Facts Don't change minds, friendships do

A few days ago, I shared the sermon Andy Stanley delivered to North Point Community Church Sunday. I said it was the most powerful sermon I'd ever heard. I'll include a link to it below. I'm spending this week processing some of the things Andy said.

In the sermon, Stanley said, "proximity is not friendship." He would go on to say, "facts don't change our minds, friendships do."

In the image above, I'm running with my friend Solomon. We've run some miles together. I won't suggest we are best friends in the world. But we are good friends. We've spent time chatting about life, running through life, and checking on each other when we know life is challenging the other.

After the Ahmaud Arbery tragedy, Solomon posted these words:

I have a lot of anger, rage and negativity in my heart. Throughout my life, I’ve dealt with my fair share of racism. I can remember back to my senior prom and not being able to pick my girlfriend up in a limo because her parents didn’t want the neighbors as well as themselves having a black person come to their house. I can remember back at my high school graduation having to pretend I didn’t know my girlfriend for fear of embarrassment that I would cause to her and all her family. I can recall countless times of girls that wouldn’t date me because their parents would not approve simply because of the way I looked. Even now, my wife’s father will have nothing to do with her and that is large in part because her husband is black and not white.

When I read those words, they struck my heart. Not because they reminded me that racism is alive and thriving in our country, but because a friend's life was being impacted by it.

For the past several months, social media has been a "facts" factory. It mass produces memes and newspaper headlines and statistics and machine gun finger pointing. Almost all of it intending to change someone's mind about something. Almost none of it doing so outside the context of friendship.

No statistics are alarming or heartbreaking if you don't deeply know a heart that is suffering because of them.

Very few of us knew Ahmaud Arbery or George Floyd well enough to let the facts of their stories change us. But their stories, coupled with the facts of my friend's story, well that stirs my heart to want to be better. First for him, and then by extension, for all the people the facts say suffer through very similar stories.

I had proximity with Arbery and Floyd through the television.

I have done life with my friend Solomon.

In the bible, Jesus worked some miracles from a distance. But not many. He spent an overwhelming amount of his time in ministry going into people's lives. Purposeful and with unwavering intent, he just kept moving into relationship after relationship with the people who needed him.

To help him, he chose a diverse group of apostles to travel with him. He didn't pull together a group of seasoned pastors with well-practice sermons, he pulled together a group of people who all, one way or another said, "wait a minute, you want ME to be your friend?"

These days, I think Jesus is shaking his head and wondering how we overlooked that detail of his ministry. I think maybe he wonders if he shouldn't have spent a little more time driving home the fact that this isn't as much about changing lives as it is about entering into people's lives.

The entering IS the change, he'd probably like to remind us. Or scream at us.

I've been reminded the last few months how easy it is to post a meme or a scripture that says "love your neighbor." I've been reminded how easy it is to say "we were all created equal."

You know what is hard? Going into people's lives who don't look like us and loving them long enough and hard enough to fully understand they rightfully don't feel so equal.

Jesus spent his whole ministry going into people's lives who didn't feel equal reminding them that they are. And when he left us, he said you all take the ministry from here.

And oh by the way, he didn't call that a good idea.

He called it a commandment.

(You can watch the Andy Stanley sermon here: https://northpoint.org/messages/this-human-race)