Many believers carry a quiet worry. If Christ comes first, my race must come second, and second sounds a lot like gone. The answer worked out here is that the gospel orders who you are. It does not erase you. Your race is real and worth honoring as a feature of who you are. Christ is meant to be the foundation. You can work through this guide alone in about an hour, or with a group over one or two sessions. Keep a Bible open and a pen nearby, because the main work is the exercise in the middle.
The guide draws on a conversation between Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, and Jerome Gay, the pastor of Vision Church, about his book The Whitewashing of Christianity. The companion article takes up whether Christianity is a white man’s religion. This guide stays closer to home. It asks what Gay’s distinction looks like applied to your own life.
The question underneath the question
People rarely ask about identity in the abstract. The question usually comes with a history attached. Some have heard “your identity is in Christ” used to end a conversation about racism they needed to have. Others have watched a church treat one cultural style as the only Christian one. Some have learned their own people’s history and found a dignity nobody in church ever named.
Gay takes that history seriously. He says plainly that people who call Christianity a white man’s religion are “not just pulling this out of the air.” So the choice is not between caring about race and ignoring it. The real question is which of the things you care about can bear the full weight of who you are.
Before reading further, write one sentence that answers this: When I think about who I am at the deepest level, what comes first? Don’t polish it. You will come back to it at the end.
Two words worth keeping apart
Gay’s distinction comes out of his response to James Cone and Black liberation theology. He respects much of that tradition and names exactly where he parts ways with it. In his words, “we can’t make a feature of who we are, the foundation of who we are, the foundation of our identity is our creator, not our race or our ethnicity.” Lisa Fields gave it back to him as a short rule: “don’t confuse the feature and the foundation.”
The two words do different jobs. A feature is a real part of you. It shapes how you see, what you carry, how you worship, what you notice. A foundation is what everything else rests on. It decides what the features mean. When a feature becomes the foundation, it starts carrying weight it was never built to carry: your worth, your security, your sense of whether you belong.
Notice what Gay is not saying. He never calls race unimportant, and he never says a Christian should stop seeing color. His point concerns order. He shows that order in how he introduced himself. Asked to tell the audience about himself, he started here: “First and foremost, I am a son of Yeshua. That’s my most important title ’cause it’s one I did not earn.” Then he named his wife, his children, his church, his books and his hometown. He left nothing out. He simply put one thing first, and he said why: it was given, not earned.
Read Philippians 3 from the top
Gay grounds his point in Philippians 3:20, which the KJV renders, “For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.” In older English, conversation meant a person’s way of life as a member of a community. Many modern translations render it “citizenship,” and that is how Gay reads it. As he put it, “So we live from that kingdom perspective.”
The verse makes more sense if you read the chapter it ends. Take ten minutes with Philippians 3:1-21. As you read, look for these things:
- In verses 4-6, Paul lists his credentials. Mark which ones are about ancestry and people. Philippians 3:5 includes “Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews.”
- In Philippians 3:7 he writes, “But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.” Ask what these things were gain for. Read verse 9 to see what Paul was trying to stand on.
- In verse 20, notice where the chapter lands, and what citizenship means for people in a city that prized its Roman status.
Here is the observation that matters. Paul does not say his Jewish heritage stopped being true. Elsewhere he still writes, “For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin” (Romans 11:1). What he counts as loss is confidence in that heritage as the ground of his standing before God. His ancestry remains. It is no longer what his righteousness rests on. That is Gay’s distinction in Paul’s own life, in the same chapter as the verse Gay cites.
Christian interpreters read some details of Philippians 3 differently, especially what Paul means by righteousness in verse 9. But the main movement of the chapter is clear. A man with real ethnic pride relocates his foundation without pretending his heritage is fiction.
Where dignity starts
The strongest case for building on race is that race has sometimes been the only place dignity could be found. Gay grants this. Describing what liberation theology got right, he says that while Cone did not phrase it this way, the heart of much of his writing is that “value and dignity starts at creation, not salvation.” Gay pointed to the era Cone wrote in, when lynchings could follow a church service.
Genesis 1:27 is the root of that claim: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Your worth does not begin when someone accepts you. It does not even begin at conversion. It begins with being made.
This is also where Gay locates the limit. His concern with Cone is that “a lot of it is relying on blackness within itself.” Creation gives dignity to every person through God’s act of making. No race supplies it. If dignity comes from the Creator, then the Creator, not the category, is the foundation. Gay’s conclusion: “from the foundation, it must be the gospel.”
A reader sympathetic to Cone would likely push back. Talk of Christ as the foundation, they might say, has often come from people who used it to move Black suffering to the margins of the church’s concern. On that reading, Cone’s emphasis on blackness was less a rival foundation than a claim about where God stands in a world of oppression. That reply deserves a hearing. Gay and Cone’s readers are not just using different words. They disagree about how central blackness should be to theology itself, and this guide does not settle that disagreement.
Gay also names a danger in the other direction. He describes self-hatred as one response to whitewashing, and tells the story of Leo Africanus, a man taken from his homeland who came to write against people of color. When race is the measure of worth, the measure can turn on the person holding it.
Practice: the introduction exercise
This exercise borrows the shape of Gay’s self-introduction. It takes about fifteen minutes and works best on paper.
- List every true thing you would say if someone asked you to introduce yourself properly. Include your ethnicity, family, hometown, work, church, and anything else that matters. Aim for at least six items.
- Number them in the order you would actually say them, not the order you think you should.
- Next to each item, write what would happen to you if it were taken away, questioned or insulted. Be specific. Would you feel unsure of your worth? Angry but steady? Grieved but secure?
- Circle the item where your answer to step 3 is most severe. That is a good candidate for what is functioning as your foundation right now, whatever you believe in theory.
- Read Romans 8:15: “For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” Then ask whether being a child of God, a title you did not earn, sits where your circled item sits.
Some people find race carrying the weight. Others find their job, reputation, politics or church approval. The point is to see where the load actually rests, not to grade yourself.
Does the gospel erase who I am?
Galatians 3:28 is often read as if it did: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” In context, Paul is arguing about who belongs to Abraham’s family and inherits the promise. None of these categories decides that. The verse doesn’t make Jews and Greeks stop existing, any more than it abolishes men and women. Interpreters do differ over how far the verse should reach beyond that point, into the social relationships and structures of church life.
Two other passages fill this in. Acts 17:26 says God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” Gay draws on Acts this way: we share one ancestry and appear in different hues, and those hues should be shown accurately. And the final scene of Scripture keeps the nations in view. Revelation 7:9 describes “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb.” Revelation is visionary writing full of symbols, so read it with care. But the picture is not a crowd stripped of difference. It is a crowd whose differences are still visible, gathered around one center.
This is why Jude 3 Project can hold two things that sound like they compete. African and African-descended believers do not have to choose between their heritage and their faith. And before any adjective, we are Christian. The order is the point. The adjective stays.
The opposite mistake
Christ-first language can be misused to avoid talking about race, or to pass off one group’s cultural habits as plain Christianity. Gay’s work pushes against this. He insists on correcting whitewashed images of African saints because Christians should care about truth and accurate history. He challenges Reformed culture for presenting one style of preaching and singing as the only way, while still holding most of Reformed theology.
A secure foundation is what lets him do that without rage and without retreat. When Lisa Fields asked how to engage hostile critics without trading insults, Gay said, “We can disagree without being disrespectful.” He also warned his own church that “we can confront sin sinfully.” Someone whose worth rests on winning every argument about race will find those words hard to live by. Someone whose worth rests on adoption has room to be wrong, to apologize, and to keep talking.
Questions for discussion
- Look at the sentence you wrote at the start. Did the introduction exercise confirm it or complicate it? What surprised you?
- In Philippians 3, Paul keeps his heritage but changes what he trusts in. What is the practical difference, in your own life, between valuing something and resting on it?
- Gay credits liberation theology with insisting that dignity begins at creation. Why might that claim have mattered more to some believers than anything their churches told them?
- How would you answer the Cone-sympathetic reader who worries that “Christ first” pushes justice to the side? What would you need to see in a church to trust that it doesn’t?
- What does it mean for your heritage that the nations are still distinguishable in Revelation 7:9?
- What would change about how you handle criticism of your people, or of your faith, if your foundation were somewhere neither could reach?
If you are leading a group
Do the introduction exercise silently and individually. Then invite people to share only what they choose, perhaps just their circled item or just what surprised them. No one should have to read their full list aloud. Some in the room will carry deep wounds around race and church, and some will never have had to think about their ethnicity at all. Both need to hear the other without being turned into examples. If the conversation drifts into debating whether racism exists, bring it back to the guide’s narrower question: given that race is real, what should hold the weight? If you meet twice, a natural break falls after the exercise.
Before you close this guide, take one more look at your list from the exercise. Rewrite it in the order you want to be true a year from now. Keep every item. Change only what comes first, and notice whether anything on the list feels less like you because of it.