
November 22, 2023
Episode #012
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There are good reasons why our justice system is often more slow and tortoise-like than it is swift and speedy like the hare.
Episode Transcript
Starting to understand the systemic causes of racism and poverty that there are things that are built into the system that keep people poor or keep people under class. But those of us who are in the system, the white privilege system, though we wouldn’t choose to do that intentionally, benefit from the system.
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David: For many years, Karen, the word justice seldom, if ever, came up in my prayers. And then a decade spent as a young inner-city pastor in Chicago on the near West side changed all that. It’s also when I first became sensitized to the fact that justice or fairness to all was a matter that was high on God’s agenda. Scriptures I had tended to overlook now became very important to me. I say some of these and emotionally I’m moved. I can hardly say the words “For I the Lord love justice.” That’s Isaiah 61:18. I can say this, but it’s better if a black says it because they can say it’s a well, “But let justice roll on like a river. Righteousness like a never-failing stream.” That’s the prophet Amos. Here’s one of the Psalms. “He will judge the earth in righteousness. He will govern the people with justice.” And I’ve purposely stolen the microphone from you because I know once I let you start to talk, I’ll have a hard time getting over it. Yes.
Intro: Welcome to the Before We Go Podcast featuring Dr. David Mains and his life noted author Karen Mains. Here’s David and Karen Mains.
Karen: Well, let’s describe that inner city environment in which we learned these lessons about racial discrimination and systemic poverty, and you know things that were outside of our can. I remember writing that once we hit the inner city of Chicago, I felt like I was we’ve left the suburbs and the basically white culture of the suburbs and the white evangelical culture of the suburbs and hit the city. I felt like I was a party girl and we’re wearing a party dress that was ill suited to the environment that was in there. So, we were on the west side of the city. The west side of the city now in Chicago is the up and coming area. It’s all been revitalized. Young professionals have moved in their lofts. I mean, it’s a gorgeous area of the city. But we started, we planted the church in 1967. We had 27 people. That started, yeah. You look back and you say, what were you thinking? But it was an act of faith and we felt obedience.
David: We were just a few blocks where we were meeting from where the Black Panther shootout was.
Karen: Yes, well a lot of people don’t remember what that was.
David: But they left just the words of your country back.
Karen: Across from the West Side Medical Center, which is acres now of medical hospitals and centers. It’s like five or six. I think it’s the largest medical center in the world. But at that time…
David: … one of those hospitals was Good County Hospital.
Karen: For the indigenous poor. 67 and 68, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. In that West Side of the city where we had planted a church in a Teamsters Union Hall local 705, those were the Deans, Demondows guys, Chicago’s truckers.
David: How’s she going to help the river? That was Louis Pike, the head of the Teamsters, shaking down the different units.
Karen: To give you Christmas gifts, Christmas money. And after those riots, where we planted our church, there were just empty lots that had been burnt out. So that was the environment in which we were learning the lessons of justice. And I just have been writing a lot about this as far as not understanding that.
David: I just want people to know I’m still here. I’m not in my head. Go ahead.
Karen: Starting to understand the systemic causes of racism and poverty that there are things that are built into the system that keep people poor or keep people under class. But those of us who are in the system, the white privilege system, though we wouldn’t choose to do that intentionally, benefit from the system. And so, it’s a long, hard deckends of conversation and dialogue and reading struggle to come to the point where you understand what that’s all about.
David: What did you call yourself in this article that you just finished?
Karen: I just wrote an article titled “Confessions of a Recovering Racist.” And that’s after years and decades of working to understand and then to work against the things that keep our black brothers and sisters and people of other races in the underclass, keep them down. We like to say everyone in America can raise themselves up by the bootstraps. On one hand that’s true and on the other hand we have systems that are in place that keep people from doing that very thing. And it’s very difficult to understand it. It’s taken me years to really get into it. But this is a justice issue. So, when we talk about justice sometimes we don’t get into it because we don’t understand how complicated it is. And so we come up with easy answers or easy solutions or easy kind of disclaimers as far as why don’t they do something for themselves? Why don’t the poor help themselves? And we need to enable them to do that because that is a successful model as far as people all over the world who have been empowered, they have to be empowered first, empowered to solve their own problems. So anyway, that’s where I land. But it’s been decades of my life. One of the things I’m proudest about, if I go on a little bit on this, do you have some things you want to say?
David: Well, just so that people see it as a dialogue.
Karen: Okay. Not that you haven’t been interested in this, but I’ve probably been the most active. I’m not most of an activist in it.
David: That’s fair. And I commend you for that. An area related to justice where I have learned something that has helped me, especially as we move more and more toward a time of impeachment, is that justice moves very slowly. Just by its very nature, it takes a long time. So, the opposite of that would be to rush to judgment or to push to…
Karen: … a conclusion. A superficial conclusion.
David: And sometimes not only superficial, terrible, terrible conclusion. When you talk about rush to judgment, I mean, if anybody ought to understand it would be Christianist because that’s what happened to Jesus. I mean, the night when he was put on trial, that was totally unjust. And I think that we must be aware that justice takes time. That’s just part of the nature of it. And I think I want to say this, or I’ll forget it. This has been very helpful to me. In fact, I’m on the board of a ministry that was accused, and it went to trial, and it took years to settle it.
Karen: Wrongly accused. Unjustly accused.
David: And it never actually happened except that there came to a settlement. But I mean, you’re talking years and lawyers and all this. So sometimes if you think justice, you can snap your finger and it’s going to come. That’s not what happens. And I say that now, here’s the reason I say that is I watch what is going on in our country.
Karen: In regards to the impeachment.
David: In regards to the impeachment.
Karen: Inquiry now, still, I think it is.
David: Yeah, but it will move.
Karen: Yeah,
David: I don’t think there’s any question about it. I don’t want to get too caught up in the immediate. You know, you watch television and it’s very possible through various commentators. Some are very careful. Others are not to say, well, “We know this man’s guilty already or we know this man is innocent already.” There are two sides. They’re very strong.
Karen: Right.
David: Very strong.
Karen: Yeah. Polarization.
David: I think you almost have to take attitude of I’m interested, but I’m taking it in a little dose at a time because this is going to be a good while before it all unfolds. And that’s especially true when we talk about the season, we’re coming in. We’re coming into Thanksgiving and Advent and Christmas and New Year. That’s the best time of the whole year. And I don’t want this whole justice thing to rob me of that season. And it’s not that I’m not interested. It’s just that I know it’s kind of the mills of the gods grind slowly. They grind exceedingly small, but they don’t do it quickly. And that’s, you know, I’m I have a lot of confidence in our founders, and they set up the fact that we may have times when there needs to be impeachment. And that doesn’t mean guilty or not. It just means that the process is kicked into motion. And so, I say, “Okay, I can maybe spend the most an hour a day.” I mean, that’s a lot of time, an hour a day, watching a program and listening to someone whose opinion I respect. But then maybe I need to leave it alone again for a couple of days and come back and say, “What kind of progress did we make”? I think that’s a very healthy attitude to realize that you can’t rush this. Wise people have put this whole system together. They said, this is the way we’ll handle it and let it play itself out.
Karen: Well, the concept of suspending judgment until you’ve heard all sides is a really healthy one. But most of us don’t practice that. We hear something, I know there’s a lot of conversation today is about we listen to the things that agree with our primary placement, our primary emotional placement, we listen to the things that we want to hear that agree with what we’ve already decided. So not rushing to judgment is a really mature attitude and a sign of wisdom. I’m not sure we know a lot of wise people or hear wise people interpret some of the things that are going on in our culture right now.
David: Give it time.
Karen: Give it time.
David: The process is in place.
Karen: And expose yourself. If you’re more liberal, then deliberately read good conservative thinkers. If you’re conservative, then expose yourself to people who are more liberal. Don’t just write them off, read what they’re saying, listen to what they’re saying. Because in that process, then we educate ourselves and we teach ourselves to be wise. But it’s hard to do that when you are living in a clamor.
David: That’s exactly right. One of my prayers for this whole time is that our elected leaders will come out as heroes, how they handle all this. They did it well.
Karen: Yes.
David: They did it with…
Karen: They were circumspect.
David: They were circumspect. They didn’t rush.
Karen: Right.
David: They tried to get it right.
Karen: Right. I have an interesting story out of my own past that I’ve been resurrecting because I was asked to write something about it. I was on the board of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and then became the first chair, first woman chair of that board. Intervarsity is a national campus organization, so it has representation on secular college campuses all across the country. And I was on the board about 20 years ago and at that time it was estimated that the campuses, the secular campuses would be non-white by, I think it was 2012.
David: Majority non-white.
Karen: Majority, whether we know majority white any longer, it would be the majority, they would no longer be majority white. So, we thought on the board that it was extremely important to understand what the meaning of racial diversity was. And a lot of injustices happen in the whole context of race. So, I led with very worthy colleagues, people of racial diversity who were on the board.
David: Well, I don’t think they were when you first came on.
Karen: It wasn’t when we first came on. We began to brown the board and then that group of people and I did an extensive, it may have been a two or three year program of plunging us into learning about racial diversity, diversity issues, which meant that we would send out reading material, we had three board meetings a year, we would send out reading material in between each board meeting and then we’d set a half an hour of time at the end of the agenda to talk about those diversity issues. So that was like 20 years ago. And intervarsity has a triennial student gathering over the Christmas holidays called Urbana and they will attract 20,000 to 16,000 students.
David: These are potential missionary candidates.
Karen: They’re people who are, it’s a missions conference, but they’re interested, those are kids who are interested in taking their faith into the world in one way or another. And when I was on the board, that was predominantly a white group of 16 to 20,000 students. So we did this diversity training. I stepped off the board and did other work on other boards and didn’t get back to an Urbana until about 15 years after I had ended my responsibilities with the diversity. I feel very warmly about the organization. I just admire it tremendously. When I went back to that Urbana 15 years later, the non-white percentage was like 51 to 52%. I tapped; I was sitting up in the audience.
David: So, these are, you’re talking about the students, the university, college students from around the country.
Karen: 51, 52 % sit, not why. I’m giving an example of how long it takes for justice to move forward.
David: Yes, I understand that.
Karen: Okay. Tapped the shoulder of the guy in front of me who was from Pakistan. He was a staff member and had been in charge of the international outreach of the university. And I said, how did we get here? I mean, the worship was all enculturated. You had women and men speaking from the platform, the men and most of them were internationals. I mean, it’s a mission organization. Why doesn’t that make sense that you’d have international leaders speak? So I said to him, “How did we get here”? And he turned around at me and he pointed at me. He said, “Well, you led the charge.” I wouldn’t have taken it. I did. I wouldn’t have taken any credit for that because I was so amazed to have been there because I hadn’t been in an interview for active in it for a long time. But that’s what it takes. Now, I don’t take credit for that 52% non-white. I take credit for getting the ball going with those worthy colleagues to a point that we had educated ourselves to what the issues of diversity were. But the wheels of justice may move slowly, but David, they do move. And when we put ourselves on the side of justice and work toward justice, we may not see the results now or overnight. And when we pray for justice, 20 years down the road, we’ll look at something say to the fellow in front of us, “How in the world did we get here”? And they’ll say back to us.
David: Praise the Lord.
Karen: “Well, you led the charge.” Isn’t that an extraordinary story?
David: That’s a wonderful story.
Karen: Yeah.
David: Yeah. So, justice, I think when we say that word, immediately people’s minds go to the whole process of impeachment.
Karen: Right. Today.
David: Yeah. Whatever happens, again, I think it’s important for God’s people to say, I’m praying, Lord. I’m praying for all the people involved.
Karen: Yes. And suspend judgment.
David: Yeah. I don’t know how it’s all going to turn out. And it doesn’t hinge on me. I’m not the…
Karen: They’re not asking me. You might not be asking.
David: All I’m saying is I know what I’m praying for. This is what I’d like the outcome to be. I would like for many people to share in the look at what we did.
Karen: Yeah,
David: there was wonderful.
Karen: So, what are we asking our listeners to do? I’m saying to them “Are you someone who rushes to judgment”?
David: Are you so in I think I’m saying Yes, or are you someone who has to say I need to know now without giving the process opportunity to play itself out? and “Are you somebody who is almost Addicted”?
Karen: …yeah addicted is the good word. I mean, this is very addictive.
David: What’s going on?
Karen: Yeah,
David: it’s like I got to know not to read about it. I got to sleep…
Karen: I got to watch about it. I’ve got the TV on for hours or my screens whatever they are reporting what’s going on in all…
David: this somebody who’s very day? Emotional day is…
Karen: Determined…
David: …by what’s going on in a process. It’s going to take a long time.
Karen: Yeah. Are you someone whose words tell. You have nothing but nasty or bad things to say about the people with whom you disagree. And are you praying? You know, that’s the big those two are huge tests. What are your words saying? What is your tongue tell about your own disposition and all of this and are you praying? Can you really say that you have spent time in prayer for our nation and for the leaders of our nation? That’s what we’re calling people to do. Don’t rush to judgment. Let it take its time. Justice take its time and is open to all the aspects of where it might land.
David: … and that there may be heroes on both sides, heroes on both sides.
Karen: Yeah, right.
David: Yeah, I think that’s where my guts are.
Karen: Okay.
David: I’m wanting first all to take a deep breath.
Karen: Take a deep breath, sit back.
David: Yeah, I say this country is a good country.
Karen: Right,
David: …and it’s got better days ahead. We’re going to see this thing unfold in such a way that we’re going to be amazed at the maturity of our leaders.
Karen: And we can be a part though we’re only one. We can be part of a sea change in the disposition and attitude of our nation. And we’ll be part of something bigger than we ever dreamed.
David: And something that pleases God because justice is very close to his heart,
Karen: Right?
David: Yeah
Outgo: You’ve been listening to the Before We Go podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please remember to rate, review, and share on whatever platform you listen. This podcast is copyright 2019 by Mainstay Ministries, Post Office Box 30, Wheaton, Illinois 60189.
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