Good Morning Church Jeff Mikels

Sooo... this episode is a bit long. Remember how I was critical of a sermon I heard a couple weeks ago? Well, this is my conclusion to that episode, the conclusion to my thoughts on how that pastor misunderstood the passage, but more than that, why that pastor misunderstood the message. Ultimately, I don't blame him. I blame the American Evangelicalism that trained him to see the Bible through a specific lens that led to his own misunderstanding.

This is the first in a series of episodes where I'm going to talk about some problems commonly found among evangelical preachers while also talking about the problems I myself have when listening to other preachers!

This first message teaches us to point the fingers at ourselves first even if we sometimes need to address the errors we see in other people.

And it's not that passage about taking the log out of your eye!

I was taught that all Black people descended from Noah's son Ham.

I was also taught that Noah pronounced a curse on Ham's children.

That created in me a lingering racial bias that I never really confronted until a few years ago.

The story of Cain and Abel is commonly taught to children in American churches, but in white contexts, the implication is often that God punished Cain by turning him black. Not only is that a misunderstanding of the text, it actually perpetuates the opposite lesson we are supposed to learn from the passage.

No one ever taught me that Adam and Eve were white, but lots of tiny details in the way it was taught definitely led me to that presupposition. In fact, many aspects of the story led me to think that being white was "normal" and if being white is "normal," then any focus or attention given to the Black experience would be celebrating something that wasn't normal. In other words, the way we talk about Adam and Eve has led many including myself to disregard or discount the experience of non-white people. I used to consider Black History Month to be itself racist. In this episode, I share briefly how I came out of that misunderstanding.

For some reason, the term "Woke" has become a negative term among modern evangelical Christians. However, the Bible is filled with references to "wakefulness" and commands to "wake up."

In this introductory episode, I cover some of those passages to see what it means to be Biblically Woke.