by The following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book Embodying God’s Multiethnic Kingdom: Live Out the Diversity of Heaven Every Day by Nathan Walton. Preorder your copy here.
Once I attended a majority-White church that was just beginning its multiethnic journey. One of the leaders announced that the church would launch a new Sunday book study on racial reconciliation. I was very interested in this topic, so I joined the group in hopes of seeing congregational change. The first thing I noticed when I attended was that there were only five attendees. Then by week two I realized the lead pastor was also not planning to participate regularly. Now, this wasn’t my first rodeo, so I had been involved in this type of work long enough to know that it’s hard to pursue multiethnic ministry without buy-in from key leaders or a critical mass of congregants. But I wanted to hold out hope. A few weeks in, I had to travel out of town on a Friday, three hours away. On Saturday night I had a choice to make. I finished up what I was doing pretty late, and I knew that if I drove home that night, I could make it to the Sunday morning book study, but I wouldn’t get back until around 2 a.m. that morning. I had committed to doing everything I could to attend this group, so I found myself driving late at night on a dark, lonely highway.
At around 1:00 a.m., I realized I was not alone. I noticed a full-grown raccoon attempting to cross the road. A moment later, I saw a second raccoon right behind it. As soon as I realized what was happening, my car ran into both scurrying animals. I felt the initial impact and heard pieces of my front bumper and undercarriage shattering on the ground before pulling over to the side of the road to assess the damage. I remember calling my mom. “Mom, I’m fifty miles south of my house and just had an accident—just wanted to let you know, but I’m going to try to make it back home tonight—I’ve got a book study in the morning that I want to make it to!” Fortunately, I made it back home safely, and after assessing the damage in the morning and using two shoestrings to reattach the end of my front bumper, I made it to the book study on time.
When I arrived I realized that the group leader wasn’t there, the lead pastor was filling in but clearly hadn’t done any of the reading, and as the conversation unfolded I began accepting that most of the group was convinced that there wasn’t much difference between the Christianity of the early church and the White cultural expression of their own church two thousand years later. I just remember thinking to myself, Did I just risk my life for this?
Up until this point my internal dialogue had sounded like this: Nathan, if you want to promote racial reconciliation you’ve got to deny yourself, embrace being uncomfortable, and bear the cross of whatever it takes to become a reconciled church. After all, Jesus calls us to deny ourselves and take up our crosses daily (cf. Luke 9:23). But the new question this situation made me ask myself was this: What if I’m conflating dying to self with allowing something to kill me? This whole situation simply left me discouraged and exhausted. Eventually I accepted that it would be best for me to move on to another church. Only later did I realize that part of what I was feeling was racial fatigue.
Although White people are often susceptible to racial fragility, racial fatigue is more common among BIPOC individuals. Racial fatigue can be caused by deep disappointment, especially when a person of the majority culture demonstrates they are not as invested in justice or equity as we had hoped. Racial fatigue can also be triggered by overt racist actions such as institutional discrimination, or it can stem from everyday microaggressions.1 It can be deflating to have high expectations for fellow Christians, only for them to remind you through their actions or inaction that they do not share the same level of awareness and urgency about racial injustice—and by extension may not care as deeply about you or your people as you had hoped. This reality can then lead BIPOC individuals to lose hope that others share their concerns. It can also lead BIPOC people to distrust other majority cultural individuals in the future based on the emotional wounds of past disappointments. Racial fatigue is a weariness that can sap us of our spiritual stamina.
Racial fatigue can also stem from the effects of racial trauma. In her book Healing Racial Trauma, Sheila Wise Rowe defines racial trauma as “the physical and psychological symptoms that people of color often experience after a stressful racist incident.”2 Rowe outlines a multitude of ways people of color experience racial trauma, including “historical, transgenerational, personal, physical, vicariously, and through microaggression, gaslighting, and moral injury.”3 Particularly for BIPOC Christians, racial trauma can create a barrier to racial resilience, especially when there are longstanding emotional wounds that are triggered by microaggressions.
Many practices and habits can help us care for our emotional health when our souls become weary. There may be specific things we can remove or reduce in our lives that are causing us unnecessary stress or anxiety. There is no shortage of unavoidable opportunities to become weary, so it behooves us to control what we can. Sometimes we may need to take a break from specific types of media intake. We may need to set a different frequency for when we are in certain spaces or among certain people. This is not escapism, being avoidant, or being weak; this is soul care. We also cannot love our neighbors as ourselves if we do not love ourselves. It is very hard to give what we have not first received. As we consider the types of practices or habits to reduce or remove in our lives, we must also consider new practices and habits that can be lifegiving and foster racial resilience.
About Nathan Walton
Nathan Walton (Ph.D.) is a pastor in the Evangelical Covenant Church and serves at East End Fellowship (hyperlink: eastendfellowship.org) in Richmond, Virginia. He also hosts the East End Fellowship Podcast and is the author of Embodying God’s Multiethnic Kingdom: Live Out the Diversity of Heaven Every Day. As a graduate of Duke Divinity School and former board chair of the Center for Nonprofit Excellence, Nathan offers consulting, coaching, and trainings for faith-based organizations. He can be reached at nathaniwalton.com.
- Microaggression was a term coined by Harvard psychiatrist, Chester Pierce, to describe how racialized denigration, either explicitly or implicitly, is an everyday reality for Black Americans in particular.
- Sheila Wise Rowe, Healing Racial Trauma: The Road to Resilience (InterVarsity Press, 2020), 10.
- Wise Rowe, Healing Racial Trauma, 11.
