For many people the pull between heritage and faith does not begin as a theory. It begins in a church. Someone made it clear that the way you talked, dressed or worshiped, or the questions you had about your own history, belonged outside the door. Perhaps you were handed a verse in place of an answer. Over years, a feeling like that can settle into a belief: your people and your Lord are two loyalties competing for one heart, and sooner or later you will have to disappoint one of them.
That ache deserves to be taken seriously before anything is said to ease it. It should not be called oversensitivity, or a lack of spiritual maturity, or a political grievance dressed in church clothes. The hurt of being told, in so many words, that you must become someone else before God will receive you is not small. It can bend a person's picture of God for a long time. Several of the pastors, scholars and counselors who have spoken with Jude 3 Project carry some version of it themselves. Any answer that hurries past it is not worth giving.
Still, there is an answer, and it is gentler than the choice you were handed. You do not have to choose between your people and Jesus, because God never asked you to. Your ethnicity is a good gift from the God who made you. Your worth rests on him, not on any culture, including the culture of a church that dismissed yours. What follows moves slowly through four steps, each building on the one before. You will name the wound without letting it name God. You will read the passages often used against heritage in their real setting. You will find where your worth actually comes from. Then you will practice honoring where you come from in ways Scripture welcomes.