Standing against Racism

World Renew, Back to God Ministries International, and the Christian Reformed Church in North America’s Office of Race Relations recently joined with Calvin University and others to hold an event at which a panel of people shared ways in which God led them to fight racism.

Called “Stand against Racism,” the event in West Michigan was part of a larger gathering that is sponsored and organized every April by the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) USA to raise awareness about the negative impact of institutional and structural racism.

Normally groups and individuals meet in one place to speak about and discuss different ways in which they have fought and will be fighting against racism.

But with the need for everyone to stay at home because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the event took place mostly online in various locations.

In West Michigan, members of Madison Square Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids created a special edition of their Antioch Podcast, on which a panel of participants made presentations. Titled “Conversations about Biblical Racism,” the podcast aired on Friday, Apr. 24, and remains available online.

“The episode . . . focuses on storytelling about how each contributor on the panel sensed God’s call to the work of antiracism,” said Michelle Loyd-Paige, executive associate to the President for Diversity and Inclusion at Calvin University, who served as moderator of the panel.

“You will also . . . [hear] stories of what strengthens and encourages each panelist as they remain faithful to this call,” said Loyd-Paige.

Panelists included Suzi Dixon, director of discipleship and relationships at Madison Square’s North Campus; Libby Huizenga, a seminary graduate, teacher, and research librarian at Kuyper College in Grand Rapids; Eric Nykamp, director of worship design at Madison’s North campus, who is also the host and producer of the Antioch Worship Leadership Podcast; and Reggie Smith, director of diversity for the Christian Reformed Church in North America.

Special guest was Pennylyn Dykstra-Pruim, associate dean for diversity and inclusion at Calvin University and a series editor for the Yale University Press.

Referring to her call to the work of antiracism, Dykstra-Pruim said her journey began in earnest after her family moved back to Grand Rapids in 1998.

She recalled telling the pastor of the church she was attending that she wished it wasn’t so necessary and so hard to fight racism — a reality she knew firsthand as a person in an interracial marriage, which opens you to racism in different ways, she said.

But the awakening to really fight racism dawned when her pastor told her that without hard work, racism would never be erased. She couldn’t sit still and do nothing, she realized.

After that, she went through training to learn more about what she could do to help achieve a better sense of equality in the church and society.

“We need to keep working hard at this to make better spaces for our children one day,” she said.

In her efforts, she said, she has often tried to take a low-key approach, not hitting people hard with their shortcomings in terms of racism.

“When it comes to anti-racism work, you sometimes confront it forthrightly and directly,” she said. “But in some cases . . . you need to take some real winsome on-ramps to the issue.”

Fighting racism can be done creatively, finding ways to move people from ignorance of the issue to awareness and ultimately to personal change, she added.

Suzi Dixon said her moment of call came on the morning after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. She saw division and bigotry arise overnight at home and across the U.S. and couldn’t really understand it, she said: “I saw my whole world and everyone I love divided, and I needed to know why. I wanted to go deeper.”

Dixon came to see, especially by serving as a pastor at Madison, she said, that she needed — in every way in which she was able — to resist the racial hatred that had been hidden in many places but had now become much more obvious in the U.S.

“My calling to stand against racism came after the election” and has, if anything, grown stronger since then, she added.

For Libby Huizenga, the call to fight racism came, of all things, through vegetarianism, she said. She had turned to that way of eating — and its subsequent lifestyle of living more peacefully — when she came across a book on the topic. She suggested that a friend might want to read it.

On the one hand, the friend recognized that the book was probably valuable, but he wanted no part in reading it because that would mean he might have to change.

“Can you imagine that! Not reading the book because it could change you?” asked Huizenga.

The call to fight racism came to Reggie Smith in early April of 1968, he said, when he looked out the window of the apartment in which his family was living and saw flames consuming homes — and people struggling with the National Guard on nearby Roosevelt Road in Chicago.

Watching the violence, in the wake of the assassination of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., Smith knew he wanted to be a part of whatever could be done to eradicate racism in the U.S.

Not long after that, he said, he became connected with nearby Lawndale CRC, a pioneering congregation that dedicated itself to issues related to racial integration.

“I put my toe in the water and started going to church,” said Smith, and he said he appreciated the antiracism work of Lawndale. Eventually he decided to attend Calvin Theological Seminary. It took time, however, to firmly decide on becoming a pastor.

During that time, in the early 1980s, the CRCNA was coming under criticism for its ties to the white Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa for its support of apartheid, an officially sanctioned racial-separation policy in that country.

Smith was not sure he could serve a denomination that had at times supported causes he found deplorable. Whatever calling he had to become a CRC pastor was deeply strained at this point.

But then, over time and in various ways, he said, “I began to see that my role as a CRC pastor was to help people enter into and better understand bigger spaces of our history” — and to help others do the same.

A different riot — not the one in Chicago — turned Eric Nykamp’s life in a new direction. That event was in Los Angeles.

He began growing aware of racism as a huge problem when, like millions of others, he watched a TV news clip of four LAPD officers beating motorist Rodney King in April 1991. They wanted to arrest him for fleeing the police and resisting arrest on California State Route 210.

Then, things ramped up for Nykamp in April 1992 when a jury acquitted the four officers of beating King and a riot erupted in L.A., lasting six days and killing 63 people and injuring 2,383 others.

“I lived in rural, white West Michigan and didn’t know anyone who was black or a Democrat” — and none of his friends seemed to be the slightest bit bothered by King’s beating, the acquittal, or the riot, said Nykamp.

Yet it all horrified him and shook something inside of himself awake, he said. He couldn’t imagine the pain and circumstances that would motivate people to try to burn down their own city.

When he began attending Calvin College and became active in a multiethnic church, Nykamp said, he knew he needed to learn more about racism as well as to deal with the social and political forces that shaped him.

So he went looking for a mentor and met Loyd-Paige, who had recently been hired to address issues of diversity on campus. They met at least once a week throughout his four years of college.

“In that process, I realized I was being called into student leadership and, after graduation, into leadership in my church and in different places where I’ve worked since then,” he said.

Loyd-Paige acknowledged that there are as many ways to answer the call to stand against racism as there are people seeking to do the work.

Near the end of the podcast, she encouraged panelists and those tuning in to listen for the whisper — or sometimes the thunderous call — of God’s voice to fight social injustice.

At the same time, she urged listeners to keep in mind that this can be very hard work, pushing upstream against a culture not always interested in matters of inclusion.

“Bringing attention to the disparities that exist can be hard, but I want to be part of that conversation,” she said, even if “sometimes you can run into a buzzsaw” of opposition.

But keep in mind, she added, that in the midst of this effort it is necessary to be gentle on yourself. Answers are not always easy, if ever, to find.

“It is okay to say that the wounds are too deep and you need to stop [in the work] for a time,” she said. “Get rested and then have a plan to get back out there. None of us can solve racism as an individual. We must do this together.”