Discipleship, Suffering and Racial Justice: Mission in a Pandemic World

Discipleship, Suffering and Racial Justice: Mission in a Pandemic World by Israel Olofinjana is a helpful book that contains a number of important insights for the church in Britain reflecting on its mission in light of the pandemic. The author is seeking to explore the ways in which the pandemic has revealed a number of existing fault lines and endemic problems in how churches in Britain have engaged in mission. His chief intellectual point is that Western, predominantly White churches have settled for a corporate form of “cheap grace” in which the inevitable calls for suffering that emerge from the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross have been shunned. That is, that the post enlightenment paradigms that have shaped British Christianity, aided and abetted by postmodern intellectual and cultural facets that have exerted a profound impact on our current epoch, have prevented churches from being able to live into a time of crisis and uncertainty. Upon reading the initial premise of the book in the introduction, I was immediately brought back to a conversation with a friend who is in ministry in the UK, but who lived through the genocide in Rwanda. In the midst of the visceral and psychological pressure of seeing the rising catalogue of deaths from the Coronavirus nightly on the news, she made the point that some people have had to live with trauma as a daily form of existential terror for decades. Perhaps, she argued, it was the presumption of freedom from terror, war and death that had made so many predominantly White British people susceptible to a form of inertia; an inertia against moving into a form of global awareness and solidarity with majority heritage peoples for whom this pandemic is nothing new. It is against this reflective backdrop that I read and have a great deal of appreciation for Israel Olofinjana’s book. The book consists of 4 chapters. Chapter 1 is entitled “Jesus’ Discipleship Model of Suffering and Sacrifice: Hallmarks of Discipleship”. The author states