What Jesus do we worship? And how does our picture of Jesus shape the faith we live?

In this episode, we continue our conversation with Dr. Reggie Williams, but now exploring "white Jesus" and the ways in which we have inherited a broken and diseased theology that rewrites and controls the scripts we live into.

If you’re new to the podcast, or forgot what we do, in each episode we explore culture and theology like they matter, because they do. Maybe that sound strange, but often it the way we learn and talk about our faith can feel abstract, like ideas that are “good to know” but hard to apply. Which leaves a lot of us feeling like our faith is empty when we need it the most.

In this episode we begin a conversation with Dr. Reggie Williams, social ethicist and author of Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus. I first had an opportunity to engage with Dr. Williams in a doctoral seminar and have been a fan ever since. Through his research and writing on Bonhoeffer’s engagement with the black church, his theological journey, and his activism in Nazi Germany Williams provides us with an imagination to make our own faith matter.

Brand new episodes of The Peoples Theology are coming soon!

If you’ve been listening to the people’s theology recently, you are familiar (probably exhaustingly so) with the themes and questions we’re wrestling with: Mainly, why is the world the way that it is and, what do we do about it?

In the last few episodes we’ve interviewed and explored the lives of different people who have been startled, grieved, frustrated by these questions and thus committed to answering them. These folks come from different places and experiences but their stories share something. Each person went through a similar kind of journey to get to where they are.

It starts with a set of questions, experiences, wounds, needs which leads to an attempt to answer those questions. So we try and address those needs but what we learn is that the situation is more complicated than our question assumed and so we need to evaluate, rebuild, and do a little renovation so that we can truly get at the issues.

In this episode of The Peoples Theology we are talking to someone who has both done that work and will force us to do our own work with their story. This person is, Leonce Crump former New Orleans Saint, founding pastor of Renovation Atlanta, and author of the book Renovate.

Our history is full of saints and radicals who have asked the question, “is this how it has to be” and then revealed to us that it doesn’t. If the only image of the “Church” we have is the modern American white evangelical community than, well, we should all go home and give up. I’m not interested in that. But that isn’t the only image nor is it even the primary image of the church. Our history is full of communities of dissent that have revealed, if even for just a moment, the Kingdom of Jesus because they had no other option.