Amos 5:21 records a verdict on worship that was being done correctly. The feasts were kept, the offerings brought, the songs sung, and God answered: "I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies" (Amos 5:21). Three verses later the reason arrives: "But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream" (Amos 5:24). Set beside Nehemiah 1:4, where a court official hears that Jerusalem lies broken and responds that "I sat down and wept, and mourned certain days, and fasted, and prayed before the God of heaven," these passages give a two-part answer to what Scripture calls the church to do about racial injustice. God's people grieve honestly and confess, including the sins of their fathers alongside their own. Worship that ignores justice is worship God refuses.
Those two claims are plain in the text. The method that follows from them is not. The texts do not say whether a congregation marches, writes to its school board, joins a coalition or keeps its distance from one. Much of the public argument about race and the church begins with that method fight and only afterward opens a Bible to look for support, so Scripture becomes ammunition for a side already chosen.
The readings below reverse that order. Each one takes a literary unit, asks who is speaking, to whom and in what genre, and works through the wording before any scholar from the Jude 3 Project library is brought in as a witness. The sequence moves from lament in Nehemiah and the Psalms, to the prophets on worship and justice, to the story of Zacchaeus in Luke, to Jeremiah, Esther and Titus on seeking the good of a city. It closes by separating what the texts mean from how readers apply them, so you can say which questions the Bible settles and which it leaves to wisdom.