I found these suggestions, observations, and reflections by John Piper very helpful:
- Preempt the next newsflash with prior teaching on how God views race.
- Proactively instill biblical categories so that your people are not limited to the political and ideological categories of the media.
- The command of Jesus to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44) is universally relevant and deeply transforming.
- Christ-exalting, Spirit-given heart-change, attitude-change, and relational-change are linked essentially.
- Christians should care about changed lives and changed laws.
- Don’t expect remedies from secular institutions that can’t even name the disease.
- Beware of saying that the condition of society is the report card of the church.
- Ethnic and religious conflict is intensifying globally.
- Beware of false alternatives: Assimilation vs. Balkanization.
- Never drive a wedge between the call for personal responsibility and structural change.
- Common grace calls for reflection and celebration over ways police can do better.
- One flesh-and-blood relationship with another ethnicity is worth a hundred conferences and panels and books.
- Generalizations from specifics are necessary for life, but we need not act on our stereotypes.
- Cultivate coronary Christians, not adrenaline Christians.
- Racism is part of the seamless fabric of sin in human life.
- Only the gospel of Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, severs the roots that feed racism.
Go here to read an explanation for each one.
Piper’s book, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian, is now 61% off at WTS for a limited time.