Mission Resources

African Americans in World Missions

1970 - A Turning Point in Urbana's History

In December 1970, over twelve thousand students, pastors and missionaries decended on the University of Illinois for the 9th Urbana Student Mission Convention.

The air was ripe for change. For years, African-American students in InterVarsity Chapters around the country had been experiencing racism - usually unnoticed by the whites, and usually unchallenged. At the same time, God was using the Black Power movement to teach African-American Christians to view themselves as full humans, but precious few white Christians were listening.

Black Evangelicals in the late sixties were feeling the heat from their nationalist friends for subscribing to the "white man's religion," yet remained outsiders to White Evangelical circles.

In the months preceding the 1970 convention, the word got out that the Urbana leadership was making an effort to change. Tom Skinner, a Black evangelist from New York City, had signed on as a guest speaker, with the worship band from his revivals, Soul Liberation. So it was that several hundred Black students showed up in Urbana, Illinois in December 1970.

Ron Mitchell wrote about the story in his excellent book, Organic Faith. In 1967 a white speaker at the Urbana convention had made a comment that indicated a racist attitude toward African-Americans, and a "major commotion," as Mitchell tells it, had erupted. But with Skinner coming, things were going to be different.

On the second night of the convention, Tom Skinner, went up to speak, After a warm-up from Soul Liberation, an Afrocentric worship band that toured with Skinner. For the background story on this event, click here to read an article from Christianity Today. (opens new browser window).

Tom Skinner's speech was titled The U.S. Racial Crisis and World Evangelism. Skinner's main point was that the racism that was a part of "Bible-believing, fundamental, orthodox, conservative, evangelical Christian[ity]," as he put it, was in direct opposition to the Gospel, and as such hindered the progress of the name of Jesus.

That may be a moot point, but the trouble was, and still remains, that most racism in the church is invisible to the perpetrators. So, Skinner had to explore the meaning of racism in U.S. history, and in the white church:

Understand that for those of us who live in the black community, it was not the evangelical who came and taught us our worth and dignity as black men. It was not the Bible-believing fundamentalist who stood up and told us that black was beautiful. It was not the evangelical who preached to us that we should stand on our two feet and be men, be proud that black was beautiful and that God could work his life out through our redeemed blackness. Rather, it took Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown and the Brothers to declare to us our dignity. God will not be without a witness.

Tom Skinner had taken the truths from the Black Power movement, and applied them to the gospel, where too few white Christians had dared to go. He found in the process that the gospel he had internalized as a child was a gospel of and for white Americans.

But I had a problem with this guy Jesus: [He] was always pictured as an Anglo-Saxon, middle-class, Protestant Republican. He had those nice soft hands that looked as if they had just been washed in Dove. And I said, "There's no way that I can relate to that kind of Christ." I said, "He doesn't look like he'd survive in my neighborhood. We would do him in on any street corner, and we wouldn't have to wait until after dark."

Then I discovered that the Christ who leaped out of the pages of the New Testament was nobody's sissy, nobody's effeminate. Rather he was a gutsy, contemporary, radical revolutionary, with hair on his chest and dirt under his fingernails.

Skinner continued: the Jesus who was going forth around the world in the witness of White Evangelicals was a defective Jesus: an Americanized version that stripped away so much of his message. Jesus had become a solid element of American society, an element that never challenged oppression and injustice.

The thing you must recognize is that Jesus Christ is no more a capitalist than he is a socialist or a communist. He is no more a Democrat than he is a Republican. He is no more the president of the New York Stock Exchange than he is the head of the Socialist Party. He is neither of that. He is the Lord of heaven and earth. And if you are going to respond to Jesus Christ, you must respond to him as Lord.

The Skinner Speech Today

Tom Skinner went on to many other projects before his death in 1994, but his legacy remains alive. Many of the people he influenced are active in spreading the message of genuine racial reconciliation. Will we hear it? Unfortunately, the reason Skinner's Urbana speech sounds so relevant today, is because so little progress has been made in reconciliation in the American church in the last thirty years.

It would be a white-washing of history to pretend that everyone listened to Tom Skinner, and finally understood. The fact of the matter is, many people were not ready to hear the truth. But who ever is?

In fact, for the bulk of the last thirty years, little or no action has resulted from Skinner's and others' gracious words of tough love. Many of the Christians he described, who were good people, but whose inaction made large-scale institutional violence possible, have merely been replaced with younger versions of the same.

A few elements aside, Tom Skinner's speech would be 'going too far' to be presentable at most reconciliation-themed events today. He addressed the need for the White American church as an institution to recognize the sin of racism and repent. However, as the authors of Divided By Faith argue, most evangelicals do not even acknowledge the existence of institutions - they believe we're just a collection of individuals, so all racism boils down to, is individuals having problems with other individuals.

Tom Skinner, and the African American students in the audience that night in 1970, had every right to be suspicious of white America, but weren't. Skinner had the grace to stand up and tell the truth, at the risk of getting poo-pooed by the same people who wanted to hear about preaching the good news of Jesus to the ends of the earth. May we learn from him and from the prophetic voices that today sound out his clarion call to righteousness!

Click here to read the Skinner speech, or listen to the audio recording. The impact is much more apparent on the recording than on the transcript.

To learn more about Urbana 70, and read other speeches, click here.

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