Johnson Bowie is the lead pastor of Victory Church in Atlanta, GA. He recently spoke at “OneRace Movement,” a DEI consulting nonprofit whose board he co-chairs.
During his message, Bowie regurgitates the worst excess of Critical Race Theory and partialism, framing it as a “gospel issue” while insisting that churches whose websites feature mostly white people might as well burn them down on account of the racist message it sends.
“Hire people of other cultures in increasingly influential roles. One of the things that makes me ‘christian cringe is when you go to people’s staff pages…if you have a majority white church, the worst thing you can do is have your staff page. In fact I was just looking at a church a few months ago. Their entire staff was white, except for their janitor.
What the!? Just take the whole thing down. Just burn your website down. Burn it down. What are we doing? What are we doing? We don’t think that people are looking at that? We’re not thinking of the message that sends?”
…We need to pursue quality, called, gifted, people (of color) to be on our teams, because it’s a gospel issue.
Commenting on this, Woke Preacher Clips offers:
The Bible’s qualifications for church leaders say NOTHING about ethnic identity, and we are warned explicitly against ethnic partiality. To add an ethnic requirement is to nullify the word of God with traditions of men. Pharisaism.
I’m sure you could find some situations where people sinfully shut out qualified minority candidates for church leadership, but on the other hand, people like Eugene Cho are on record saying they knowingly hired unqualified people merely for diversity’s sake (he ended up leaving the church he founded and it became a pagan, queer-affirming cesspool).
If we are going to accuse church leaders of the former sin, we need 2 or 3 witnesses to even entertain the charge (1 Tim 5:19), not just a first impression from looking at their website.
Oh, and one last thing. The “black janitor” anecdote isn’t new. Jack Alexander, Bowie’s predecessor on the OneRace board, used a similar illustration at the org’s “400 Conference” 5 years ago:
I went to the Black Church Leadership Conference in North Carolina, and there were 19 different pastors sitting there, and they were talking about getting recruited by white churches. And they said, well, first, you need to look and see if there’s any black leadership. Secondly, you got to check if the janitors are black. Isn’t that something? So if a white church has a black janitor, they said, stay away from them.
