(upbeat music) - Thanks for listening to another week of the Ask Pastor John podcast as we close out the week here. We get a lot of really good questions via email and of course you can send those questions to me at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. And a number of those email questions have come in on the Black Lives Matter movement.

Pastor John, I'll just put this topic out there for now. I mean, talk to us about the Black Lives Matter movement. What can we learn from it? And what have you learned from it? - One of the main things to learn from the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement is the need to distinguish between one, the plain truth of the slogan, two, the ideological nature of its origin, and three, the strategies of action that it unleashes on the street.

We need to distinguish those when we talk about this. Now you would think after wrestling with these things for 40 years, these ethnic, racial, social dynamics, after 40 years that this would be more obvious to me, those distinctions, but they weren't. I had to be corrected. So another thing to learn besides those distinctions is no matter how long you've been at this, like me, no matter how long you've been at this, thinking about the issue, talking about it, writing about it, you can easily fall into unhelpful ways of thinking or talking, which is why ongoing friendships across ethnic lines is important.

Conversations embedded in friendships is ongoingly important. So let me tell a story now just to illustrate my blowing it and the lessons, those two lessons that emerged from it. Last year, 2015, there were widespread protests under the banner of Black Lives Matter, largely because of some high profile cases in which police killed unarmed black men.

Good question, whether it was warranted or not. And that's of course the tip of the iceberg because there were about 100 of those and most of them were not high profile in 2015. I saw a statistic that there were 102 unarmed black men killed by police and that compares in its rate to a rate five times larger than the killing of unarmed whites.

So you can get a feel for why there might be some concern and the emergence of something like Black Lives Matter. And as I was watching all of this happen, I wondered what to think about it, what to say about it. And I Googled and found, oh, there's a website called blacklivesmatter.com.

And I read it and oh my goodness, it was awful. I mean, I didn't like it because it featured three women who claimed to be the founders of Black Lives Matter, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, Patrice Cullors, and they self-identify as quote, clear queer, not clear, queer black women. And in big bold banners on their, her story, not history, her story page, they say that they are queer affirming and transgender affirming.

Well, this did not excite me as of course it wouldn't most of my Christian black brothers and sisters. And I was so surprised I tweeted this link so that people could be aware of these roots. Well, a few weeks later, I was in Louisville with the Together for the Gospel team, which included Thabiti Anyabwile.

And if you don't know Thabiti, he's a black pastor in Washington, DC. And he is, as everyone who knows him realizes, intellectually, theologically, culturally, highly intelligent, highly articulated, highly courageous, highly level-headed, and not a pushover. And he let me know clearly that I wasn't helpful. That kind of thing, unqualified, no context, was in the give and take we were having around the table.

We did it for two, three days, great friendships there, a lot of blunt in your face talk at that meeting. And he helped me see, for the mass of ordinary folks, black folks in particular, that website is a non-issue. It doesn't even exist. They don't even know it's there.

It's not driving anything. And therefore, my call now, my learning afresh of needing to make distinctions between, one, a patently true slogan, Black Lives Matter, and two, ideological roots of a name that may be the real roots, or they may have been co-opted. I mean, the name may have been co-opted.

So there's a double point here for my learning, and I hope for all of us who are listening to grow in. First, we need ongoing regular conversations in the context of friendship across ethnic lines, because otherwise, we will see things in a certain way, say things in a certain way that may be naive at best and hurtful at worst.

The best way to be discerning in regard to the complexities of racial matters is to be in regular, normal, not exceptional, normal conversations across ethnic lines so that we see through other eyes. And the other lesson is that we should distinguish. We learn from these conversations to distinguish the plain truth of the slogan, the ideological nature of its art, the strategies of action that may or may not always be the best.

Patently, Black Lives Matter, that's true. And before, it's another little lesson maybe, I'm just sticking this in. Before we say anything like, "All lives matter," before we say that, we need to pause. Because if you quickly add that, it sounds like a rebuke. It sounds like a minimizing of what was just said.

It sounds like the point that was trying to be made isn't worth being made. So you don't wanna make that point. You don't want to say that. So you'd learn that pretty quickly in that conversation if you added, "All lives matter." Of course that's true, all lives matter. But oh, how timing matters and how context matters.

Let me give one more illustration of this friendship issue. I have been meeting about once a month with a pastor friend, a Black pastor friend in the Twin Cities. And we have talked about over the last months the case of Jamar Clark here, who was killed by the police last November, November, 2015 in the Twin Cities here, unarmed.

And I have learned things in this conversation with my friend that I would have just never, ever been aware of. I've learned things about the sorrows of the Black community here in the Twin Cities that I would have never felt without this friendship. Everything would have been seen from a distance, seen through political or ideological eyes.

But oh, what a difference to listen to the sorrows of a man pushing 60 who's been at this business for a long time in his community and to hear him unpack the depths of things that cannot be bought or sold, that can only be received in trust and friendship.

So those are my two or three lessons that I offer to everyone from my blowing it for your consideration. Enjoy some close friendships across ethnic lines and be sure to make distinctions between true slogans like Black Lives Matter and questionable roots and strategic applications. They're not all the same and many things need to be said about each one.

- That's so good, thank you, Pastor John. Well, 34,000 people follow Thabiti on Twitter and so should you. Go to Twitter and search for Thabiti, T-H-A-B-I-T-I and you'll find him. Grateful to God for Thabiti's life and ministry. Well, we're gonna break for the weekend now and you can look back on the episodes from the week, search our archives of hundreds of episodes, download our podcast app, subscribe to the podcast, or even send us a question of your own.

Go to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. I'll see you on Monday. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)