By Phil Haslanger
Collaboration Project Story Team

It seems so simple on the surface. 

Jesus said, “Love your neighbor.” So that’s what we do as people who follow Jesus.

But as some 150 people gathered on a the first Friday evening in March to explore the dimensions of that phrase and then some 160 gathered all day on a Saturday to explore how to live that out in our local community, it turns out to be a very complex and challenging phrase.

The opening night of the 2020 Kingdom Justice Summit was at Upper House near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The Saturday intensive sessions plunged into school partnerships, immigration and human trafficking at three different congregations around the city. The words of the keynote speakers were leavened with a dramatic reading of the “love your neighbors” Bible passage, a variety of music and rap, a video and finally a deep dive with questions at the end of Friday evening. (More photos at the end of this story.)

“When talking about loving our neighbor, Jesus tends to take it a little further,” noted Charles Yu, pastor of Multicultural Ministry and Theology at Blackhawk Church. He cited the “love your enemies” passage in the Sermon on the Mount. “The problem of our world is not love, but who we love.”

Yu talked a bit about tribalism in our world - a natural response of seeking out those like us that becomes toxic as “we divide along cultural and ethnic lines and do unspeakable things to the people on the other side.”

He suggested that the church’s mission is “to show the world that people who are different can come together and love each other.” He drew that mission from the story of Pentecost, when people from many nations speaking many languages came together not as divided tribes but as one people of God.

It was not quite that dramatic in the room on Friday night, but the people there came from at least 50 different congregations, spanning the spectrum of Christian theology and practice. 

Yu sharpened the focus to the racial divides in our society. “Racial reconciliation is not just one more thing to do on our list,” he said. “It’s our calling card.” He said that acknowledging that he had no easy answers to offer.

Then he shifted his focus to the ideological and political divides in our country and in our city.  “All we have done is redrawn the lines of who we will love and who we will hate.,” he observed. 

 Yu offered this idea: “We begin with our hearts, paying attention to the superiority we feel or the disdain we have for others. We listen, not to do rebuttal, but to understand, to sympathize, to learn something.” After all, he concluded, “Kingdom Justice is not about redrawing the lines but removing the lines altogether.”

Nikki Toyama-Szeto picked up the theme at that point.

She is the executive director of Evangelicals for Social Action, an organization that tries to catalyze Christian efforts for cultural renewal, holistic ministry, political reflection and action, social justice and reconciliation, and creation care.

Toyama-Szeto used the words from Isaiah 58: 1-12 to sketch out the difference between religious people who only have a vertical relationship with God and those who include the horizontal dimension of their relationships with their fellow human beings. She noted the use of words like “bonds” and “yoke” in the passage and asked how we can let our love “know no bonds.”

She talked about how when we are confronted by the injustices of the world, our response can be to shrink our imaginations so we won’t be disappointed. Go back to Isaiah, she urged people, where if we life the yoke on others, “your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.”

She had one very concrete suggestion in this era where women often face sexual assault and domestic violence. “The church is a place in the world that can model healthy relationships,” she said. It is also a place that can offer bystander training to its members to prepare them to stand up for those facing harassment or assault. 

Toyama-Szeto ended by asking everyone to offer this prayer as they face the issues before the world: “God, how can I make this personal for me?”

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