An Unlikely Multi-Ethnic Friendship Sealed in Christ

I have a friend named Virgil Walker and he says racists don't reconcile hearts do. And I think that there lies the key to the issue is that we are trying to reconcile races, but not everyone has ever experienced racism, nor has everyone always been a racist. Our hearts need to reconcile first a sinful heart to a holy God, and then understanding that once our hearts are reconciled to God, we are reconciled one to another. Well, that's Monique Dussin sharing some pretty wise words about unity that can only be found in Christ Jesus. Welcome to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly.

We have an especially meaningful conversation for you today on the show. John, issues like racial tension make most people uncomfortable. They try to avoid bringing it up because they're afraid of saying the wrong thing and offending someone.

So it gets a bit messy. Unfortunately, we know there will always be instances of racism, but I agree with Monique in the clip we just heard that not everyone is racist. Some buy into a narrative that says different races can't get along, but we see plenty of examples all around us of people coexisting and working together peacefully, and that's the goal. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

What a statement. And I think we've made great strides in America and should continue making the decision to love others regardless of their skin color. Our guests today, Monique Dussin and Christa Bontrager, were polar opposites politically. They came from different backgrounds and had completely different experiences. But they now have a story of a beautiful friendship to share, and it happened because of their love for Christ who designed us all to live in unity with our neighbors, created in God's image. Yeah, and Monique has a BA in sociology from Biola University and is the president of the Center for Biblical Unity.

Christa is a Bible teacher and former university professor, and after Monique returned from the mission field, Christa invited her to live with her and her family for several years. And then later they worked together to start Monique's ministry to help people overcome racial divides, especially among believers. Now together, they've written a book called Walking in Unity, Biblical Answers to Questions on Race and Racism. And Jim, that book formed the foundation for a conversation you had with them on Refocus with Jim Daly, your podcast. We're going to feature a small segment from that longer conversation here on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. So how did those conversations go? What did that sound like in the beginning and then finding some path that you could walk together in even though you may have disagreement? Those conversations were arguments. Okay, now we're talking.

Yeah, they were fights. Because I loved talking about race so much and justice and, you know, all of those key or hot button words, I would just talk about it openly. And so we would have these heated head to head conversations that ended up turning into Bible studies. Well, we had a lot of assumptions about each other. She had a lot of assumptions about white people, living with white people, even though she had grown up, you know, for a lot of her adult life, working with white people.

She thought she knew everything there was to know about white people. But then living with with us was a little different. And we used to go on a lot of walks together and she would ask me, you know, like, well, are you a Republican?

Who did you vote for in the last election? And she would be grilling me and I'm like, I don't know if I feel comfortable talking about that. And it was hard, but she had a lot of assumptions about me, but I had a lot of assumptions about her.

And ours is a story of a very unlikely friendship and an intergenerational, intercultural friendship. But how did you find that common ground? How did you when you hit those impasses, attitudinally, how did you address that? How did you think before you speak? A big part of it was scripture in that, although Monique was very progressive in her theology and her belief system at that time, she still had a very high view of scripture.

Some people who had discipled her early in her Christian walk had really instilled in her the importance of the authority of the Bible. And so I could make an appeal to that. I could say things like, I would often say, persuade me to where you are. Help me think like you.

Show me in scripture where you get this idea. And it was an invitation not to conflict, but to agreement. Now I already pretty much knew where I stood and I was pretty sure I wasn't changing my mind, but I did want to invite her into deeper reflection on her own belief system. And that was a way that I found that I could do that. Did you find some areas, though, that Monique's perspective persuaded you?

Oh, for sure. And I do think that there were points of agreement between us. When we first talk about being created in the image of God, for example, I said, hey, I'm for human dignity. But I could really explain in a very detailed way why I was for human dignity and what the biblical case for that was. And what some things in the world were being called human dignity actually went against scripture and were a violation of scripture.

So that led, though, to some common ground between us. As far as what I learned, I think the big holes in my knowledge were largely about history. That was a big one. I had never heard of people like Emmett Till. I had never heard of the Tulsa massacre.

I had never heard of many things that for her were just second nature. But she also had many holes in her understanding of American history. It was almost as if we had been taught two different visions of our country and we had different data sets. And so that put us on a journey of how do we make these not competing visions of our country but a fuller narrative of our country's history.

No, in that regard, there's such an application to today's news. I mean, I'm hearing everything you're saying, and I'd like both of your responses to this. But my wife and I often talk about this because not everybody in our families agree with our Christian perspective. So we make assumptions that some of the people in our extended families are probably watching something like MSNBC.

We're watching Fox. And you end up with different perspectives on what is true and what is happening. And it does deepen the divide in the country at this stage.

I mean, I think they've recognized there's these markets and they're playing to that division. And it's unfortunate. You know, and I'll add this to it and then get your response. But here at Focus, I talk a lot about the fruit of the Spirit. And it's in Galatians 5.20. But it's also important to know the fruit of the other guy, Satan. And that's in 5.19, Galatians 5.19. And there's sexual sin in there.

But you move beyond that. And then it's a division, disunity, strife, envy. I mean, these are the things that somehow are being uncorked in unique and bigger ways than ever before that are dividing this nation. Social media, cable news. Speak to that dilemma of the division that culture is experiencing right now and the way that we interpret what is true. Well, I mean, just even looking at our two social media feeds, I'll say, hey, did you see this happening in the news? She's like, what are you talking about?

I haven't seen anything about that. And if people don't know this yet, social media is programmed to know what your political positions are and to send you information that will make you angry, emotional, sympathetic. And it can do that just depending on what kind of content you interact with. And it does cause a divide and in a very real way. And you have to be quite intentional about having face-to-face conversations, I think, and being willing to be in a level of discomfort with each other.

What would you say? So I would say that the division and the culture should be expected because they have no common ground to stand on. For Christians, we stand on Jesus. We stand on the truth of the scripture.

But what does the person who has no relationship with Jesus or no active relationship, what do they have to stand on? Everything there is shaky. And when we think about some of the critical theories, it's meant to break down everything. It's meant to deconstruct everything. It's meant to get you to question everything. And so if your worldview or the theory that you're looking through is meant to question everything, you will never have anything solid to stand on. And so to me, the division and the culture is rightfully so.

I should not expect to see anything different. The problem comes is when I look in the church and the division looks like the culture. That suggests something's not right within the church. Speaking to that frenzy, if we could call it that, or that fearfulness. I remember a non-Christian friend of mine said during his election cycle, I can't remember when it was and who were the candidates. But this person said, boy, if you Christians are worried about everything, we should be really worried as a non-Christian. Because he said, you guys are supposed to the people that are fear not and, you know, have hope. And if you guys don't have hope, we should be really worried, which is a little bit funny, but actually true as well. I mean, to hear a non-Christian say that to you, like, aren't you the people of hope?

If you're hopeless, what's got you? Right? Isn't that an amazing statement? It's pretty convicting.

Yeah. I mean, we should be the people that know truth, that can express truth in a boldness with love and kindness and all those things. But if we're acting like the world acts, there's nothing for them to have confidence in, in what we believe.

It's a bit frightening. It is because I think we are called to live out our theology. And when we have kind of this, what I call escape pod theology, where we're only looking to escape the world, rather than what meaningful contribution can we have as Christians as salt and light to the world to really display the kingdom of God.

That's very convicting that a non-Christian would notice that. Right. To me, it means they're tipping in. They're looking in because they want to see hope. Right?

And who doesn't? I mean, that is the human wiring. God has wired that, I think, in our spiritual DNA. With your relationship, what was that breakthrough moment where you, I don't know how to describe it, you probably would know it, but where you got over the hump, where it was grind, grind, grind, grind, and then all of a sudden there was this, maybe this moment, I don't know. It was a few moments. Okay. I'm going to go first on this one. Okay. So we were in the car in her driveway and I was in the driver's seat, she was in the passenger seat, and we, of course, were talking about race and we were having a heated argument.

I mean, it was no holds barred. And she looked at me and she was crying and she said, I'm always going to be a racist to you, right? Like, right? Wow. Because I have white skin, regardless of the fact that you live in my home, that we love you like our own, that, you know, we are in this with you.

I'm always going to be a racist to you just because I have white skin. And I was like, this is interesting. It was ugly crying. It was, it was bad. It was ugly crying. What a great insight though.

I mean, it's really bold. I felt like I was in a box and I would never get out of it and there was no amount of love, acceptance, care, compassion that could ever overcome my skin color. And it was such a hopeless, helpless feeling. Yeah.

But Monique, I mean, you could wear that on your foot as well. There's no way I'm out of this box. I'm always going to be black.

No one's going to, right? It's kind of a weird... I could, but here's the thing is that this cultural moment that we're in doesn't put me in that box. Huh.

Interesting. It only puts me in that box based on things that are flawed to a degree. So you're always going to, when I put that on, when I try that on, the conversation of equity comes up. But we don't ever really drill down into equity to say, well, should everything be equitable? If we have complete equity, does that mean that everybody needs to be doing all of the same things all the time so that everybody can have all of a general amount of the same things? If we're looking at equal outcomes, that means that we generally have to kind of want the same things.

I might not want what you want. And so we're going to have inequity. We have inequity in nature. We have inequity in millions of other things. But now we're looking to this conversation of, you know, do blacks have this? But what if blacks don't want that? But we have, the whole conversation of equity has a bit of an assumption to it, especially when we're talking about outcomes. So, no, I don't think it's the same that I could just put that boot on myself. Right now, what culture is doing is saying, well, you're white and so you are. It goes back to the slavery, the 19, you know, the Reconstruction era, Jim Crow era, even, you know, into the civil rights era. You're black, so you are.

It's just a flip. And so in looking at Krista and saying, I never said that I didn't think she wasn't a racist during that conversation as she's crying. I actually probably doubled down a little bit in my heart and was like, those are white tears.

Wow. So I don't have to pay attention. I don't have to pay attention because it's white tears. And then I went to a friend of mine and discussed the conversation and she was like, girl, don't be moved by that. That's white tears.

And so they don't count. Yeah, it's kind of a blank check almost of like, I don't I don't have to pay attention to this. I don't have to, you know, have sympathy if the tears are from especially a white woman. And I sense that it always felt like there was this kind of wall between us. And I felt like I'll never get past this wall where we're really going to hold on to each other as sisters in the Lord, as friends. For me, that was a big turning point of feeling very helpless. But in a funny kind of way, it led to the Lord doing something in Monique's heart.

Yeah. So I go up and I go to my room because I'm very angry at this point. And so I'm going to pray. It's a big day. Yeah, I'm going to pray for her and all her whiteness.

Lord, please show her her whiteness. And I can't explain what started to happen in my heart even before I had the conversation with my friend. It was just the slightest revelation of the ugliness in my own heart. And the thought that maybe you're wrong. I couldn't understand why, because I don't usually think that I'm wrong about much. Welcome to humanity. You know, but it was it was just the slightest question as I prayed. Yeah.

What if you're wrong? And so that's when the next day I went and I had a conversation with my friend. And without missing a beat, she was just, oh, girl, those are just white tears. And she just kept on going with the conversation.

But there was something nagging, something nagging at me. And then I had an intern who came to work a couple of weeks later. She was white at her Christian university. The student body was demanding that white teachers resign.

The white president resigned and white students were not allowed to speak in their classes. Now, I verified this at a Christian university. I verified this. I've talked with, you know, the new president and things like that about this situation. And when she came in, you know, my heart, there was something in my heart that was like, maybe, maybe there's something not right about this. But I couldn't put my finger on it. I was just like, maybe there's something. And just that little bit of sliver, I think, began to help me question.

As I'm as I'm reading Amos and as I'm reading Micah and as I'm reading, you know, these the full books, not just one Bible verse and having Christa's response and then my intern's response and some other things that happened, I began to slowly see where for me personally, not even the whole theory, not the framework or anything like that, but where my heart was wrong. I think it's really important to think about in our friendship, because sometimes there's a narrative because of our races that I'm white, Monique's black. People think, well, this is just a story about a white woman who brainwashed the poor black girl. Some people will think that.

Some people will think that. So let's just talk about that for a minute, because that is not an uncommon lens that people bring to our friendship. And you talked to Monique for quite a while before I came in here. You know, she's a woman, a strong woman. She knows her own mind.

She was the immovable rock. There wasn't one thing that I said to her that I think was very persuasive, where she came back and said, you know, you changed my mind about that. But it was through the work of the Holy Spirit and orchestrating situations that then the Holy Spirit took those words that I had said to her and then began to explain those things to her. That's what ultimately changed her, was the Word of God and the Holy Spirit. I did some things. I had some conversations to kind of loosen the ground, if you will.

But it was really the Lord who came in and did the changing. Well, the thing as you describe it, one of the attributes of our Heavenly Father is humility, which is so amazing. And what that is, in my opinion, is you're expressing a humbleness that comes from the character of God. When you can stop and say, OK, what is it? Something's nagging at me.

Maybe I'm not right. That's for all of us. That is a brilliant moment because it's, to me, the character of God working in your heart, the very nature of God.

And I think that probably is the way forward because the Lord even says be humble for I am humble. Wow. OK. I went kicking and screaming. I wasn't just like, you know, maybe I'm wrong. Let me change.

I kicked and I screamed and I was like, God, you're kidding me. You know, it was it was a long journey. The last question here for both of you is why should we be energized that racial reconciliation is even doable rather than shut the battery down? Let's just all go live our lives and we'll figure it out in heaven. You want to go first? Sure. I think racial reconciliation is not doable. Yeah, I don't. I think it's impossible.

It is the impossible standards. You're going to get all the. So just let that go. Just let that go.

You've got us. We encourage people to not even use that phrase because it is an impossible standard to get all the people from certain races to agree on one posture. And we're going to all come together because of its tenets in anti-racism.

Right. So that's not the goal. What is the goal? I think the goal is to be brothers and sisters in the Lord, to unity and to walking together according to God's commands. And when we have problems with each other, we do the same things Christians have always done. We go talk to the person. We extend generous forgiveness. We repent of our sins. We engage in the fruit of the Holy Spirit. And all of those commands are given to all of us as brothers and sisters. That is our obligation first before taking cues from the culture that tell us how to get along with each other. Wow.

Ditto. That's what I would say is that, you know, this idea of racial reconciliation that is now so steeped in an anti-racist ideology is not the way for us to go. We are not avatars for our our skin color groups.

Skin color is only skin deep. And so how do I, especially within the church, come to you as my brother, regardless of your skin color, and say, hey, can we have a conversation? Hey, I need to repent.

Please forgive me. But we need to get away from this this idea that has been so blown up in the culture of race and really get back to who we are as image bearers, who we are as children of God. And then we can have conversations about what we would call our matters of providence, the things that God has providentially designed. My skin color is a design of God's providence that my sex can be considered a design of God's providence in that he didn't make me a man. He saw that it was better for me to be a woman. That was that was his design for my life. The socioeconomic status that I was born into. I was born into poverty. That is a providential design for my life.

That's hard to say, but it's true. God uses these things when they're submitted to him. And so we are looking first at our creation identity.

Who is who? What does God say about all humanity? We're all image bearers. And then we're going to look at our salvation identity and say, what does it mean for me to be a sister in the Lord?

You know what I mean? And you would be my brother. And how do we participate? And then our matters of providence, the things that the culture might separate us on. But then we're going to talk about now, now that we've thought this through, how do I walk with you?

What does the scripture say about walking with you, being slow to speak, being quick to listen, slow to become angry, preferring my brother above myself, believing the best about someone else, walking in love? How do you know you're talking? How do we do that? That's the hard stuff.

It would be easy for me to participate in anti-racism because in anti-racism, all I need to do is acknowledge the fact that I am oppressed, that systems and structures continue to oppress me because of my sex and the color of my skin and tell you that you need to read books and that you need to do the work. You know, it's so interesting, like that fork in the road spiritually. It's like sin is a downhill side of the fork, meaning you get on that.

It's easy to go do that. The tougher path is uphill, you know, spiritual depth and growth. It's just like the forks aren't just split.

They're also one's uphill, one's downhill. And as believers in Christ, we do have a much harder work because it would be easy for me to automatically assume that the guy behind me honking in his truck is a racist who just hates me. It's harder for me to actually get my own thoughts in check and say, how are you participating in this right now?

What is your responsibility? Well, this has been great, Monique and Christa. Thank you for being with me.

Thanks. Glad to be here. Well, we've been listening today to a portion of a conversation Jim had on his podcast, Refocus with Jim Daly, and what a great example set by Monique Dussin and Christa Bontrager demonstrating what it means to yield to God's word and treat each other as sisters in Christ. Yeah, Jon, I'm so impressed at how Monique wanted to honor God so much that she was willing to change her thinking and face heavy criticism from others, even losing friends in the process. That took a lot of courage, and I hope this honest exchange we've heard will inspire you to do the same and share the truth in love where there is racial division.

Get a copy of Christa and Monique's book, Walking in Unity, Biblical Answers to Questions on Race and Racism. That's a great place to start to get equipped to be able to get into those conversations. When you make a gift of any amount, we'll send you a copy as our way of saying thank you for being part of the ministry. Yeah, donate today and get a copy of the book when you call 800, the letter A in the word family. Or check the show notes for details. And then we have a video series with Monique from one of our Lighthouse Voices events that you can access at our website. It's called Christianity and Race, and it's going to offer additional encouragement to think biblically about issues of race. And then this reminder that what we heard today was from Jim's podcast, Refocus with Jim Daly, and there's an extensive conversation with Monique about critical race theory in that episode.

We're going to link over to it in the show notes. Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back next time as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Call us at 1-866-875-2915. We'll talk with you, pray with you and help you find out which program will work best. That's 1-866-875-2915.