What does living out the reality of Jesus look like in your world?

Been asking this question a lot. Of myself, the staff, and the church. I started with the circles that I walk in for the city of Topeka – volunteer Chaplain with the Topeka Fire Department, Freedom Now, and part of a larger community of faith leaders that love this city. It was through these circles that I first met Pastor T.D. Hicks of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church.

A deep friendship developed during the course of all the meetings we ran into each other at. Unbeknownst to either of us, we both grew up in Aurora, Colorado. He ended up going to a rival high school of mine. We both love soul food, BBQ, and the Denver Broncos. He serves Topeka as a police chaplain, I serve as a fire chaplain.

Of course, serving in these places has exposed us to the deep and perplexing issues that are pressing in on our city. Issues like food-insecure children, human trafficking, and racism.

Over many meals, TD and I have wrestled with how the Church could engage in these issues in a redemptive way with city leaders. What is our role as pastors and leaders of local congregations? How can we bring life and hope and healing to these places? What is the church’s role in these places? How can the community of Jesus-followers engage in a redemptive way in these places? Particularly on the issue of racism, which is the ‘third rail’ of conversation topics.

Just in case you haven’t quite picked up on this particular detail yet, T.D. is black. I am white. After a lot of different ideas on the subject of racism in the city, the reality that he and I were faced with was this… The Church is SUPPOSED to be the place of hope for our world, because we are the people of Jesus. But the people of Jesus are still the most segregated people in the world on Sunday mornings. It’s kind of hard to expect something from the community that the church isn’t modeling.

So this Sunday, November 18th, Pastor T.D. Hicks is coming to preach at Western Hills Church. And he’s NOT coming to preach on racism or poverty or human-trafficking. He’s not coming to address how we can solve any problem at all. He’s coming to preach on James 5:7-12.

Why that passage? Because that’s where we are in our series on James.

I do not know what all it will take to heal the wounds of racism in our city. But I do know that one of the things that must happen is that we have to stop seeing T.D. Hicks as a black pastor for the black church and start seeing him as a gifted teacher of the Scriptures, a man of God, who just so happens to be black.

I’m really looking forward to Sunday so that you can meet my friend, T.D. See ya there.