Jesus is the Light of the World

Jesus is the Light of the World

Below is an excerpt. For the full article purchase UrbanFaith Magazine December Quarter 2022

It’s December!  It’s that time of year when many people are either anxious or excited about the Christmas holiday season.  On the first day of December the countdown to Christmas day begins.  Some write Christmas lists while others plan holiday meals. Some begin shopping for the perfect gifts while others decorate their homes inside and out.  The brightest reminder of the upcoming holiday is the Grand Illumination of cities and towns around the world. Christmas lights accentuate buildings, houses, trees, ugly sweaters and more.  The world is filled with light.

Jesus is the Light of the World

 What’s the use of the sun – if the earth can’t feel the glow?

If it couldn’t make flowers grow?

It wouldn’t be a wonder – it wouldn’t be a miracle…

                        (‘Miracle’, Jonathan McReynolds & Mali Music)

 

Christians around the world celebrate the birth of Jesus on Christmas, the annual festival observed on December 25.  The Gospel according to Luke and Matthew chronicle this illuminating occasion.  The birth of Jesus was no ordinary birth; it was a miracle.  Jesus was no ordinary man; Jesus was and is the Christ.  Christ, which means ‘anointed,’ is a proper name, or title.  Jesus Christ is not a name; it is a faith statement. All who declare that Jesus is the Christ, believe and declare that Jesus is God’s anointed Savior. The Gospel according to John declares that Jesus is ‘the Word’ that became human and lived among us.

The song, Miracle, sung by Jonathan McReynolds & Mali Music, reminds me of the miraculous work of God through the son (s-o-n   not  s-u-n), who came so that we could not only see the light and truth, but also feel the light and be changed by the warmth of it.  What’s the use of the Son, if the world can’t feel the liberating power of the God’s love, and be renewed by it?  The miraculous birth of Christ would mean nothing if the seed of humanity didn’t turn toward it and mature to its fullest possibility.  I often wonder what the world would be like if all of humanity believed and declared that Jesus, the living Word of God, is the Christ.

So the Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness.

(John 3:14a, NLT)

The birth of Christ was necessary because we, human beings, needed to restore our relationship with God.  Sin is often compared to darkness, and salvation compared to light.  When we say that Jesus is the light of the world, we acknowledge that Jesus was born and lived with us. Jesus took on the form of a human being, ‘fixed his tent,’ and became our tent-mate. Well, of course most of us aren’t living in tents these days. However, we do know what it means when family and friends come to our homes and spend time with us.  This is what Jesus did, so that we could physically see God’s power and God’s love for us.  God loved us even when we weren’t loving toward God.  That is unfailing love. When you think of buying and giving Christmas gifts this holiday season, remember Jesus, the greatest gift ever given.  When you are paying for the perfect gift that you have chosen for a loved one, remember Jesus is the perfect gift God offered to us.

EntreVangelism: Stepping Out of the Church and Into the Marketplace

EntreVangelism: Stepping Out of the Church and Into the Marketplace

 

For years, I struggled to reconcile my passion for ministry and the marketplace. As a young minister, I found myself equally intrigued by the stories of great evangelists and the stories of entrepreneurs that used their influence to change the world. While the aspiration to be like the men and women I admired was immense, my reality painted a different picture. I was broke. Not only was I broke, but I faced the hard truth that I did not have the financial resources to accomplish what I felt God was calling me to do in ministry. Please don’t get me wrong, money does not make a ministry successful, but it sure does help. After all, the Bible states: “Money answers everything.” (Ecclesiastes 10:19).

As a Campus Staff Minister at a major Christian non-profit, I was tasked with raising a substantial budget to support the work of ministering the Gospel to students at Wesleyan University. After eight months of meeting with fundraising coaches and pitching the ministry to over 200 potential philanthropic partners, I was only able to raise half of my original fundraising goal. Little did I know that my failure to secure funding would be the catalyst to discovering my destiny in Christ.

Like many other young ministers, my desire to be an entrepreneur was distinctly separate from my desire to preach the Gospel. Because of this, I attributed my failures to lack of networks, lack of skill, and poor personal leadership, only to find that the deeper issue at play was that I was inauthentically engaging the call of God on my life. God called me to be a minister and an entrepreneur. In essence, an “EntreVangelist.”

I had spent nearly a decade preaching, serving on non-profit executive boards, traveling on missions nationally and internationally, and ministering in my local church. Yet, I never thought of taking the skills I acquired in ministry into the marketplace until I received what seemed to be a random call from a multi-millionaire asking me to work for him. He remembered my fundraising pitch from years ago. Now, it was his chance to pitch his multimillion-dollar project to me.

During the interview, I listened intently, mentally documented the areas needed for improvement, and made a suggestion that changed the project’s trajectory. Within a few weeks, I became the lead consultant. From that point on, I leveraged the skills I learned in ministry to lead a team of consultants, hire staff, and successfully pitch the project to city officials. While this opportunity transitioned me into a better understanding of God’s will for my life, I realized that I was internally conflicted by my desire to minister outside of the confines of the box I created around my calling. To address this internal struggle, I needed to clear up a misconception within myself regarding ministering in the marketplace.

Misconception: Ministry and the Marketplace Must be Separate

The misconception that deterred me from merging my skills in ministry and the marketplace was that I believed they were distinctly separate. Remember the story in the Bible where Jesus entered the temple courts and drove the money changers and merchants out of the temple? Well, for many that Scripture has been used to justify a separation between business and church; however, when one takes a closer look at Matthew 21:13, they will notice that Jesus declares: “My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.” This narrative focuses on the merchants and money changers perverting the House of God for personal gain. When Jesus forcefully redirects those exploiting the temple, He re-shifts the focus back to its primary use as a house of prayer. So, does this justify that the church and business should remain separate? The answer is no.

One thing to consider is that churches in America are legally and practically a business. Many, if not most churches have budgets, paid and volunteer staff, insurance, and boards of directors. In fact, the estimated hundreds of thousands of Protestant churches in America collect billions in revenue each year. They provide services, strategic planning, community development, networking events, conferences, and workshops that are considered valuable services in secular industries. A critical concept to understand is that the Church is a business and a ministry. As stewards entrusted with leading both, we should never forget that the primary function of the Church must always remain for the worship of God.

Balance: Interview with Touré Roberts

Balance: Interview with Touré Roberts

UrbanFaith sat down to interview Touré Roberts, the visionary leader and founder of ONE (formerly OneChurch LA) to discuss his new book Balance.

Touré Roberts is a man who wears many hats. He is a husband, father, producer, pastor, author, speaker, and business executive with churches and homes in two cities. His wife Sarah Jakes Roberts who wrote the foreword to his most recent book is one of the most sought after speakers in the country. Saying Roberts needs balance to maintain his success is an understatement. But Touré has uncovered an unconventional approach to balance…as a place to live from. An overview of the book is below.

Imagine learning to tap into the awareness, the sensitivity and highest thought patterns that enable the most successful outcomes in life, love and business. What would your life look like if you were able to break the patterns of inconsistency that keep you from your absolute best? These goals are not only possible—they are what you were made for! In Balance, bestselling author Touré Roberts guides us on the eye-opening journey that unpacks the divine formula that makes this a reality. This illuminating guide brings a unique and eye-opening perspective to the evasive concept of balance.

Marcus Garvey’s Dark Mirror

Marcus Garvey’s Dark Mirror

Marcus Garvey’s Dark Mirror

In NPR’s February 17th episode of Throughline, Marcus Garvey takes center stage as an enigmatic, underrated, revolutionary figure on a mad quest to reconnect former American slaves to their motherland via the Black Star Line. Marcus Garvey is not a widely discussed figure for a few reasons, chiefly the fact that he is a revolutionary. He possessed a vision on Blackness that transcended culture and context, a nation of people bound impregnably by race alone. However, this grand ideal for the freed children of the African Diaspora would never come to fruition, much like the fated black star line. 

There is a great metaphor in the Black Star Line, it encapsulates everything about Garveyism. As mentioned in the podcast, it would eventually be Garvey’s ruin when it proved to be much less profitable than expected, causing Garvey to begin selling bad stock in a bankrupt company. However, the Black Star Line persists in the cultural imagination, through television shows and in literature. There is something common in the motivations that built the Black Star Line, in the dream the line came to represent. However, our lives as Black people have only grown increasingly complex since Garvey’s death in 1940. Even the dream of sailing back to Africa seems to have lost its allure through the maelstrom of time. And yet, Garvey and his ideas seem undying, like embers on dry grass that refuse to dim. Instead, they splinter off into wild emanations like Pan-Africanism and Rastafarianism. In this way, Garveyism still affects our lives especially within the Black church. In some sense, Garvey’s view of the Black church became realized decades later during the civil rights movement. One the other hand, his worldview would birth forth Rastafarianism, a derivative distillation of his beliefs. Like two sides of the same coin, these two forces fight for Garvey’s legacy and so too are we placed between them as people affected by these very ideas. By finding our place within this conflict, we are able to live more nuanced, more freelives by choosing what ideas we allow to influence our decision on a daily basis. But in order to develop in this area, we first need to understand what Garveyism is and how it differs from its Rastafarian cousin. 

The following quote is from an article written 1962 edition of the Journal of Negro Education by John L. Graves. He quotes Garvey as saying, “ If the white man has the idea of a white God, let him worship his God as he desires. Since the white people have seen their God through white spectacles, we have only now started out to see our God through our own spectacles[…] we shall worship Him through the spectacles of Ethiopia.”  

In a sense, this sentence tells you everything one needs to know about Marcus Garvey’s relationship with Christianity. The tenants, cultural additions, and governing philosophy of a religious belief is not so important as the Black authenticity expressed throughout said belief. This authenticity is not expressly depicted through art or skin color but specifically nationalism. Garvey presents Ethiopia as the heart of Black culture, an imagined ancestral motherland whose culture presents some sort of refuge for the vision of a unified black identity. This view of religion is quite utilitarian. It removes the supernatural element of belief from religion and places the culture and ambition of men above the will of God. While this might seem like a bold claim, it is actually pretty common. For instance, the rise of the Anglican church only occurred due to the fact that King George the 3rd wanted to divorce his wives so he created a national religion with himself at the head. To a degree, origins of African-American churches during enslavement had similar roots. For some slavemasters, allowing slaves to practice Christianity became simply another method of control. There were slave bibles specifically edited to remove any part concerning fair treatment and release of slaves. Even Mormonism coincided with the rising national pride of a newly independent America and the buzzing fervor of manifest destiny. In all of these cases, the man-made objective that causes the schism (in these scenarios) became central to the movement for the remainder of its existence. For the Anglican Church, a national church would give rise to a new sense of national identity during an age where such ideas were novel. For Slave Churches, obedience and patience in the face of oppression became the objective. In the heights of the Civil Rights era, Martin Luther King Jr. took these same tenants and used them against those same oppressive forces through peaceful resistance. Even the Mormons today are one of the fastest growing religions both at home and abroad due in part to their potent evangelicalism and motivating sense of divinity. When viewed through this context, it is no wonder that Garvey’s ethnocentric view or religion would spawn a belief system for the diaspora, by the diaspora. However, before I begin to describe how Rastafarianism and Garveyism intersect, there are a few more ideas Garvey espoused that are important to understand. 

For Marcus Garvey, assimilation was never an option. In my own words, Garveyism is an attempt to create a western system of culture for the African Diaspora. However, instead of creating a wholly organic culture, a lot of Garvey’s ideas are copied directly from the governing political ideologies of the time. A good example of this is racism in and of itself. Garvey firmly believed in the separation of the races, hence why the Black Star Line became such an important part of his life. He was so committed to this idea that he would go on to give several speeches at KKK rallies extolling the virtues of Jim Crow. For Garvey, the oppression of his life was not so much that racism existed. This, to him, was the natural order. Instead, the real oppression was that Africa and the people from there were shattered and divided in a world that was becoming increasingly connected and organized along racial lines.

In this sense, he was a Black nationalist. He believed that people could be categorized along racial lines and that these groups deserved autonomy. Garvey sought to center the Black world around Ethiopia, one of the oldest centralized states on the African continent. He hoped to foster a national sense of unity across the entire African Diaspora in order to resist the colonial powers threatening Black people at home and abroad. I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a Black supremacist, in a way, he had a keen sense of equality. He believed that given a fair hand, people will work to increase their own quality of life and legacy. This idea of self-determination is common today, however, we tend to apply it on an individual basis. To Garvey, personal advancement is the responsibility of the race as a whole and only when the races are unified will there be social harmony. In the March 1st, 2003 edition of the Journal of Black Studies, Otis B. Grant quotes Garvey as saying,

 “African Americans should stop making[…] noise about social equality, giving the White people the idea that we are hankering after their company, and get down to business and build up a strong race, industrially, commercially, educationally and politically, everything social will come afterwards.”

To me, this is an excellent encapsulation of Garvey’s beliefs. Garveyism’s goal is racial unity, but the means of reaching that point seems to be copying the popular institutions of one’s society and creating replicas exclusively for the profit and benefit of your own race. While publicly, Garvey might have downplayed his relationship to the church, he was very interested in continuing his Garveyite project within the Black Christian community. In 1921, he attended the foundational ceremony of the African Orthodox Church in Chicago. I find this very interesting because instead of trying to revive traditional African belief systems, Garvey endorsed a specifically Christian, ethnic worldview for his ideal vision of society. This process of replication then assimilation of western ideas is the heart of Garveyism. Instead of trying to find something authentic and new from the black perspective, he sought to create a mirror of the world around him. Viewed in this way, the fate of the Black Star Line and the rise of Rastafarianism seem soaked in bitter irony. 

  There was a lot of hype around the Black Star Line from both its proponents and its detractors. For Black people, it represented something of their own. However, by this time in his career, Garvey was a bit of a social pariah for giving a series of speeches at KKK meetings. Today, we would just say he was canceled. He ended up getting cheated out of ships of good quality and then was forced to hire an incompetent crew for those ships. In order to keep his operation running, he essentially committed mail fraud and was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment in 1925. The reason that I find this so ironic is because this venture inflamed every contradiction within his ideology. In a world where races must compete as unified blocks, when one race controls a majority of the resources in an area, they are not inclined to extend those resources fairly across racial lines. So instead of getting the quality ship that you pay for, you get cheated and nobody cares and then they throw you in jail. Had there been more racial equity between Garvey and his business associates, perhaps they would have been inclined to see him as a human being and not as someone unworthy of the decency of fair trade. 

Matthew 6:24 says plainly that man cannot serve two masters. To me, Garvey’s vision of Christianity attempts to do just this. By using Christianity as the catalyst for Pam-African, nationalist sentiment, Garvey positions Ethiopia as the new chosen land for Black people. Salvation, then, becomes less an exercise in humanity but a right of birth and race. Much like the Black Star Line that came before, Garvey’s vision for Christianity would ultimately collapse and give rise to something much more potent and sincere. In a follow up piece, we will discuss Marcus Garvey, his view of Christianity, and his relationship with Rastafarianism. 

Ready to Raise Your GPA: An Interview with Jonathan Banks

Ready to Raise Your GPA: An Interview with Jonathan Banks

Across the world students, teachers, parents, professors, pastors, and caregivers are beginning a new year facing numerous challenges. The uncertainty of the pandemic, the logistics of classes, and the worries about the economy are one thing. But the larger questions about purpose, relationships, and faith impact us far beyond the classroom year after year. UrbanFaith interviewed Jonathan Banks, author of Raise Your GPA about how we can have success this school year and beyond. The full interview is above.

“Type Faith”

“Type Faith”

Adapted from a Spoken Word

A brown man taught me how to love and He taught me about faith, too.

On a Friday night, He was tragically killed by brutal state-sanctioned force for “crimes” he did not commit.

Left to die there in cold blood, his body hung lifelessly before his weeping mother.

Back then, Calvary trees did bear strange fruit.

He died a living sacrifice.

The Ultimate Martyr for the benefit of all. And all He ever asked for was our faith. In Him. In Love. In the mountain-moving, overflowing, miracle-working, revolutionary and soul saving power resting in His pierced hands.

But we want safe Jesus.

We want a sweet by and by in the sanctity of our own hearts and silence in the face of skeptics.

We want prayers answered but doubt every chance we get.

We sit 21st century Jesus in a cute little box decorated with our every wish.

We are a generation clinging to faith by a thread….

Yet, we’re trapped in 21st century strait jackets threaded in skepticism and laced in fair-weather Christian faith. 

Yet, we’re searching for God in places we need not… as He stands, pierced hands, open-wide.

 

Yet, we’re too blind to see the same brown man who casted out demons, walked on water, and healed with the touch of His hand is the same One we bow before today. 

Whatever happened to that “I won’t go unless your presence goes with me” type faith?

That “I’d rather be burned alive than to bow before your idols” type faith?

That “PUT ME IN A LION’S DEN, IF YOU WANT TO” type faith?

That “ran my biological clock but still expecting” type faith?

That “come against giants… with a SLINGSHOT” type faith?

That “I don’t see the promised land, I don’t see it, but Lord….I’ll walk” type faith?

I want a throwback type faith.

That old-school faith you could feel in your bones.

The type that made Aunty jump in circles in the church.

That sit in your prayer closet and pour out your heart.

That never woulda made it without you.

That—“this is my last dollar, Lord, be my last dream.”

I won’t settle for a Sunday morning and done type faith.

I want to see. And touch. And hear. And taste the goodness of God 25/8.

These hands, they WILL heal, WILL bless, WILL be lifted to praise the Lord.

The sea-splitting, earth moving, life-breathing, King of kings and Lord of lords!

The Name above all names, worthy of ALL our praise.

The One to whom every knee will bow and every tongue shall confess.

The One who was, and is, and is to come.

The only God in history that ever came down in human form and humbled himself to relate to me.  

So if anyone should ever ask, a brown man taught me how to love, and he taught me about faith, too.