Lord, When Did We See You?
Reflection Roundup reports from conversations couched in relationships. Here, readers will find boots-on-the-ground and “live from the field” items important to Christian leaders. As always, listening broadly draws together differing perspectives from which we can learn but which may not concur. This month’s conversation includes a timely story and an opportunity for churches who are interested in understanding why conversations surrounding race are hard.
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
O Lord, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
~Psalm 139:1-5
There are people in my life that remind me of God’s mission, as well as the fact that God’s plans—amazingly, those that involve our lives—reach back into our families prior to our birth. Graciously, God chooses to enact God’s mission in and through the lives of people, providing us with experiences we know we will be reflecting upon for decades to come. David and Shelley Park are such people, sensitive and perceptive, willing to join the Lord’s imagination for their lives. In a recent interview, the Parks unpacked the ways in which they are able to see some pieces beginning to fit together. As founders of “Let’s Talk Race,” or LTR Ministries, David and Shelley Park have sensed the Lord directing them into a new ministry and a new phase of life. Understanding their story of the way God’s call to ministry came to them might help others of us discern how to join what God is already doing in our own lives.
David graduated from Texas A & M University (we won’t say how long ago) with a degree in mechanical engineering. He entered the workforce with a company that became Atmos Energy, and he worked 28 years finding great favor with both God and the people with whom he worked. A few years ago, David sensed that the Lord had a “next thing” for him, and this next thing was not with Atmos Energy. This was disorienting news at the time, as David had secured a role in senior leadership with the company. His spiritual and corporate sensitivities being undeniable, David and Shelley began discerning what this next thing might be. Over the course of a year, the clarity they received was simply “ministry: that’s what your next thing will be, and I want you to begin preparing.” They felt they had heard the word of the Lord, and they obeyed.
David entered the Graduate School of Theology at ACU and began preparing for this “new thing,” working toward a Master’s Degree in Christian Ministry. His first class was “The Spirituality of the Black Church” with Drs. Wes Crawford and Jerry Taylor, an impactful summer intensive that called his mind back to days at A & M when he had taken important classes that proved especially meaningful to him, including “The Sociology of Minority Groups.”
During this time, Shelley began hosting people around their dining room table for a version of a class she adapted from one her father, Ron Holland, taught: “Let’s Talk Race.” By mid-2021, David and Shelley’s life had grown quite full. Preparing for ministry while still working full time and engaging in full-time graduate studies, teaching classes while anticipating their two children entering their senior years, one at A & M, and one finishing high school, had them asking an important question: “If this is the next thing, then why are we waiting? Why not just DO the thing?” And so they did. David announced his resignation from Atmos, and made his exit from the company on October 1, tipping the family into an intense year of transition. Since then, they’ve graduated a high school senior and entered him into a university in another state, graduated another from college and settled him in an apartment where he’ll transition into vocational life, empty-nested, and began a non-profit while traveling, teaching, and taking grad classes.
In a moment of pause in our interview, it became clear that what is coming to fruition in David and Shelley’s lives presently is a next step in what God has been doing in and through them for a very long time. Looking back, Shelley wonders if the “untethering” or “great resignation” much of the country was going through during these recent years provided part of the tension they felt, the urgency to “get on with it.” I suppose one of the blessings of COVID is the way it “fast-forwarded” many things.
The Parks listed several things, additionally, that played a part in the fact that, for them, “Doing Nothing is No Longer an Option” (a title borrowed from a book by Jenny Booth Potter that Shelley is currently reading). They mentioned the 2016 death of Philando Castile during a routine traffic stop in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, when his passengers included his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter, as well as a similar incident in Baton Rouge, which claimed the life of Alton Sterling. It’s important to note, at this point in the Parks’s story, that their youngest son is African American, was adopted at birth, and was coming of age around this time. For his safety, it was time for “the talk.” Shelley described, “I thought from a young age I’d adopt as a parent; we’ve always been on this journey.” David described his own growing-up household as one that talked about race and systemic injustice. This was a regular conversation growing up in his house, and now it was time for him to have it with his own children, and he didn’t know what to do, so he began doing what he said was the “weirdest thing he could think of.” He went to lunch with every black person he knew, asking them what their interactions were like, specifically with law enforcement. What he found was that everyone he talked to had had negative experiences, scary ones, or was closely connected with someone of color who had.
Of the most compelling conversations David had, one was with a childhood friend of his. They had grown up together in Longview, Texas, and had been together many of the days on which his friend had experienced discrimination, and David had been oblivious to each of these experiences. On one occasion, the friend thought he might not survive. The hard truth is this: there’s an invisible wall to white Christians. We don’t see it, but our brothers and sisters of color do, and emblazoned on this invisible wall is this slogan: “Your Story is Not Safe Here.” Because our brothers and sisters of color don’t feel safe or confident they will be believed and supported telling their stories to white people, white people don’t experience a call to respond, and believe or act as if the stories didn’t happen simply because these stories have not been allowed to be heard. David made this heartfelt confession: “To really know people, we have to be safe for each other’s stories. I wasn’t the friend I could be to him because I was not safe enough for him to tell these stories to.”
LTR Ministries is an organization that offers a class for white people called “Let’s Talk Race: A Beginner’s Guide to Conversations About Race.” In 5 weeks of video-based sessions, facilitators explore what the Bible does and doesn’t say about race, as well as the history of racism in the context of situations that have taken place in our country and around the world. The class examines what privilege means and why some are still privileged over others even though laws prohibit such things. Offering curated homework in between sessions and time for discussion, LTR classes explore this simple question: How can we better hear these conversations about race?
Historically, white churches have struggled with how to engage this. We’ve convinced ourselves reconciliation and change are never going to happen. We have settled for what is easy, and are not working toward the reconciliation Jesus’ prayer in scripture says the world will recognize and know is only the work of a living God: “that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21). We are missing out on a paradoxical witness, one that the world does not think is possible, to the glory and power of God Almighty, if we don’t go through the hard work, personally and relationally, to become activated.
If you or your small group, or church group, would like more information about LTR Ministries, the classes they offer as well as other ways in which they partner with congregations, please visit their website, www.ltrministries.com. They are ready to facilitate hard conversations and train facilitators within your congregation to carry the dialog forward. While the classes are web based, facilitators are making contextual visits in 2023. Look for more about LTR partners and testimonies from those who have experienced this ministry in the Reflection Roundup in coming months. In the meantime, please pray for confidence and joy for the Parks family and those involved in this prophetic, restorative ministry.
