Carl Lentz, lead pastor of Hillsong East Coast, appeared on the latest episode of “Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man” to speak on how he believes the American Church has been complicit in racism and how to better reflect Jesus moving forward.
“Now historically speaking, the most powerful person in America is a religious white man. Well, more specifically … the Christian, white man,” NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho, who’s now an ESPN analyst, said at the top of his show.
“I know that America we are religious people, generally speaking, and religion, it teaches you compassion, it teaches you empathy, it teaches you sympathy. But I recently read that compassion without confrontation is like fruitless, sentimental commiseration.”
The quote inspired Acho to have an uncomfortable but “compassionate confrontation” with the popular Hillsong pastor. He noted that although segregation in America was outlawed in the mid-1960s, Sunday mornings in houses of worship across America still remain segregated.
“It’s hard to listen to a preacher preach if you know that that preacher believes in systems that are hurting your people,” Lentz said. “So it’s safer sometimes to go to a black church … [because] I don’t know if I can trust somebody who claims to love Jesus and professes to teach me about this man yet you’re silent on issues that hurt my people.’”
When asked why Lentz believes white pastors have not been outspoken on the matter, the minister used the example of an extremely dirty house.
“I’ll just let my house be dirty because it’s too much work. This is what happens with racism,” Lentz said in the episode.
“The moment you start looking into this, you realize, ‘Oh, wow, this goes all the way to the top. This is in our church choir. This is in our church administration. This is in the way we’ve taught the Bible. And there are a lot of Christians who set out to clean house until they find out how close to home it might come.”
“For decades in the American Church,” people have stuffed the problem of racism away, he said.
“I think, in fact, it could be said that churches might be one of the biggest propagators of racist ideology in our country.”
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SOURCE: Christian Post, Jeannie Law
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