Abstract
Montague Williams's book, Church in Color, opens with two powerful words spoken by an African American male near the end of his Friday night youth group: “I’m BLAAACK!” (11). Read like a declaration, these words encapsulate the hope for youth ministries and Christian congregations to embrace race and racial identity as essential features of Christian discipleship. In his roles as pastor, chaplain, professor, and mentor, Williams saw firsthand how the church underestimates and neglects young people's need to engage with racism and racial identity. Using compelling stories from his ethnographic research, Williams centers the voices of youth of color to show how congregations embody a post-racialist framework when they claim not to see race or refuse to engage with racism critically. Instead, Williams urges youth ministries to embrace a “church in color,” which is a church that sees “the realities of race-ism and respond[s] in ways that reflect the hope for the Beloved Community and trust in the Way of Jesus” (166).
Williams identifies racial colorblindness as a common form of discipleship in youth ministry, expressed as a belief that colorblindness should be the goal of a non-racist world, even for the kingdom of God. Instead, Williams contends that colorblindness is “theological malpractice” and an anti-Christian virtue (13). Using stories from three multiracial, multiethnic evangelical youth ministries in the United States, Williams shows how a colorblind approach to youth ministry promotes a disembodied Christianity and bifurcated identities because it asks young people to “leave their bodies at the church door” and “ultimately declares that their bodies do not matter” to the church or to God (58). Inevitably, readers will find themselves interrogating their discipleship practices, wondering if youth have similar stories to tell in their congregations.
The book's first chapter explores “color-blind discipleship” and how it led students in one congregation to believe that race is “separate from Christian discipleship” (33) and that the Christian faith does not offer “any meaningful response” to their deep yearnings about race, racism, and racial identity (45). Chapter 2 offers a helpful analysis of the origins of colorblindness, its function in post-racialism, and its conflation with Christian eschatological hope. Lest the reader thinks that colorblindness only impacts white youth workers, chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how Black youth workers also struggle with the ideal of colorblindness even as they wrestle with their own experiences of racism. To explain this struggle, chapter 5 investigates how post-racialism functions as a habitus (an ingrained way of being) that works to form human beings through everyday imagery, actions, and distortions of history to surrender to the myth of whiteness. This post-racial aesthetic also spreads through “the absence of necessary language, and the cultivation of forgetfulness regarding anti-black violence” (7). Williams contends that congregations can recognize, resist, and disrupt post-racialism through communal practices that welcome “the stories, perspectives, and histories of silenced communities and [foster] memory of racial violence as an interpretive lens for current happenings” (124).
As a practical theological project, Williams wants to do more than describe the current state of post-racialist youth ministry. He wants to explore whether and how youth ministries can resist post-racialism and commit to an anti-racist praxis. As such, chapter 6 constructs a theological vision for youth ministry using “a more faithful interpretation” of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Beloved Community (204). The chapter is a helpful corrective to the prominent misuse of King's theology in popular culture, but it is not the only path Williams could have taken. He writes (in the endnotes) that he could analyze how the biblical writers engage issues of difference, power, and identity formation, or explore youth ministries that have successfully resisted post-racialism, leaving us with hopes for future texts that will do just these things. In the end, the book concludes in chapter 7 with recommendations for how each congregation might cultivate practices that disrupt and resist post-racialism in youth ministry.
Church in Color is a valuable resource that centers the voices and lives of youth of color in its quest for more faithful youth ministry practice. For practitioners, students, and scholars, it is a timely invitation and a much-needed model for how to listen to and engage young people's questions about race, racism, and racial identity as a Christian practice—in youth ministry and beyond.