Leroy Barber

Do you ever find yourself in a rut? Or find yourself wondering what God can do with your "averageness"? The solution is to stop focusing on yourself and start focusing on loving and serving those around you. This book describes ways in which that shift can be made via service, ministry, Bible studies, witnessing, tithing, teaching, and praying.

Barber, President of Mission Year, a young adult inner-city ministry, writes in a down-to-earth way, using anecdotes and other people's stories to weave throughout his topical chapters. This book would be best for college students and adults who are passionate about being extraordinary Jesus followers in an ordinary world.… (mais)

Summary: An extended reflection on Jeremiah 29:4-7 and God's invitation to embrace the difficult places, people, differences, and callings involved in bringing his peace and justice into a divided world.

Many of us who are followers of Jesus feel ourselves to be "strangers in a strange land." As people who have experienced the life-giving shalom of new life in Christ, we are disturbed to witness the deeply divided public discourse in our country that reveals hostilities between political parties, between racial groups, between rich and poor, between natural born citizens and immigrants. As people who look forward to God's new city, the new Jerusalem, we grieve the devastation of decaying cities, of polluted water and air, of unsafe streets.

Leroy Barber offers in Embrace a series of reflections on Jeremiah 29:4-7:

"This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 'Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you to will prosper."

Barber speaks as a black pastor who has worked extensively in Christian community development work. He sees in these verses a call to embrace that will lead to the healing of our cities: an embrace of the place where we are, an embrace of the "difficult people" in our lives, of difference as a gift of God, He invites us into the hard work of change that lays down privilege to serve. He bids us to settle in for the long haul.

For the baseball fan like me, he challenges us to recognize and embrace the sacred spaces of the other--a favorite sport, television show, and to create new traditions in our Christian communities that honor those spaces. He calls us into the embrace that grieves injustice and advocates on behalf of those who are on the receiving end of injustice. He calls us into the difficult choice to offer the embrace of forgiveness to those who hurt us deeply as did families and friends of the Charleston Nine did with Dylann Roof.

Probably for many, he could have stopped there but he concludes with a chapter on Black Lives Matter, addressing ten myths about this movement. He writes, "I am not requesting that you agree with everything you have read about Black Lives Matter. I am advocating for a listening ear, healthy dialogue, and love. This is where loving hard people--including our enemies--begins to take shape in our hearts. Can you love and disagree? Can you love and honor another's humanity in spite of the differences?" It seems in this that Pastor Barber may defining something of what "embrace" looks like between whites and blacks.

I feel in writing so far I haven't captured the "winsomeness" of this book. Leroy Barber's personal stories, but even more, his embracing manner makes embrace across the divides and challenges he speaks of, not easy, but compelling. He helps us see that this is the arc of the biblical narrative, the arc of the ministry of Jesus, and the arc of joy for many like him who have dared to embrace. He helps us envision, and believe, that this could be the arc of our own lives as well.… (mais)

Leroy Barber is my friend and mentor. I trust his voice when it comes to urban ministry and community. So when I saw that his new book was out, Red Brown Yellow Black White Who’s more Precious in God’s Sight?: A call for diversity in Christian missions and ministry, I was eager to read it. I knew it would be a game changer.

But it was much more than that. Red Brown Yellow Black White (RBYBW) is a summons for those of us who ‘say’ we care about reconciliation and justice to quit playing a it; it calls us to get on with working for real change in how we minister across the racial divide. In these pages, Barber opens up about his sometimes painful journey in the urban ministry world, how discrimination from fellow leaders and boards, locked him and fellow minorities out of key leadership positions. Because Barber is such a great relational leader, he sets his story alongside friends and co-conspirators.

In RBYRW, Barber grounds missions in the Missio Dei–the mission of God (God’s larger purpose for his people and his world and the end He is leading us toward). But the history of missions, at different points, bears little resemblance to the Missio Dei. Often white Europeans blended their efforts to spread the gospel with imperialism, colonialism and paternalism. Missionaries came to new cultures to minister, but seldom included indigenous leadership in their mission. Fast forward to the modern era and you find that missions organizations and missionary boards are still predominantly white.

Barber is an African American leader called to urban mission who launched his own non-profit and has led national and international missions organizations (he is currently the global executive director of Word Made Flesh). His heart burns for more diversity in mission and he has led ministries (like Mission Year) and counseled others to be more thoughtful about how to promote diversity in their organizations. Barber doesn’t tells stories of not-for-profit organizations which have labored to change the culture and are working to promote diversity. While reconciliation is a difficult journey, real diversity is possible. And when it happens, we reveal the Kingdom of God to the watching world.

For us white Evangelicals, this means we share power! Barber observes how even justice-minded, white evangelicals fail to include African Americans in decision making, and fundraising. He also relays several stories from the field, where leaders of color were deemed unqualified by short-term, white teams even though they had years of experience and understanding that these teams lacked. Unfortunately these racial attitudes can still poison the well of real diversity in mission. Leaders of color bring different histories and gifts to the realm of mission and leadership. We are impoverished in our missional attempts when we fail to make space at the table and include people of color. For when we do, they can help shape our mission to the wider community in beautiful ways.

RBYBW is challenging for me. I love and respect Leroy and am grateful for the ways he has invested in my growth (and countless others). I am captivated by his vision of diversity in mission. And yet this book highlights how much work is still to be done. I have recently become pastor at a mostly white church that does care about racial justice and reconciliation. We are making an impact on our city but I still have a lot to learn about doing mission well. Barber highlights the racial and socio-economic dimensions of urban mission for me and helps me pay attention to the dynamics. This book is a goldmine!

I highly recommend this book. Anyone interested in the mission of God (which should include Christians everywhere) will gain insight on how to engage in mission in ways that are sensitive to race and culture. For white evangelicals (like me), we can be ‘color blind’ in a way that demeans the challenges that people of color face. We can also fail to value the gifts that people of color bring to our organizations and leadership. I give this book five stars and think that this book should be required reading for pastors, non-profit directors and missionaries. ★★★★★… (mais)

There are few voices that have been so prophetic and formative in my own life as that of Leroy Barber. About eight years ago my wife and I did a program called Mission Year in Atlanta and Leroy was our director (Mission Year is a one year long urban mission program which seeks to incarnate the love of God in an inner city neighborhood). Leroy was someone full of energy, enthusiasm, wisdom and challenging insights. During my time in Atlanta I had to face parts of myself and had to wrestle with ways l had benefited from white privilege and I had turned a blind eye to systemic injustice. Leroy was a gracious mentor and friend through the process, sometimes issuing challenges, other times dispensing wisdom and always listening and eager to pray for me. Some of my favorite memories of my time in Atlanta were sitting over grits and pancakes at a local breakfast stop and talking with Leroy about what was going on in my life. A lot of my thoughts on leadership, ministry, marriage and life are heavily influenced by my friend Leroy so I am glad to commend his book to you.

I like Everyday Missions because it has the same energy, enthusiasm and wisdom I have come to expect from Leroy. The book is an extended reflection on what Romans 12:1-2 means. In the Message it translates as:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life–your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking around life–and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well formed maturity in you.

This is what Leroy want to see: ordinary people offering their everyday life to God and being used by him to effect change in a culture that is not always friendly to people on the margins. In his capacity as an urban minister (he’s Executive Director of Mission Year, CEO at FCS Urban Ministries and founded several other urban ministries) he’s seen what it looks like when us ordinary people offer our lives to God and this book is interspersed with stories of people who have done just this. Leroy challenges the idea that it is extraordinary people that do great things for God. Rather it is the people who submit their (ordinary) lives to God and look around to see how God can use them where they are at.

And so Leroy casts a vision of how we can do this, encouraging us to take risks about how to reach our neighbors with the love of God. This is what he means by everyday missions. ‘Missions’ is the sort of term that people struggle with because ‘missions’ are often badly done. I caught up with Leroy a few days ago and he said, he wants to rehabilitate the term, reconnecting missions to the missio dei (the mission of God: God’s heart for the world/culture). As we find our life call and step out in faith, what we are doing is connecting our life mission, to the missio dei.

One of the things that stands out for me in this book is Leroy’s encouragement to be out of step with our culture. Particularly when you consider systemic injustice means that going with the flow means you are participating in and actually perpetuating systems that hurt people. Leroy sits at the helm of several urban ministries and as an African American leader knows the alarming statistics about how difficult it is for people of color to secure funding for urban mission (this has more to do with historic networks of trust more than blatant racism). Leroy reflects on how far we still have to go as we confront racism and poverty and injustice and he is grateful for those Christians who do not just go with the flow of culture but take a stand for the common good. Churches are still segregated, people of color are often are disproportionately imprisoned. Being out of step with the culture, means choosing to not go with the flow and to take a good, hard look at reality.

But Leroy is always gracious and hope filled, even when confronting injustice. What this book will do for you is give you permission to dream what God can do with you in your life, where you, when you offer him your life. The kind of dreaming Leroy commends are not narcissistic and self seeking but rest confidently in who God is and what he can do through you where you are at, Leroy closes one chapter with this prayer,”May the God who holds all power reveal himself to you in a way that guards you from elitism and inspires more than medicrity from you, a way that brings hope, restoration and peace to and through your ordinary life.”

So read this book and be inspired to offer your ordinary life to God in creative, risky and gracious ways. I know you’ll love Leroy as much as I do!… (mais)