To My Fellow White Pastors: Continuing Reflections on Black Christians: The Untold Lutheran Story

“[Pastor] Boltzius began his mission to blacks by first appealing to friends in Germany to provide him with money to purchase young black children directly from slave ships so that he could raise them as Christians.” – Black Christians: The Untold Lutheran Story, page 62

I try to imagine what I would have been like sitting at a rostered minister’s meeting, looking around at my beloved colleagues seated at various tables, and seeing the one or two who enslaved humans. They, no doubt, would be dressed the same as me. Obviously, they would be white men like me, quite likely seminary classmates of mine with whom I shared notes or church leadership ideas in the late hours after class.

I try to imagine myself throwing tables and pitching fits. I’d be fighting racism and slavery with a Bible and an axe. Maybe I’d be like John Brown, kicking ass and taking names, starting a revolution in the name of liberation and the fundamentals of Lutheran doctrine.

Yeah, right. I’d probably just sit there and drink my watered-down coffee and laugh at the bad jokes and grumble about whatever the Bishop was doing. I would have done nothing. Because its normal for humans to own humans. Right?

Dr Jeff Johnson, in Black Christians, is clear, that’s pretty much what non-enslaving white men pastors did to their slave owning colleagues. Absolutely nothing. Its clear because there are no stories of uprisings and strong abolitionist movements in our Lutheran history. Dr Johnson does note that there were some abolitionists within our ranks, specifically naming the Franckean Synod as speaking “out vigorously against slavery on moral grounds and [taking] the position that they would not have fellowship with any Lutheran who favored slavery” (p.123). Unfortunately, that’s about it for notes on good white Lutherans being good throughout the book.

For some Lutheran congregations, it was not simply the resident pastor getting into slavery. In colonial Virginia in the early 1740’s, a capital campaign was formed by a congregation in Hebron to raise funds for a 685 acre farm and “slaves to work the land.” They owned at least nine humans.

In Guyana, a Lutheran congregation connected to, and funded by, the Dutch East India Company, asked for 500 acres. It was named “Plantation Augsburg” and the land was “worked by slaves owned by the church” (p. 87). In 1838, when emancipation came to the enslaved people through British decree, the Lutheran church were judiciously compensated for the “180 slaves on Plantation Augsburg, [receiving] over 9000 pounds as their reimbursement for emancipation” (p. 91). In today’s dollars that is approximately $1.4 million.

Side note: what is the origin story of your congregation’s endowment? If your white church has financial reserves, where did they come from?

But lets take a moment to sit with that first truth about Pr Boltzius. He launched a GoFundMe in his native Germany to buy humans. Specifically, children directly off of slave ships. He participated in the entire machinery of enslavement in the New World and did with the absolute arrogance of a white man hoping to bring these poor people to Jesus. He did it without regard for humanity, divine identity, or any sense of decency. This was his mission field. I am confident that when he first floated this idea to his colleagues, to you and me, we responded with nodding heads.

This is not Lutheran history that we can read about and ignore. This is our history. This is my history. I have been complacent. I have been passive. I have sat in conference meetings with rostered colleagues and nodded my head. Said nothing. Once in a while, even had a passing question of integrity or justice, but said absolutely nothing.

Because, my white pastor and rostered friends, that is our pattern. It is our history and our present and it directly impacts the lives of God’s people to whom we are called to love with a glimpse of Christ’s love. How could anyone have thought that Pr Brotzius was loving the ones he went down to the slave houses to buy? The same way we convince ourselves that the embedded, systemic racism in our congregations and denominations is acceptable.

We think of it in terms of good order. We assume, as we do when a non-white pastor is targeted and defrocked without a proper judicial process, that they clearly did something to deserve it. We convince ourselves that every congregation, including historic black churches in deeply impoverished communities, need to pay their own bills the same as our very white, very wealthy suburban congregations. We establish training and affirmation processes to lift up clergy that are shaped in white thinking and wonder why we don’t have many black, brown, and Latine clergy. We show no regard when black women clergy are ushered out of church leadership and bishop roles because the white voices tell us there was simply a conflict of priorities.

We keep nodding our heads and sipping our watered-down coffee, chuckling at the bad jokes and griping about this or that, while saying nothing about our history. One that is continuously being manifest right in front of us.

Friends, it doesn’t need to be this way. Christ liberates the oppressed, and we are co-conspirators in the oppressive narrative of good order and passivity. We are also liberated from our sin through the cross and set loose as people of God to speak God’s Word of justice.

Read this book. It is a divine pry bar that wedges open our eyes once squeezed shut by our acceptance of the systems we are part of. Let’s read it together and create a conversation. Let’s listen to our black and brown colleagues without the filter of good order and with the expectation that God is speaking to us. May we be cut loose of our complacency and our need to be good white Lutherans. 

This reflection is part of a short series on Black Christians: The Untold Lutheran Story, Jeff G Johnson, Concordia Publishing House: St Louis, 1991. You can purchase a copy of this book through the link and read the prior post to White Lutherans here.