Famed New York pastor Timothy Keller says a system of injustice in American evangelicalism is the custom of churches and parachurch organizations asking volunteers and missionaries to do their own fundraising. This clip comes from a June 2021 online discussion with Dr. Anthony Bradley for the Downtown campus of New York's Redeemer Presbyterian Church.
—TRANSCRIPT—
A great example of systemic racism is the traditional evangelical approach to fundraising, in which you ask Christian staff workers to raise their own support. I see that as systemic injustice, in spite of the fact that there is, frankly, our denomination does it both for missionaries and for our Reformed University Fellowship.
The reality is, after 50 years of watching people do this, I never realized, and, you know, in other words, it's not just African-Americans but Hispanic and Asian Americans. Even Asian Americans, we've got a couple generations of people in this country and everybody's a professional, they still can't raise their own support. It took me 50 years to realize that accumulated wealth in your family and friendship networks takes generations to develop. Generations.
So recent immigrants or African-Americans who've been here from the beginning but who, because of slavery, then Jim Crow laws, then redlining them, everything is, they've just they've got no money in their networks. They just don't. And if you send them out there and say "raise your own support," they can't. So then what happens is, in so many of these evangelical organizations, they basically are, because they can't do that, they never move up and really become part of the power.
And, has our denomination participated in that? Yes, it still is. That's a pretty uncomfortable thing to say. But the fact is that if we started to say, "Oh, guess, you know what? We're going to totally change that. We're going to fund everybody, essentially, we're going to raise money centrally and then just pay all of our workers." Now, the reality is that it's much harder to raise money that way and it takes more time and effort and all that. And so these mission organizations and denominations don't want to do it, and they won't even be open to it.
But it's a version of systemic racism. Now, I don't know whether everybody, my guess is a lot of people on the call, if you, unless you've been involved in the evangelical world for a long time, don't even maybe know what I'm talking about, hardly...And it's just a blind spot. And why can't we address that? Why can't we say we're going to try to do something about that? You really could, frankly. I think there are things you could do.
But you unless you have the discussions, these things, most of us, especially as white people, just sort of, "This is the way it's always been done. I'm not a racist, so how could you call that systemic racism?" I have to say, every time I ever bring it up, I just never get any response from anybody. People just say, "That's Tim's hobby horse." But I said if you're non-white and you've tried to raise your own support in one of these organizations, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
In fact, to me it was one of the things that proved the reality of the hangover. I mean, just how deeply our past is affecting African-Americans now. You know, the whole idea that, "Well, that was in the past, and now, you know, it's a level playing field. Get out there and work hard." That's gone in my mind. I began to realize what, no, it takes generations for the playing field to become leveled far more than we've had.
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