The Last Shall Be First

(And let's not forget) The First Shall Be Last



One of the nice things about the black church is that the black community can leave behind a week of living in the white man's world and come to the one institution owned by the black community: the church. At church, the individual becomes a leader of songs or a deacon or elder. The black woman is the best singer or teaches Sunday school. Everyone is called Brother or Sister. They move from being "last" and discover what it is to be "first."

Fair enough.

So then what is going on in white churches? This is how we read the same verse: "The last shall be first in their communities as long as we never have to notice that they are first, AND in our communities the first will remain first... in fact, let's train the first how to be more effective Firsts—leaders for Christ!"

We spend so much money on training programs that help us become effective leaders, we buy books and go to seminars designed to "equip" us to lead, we talk about identifying and raising up leaders. Lead, lead, lead. In fact, Jon and I used to joke about the overuse of the term "leader." It got to be nauseating. We went on a retreat for church "leaders" one time and 400 people were there! Do we just plaster the name leader on anyone who tithes to keep their egos fed and their sense of personhood secure?

The First Shall Become Leaders! That must be what Jesus said.

And for the few who feel a little guilty about tweaking Jesus' words beyond recognition, there is always that ironic appellation: the servant-leader (whatever that is). I suppose it means you can lead just like before but you get credit for being a servant by lowering your eyes and speaking quietly into the microphone from the front of the room.

Let's scrap all that.

What if we took a cue from the black churches? What if we put into practice the teaching that says, "The last shall be first and the first shall be last"?

How would the white church express being last on Sundays?

I have a few suggestions.

• We begin by entering the church and losing our last names. We have no venues for the cult of personality. The worship team is situated behind the congregation and no one can see their faces or know their names. There are no leadership trainings. Instead, we hold confessions (not discussions) where the group grapples with namelessness and how to shed white privilege during the week when we must combat the temptation to live as the first instead of the last.
  
  
• We go to the conferences put on by other groups, especially those groups that scare us or feel wholly other, and learn how to learn from someone who is vastly different in background and experience.
  
  
• We stop sending missionaries other places. We invite them to come to us. We Protestants invite Catholic clergy to speak to us. We whites invite black inner city Christians to live in our homes and use our churches and our families for cross-cultural training so that they can go do the real ministry in the communities of their choice (isn't that what Campus Crusade for Christ does in reverse? Sends white kids to live in the inner city with blacks for "cross-cultural studies" and then launches those kids overseas...)
  
  
• Maybe if we really got into being last, we'd stop writing books. We'd read some. We'd make a plan to read all the books that threaten our existence—the Communist Mainfesto, Black Theology, Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison, the history of feminism, writings by Native Americans, books by the "heretics" like Darwin, books by our critics like Carl Sagan, and any other material that makes us angry or uncomfortable or embarassed.
  
  
• We could commit to memory the "counter time line"—the one that remembers important dates and names and places that remind us that the first shall be last... The Civil Rights Movement, the Abolition movement, the moments in history where we robbed the Native American of his land and heritage, Women's suffrage, McCarthyism, Central America in the early eighties.
  

I used to see this kind of thinking as pessimistic and typical left-leaning America-hating university professor drivel. I saw these kinds of emphases as denying the great things that are true about our country and history. I now see that we have a great country that is made up of more stories than the one I have memorized that affirms and supports my place in America's history.

What if, like James Cone says, salvation for one depends on salvation for all? Now you're feeling the flames under your feet a bit, aren't you?

Come on church. Do you have the courage to be last?