After having recently read and reviewed Owen Strachan's book, 'Christianity and Wokism: How the Social Justice Movement Is Hijacking the Gospel - and the Way To Stop It,' and picking up from an episode published last August, 'Dr. Eric Mason and the Council of Philadelphia,' I made time yesterday and today to read Mason's 2018 book 'Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice.'
Mason, you may recall, is pastor of Epiphany Fellowship Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And I think even less now that I mistook his tweet storm from 2018 about calling a modern day ecumenical council after having read 'Woke Church.'
That is, I think now it would be hard to deny after reading his book that Mason is more than open to the ordination of women in the Church, nor either that he regards theologically conservative Christians opposed to such as anything other than sexists, nor either that he regards theologically conservative Christians opposed to the claims at the heart of social justice and Critical Race Theory as anything other than racists.
But this goes back to one of the most helpful confirmations I gleaned from Strachan this past weekend. Most of the books promoting social justice and CRT to Christians don't actually use the technical terms for either. Rather, they argue the presuppositional claims of both so as to prime readers to view the Woke conclusions as inescapable and foregone.
Just so, Mason here need not tell us he is for CRT and the ordination of women in those exact words for the discerning reader able to make 4 out of 2+2. To bemoan so many women who've graduated from seminaries but have a hard time getting hired by churches because of "traditional" and "cultural" stereotypes about gender does not leave much to the imagination, after all.
For that matter, an odd kind of double-speak is present here where Mason gives an example of what he's hoping we'll see more of in telling how Matt Chandler emailed him and several other black ministers after the shooting death of Philando Castille to extend his condolences and apologize. But, wait. Do those same black ministers also email Matt Chandler and all the other white ministers they know when a young white man is shot by police in questionable circumstances? Or should they?
Of course not. But then these are just the sorts of questions which we are expected to not ask on pain of being accused of racism and insensitivity. Thus there is no consistency. Young black men being appointed to leadership roles in churches and organizations is insulting because it's tokenism. But not having enough young black men represented in leadership is also offensive.
Here is the test of whether this is the heart's cry of a humble minister of the gospel. Is Mason so willing to hear correction and calls to repentance if they might mean letting go some of the Leftist assumptions he picked up at the academy and in the hood? Are theologically conservative white brothers and sisters just as free to have a conversation about race and the church in America as he is? Or is Mason's idea of conversation like that of so many other Woke folk I've been friends and family to - a one-way monologue rather than a genuine give and take dialogue borne of honesty and good faith?
From reading 'Woke Church,' I'm sorry to say I have a near certainty that the latter is the answer.
