How Christians Can Leverage #BlackLivesMatter and Have a Seat at the Table

'The Church Has the Answer to Systemic Racism and It Is the Gospel of Jesus Christ,' D.A. Horton Says

By Nicola Menzie, Christian Post Reporter Thursday, October 01, 2015

From Left: Phillip Bethancourt, Russell Moore, Robert P. George, Thabiti Anyabwile, and D.A. Horton during a panel on 'The State of Racial Reconciliation in America: Ferguson, Eric Gardner, and Your Community,' at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission's Leadership Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday, March 26, 2015. — From Left: Phillip Bethancourt, Russell Moore, Robert P. George, Thabiti Anyabwile, and D.A. Horton during a panel on "The State of Racial Reconciliation in America: Ferguson, Eric Gardner, and Your Community," at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission's Leadership Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday, March 26, 2015. | (Photo Courtesy of Alli Rader)

CP: Any advice for those who say they are tired of trying to make people feel comfortable about engaging Black Lives Matter discussions?

Horton: I think it's always unique. In my situation, being Mexican, and I've been in a lot of places that are predominantly African-American. So even the neighborhood that I grew up in, I was the only Mexican in my neighborhood.

Sometimes, that even puts me in an awkward position, because I'm asked to speak on certain topics that isn't even my ethnic heritage. But that's why I leverage men like Anthony Bradley, Adam Thomason, James Roberson. Men that are African-American that I affirm as leaders and voices, so that people don't pigeonhole me or make me even the token African-American when I'm Hispanic.

So it's about looking at people and having the sensitivity and compassion with them to meet them where they are and lead them from where they are if it's not in harmony with Scripture. We have to press through the discomfort. We have to press through the ambiguity. We have to make sure we're clearly defining our words. All that takes time, so if you don't have the heart investment to take time to talk through these issues, it's not gonna get solved in 140 characters on Twitter.

It's not gonna get solved with a hashtag. It's gonna take discipleship. It's gonna take Gospel penetration and it's gonna take patience and us individually going to God and saying, "Search my heart, so that I can be proactive."

So that it doesn't take a Mike Brown. So it doesn't take a Tamir Rice. It doesn't take the next video that's gonna go viral for my prejudice to surface. It should take my prayer time with you, God, speaking into the prejudice of my heart that I'm comfortable with to surface that, so I can confess it, I can repent and I can live on mission with the Gospel to make disciples of all ethnicities.

That's why I believe that as the Church, we are the ones that have to mobilize with the answers the world is looking for, because when Jesus said, "Make disciples of all nations," that "panta ta ethne" in the Greek, literally is "all ethnicities." We have been commissioned to be intentionally multiethnic because that's the reality of Heaven.