Jesus” has become the critical call of our time.

TO THAT END, on Ash Wednesday a group of church leaders, all old enough to be called “elders,” met in a private retreat. We prayed. We experienced a deep sense of lament for the political and moral crisis we are in and for the ways it has unfolded. We confessed on behalf of the churches and for our own complicity in the situation in which we now find ourselves. And we strongly sensed the need for repentance, realizing that word means much more than guilt and shame, but a “turning around” and moving in a new direction.

We agreed to write a declaration together—something that would be much more than just another statement to sign and then file away. Rather, with a shared humble spirit, we felt called to act as elders for a time such as this and to commend our message to the churches for a process of prayer, study, reflection, and action.

Throughout the season of Lent, we offered to God our prayer, confession, and collaborative work. Just before Palm Sunday, we unveiled our public declaration, titled “Reclaiming Jesus.”

The heart of the declaration focuses on this question: Which Jesus do we serve? Not one that is silent, nor one that is white, nor one that is an American first.

Rather, the Jesus we serve and will obey offers a powerful alternative to the moral crisis that exists at the highest levels of political leadership in this county and to its bitter fruits of racial bigotry and white nationalism, the mistreatment of women, the rejection of immigrants and refugees, the abandonment of the poor, the denial of truth, and the dangerous replacement of public service with autocracy. We believe these issues are not just political problems but pose pressing dangers to authentic Christian faith.

During this Easter season we have engaged with the online readership of Sojourners, the heads of church denominations, and Jesus followers everywhere in a process of civil discourse and discernment around this declaration and what it means for Christians in the United States. We know that this confession of faith must lead to concrete action, and we plan to officially launch a season of actions to reclaim the ways of Jesus—starting on Pentecost, which is when early Christians first took their faith to the streets. Going public with our faith is now demanded of us.

Let no one tell you that what our country is going through in this political era is normal, or business as usual, or that Christians are behaving as they have always behaved. The future of the nation’s soul and the integrity of faith are both at stake in how Christians respond to this political moment. Even now, it is not too late to repent and choose a more faithful future. Let us pray that Pentecost marks a decisive moment in the journey back to Jesus.