As the Gallup chart for this post shows, race relations in the United States have tanked in the last few years.  As a minister of a racially diverse church in a racially diverse neighborhood this concerns me a great deal.  This means that white people and black people – at

A few weeks ago a gentleman at our church asked me why I spend so much of my time addressing crime in the neighborhood.  It was one of those questions that is so simple to ask, while the answer is so big and has so many layers. For starters, we

Part 4 of 4 – Mixing Yellow & Blue (read Part 1 HERE) Yellow Team Christians and Blue Team Christians are each right about a lot of things when it comes to living out the Way of Jesus in a Violent Society – a passion for justice, valuing the sanctity

Part 3 of 4 – What the Blue Team is Missing (read Part 1 HERE) While the Blue Team does a great job of recognizing the role that moral agency or free will plays in the violence in our society, works to protect the sanctity of human life from those

Part 2 of 4 – What the Yellow Team is Missing (read Part 1 HERE) While the Yellow Team does a great job of recognizing and attempting to address the big picture, systemic, and historic factors that contribute to violence in our society, they often fail to give proper weight

Part 1 of 4 – Yellow & Blue I have had a statistically unusual amount of violent encounters in my adult life and I also minister to people who have been victims of violence and people who use or have used significant levels of violence in their lives (on both