Hey, Bridgetown Church, John Mark Comer here with the pastoral word on behalf of our leaders.

As all of you know, our nation and our city and our church are really right now from

the last few weeks and the string of the kind of recent string of racist killings.

George Floyd, who was a fellow follower of Jesus, is one and his church called a gentle giant.

Brianna Taylor, a med Arbery who was out for a run, and so many before them, not to mention

the untold stories of the Chris Cooper's of the world. And this is nothing new. That line is going

around from Will Smith, racism is getting worse, it's getting filmed. But this is a historic moment.

And I pray it is a tipping point for our city, for our nation, and honestly for our church.

It's very sad that it takes riots and social unrest and outrage to wake up. People like myself

and many more from our compromise and complicity and systemic racism. For those of you like myself

who grew up in the middle class and or the majority culture, we can no longer in the digital age turn

a blind eye to the reality of injustice against our black and brown brothers and sisters and so many

others that in our nation goes back four centuries. Myself and our leaders over the last week have

spent hours in prayer and in-depth conversation with people of color and with our diversity team

and pastors of color in our city and beyond. And I just want to say three things on behalf of our

leaders and do my best to articulate our heart. First, I want to begin with repentance. We repent

for not doing more sooner. I say we, but I take the responsibility. I was most at fault by far.

We started as a church to kind of step into the waters of racial justice or at least to talk about it.

Three or four years ago with a Mark Charles lecture over 800 of you came out that night.

I started working on a teaching series on the subject matter. And in all honesty, like most of you

know my shadow side and my just hyper perfectionism got the better of me. I was working hard at it and

hearing and learning and sorting through, man, all of the emotion there. And I just could not get it

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