At Oaks Christian Online we proclaim to be a place full of people trying, and failing, and trying again, and failing again, to follow Jesus. In our most recent faculty meeting, we gathered together to notice and observe Jesus’s intentional work to ‘bump into’ people outside the cultural lines he would have been predisposed to inhabit. Crossing patriarchal, racial, ethnic, social, class, and purity boundaries, Jesus honored others by listening to them (Mark 4:35, 36, 5:1, John 4:5-9, 27, Mark 7:24-26, Luke 17:11-13, Luke 19:1-6).
In response to these Jesus stories, we prayed a prayer of confession for the ways in which we have not followed Jesus’s model to seek understanding. We have not worked hard enough to learn from the marginalized.
At the end of our meeting, we collected books we have read in order to deepen the voices of others within us. We offer this list of some of the books here and pray for more concentrated and purposeful listening in the days and weeks ahead. We have a long, long way to go towards justice.
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