The Sun Is Up: One Minister’s Awakening to Racial Reconciliation

A white female minister struggles to understand the real lessons of racial justice in America and what work is required of white people of faith to make things right.

First as a teacher, then as clergy, Martha Dixon Kearse, a white female minister, struggles to understand the real lessons of racial justice in America—particularly for those people of faith who claim to love everyone—and what work is required of those same white people of faith to make things right. Through the theology of hospitality, Kearse describes how she came to understand her privilege as a white person, the racism built into many institutions—even sometimes in the church—and ways she can speak out against racism without speaking over marginalized voices. Delay it, do it halfway, ignore it—however we avoid it, the truth is that progress is stymied until the people of the church confront real issues in hard, sincere, painful, revealing, and honest conversations with other Christians, both black and white. Only then can any action occur; only then can the process of true reconciliation move forward.

Martha Dixon Kearse, a Virginian by birth, has divided her years between central Virginia and Charlotte, North Carolina. Martha attended the College of William & Mary, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Gardner-Webb University’s M. Christopher White School of Divinity (twice). She and her husband, Henry Montjoy Kearse, Jr., are the proud parents of Mattie, Conner, and Anna. The people of St. John’s Baptist Church in Charlotte supported her call to ministry and formed a minister out of rough clay; the people of Peakland Baptist Church in Lynchburg are currently affirming her call.

Praise for The Sun Is Up

“’Sleeper, awake,’ Paul sings, ‘and the light of Christ will shine on you.’ In these personal reflections, Martha tells the story of how she, like Paul, has woken up and had the scales fall from her eyes. In a church culture that loves its willful blindness, this memoir comes from a powerful white lady who has seen the light, and now has an important song to sing.” —Greg Jarrell, Author of A Riff of Love: Notes on Community and Belonging and Founder of QC Family Tree