What Paul does is transform the master-slave relationship by insisting that both masters and slaves have the same heavenly Lord and are accountable to him. The emphasis is on mutual responsibility und...
Arise, 0 LORD; 0 God, lift up your hand. Forget not the afflicted. We call to you in our sorrow and frustration, Lord God, eternal, everlasting God. Why do you stand so far off? Why do you hide y...
Pastor: For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was no...
Father of heirs and orphans, Salvation of saint and sinner, Draw near and forgive us. Forgive us for clinging to law more than grace. Forgive us for choosing slavery when you offer us adoption. Forgi...
Pastor: God our Redeemer, you have saved your people through Jesus Christ, your Son. You have delivered your people out of slavery to sin and have freed us into new life. Yet, we still wander through ...
For years, Bible scholars have danced around the matter by saying slavery in Rome was far different from slavery in the first few centuries of American history. No doubt their observations carry a mea...
Pastor: O my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift my face to you, my God, for our iniquities have risen higher than our heads, and our guilt has mounted up to the heavens. All: From the days of our f...
Psalm 46:1, Philippians 4:19, James 4:8, Hebrews 4:16, Matthew 11:28-30, Psalm 34:18, 1 John 1:9
Dear Christ, hasten to me. Release me from my sins. Free my arms from the chains of evil, that I may embrace you. Lift the scales of ignorance from my eyes, that I may see you. Why do you delay? What ...
In his excellent book, Woke Church , Eric Mason shares a personal account of watching people being sold into slavery in real-time with his family: “CNN released an exclusive report in October 201...
Several years ago I saw a television show called Caught on Camera . It featured clips of people being secretly filmed doing all manner of horrific things, precisely because they thought they were...
Few voices captured the brutal reality of enslavement as powerfully as Sojourner Truth. Truth endured profound mistreatment and indignities as an enslaved woman. A severe beating left her reliant on a...
Mother’s Day is complicated for a pastor. Among the happy families that are celebrating, there are children who were abused by mothers, mothers who lost lost a child, and women suffering from inferti...
“This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the sam...
So if we want to get the church right, we have to learn to see it as a salad in a bowl, made the Right Way of course. For a good salad is a fellowship of different tastes, all mixed together with the ...
A particularly brutal set of slave owners we recently encountered in South Asia held more than twenty slaves in a rice mill. They and their thugs beat the slaves, sexually assaulted the women, even do...
Unlike hunger or homelessness or illiteracy, if you try to attack the problem, it will attack you. Violence fights back. One of the places we have seen this most starkly is in IJM’s fight against slav...
To illustrate how the racial oppression of previous generations has benefited European Americans, we can look at the fate of Native Americans. When Europeans arrived in North America, Indians owned al...
Leader: God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. All: Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it? Leader: The LORD...
The first thing to notice is that violence is intentional. For example, one of the most brutal forms of violence affecting millions of poor women and girls in our world is sex trafficking. Lured a...
One of my favorite Bible illustrations of someone willing to go against the norms of society to befriend another based on love and forgiveness is found in the New Testament book of Philemon. It is a m...
1 Peter 2:9, Colossians 1:13-14, Galatians 2:20, Ephesians 4:22-24, Matthew 16:24, Philippians 3:20-21, John 8:36
Gracious God, You have called us out of darkness and into the light of Your love. You have redeemed us and made us whole in order to set us free from bondage. The challenge You place before us is to d...
John Newton authored one of the most beloved hymns for English-speaking black Christians in the world, yet he spent his early life transporting African slaves to the New World. He was born in 1725, w...
Matthew 25:40, Jeremiah 22:3, James 2:1, Psalm 82:3-4, Micah 6:8
Frederick Douglass describes how the evils of slavery and racism acts as a sap on the integrity of both our country and our faith in a God where there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free: Fello...