Commitment isn't a short stint. It takes digging in and never giving up. For Dallas Leadership Foundation and a core team of churches, helping our neighbors is worth the sacrifice of time, money or sweat equity. When we hear from families about how our volunteers or partners changed their lives with small gifts of kindness, we know that the sacrifice was worth it.  

This is why Dallas Leadership Foundation, and the core planning team that includes Concord Baptist Church, Fellowship Church Dallas, Friendship West Baptist Church, Highland Park Presbyterian Church, Park Cities Baptist Church, and Prestoncrest Church of Christ, are looking forward to Transform Dallas 2017. 

Followers of Jesus honor God when we help people because we reflect His loving heart, His feet that run to people and His hands that hold them with an everlasting tenderness. In fact, the Bible says:

Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ (NIV, Gal. 6:2).

Join us for the Transform Dallas citywide workday on April 8. The workday will give you a chance to see why we're committed to helping people!

Leadership begins with serving. On Sat. April 8, 2017, you can help Dallas Leadership Foundation and local churches celebrate the power of leading by serving others through the second annual Transform Dallas citywide workday.

The workday is part of a Transform Dallas community service campaign that acts as a springboard for expanding projects annually and throughout the year. Our goal is to serve our community together -- across denominational, racial, class or political differences. 

The Transform Dallas core planning team includes Concord Baptist Church, Fellowship Church Dallas, Friendship West Baptist Church, Highland Park Presbyterian Church, Park Cities Baptist Church, and Prestoncrest Church of Christ working in partnership with Dallas Leadership Foundation.

We're partnering together to feed the homeless, show hospitality to refugees, visit patients in hospitals, and make home improvements for Dallas residents -- free of charge.

Interested? Volunteer registration opens on Friday, Feb. 24, 2017. Sign up at the Transform Dallas site to let us know you're ready to pitch in!

*Photograph of 2016 Transfom Dallas volunteer.

A new report released by the public policy organization Demos and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) at Brandeis University's Heller School of Social Policy and Management puts the issue of economic disparity nationwide front and center. Researchers say there is a “misconception that personal responsibility accounts for the racial wealth gap.”

Instead, the report “explores a number of these popular explanations for the racial wealth gap, looking at individual differences in education, family structure, full- or part-time employment, and consumption habits. In each case, we find that individual choices are not sufficient to erase a century of accumulated wealth: structural racism trumps personal responsibility.

“Drawing on data from the 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that white adults who don’t graduate high school, don’t get married before having children, and don’t work full time still have much greater wealth at the median than comparable black and Latino adults—and often have more wealth than black and Latino households that have married, completed more education, or work longer hours. Differences in consumption habits also cannot explain the wealth gap; we look at academic research finding that white households spend more than black households of comparable incomes, yet still have more wealth.”

The Demos and IASP report also posits that wealth disparities are not eased by a) two-parent households; b) by working full-time or c) spending less.

In 2013, the median white household possessed $13 in net wealth for every $1 median black households held, according to data from the Survey of Consumer Finances. Latino households held $1 for each $10 white media households had.

The Demos and IASP report is worth a careful, prayerful study, and frank, intentional conversations among Christian leaders, whether they live and worship in urban, rural or suburban areas. The wealth gap is like the billboard that never goes away, and Americans can’t afford to ignore it.

An economic system that allows — or even promotes — bias to persist by race, zip code, credit score, previous incarceration, mental health and well-being, and delivery of goods and services should be challenged outright in a democratic government. Redlining, for example, isn’t sanctioned in the U.S. Constitution. Neither is redlining approved in the Bible.

So to pretend that institutions and policies haven’t perpetuated economic disparities based on race or to excuse them away isn’t only short-sighted. For followers of Jesus who understand His ideal for community, it’s unloving. 

When anyone slips into thinking that “it can’t be done,” “it costs too much,” or “they won’t let us,” stories about historical figures like Matthew Gaines can inspire. At Dallas Leadership Foundation, the American story about a former slave motivates us to look beyond obstacles and difficulties to what could be.

Gaines was a black man enslaved during the 19^th century. He was born on Aug. 4, 1840 at Bernardo Martin Despallier’s Louisiana plantation. Gaines taught himself to read after a white boy — some think it may have been Blaz Philipe II Despallier — smuggled books to him. 

Yearning to be free, Gaines resisted slavery and fled several times before being recaptured after each escape. As a slave, he had worked as a steamboat laborer, a blacksmith and a sheepherder.

After Emancipation, he lived in Washington County where he was a minister and community leader. Gaines became a Republican state senator representing the Sixteenth District in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Texas Legislatures during Reconstruction. Gaines was one of four African Americans to serve as a state senator in the 19^th century.

Voters elected Gaines to a six-year-term, but he served only four because of a bigamy charge in 1873. The Texas State Library and Archives Commission in its biography of Gaines says the charge was false and politically motivated.

“The charge was overturned on appeal, and he was reelected, but the Democratic and white majority seated his opponent,” explains a biography from the Texas State Historical Association. “Gaines continued to be active in politics and made his political views known in conventions, public gatherings, and from his pulpit.”

During his tenure as a legislator, Gaines worked for reforms in tenant farming and prisons, mental health, protection of African-American voters, and the election of black public officials. He was a leader in “the 12^th Legislature, which established free public education in the State of Texas and  enabled the founding of Texas A&M University,” according to the university’s The Matthew Gaines Memorial Homepage. The Texas State Library and Archives Commission biography describes Gaines as “daring, keen of mind, courageous, and firm in the equality for all men without regard to race or color.”

An article by Dale Baum on the Texas A&M site observes: “Gaines proved to be the most forceful, charismatic, and militant black leader in Texas politics during Reconstruction.”

Baum also writes that “Texas A&M and Prairie View A&M are today the only two tangible achievements of the bi-racial democracy which was briefly brought to power in Texas by black political activism in the late 1860s and early 1870s.”

Baum offers an extensive history of the political heights Texas Republicans reached for during Reconstruction — before Texas Democrats "chose brute force and expediency over statesmanship and fair play" and dismantled those efforts.

As the nation begins commemorating African American History Month, it's a great time to reflect on the history of Gaines and Reconstruction in Texas. Consider the obstacles Gaines and others had to face in a nation healing from civil war while black people sought full privileges as U.S. citizens. How much can we accomplish today when Christians pursue a spirit of authentic, loving, pragmatic and Jesus-honoring unity?

Photo of Matthew Gaines from Wikipedia.