Forming Just Reading Communities

This article is from a forthcoming series in the Moody Center magazine. To learn more about the magazine and Moody Center, subscribe to their newsletter.

Does not wisdom call, and understanding raise her voice? -Proverbs 8:1

The past year has taught us that understanding the problems we face is not as easy as one would hope. We are stuck in the irony of having more information available to us than ever before but not knowing who to trust. This past year begs the questions, “how do we best love our neighbor,” and “what is just?” To complicate matters further the pressure has revealed deep disunities in our homes.

We need to invite people to understand more—to heed the call of wisdom. But how does one begin? One way is by creating space where we can slow down, focus more deeply on engaging resources that have studied the issues, and process questions together.

What follows is what I have gleaned from participating in and leading reading groups. I offer a theological framework of the goals and practices of these groups as being an exercise in biblical wisdom. For it is within the practice of wisdom that we will find our first steps in justice. First, I overview certain aspects of wisdom that form the method and goal of our reading communities. Second, I show how these aspects of wisdom are best exercised by reading in community. I conclude with how these practices differ in approaching justice than our broader social context. For justice is wisdom moving towards love.

Reading for Wisdom

To know wisdom and instruction, to discern the sayings of understanding, to receive instruction in wise behavior, righteousness, justice, and integrity. Proverbs 1:2-3

Wisdom is the understanding by which the Lord has ordered creation. The personification of wisdom in Proverbs chapter 8 tells us that she was beside God “as a master workman.” Scripture presents us with an invitation into wisdom by revealing who God is and what God has done. In this revelation, wisdom is shown to be God’s gift to us. God graciously reveals Godself and God’s purposes to invite us to enter in. In recognizing that wisdom is a gift from God we understand that our practices to enter wisdom are not acts of positive contribution to our own improvement but a withdrawal to allow the triune God to begin, progress, and accomplish the work within us.

Our invitation into God’s wisdom is to recognize our relation to that which the Lord has made. The fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom is to rightly understand this relation to the Lord and the rest of his creation. It is a recognition of the way of life that God has set before us to cultivate shalom in a fallen world, in other words to know justice. This recognition is a humble locating ourselves as the aids, not the originators, of bringing peace into the world. It is recognizing our finitude and the immense complexity that challenge the peace of the kingdom of God today.

Recognizing our finitude should lead us into constant formation of wisdom instead of chasing the illusion of mastering these issues. This means that we are constantly cultivating questions. We ask questions, seek out the answers, and then ask better questions. This process resists settling for simple answers to complex problems. I believe this is displayed in Proverbs 26:4-5. In these verses we are given two apparently contradictory responses to similar situations. Wisdom is not found in knowing the responses but in the ability to discern when to employ them.

From these above points-- understanding wisdom as God’s gift to us, recognizing our relation to God and creation, and leaning into our finitude amongst complexity-- we should recognize that wisdom shapes us primarily to be excellent listeners and secondarily as speakers. God calls his people to listen to his statues and cherish his law (Deut 4:1, Ps 119). James 1 advises us to be quick to hear and slow to speak. Proverbs repeatedly asks the reader to listen. Jesus constantly ends lessons with “those who have ears, let them hear.” It is only in listening that we begin to understand the complexity of our contexts and be better equipped to participate in God’s shalom. 

Reading in Community 

Iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. Proverbs 27:17

Reading in community helps cultivate these aspects of wisdom in practical ways. The presence of another person changes the way in which we interact with a text. The three things I want to highlight are how reading together forces us to find and enhance our questions, encourages us to internalize the process of our thinking so we can communicate clearly, and exercises our ability to share the space to think.

Whenever our group begins a book, we always start with a set of questions. We start with basic questions; why do we want to read this book? Why did the author think it was important to write about this topic? This prepares the group to look for certain things. We can come back to those questions and start to answer them. We can modify the questions to be more specific and to reflect how we are progressing in our understanding. Why does Augustine stress the indivisibility of the trinitarian persons in God’s economic actions? Why does Willie James Jennings stress a people’s relation to land in trying to understand race? The questions propel us forward and remind us of our place as learners-- recognizing how we do not yet fully understand.

Not everyone in the group will have the same experience with reading texts or thinking through certain problems. This is a benefit to everyone in the group. Encouraging and prioritizing questions should help everyone feel free to pause the discussion and ask for clarification. It forces the group to slow down and find another way to communicate the argument. This helps us further internalize the concepts and find meaningful ways to communicate to help people understand. It forces us to focus our listening so that we can better aid our neighbors in their process of understanding.

When we read in a group we are also sharing the space to think. One person can certainly monopolize the group’s time with their thoughts. Reading in a group helps us exercise an ability to think with as opposed to for one another. We consider each other’s questions. We hear how each other processes and makes sense of a topic. We practice disagreement in a way that shows we respect and love the other person. When we fail to do so, we have a space to also repent and continue the work.

Cultivating Wisdom toward Love

At this point, you may be wondering how this understanding of wisdom and these practices of reading in groups helps us become more just. I take it to be obvious that in our time of social media and the commercialization of information in our news sources that practices contrary to wisdom are being cultivated. Complex issues are reduced into simple binary options in order to mobilize political bodies to expediency. We receive positive reinforcement for our speaking on any given issue and thus want to speak more and more. These things are not bad in themselves but when left unchecked they do not foster the type of wisdom that is reflected in Scriptures.

The above practices force us to slow down and listen to our neighbors, especially when we disagree with them. We ask questions when we recognize we do not understand. We are forced to find better ways to communicate that which we do understand. We allow issues to be complex and we find better ways of engaging in the ways that we can. This is what we do with those we love-- we continue the conversation because we care about the other and are trying to understand the ways in which shalom is broken. This is a small part of justice. This is a small part of growing in wisdom-- understanding to love our neighbor.

About Sam Keithley

Sam Keithley is a husband and father of two. He is located in Des Moines, IA where he leads a theological reading group. He has an MA in Systematic Theology from Wheaton College and hopes to pursue further academic work researching pneumatology, philosophy of language, and the doctrine of Scripture.

---

For further reading

Daniel J. Treier, Virtue and the Voice of God: Toward Theology as Wisdom

John Webster, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason

Matthew Lee Anderson, The End of our Exploring: A Book about Questioning and the Confidence of Faith

---

Articles like this one are made possible by the support of readers like you. Donate today and help us continue to produce resources for the mestizo church.

Stay or Leave

Should I stay or should I leave? Am I trapped in the barrio or is the barrio an inescapable, yet beautiful part of me from which I should not flee (or even have the desire to leave)? Should the life-taking stories of my barrio take precedence (like they do in the news) or do I privilege only the life-giving (counter) narratives that dignify my city? If I stay, am I being a bad parent, allowing my son to remain in a potentially dangerous environment where opportunity and resources are scant? If I leave, am I being a bad Christian by opting for my family’s and my own comfort and safety?

These questions invaded my mind and the noises of my barrio played a conflicting melody where love, sacrifice, injustice, and pain entwined.

El ruido que amo (the noise that I love)

I love las cumbias, las rancheras y los boleros I hear desde mi ventana. I didn’t exactly request this music pero my neighbors’ music selection is everyone’s delight. Ok, maybe not everyone’s, but I like it. I’ll be hanging out in my back yard and suddenly la canción de Ana Gabriel que puso la vecina gets me going, and I start singing my heart out: ¿Quién como tú, que día a día puedes tenerle? It takes me back to the many road trips I took with my parents when I was a little girl. Ana Gabriel, Juan Gabriel, Los Bukis – those were my jams!

I love el ruido que mi gente makes when they’re hussling. Tamales, tamales, tamales. ¡Tamales de piña, de puerco, de pollo, tamales! I love when my son runs out yelling raspadooo when the street vendors pass by honking their horns announcing la llegada of those delicious raspados we all slurp with such gozo. I love hearing mi pueblo use their voice to try to make ends meet en el swapmeet: barato, barato, barato, pásele; ¿qué le damos, señorita, pásele a lo barato? 

I love la euforia que se escucha cuando la selección mexicana scores a goooooooool!

Whoever said my people have been silenced, has not set foot in my neighborhood.

El ruido que odio (the noise that I hate)

I hate that I can distinguish the sound of fireworks from gunshots. I hate that we have to run inside the house and lock every door when we hear shots fired. I hate that every other day police sirens and the noise of helicopters drown out the sound of my favorite TV show, reminding me that I am not safe. I hate the cries of yet another grieving mother as she pleas with the public to help her find her child’s murderer.

El ruido que amo y el ruido que odio are juxtaposed mainly because “U.S. barrios have been a source of cultural resistance; they function as reterritorialized spaces where it is possible to maintain one ́s culture and to resist assimilation. At the same time, the barrios are social spaces where ethnic lower classes are segregated thus impairing their economic development and creating a subculture of violence and poverty.”[1]

El silencio que mata (the silence that kills)

But the most murderous force in my neighborhood is silent. The culprit hides in plain sight. More than two thousand pounds of toxic chemicals are emitted in Wilmington, California every single day. My beloved city is surrounded by the largest concentration of oil refineries in the state and the third largest oil field in the contiguous U.S., and it is home to the largest port in North America (Grist 2022). Wilmington, which is 90% Latino and 40% immigrant, is a toxic wasteland; the dumping grounds of big oil corporations. The contaminants expelled daily create diseased bodies in a community where the median household income is 40% below the state’s average and where 28% of its residents are not medically insured, a number that represents three times more than the national average. The environmental hazard created by these companies also has an impact on violent crime. Several studies have found a link between violent crime and pollutant exposure: “air pollutants act as stressors, eliciting endocrine stress responses in our brains that lead to irrational decisions and violent tendencies and also disturb the physical, cognitive and emotional health of people exposed to it at high levels” (The Guardian 2022).

Wilmington, CA; they call it a “bad neighborhood” and bad neighborhoods are always bad because of the individuals that inhabit it. A “bad neighborhood” is never thought to be bad by virtue of systemic injustices that include racial and environmental inequalities. My family and I are from a “bad neighborhood,” but I don’t think we’re bad people. Jesus himself was from Galilea, a neighborhood deemed undesirable. Dr. Chao Romero asserts that if Jesus was from California, he would not come from Beverly Hills or Calabasas, but the most marginalized regions of the state, like East LA or the Central Valley.[2]

What we really mean when we say “bad neighborhood” is impoverished, and, often, Brown or Black. The “good neighborhoods” are strictly regulated. Associations determine rules about the colors in which you are allowed to paint your house, how often you’re supposed to do your lawn, and how much noise you can make. “Good neighborhoods” are wealthy, have good school districts, lower crime rates and are predominantly White. Language matters because language constructs truth. The use of “good/bad” as it refers to neighborhoods continues to strengthen the belief that the people who live there are inherently bad and completely disregards systemic issues that have created and continue to sustain the disenfranchisement of our barrios.

I understand the ways in which systemic issues have worked against my community. I love my community for the ways in which it has shaped me to be resilient, humble, and faithful. I am grateful for the ties I have formed there and the life lessons that have been imparted to me: to not judge people by what they have or where they came from. Nonetheless, there is another competing truth: I have witnessed more gun violence than the average American, I attended low-performing schools in the area and do not feel safe letting my teenage son walk alone to the store that is 100 feet away from my house. I have lived in this city for over 30 years and there is a certain level of comfort granted to me by familiarity, but as a mother, I face a conundrum: do I stay or do I leave?

Deciding to leave our barrios is more than aspiring to a bigger, nicer house with abundant parking, and plentiful green spaces. Leaving our barrios means that our children will have better educational opportunities, access to resources that improve their livelihoods, and the probability of being less exposed to violent crime. Ironically, the dilemma many of us face is similar to the one experienced by our first-generation immigrant parents with one distinction: my socioeconomic status and educational levels have significantly improved while remaining in my native community.

The Christian Community Development Association (CCDA) emphasizes a ministry of presence in which believers are active members of the communities in which they serve. It is a way of doing ministry that decentralizes white saviorism and centers the voices of community members. They invite people to be wholly present in their areas of ministry by becoming (and remaining) a neighbor. As a Christian that understands the importance of serving the socially dispossessed, am I to remain and use my social and economic capital to help my community flourish or should I leave relocating in a city where my children will be safer and have access to opportunity?

I left. It might seem like that was the easiest decision to make, but it certainly didn’t feel that way. I wrestled with this decision for quite some time, asking the Lord for guidance: “Lord, help us; ayúdanos a entender tu voluntad.” Months later, my husband and I received an answer to our prayers that gave us the certainty that we were being called out of my beloved city. In very God-like fashion, he set the pieces in motion and directed our steps.

So, should you stay or should you leave? I don’t know, and I don’t think there’s a generic right or wrong answer. God directs our paths in unique ways in different seasons of our lives (Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8). For people of color, these decisions are especially difficult as we encounter survivor’s guilt. Dr. Piorkowski explains that survivor’s guilt, or success guilt, is prevalent amongst first-generation college students from marginalized communities. We often ask ourselves – and God – questions that are filled with remorse: Why did I succeed when so many others in my neighborhood didn’t? Why am I alive when many of my classmates aren’t? Why do I have the opportunity to live in better conditions when many of my family members don’t? How is it possible that I love my barrio, but still want to leave it?

Guilt and gratefulness collide, but this guilt is crippling because it doesn’t allow me to faithfully receive God’s blessings. Instead of viewing the earth as a punishment that we must endure to buy our way into Heaven, we must understand the earth as a good place created by God (Genesis 1:18; Genesis 1:31) and our salvation as a free gift from our Lord (Ephesians 2:8; Romans 6:23). Perhaps God is indeed calling you to stay, but the decision to remain should not be guided by guilt. Conversely, if we are being led to leave, we must not do so developing a posture where we see our former neighbors as less-than, or inherently lacking, because of their socioeconomic status, and in doing so, engaging in the further dehumanization of our barrios. Remember that “You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are” (The House on Mango Street). 

About Dra. Meduri Soto

As an academic from el barrio, Dra. Meduri Soto strives to engage in scholarly work that honors and gives visibility to her community. Her faith drives her passion for justice as she seeks to reveal the ways in which certain language ideologies are constructed to operate unjustly against our communities. Her work acknowledges language as a powerful tool and promotes linguistic diversity in its different manifestations. Bicultural and bilingual identities are at the center of Dra. Meduri Soto’s work. She is a Spanish professor at Biola University where she teaches second language and heritage language learners. To learn more about her work, follow her on Instagram: @la.dra.itzel

---

Footnotes

[1] Views of the Barrio in Chicano and Puerto Rican Narrative (Antonia Domínguez Miguela)

[2] The Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology and Identity (2020) 

---

Articles like this one are made possible by the support of readers like you. Donate today and help us continue to produce resources for the mestizo church.

Living in my Memory: Pastor Rich Perez on “In the Heights”

This article was first published by Rich Perez on his personal blog and can be read at here.

In the Heights, Warner Brothers 2021

Like everyone else, we were excited. Beaming with pride that any semblance of our story — our neighborhood story was being told on the silver screen. We were especially proud because our son, who has been acting for 6 years now, was able to land an on-screen background role in the movie. So, no matter what suspicions or reluctance some of us had about which story would be told, “In The Heights” had us all waiting with eager expectation.

And it delivered…kind of. Well, it’s complicated. Within a few days of its long anticipated premier, social media and news outlets like The Root exploded with criticism mainly about the movie’s misrepresentation of Washington Heights, a neighborhood that recently was canonized as “Little Dominican Republic” to pay homage to the many Dominican residents that call it home.

And that may be the source of the rub.

There are much smarter people than me talking about the nuances of Latinx identity. I won’t attempt to be scholarly about that. These are my reflections, most of which are birthed out of my experiences as someone deeply shaped by Uptown culture. The only other motivator here are my kids, who I feel the exciting responsibility to pass on the legacy of my identity so that they could discover who they are.

Art will always be complex

No matter how deeply a piece of art is connected to a real moment in history, place or person, its expression will always be at the mercy of the artist. As enjoyers of art, there will always be room to insert your observations or interpretations of the piece, but ultimately the artist decides — even if subconsciously — what the pen writes, what the brush strokes, what the camera captures. Lin-Manuel is the architect; he’s the artist. In The Heights was shaped by his experiences of Uptown (mainly Inwood, or Dyckman for us natives, which is the northern most part of the neighborhood. how that difference shapes his storytelling is also important, but for another time). For those of us that took to the theaters in celebration of what could be, we watched a movie about a neighborhood that existed in his imagination. and we didn’t leave with the level of satisfaction we had hoped for. Why? Because we don’t live in his imagination. Not as main characters, at least.

Art will always be complex, because art is birthed out of us. And we are complex beings who are shaped by nuanced experiences, privileges or lack thereof. We’re shaped by our desires and preferences — spoken or unspoken. As the architect Lin created what he imagined, a “mosaic.” But therein lies a fundamental obstacle. Washington Heights is not a mosaic. While it may be home to a variety of Latinx identities, Washington Heights is demonstrably Dominican; Afro-Dominican.

There have been so many Mexicans, Cubans, even Brazilians declaring their praise for In The Heights because they felt seen. And rightfully so, their flags and accents were in the movie. They felt seen because they were on screen. The movie’s effort to celebrate Latinidad (I don’t want any of the smoke that comes with this word) was beautiful but it minimized the Dominican story that lives in the very air of this community. Now, this is dicey, because I’d hate for this to be interpreted as a campaign to not celebrate those cultures. This is not that. We should celebrate them.

This is, however, an effort to show that Latinx expression varies across the different Latinx ethnicities, and this movie was an opportunity to put that on display.

Beyond the tasks of filmmaking

Casting, as much as the wardrobe, the script, the director, or any other department on the set of a movie, is not so much a task, but an opportunity. Better yet, it’s a responsibility to build the world of the film. And in the case of a movie about a neighborhood with such a unique expression, it is difficult to see the right cast in the backdrop of the wrong setting. It’s also devastating to see (on the big screen no less) our streets, our bodegas, our corners, our stoops with strangers occupying them. Even more — what the cast wears, how they sound, their accent, their syntax, their references, their isms, their music, their skin color, the smells of the movie, el sabor of the movie. All of those are special and important to the telling of our story. All of those serve as bricks in the construction of the world that the movie promised simply by virtue of its name. Oh, how i wished there was a perico ripia’o or a number with una bachatica ensendi’a!

But this is not In The Heights through my eyes, nor your eyes. It’s through the eyes of two Puertoriqueños, one of whose relationship to the Heights could perhaps be understood as periphery having grown up in West Philly. This may be the reason for a heavy presence of salsa music and a dominant Puerto Rican cast. Even if they played the role of Dominicans. This may explain why the beloved piraguero cooled los vecinos from the sweltering heat with piraguas and not frio frios. ¡Dame uno de chinola!… not parcha. When you know the artists, you better understand the art.

And as for the visual direction, well, that was in the hands of an Asian man and a white woman. Jon Chu and Alice Brooks are responsible for what, and more importantly, who, is captured by the camera. And listen, this is no indictment on them for those things. I could never. And I wouldn’t want to. But it is a call to awareness that they are the source of this art. And the truth is that perhaps for some of them, this wasn’t their story to tell.

Casting directors and other executive roles in the film-making journey are like the visual managers at retail stores. It’s their vision that decides which mannequins and outfits are considered most attractive for the windows that face the street. Yes, we got to see Latinos on the screen in ways that we never have, yet there still remains glass ceilings to be shattered for the Afro-Latinx community. Perhaps much of the frustration is coming from the expectations we had on this movie to deliver some of that shattering.

Nonetheless, as a Dominicano from Uptown, Lin-Manuel has given me sufficient reasons to be proud of my Latinx identity — no matter how nuanced it may be. But we shouldn’t make the conclusion that critique means that we hate the project and can’t appreciate it generally. I think Lin knows that. He’s also just an artist navigating all the heat his work is receiving. That’s no easy place to be in. I get that, too.

I won’t beat a dead horse. Afro-Latinos were desperately absent in the foreground of this story, and thus, in the present imagination of its creators. But it’s important to share that I won’t condemn anyone for not highlighting me in their imagination. None of us can, I suppose. We can only hope to inspire imagination, stretch it with truthful criticism — whether it spills out of us harshly or not. Though we hope it wouldn’t.

It’s a big deal to have this movie in Hollywood. And I’m thankful for that. There is nothing like In The Heights that has been memorialized into cinema history. That should be celebrated. As big, however, is the missed opportunity to tell the story more truthfully. Again, I think Lin gets that. His humility and active listening is a hopeful sign for great future projects and advocacy of the stories some of us felt fell short here.

If anything I’ve gotten from the loving relationship in my life is that mature love leads with celebration while holding space for growth, transformation, correction.

In the Heights, Warner Brothers 2021

The Gift of Becoming Yourself

Yes, Hollywood is watching us have our disagreements, but I want to strongly encourage us to reframe the way we have these discussions. It’s important that we don’t frame those bringing critique as “hating” on the movie and damaging our perception to Hollywood. And on that note — big production companies, like Warner Bros., with their white dollars, are not the only way to have our stories told. The film-making industry is like any other industry, I imagine. There are enough creators, writers, producers, actors, directors, DP’s of color telling our stories without the help of big wig executives. I’m hopeful for the stories In The Heights will give birth to, but I’m wary of adjusting ourselves to mass appeal. I know it produces dollars, but it dwarfs our stories into something foreign. The road to getting Hollywood to see the value in our stories is long and arduous. Surely, there are other ways.

Perhaps the next best thing that we can do is more simple than we imagine: create. Tell your story. Tell your ancestor’s story. Tell your block’s story as you know it; as you experienced it. Tell it truthfully. Don’t be held hostage by mass appeal. It’s one of the pitfalls we’ve inherited from the social media age. If you drink from the cup of mass appeal you risk the integrity of your story because you decide that what others think is more valuable than the deepest truth of your experience.

There’s no question that this movie has poured gas onto the on-going conversation about Latinx identity. And for that I’m thankful. Our Latinx identity is nuanced and complex, with Afro-desendencia and Indigeno-descendencia. Learn your story. Climb your family tree. Saca tu abuela del closet. With all its twists, painful turns and pleasant surprises, there is no journey more important than the one where you become yourself, as you’ve been made. To share both that journey and what you discover is a gift to the world. To experience that in your art, your stories, your movies is to construct a bridge that allows me; that allows us, the opportunity to enter your story. The only catch is that it must be done truthfully. No hiding the mess. Not forgetting a chapter. And not making anyone invisible.

Living in my memories

My teen years were all about basketball at Dyckman park, bread runs to Kenny’s bakery, and parties at Incarnation Catholic School’s gym on 175th and St. Nicholas. For over a decade I lived in Dyckman with my wife and two kids as a faith and community leader. In 2017 I debuted my memoir about what it meant for me to love this place that had changed so much over the years. I’ve had a number of non-native New York friends message me after watching the film: “Wow, I feel like I understand your story more” or some version of that sentiment. If I’m honest, these reflections are in large part to ensure that those unfamiliar with the place that shaped so much of me wouldn’t conclude that this film captured all what that place is.

If your conscience makes room for it, go buy a ticket. Watch this movie. Take with you what you can from this story. And trust me, you can. There’s plenty there for you. There’s plenty there for us. Beauty does not evade this movie. El fuego Caribeño wasn’t a stranger. To see the hydrants open, the streets flooded with kids, and the struggle to find our place in society — that was still especially beautiful and compelling.

About Rich Perez

Rich is the author of Mi Casa Uptown: Learning to Love Again, a memoir of his experiences growing up in the inner city of Nueva York and the intersection of faith, family, identity and the significance of place. Founder and pastor of 10 years at Christ Crucified Fellowship in NYC before transitioning to Atlanta, GA with his wife, Anna, and their kids, Josiah and Hayden.

Jesus and John Wayne Review

White Masculinity and Theology

It was in graduate school that I first heard the phrase “contextual theologies.” I was intrigued since context - both cultural and historical - is crucial to understanding theology. While reading the assignment, I realized that contextual theologies are essentially theologies with an adjective placed in front: feminist theology, womanist theology, latinx theology, LGBTQ+ theology, liberation theology, black liberation theology, etc. You may notice (as I did) a couple of categories that are missing from these “adjectival” theologies: white theology and masculine theology. The reason is that these are assumed - the “mythical norm” of theologies, as it were.[1]

Since white, masculine voices have been privileged in the field of theology for centuries (or since voices were assumed to be white and male, regardless of the truth of that assumption), any attempt to equally privilege latinx, black, female, LGBTQ+, Asian, Indigenous, or any other perspective alongside those voices is often resisted. “Those'' voices, it is argued, are too influenced by their own subjective viewpoints and focus too much on one or two aspects of theology to be taken as seriously as the other (white and masculine) voices that have dominated for centuries. As if these white, masculine voices are not equally subjective and focused on particular issues.

What Kristin Kobes du Mez accomplished in Jesus and John Wayne is tracing a history of American white, masculine, evangelical theology and to identify the historical, cultural, and political forces that influenced, guided, and focused its theological emphases for decades. In the book, Kobes du Mez draws back the curtain on the assumption that American evangelicalism has developed its theological emphases and ecclesial ethics in some sort of vacuum outside of cultural influence - that it is not just as “adjectival” as any other sort of contextual theology. Kobes du Mez argues that the guiding force behind white evangelicalism for the last 50-some years has been a “militant white masculinity.”[2]

In a fascinating study that follows, Kobes du Mez traces the history of how “militant white masculinity” has always been the guiding force behind American evangelicalism and how it was shaped by and utilized symbols such as John Wayne, William Wallace, and other “rugged, masculine figures,” the Republican party, consumerism, and even the American military as an ideal force for good in the world.[3] Kobes Du Mez takes her readers on a dizzying journey through historical periods of evangelicalism that, despite its comprehensive nature, can only really scratch the surface of white evangelical subculture and all its manifestations. Beginning her history as far back as the 1890s, when the Victorian “model of manly restraint had begun to falter” and the new economy of the early twentieth century demanded a different type of “softer” work than toiling in fields or factories (and as women began to attend college with more regularity), Kobes du Mez records that a call for a new type of more aggressive masculinity emerged.[4]  

Christianity as White, Militant, and Masculine 

Kobes du Mez’s primary argument in Jesus and John Wayne is that this “militant white masculinity” has been the guiding force behind evangelicalism for decades. In so doing, she highlights more effectively than any theology textbook I’ve ever read just how contextual white masculine theology is. Perhaps one of the most devastating moments in her book is when she outlines how white evangelicalism was used to perpetrate segregation through church polity, Christian private education, and through both its constituents’ silence about and active railing against the Civil Rights movement. She does point out that “evangelicals’ response to civil rights varied, particularly in the early stages of the movement.”[5] Kobes du Mez uses Billy Graham as a prime example of one such evangelical leader who even personally removed ropes between white people and black people at his crusades and invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to pray at his 1957 New York City Crusade.[6] However, she also points out that he distanced himself from backing activists when they began to engage in civil disobedience, and that many white evangelicals responded similarly, finding it “hard to accept that the sin of racism ran deep through the nation’s history.”[7]

She argues that this lack of willingness among white evangelicals to continue standing by civil rights activists coupled with their silence about the demand for continued segregationist policies among their fellow white evangelicals had devastating effects. One of these was using private Christian schools to continue segregation and revealing that ultimately, white evangelicalism was more concerned with continuing its own political purposes than fighting for its black brothers and sisters. Kobes du Mez states, “Although blatant defenses of segregation and racial inequality would be rare, many southern evangelicals and fundamentalists who persisted in their unreconstructed views of race would find common cause with more ‘tolerant’ evangelicals on issues like social welfare policy and ‘law and order’ politics that would carry clear racial undertones.”[8]

Millennials from white evangelical spaces will recognize that similar patterns emerged in the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement. Refusal to support that statement - “Black Lives Matter” - was defended by many white evangelicals because they claimed that the movement had ties to a more liberal political agenda and that the civil rights activists within the movement were anti-police. This movement drew fault lines across white evangelicalism that, for some, resulted in splitting away from the evangelical church due to its refusal to support what they viewed as a basic civil rights issue. These divisions only became more pronounced when Donald Trump was elected as the Republican party’s candidate for the 2016 election. What was not widely recognized, however, was that these patterns had been present in white evangelicalism from its very start. The widespread reception of Jesus and John Wayne by those of us who grew up (or are still part of) white evangelicalism has been a resounding agreement that the book puts its finger on exactly what felt off as we grew up, particularly surrounding issues of race, “family values” voting, and the strong connection to the U.S. military (which is brilliantly outlined in Chapter 12, entitled, “Pilgrim’s Progress in Camo”).[9] 

Where are the Women?  

For me, one of the most eye-opening chapters of Kobes du Mez’s book was Chapter 11, provocatively entitled, “Holy Balls.” While some readers may be drawn to other chapters, this chapter described the period of my life when my faith was becoming my own. I found my heart feeling twisted as I realized how whole-heartedly I had swallowed certain parts of toxic masculinity because I truly believed Scripture demanded that I did, and because much of the Christian culture around me absolutely encouraged me to do so. Kobes du Mez begins the chapter with some less common examples of militant masculinity, such as churches hosting MMA viewing parties and Christian mixed-martial arts groups, but speaks to the heart of what was happening at the time by saying, “As militant masculinity took hold across evangelicalism, it helped bind together those on the fringes of the movement with those closer to the center, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish the margins from the mainstream.”[10]

A poignant example of this collapsing of the margins into the mainstream is the support New Calvinism gave to two “fringe” voices in the early 2000’s: Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson. Kobes du Mez writes more in-depth about these two men and the way that they were given platforms and endorsements by the leaders of New Calvinism despite many of them expressing discomfort with their crass talk, sometimes violent focus, and even, in one case, denial that American slaves had been treated with brutality.[11] This, to me, was the gut-punch of the chapter. These two men were endorsed by other men who were at the heart of founding various church-planting networks and conferences that were wildly popular among me and my peers during college specifically, and their endorsements meant a great deal. While these organizations and coalitions claimed to hold the gospel message as the most important thing, Kobes du Mez points out that the unifying factor among many of these very doctrine-conscious men was not solely the simple gospel message, but “gender and authority.”[12]

“It was both disheartening and a reminder to me of where my place was at all times - out of the pulpit and out of any leadership that was not solely over women or children. Knowing that I wasn’t going to seek pastoral leadership was far more important to these men than my love for Christ, desire to serve the Church, and my passion for theology, and that oft-repeated question made it painfully clear.””

These two examples most brutally highlight her point about gender and authority trumping simple gospel messaging within white evangelical alliances, but so does the lack of female leadership in many churches that ascribe to this New Calvinism. Sure, there are shining exceptions, but the question I was most often asked when I stepped into a new church in the early aughts is most illustrative - “Why do you want to study theology?” which was code for “Do you want to be a pastor?” It was both disheartening and a reminder to me of where my place was at all times - out of the pulpit and out of any leadership that was not solely over women or children. Knowing that I wasn’t going to seek pastoral leadership was far more important to these men than my love for Christ, desire to serve the Church, and my passion for theology, and that oft-repeated question made it painfully clear.

One area of critique that I have for Jesus and John Wayne is the book’s claim to analyze how white evangelicals got to where they are today, while women are conspicuously absent from many of the chapters as perpetrators of this “militant white masculinity” that Kobes Du Mez describes. It was not simply men advocating for patriarchal norms in churches, nor was it only men leading the “family values” Christian Right, but women were crucial in the formation of and enforcement of this “militant white masculinity,” and one place the book falls short is in fully demonstrating that. A notable exception is Chapter Two (entitled “God’s Gift to Man”), in which Kobes Du Mez highlights women such as Marabel Morgan and her The Total Woman course, Anita Bryant, Elisabeth Elliot, and Phyllis Schlafly. Kobes du Mez continually documents Schlafly’s influence among white evangelicals (particularly politically) throughout the book, which is utterly engrossing for anyone (like me) who had not known much about this woman before. However, Schlafly appears to be the sole woman whose contribution to “militant white masculinity” is traced throughout the entire book. While I think it is important to include white women’s culpability in the propagation of “militant white masculinity,” Kobes du Mez has recently announced that she will be publishing a new book about evangelical women called Live, Laugh, Love, and I believe she intends to address much of what she left out in Jesus and John Wayne within that book. I, for one, look forward to reading it. 

Christianity, Consumerism, and a Dangerous “Culture-Making”

One poignant observation Kobes du Mez makes in Jesus and John Wayne is the way that white evangelicals harnessed consumerism to propagate their cultural message.[13] By doing so, they created their own culture and provided a weapons store for the culture war that consumed much of their recent history. This culture was created through celebrity culture (particularly as pertained to pastors, radio stars, and motivational speakers), radio ministry, Christian television shows, the Christian music industry, Christian films, the Christian book publishing business, and Christian bookstores.

Andy Crouch has written much about culture and culture making. In For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts, he describes how Genesis informs our understanding of culture making by demonstrating how God was the first culture maker and cultivator - planting a garden, which Crouch calls “nature plus culture.”[14] He describes the call of those in the Church to create good and beautiful art and other such cultural contributions. Crouch speaks of culture making as a creative, positive endeavor that the Church ought to participate in joyfully, creating art in and for the Church as well as for the world. Through the creation story, he highlights that the problem with culture making occurs when Adam and Eve no longer wait on and partner with God, but “...take and eat, and set in motion the process by which everything that God had originally given as a gift, a sign of relationship and dependence, will be twisted into a right, something grasped from a world presumed to be threatened and threatening, something that insulates us from needing relationship or dependence.”[15]

“Culture making, in the form that Kobes Du Mez documents, is dangerous, homogenizing, and used as a battering ram against anyone who stands in its way or disagrees with its narrative. It also robs white evangelicals of the incredible gift of listening to the voices of their many siblings in Christ who could expand, correct, lead, and joyfully participate in culture making alongside them had the culture wars they participated in not eradicated that focus on relationship and dependence.”

In this description of the Fall, Crouch illustrates precisely what Kobes du Mez identifies as problematic with white evangelicalism’s attempt at culture making. White evangelicals took the gift of cultural creation given by God and twisted it into a utilitarian tool used to fight a culture war - usually shouting about rights rather than gifts (whether second amendment rights, rights to gather around a flagpole at a school and pray, rights to not have to pay taxes to support people “on welfare,”, rights to defend “traditional family and cultural values,” etc.). By taking that gift of cultural creation and fashioning it into a weapon, white evangelicalism lost sight of the gift of relationship and dependence on other Christians. The reverberations of their culture war drowned out the voices of brothers and sisters who had something to contribute to the conversation about culture, and their warring cost them the opportunity to participate in culture-making alongside them.

This was not the only negative effect; when white evangelicals invited siblings of color into their spaces, they acted as gatekeepers to the culture making of that space. While siblings of color were invited to contribute to the worship teams, lead the youth groups, and act as outreach coordinators, rarely were they given roles of actual leadership to set the priorities of churches and organizations. If they stepped outside of white evangelicalism’s priorities for culture making, they were instructed to “get in line” or get out. Many chose the latter after years of being silenced and abandoned by those in leadership. Culture making, in the form that Kobes Du Mez documents, is dangerous, homogenizing, and used as a battering ram against anyone who stands in its way or disagrees with its narrative. It also robs white evangelicals of the incredible gift of listening to the voices of their many siblings in Christ who could expand, correct, lead, and joyfully participate in culture making alongside them had the culture wars they participated in not eradicated that focus on relationship and dependence.

So, What Now?

Jesus and John Wayne provided for me the context of what was happening backstage during my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. The reason the book resonates so strongly with so many (particularly white) evangelicals is that it gives answers to questions we never knew how to ask. It also articulates what our young minds may not have yet had the maturity to say about the culture wars we lived through, and in many cases, were even used as agents in.

Kobes du Mez successfully articulated a succinct, utterly readable account of the last 50-some years of white American evangelicalism, and whether you agree with her thesis or not, the book’s already astounding cultural impact will force you to grapple with it in your churches, schools, and institutions. And this is a very good thing, because so many of the historical and recent events that she brings to light have needed to be wrestled with for a very long time in a way that accounts for the historical context surrounding them and without making apologies for being bold enough to articulate what was wrong about those events.

Kobes du Mez’s historical account of white evangelicalism and how we got to where we are succeeds in highlighting a theological point: all theologies are contextual theologies. Even (and especially) white masculine evangelical theology, though the way it is often taught in many university, seminary, and Sunday school classrooms over the years may argue otherwise. Just as feminist, black liberation, womanist, latinx, or any other “contextual” theology has a cultural and historical context, so does white theology and masculine theology. More than any theology textbook I’ve read, Kobes du Mez demonstrates the danger of prioritizing one viewpoint as normative, simply by laying out the history.

So, is there hope for white evangelicalism? Kobes du Mez seems to think so, ending her book by saying, “What was once done might be undone.”[16] It all depends on us. If we as white evangelicals and former white evangelicals react to her description and critique of how we got here with defensiveness and a plugging of our ears, we are only doing more of the same. However, if we begin to consider Crouch’s culture making and what Makoto Fujimara has called culture care, perhaps we can find a way forward. Any way forward must involve focusing on relationship and dependence once more - not just including diverse voices at our tables in minor roles, but in submitting to those voices humbly (even if they no longer trust our tables and have built their own). It must also involve putting in the long hard work to earn back trust, and eventually, culture-making together again, joyfully participating in creation with one another and with the God we serve together.

---

About Luci Frerichs Parrish

Luci Frerichs Parrish is a Midwestern native living in the South. She lived on the South Side of Chicago for seven years, working in various non-profit and church ministries. She has an M.A. in Theology from Wheaton College Graduate School with an emphasis in Systematic Theology. Her current areas of study include systematic theology, theological aesthetics, and ecclesiology. She is a coffee enthusiast, independent bookstore fanatic, and Pittsburgh Penguins fan. She is passionate about doing theology to serve the local and global church.

---

Footnotes

[1] Audre Lorde defines the “mythical norm” as “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure.” Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 116.

[2] Kristin Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing, 2020), 4.

[3] See Ted Cruz’s now-infamous quotation of William Wallace at CPAC 2021 for a relevant current example of this exact point. See also Kobes du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing, 2020), 4.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, 37.

[6] Ibid., 37-38.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid, 39.

[9] Ibid, 205.

[10] Ibid, 187-188.

[11] Ibid, 202.

[12] Ibid, 204.

[13] Though white evangelicals are certainly not the only American Protestants to do so!

[14] Andy Crouch, “The Gospel: How Is Art a Gift, a Calling, and an Obedience?” in For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts, ed. W. David Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2010), 32.

[15] Ibid, 34.

[16] Kobes du Mez, 304.

Racism: A Discipleship Problem?

Just prior to the death of George Floyd and a fresh wave of civil rights demonstrations taking hold of the US, InterVarsity Press released David W. Swanson’s Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity. A white man and ministry leader, Swanson pastors New Community Covenant Church, a multi-cultural congregation in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. Encouraged by his friends of color to speak to the topics of racism and whiteness in America, Swanson wrote Rediscipling in an effort to address a historic issue from this place in time. Many white Christians want to better understand the realities of systemic racism; they want to be better allies to their black and brown family. Swanson comes alongside these white believers, and the white church as a whole, with a historical, theological, biblical, and a deeply personal analysis of whiteness. Thoughtfully written and formed through the practical experience of pastoring, Swanson’s Rediscipling is a balanced resource for the ministry leader entering the hard work of racial reconciliation.

A Method Unquestioned

While Swanson’s Rediscipling is about whiteness, he begins in an unlikely place—the American church model of discipleship. The choice to begin here is an interesting one. For me, it proved successful in disarming my assumptions of the conversation. By starting with ministry method, not historical construct, Swanson reframes the topic at hand and captures the heart of the ministry leader. Swanson then employs philosopher Charles Taylor’s concept of social imaginaries. Taylor’s concept explains how our view of the world is shaped by what we expect from it.[1]  Drawing on discipleship methodology, Swanson shows how white Christians have been discipled into racism by culture and the world in which we live, leading us to conceptualize people of color biasedly. Swanson states: “White Christianity has been blind to the powerful racial discipleship that has formed the imaginations of white Christians.”[2]

It is interesting to reflect on the many ways in which the white church has rightly identified ways the culture and values of the world lead believers away from the gospel and holy living. We are quick to identity pornography as a sexual distortion and critique our culture for promoting its creation and consumption. Sadly, our whiteness has not allowed us to see how our world has enculturated us away from the reconciling gospel of God on issues of race. Rather, we have been enculturated towards viewing the world through a lens of racial difference. Swanson rightly asks, what should Christians be discipled into? How do the values of God’s Kingdom speak to race, racism, and ethnic or cultural divides? Swanson argues biblically and theologically that our white church discipleship has not produced Christians who mirror the God who desires to reconcile all things to himself: Jew, Roman, male, female, regardless of socio-economic status or color of skin. Rather we have been discipled by our world when it comes to matters of racial division. Swanson explains: “We can think of the narrative of racial difference as invisibly polluted air or contaminated water; the fact that we don’t recognize it doesn’t dull its impact on our way of moving through the world.”[3] How did we get to this place of being discipled into what Swanson calls racial difference? This is where the turn to history is important.

A History Unheard

If historical evidence has fallen on deaf ears in discussions of race, Swanson utilized it successfully. By approaching the conversation of whiteness first as a discipleship and cultural issue, Swanson interweaves the historical underpinnings for why American history and culture has discipled white Christians into white privilege. Swanson’s use of history spans the entirety of his book but comes heavily into play in the chapter, “Wounded by Race.” The conversation gets challenging here for the white believer, as Swanson unpacks the tragedy and evils of whiteness as a racial construct and white privilege, at length. He addresses this honestly: “We prefer not to linger. Yet the discipleship journey to redirect our desires toward the reconciled kingdom of God cannot be rushed.”[4] Many discussions of whiteness begin with the historical construct, using it as evidence to prove systemic racism. These evidences are not always well received by white believers as they present a new, unfamiliar, uncomfortable view of history. However, having already established the validity to the issues of race and whiteness, Swanson uses history well as explanation, not proof, for why these issues exist in America as they do. History becomes hard truth spoken to those who are ready to journey with Swanson through these tough realities. Swanson is not hurried, but he also speaks freely of the white Christian’s historical complicity to racism, segregation, and sin against their colored brothers and sisters. If you are willing to take this journey of learning with Swanson, you will make it to part two of Rediscipling, which paints the vision of the “reconciled kingdom of God.”[5]

A Vision Unseen

The second part of Swanson’s Rediscipling excites and provides hope for the ministry leader who wants practical steps forward for the internal soul work this book initiates. In each chapter, Swanson looks at a piece of congregational or fellowship life, analyzes it, and proposes ways these areas can be changed to allow believers to be re-discipled into racial reconciliation. Looking at children’s ministry, communion, liturgies, and potlucks, Swanson’s years of pastoral ministry shine through as he presents tangible ways in which white Christians can take their current practices and traditions and allow them to be informed by the reconciling gospel of Christ. Most significant is Swanson’s emphasis that re-orienting our hearts, lives, and congregations away from racial difference is possible even for believers in monolithic communities and congregations. Swanson explains that the goal of this re-imagined discipleship is to bring believers into true solidarity with the whole of the Body of Christ.[6]

This emphasis on solidarity rather than diversity, which has been championed in the race conversation at other points, allows for all to participate. Swanson explains: “The second reason for making solidarity our goal is that every expression of white Christianity can pursue gospel reconciliation immediately. Rather than outsourcing this essential Christian vocation to multiracial churches or to congregations in urban or racially diverse regions, every white congregation can contribute to the unity of the body of Christ across lines of cultural division.”[7] This vision of reconciliation, accessible even to believers in rural or suburban white communities, is a fresh vision for what must and can happen in the US church.

A Vision for All

While Swanson creatively and thoughtfully takes the reader on a journey to consider whiteness and reimagine discipleship, his target is ministry leaders. After finishing the book, I longed for a simplified and abbreviated version to hand off to my family and friends. Swanson writes as a practical theologian and pastor to those who have influence over church life. But this leaves me wondering if this critical conversation will get stuck at the leadership level, when so many lay persons are craving resources to take steps towards racial reconciliation. This brings us back to Swanson’s guiding ministry methodology—discipleship. Be it through worship, conversation, communion, the preaching of the word, or a chat over coffee, the flourishing we long to see in our church communities and our world is only made possible through the original biblical mandate—to make disciples. While this discussion of whiteness is a bit heady to make it into the layperson’s evening reading, the essential information and journey that Swanson unfolds for the ministry leader is replicable in the lives of those we disciple and lead.

A Higher Vision

The margin note that will stick with me in my personal copy of Rediscipling is this: “He cast something in my mind I have not yet fully seen.” All theologians, from the pew to the pulpit to the academy, wrestle with the “already, not yet” of our faith. Nearly ever doctrine is touched with an incompleteness that calls our hearts home to the Father and a future completeness found only in the Son, Jesus Christ. Why should it be surprising to my soul that Swanson prompted this holy discontent through his discussion of whiteness and the American church. Swanson sees, not naively, a vision of what God intends for His Body—a reconciliation of all people to Himself within His one Body, the Church. For Swanson, we can work towards that now.

We can see a glimpse of the New Earth John spoke of in Revelation in our churches today. We can make ministry choices that change the trajectory of the American church—a trajectory that has been shaped by racial difference more than by the gospel of Jesus Christ. I saw a glimpse of this vision through reading and reflecting on Rediscipling. While my vision is incomplete, and there is so much growth to be done in my own heart, mind, and actions, I am convinced there is a way forward. There is, to quote the old hymn, “a higher plane” than we have previously found. And so my prayer for all of us is to say, “Lord, plant our feet on higher ground.”

About Emily C. Alexander

A first generation college graduate of a rural working class family, Emily C. Alexander recently completed her undergraduate degree in Ministry to Women at the Moody Bible Institute. Emily lives in Chicago where she enjoys long walks admiring architecture and pondering theological and sociological issues. Her hope is to impact the lives of women and the flourishing of the church through thoughtful theological engagement.

---

Footnotes

[1] 18-21

[2] 20

[3] 21

[4] 45

[5] 53

[6][6] 60

[7] 61

Does Righteousness Have a Color Scheme?

Editorial Note: Remember, a theology of clothing and a modest spirit are not solely a woman’s issue. The principles discussed below are also applicable to men, and we encourage our male audience to consider their role in this conversation as culture-makers.

---

It wasn’t until moving to Ecuador for a teaching assignment that Chicago born Latina, Jacqui[1], saw firsthand that modesty is understood differently culture to culture. Surprised by the way women dressed when attending church, she realized that even while Latina, she was raised with an American perspective of modesty. “When I think ‘what does modesty look like in the Christian US,’ it’s covering yourself,” Jacqui explained. “But more specifically it’s covering the shape of a woman’s body.” Jacqui is mestiza, representative of the children and grandchildren of immigrants who find themselves caught between the cultural values of their heritage and the American values in which they have been raised. Jacqui had sensed this tension but living in a Latin culture outside the US for a couple years helped her begin to sort out these differences and gave her a fresh perspective on modesty.

“For Latins,” she explains, “it’s not about covering the shape but about covering the skin. Whereas, in the US, it’s more about covering the shape of your body.” What she saw in Ecuador rang true in her personal experience, as she identified in times of celebration, like a graduation, her family reverted to a Latin understanding of modesty, focusing more on covering one’s skin than shape. This cultural difference affected how Jacqui saw the Super Bowl half-time performance, and she thinks it is this cultural tension that contributed to the heated dialogue that followed. “I think that’s why at the Super Bowl a lot of people in the Latin community were upset when people said it was scandalous.”

Jacqui’s experience is an example of the diversity in modesty principles that exist in US churches today. While the loudest voice on the topic of modesty might be the white evangelical one, our churches are filled with believers from a variety of cultural contexts and ethnic backgrounds. First and second-generation citizens, mestizas/os like Jacqui, are in the process now, more than ever, of working through their cultural identity and understanding how it informs belief and practice as a follower of Jesus. In explosive debates, like the ones seen online after the Super Bowl half-time show, Christians can easily talk past each other, forgetting a fundamental yet complex difference we all have—context.

In February, the we published “Too Soon to Talk About Modesty” and the response was overwhelming, prompting constructive conversations in the WOS community and beyond. This article proposed we first talk about being clothed in the righteousness of Christ, before developing a practical theology of clothing. But what’s next? This month I sat down, virtually, with four Christ-following women who have thoughtfully developed their own relationship to clothing. Representing a variety of ages, ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, and church contexts, the experiences of these women tell a broad story, one that acknowledges the influence of culture and ethnicity on our relationship to clothing. God has given us the Word, the Spirit, and Biblical community as three means of pursuing wisdom—whether deciding what to wear, who to marry or what career to follow. What do we do when we disagree on what is modest? Clothing, as a cultural artifact, as well as a physical covering, tells a story. Some would say the story a Christian’s clothing should communicate is the gospel. Or at least, clothing should not hinder the gospel. The beauty in expanding our perceptions of modesty is that it opens us to reflecting the robust diversity of the Church and her people.

A Story of Cultural Identity

Wife, mother, First Lady, and professional, Shay is a woman who loves the Lord and loves fashion. In living life and doing ministry within the evangelical church, Shay has experienced firsthand the cultural differences in being a Christian and relating to clothing. “The issue of Christianity and modesty,” Shay shared, “really does come from a white evangelical background, and a very conservative background.” Coming from the very background Shay names, I listened intently to what she shared. Looking at an issue through the lens of another is the first principle of humbly seeking unity in the Church. Shay continued, “So women of color like myself, black and brown, as we come into the church, we are always taught that we have to look a certain way and act a certain way. But for many of us, we honor culture and race, we honor who we are and where we come from, and all the different pieces that make us, us. Even how we are raised and our personality types. And that is always a struggle, when churches say, ‘Hey, you’re welcome,’ but then I come in dressed in my sweats or my J’s—'Sorry, women don’t dress like that.’”

Cultural differences lie not only in how we cover our shape or skin, but in style. In attempting to define modesty, conservative evangelicalism has also dictated style, which isolates those from non-white ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. Rachel echoes a similar sentiment. As a church planter in Chicago, Rachel has spent time through the years reflecting on her cultural identity as Puerto Rican, with being a modest, yet fashionable, woman of God. “Too often we are not sensitive enough to someone else’s culture,” Rachel reflected. “We may want them to be part of our church, but we want them to assimilate into our culture. But if you want someone as part of your church…you will want their culture as well. And not say, “Come but leave your culture behind.’” Shay and Rachel point out that our clothing tells a story of our cultural identity. This piece of someone’s story is hindered when modesty is made to be a universal standard. But there is no universal standard.

A Story of our Uniqueness

Broadcast journalist Lecia was raised with a British/Caribbean cultural understanding to dress up for church, as a sign of respect. Residing in Florida where it is common for congregants to gather on Sundays in shorts, Lecia prefers to wear dresses and jewelry, yet humbly acknowledges that her clothing preferences are preferences. “Where do you find that middle ground? First of all, I acknowledge that it’s not a universal standard, so I realize I am not going to please everyone in what I wear.” Lecia emphasized the need to consider a social setting when making clothing choices and asks trusted friends for advice when she is unsure. However, she isn’t burdened by trying to be modest and doesn’t care if she is dressier than most. “Clothing is like an art and your body is the canvas,” she said, laughing that quarantine had been limiting her opportunities to dress up. “Dressing isn’t about drawing attention to specific body parts…it’s expressing your passions and your personality.” While seeking to be modest, Lecia sees clothing for what it is, a storytelling artifact that communicates the many facets of a person to the world around them.

Each woman interviewed listed numerous aspects of a person that influence clothing choice: body type, age, cultural background, church context, style preferences, personal comfortability, setting, and personality. Approaching the topic with a ministry mindset, Rachel expressed caution for those who try to develop rules or guidelines for modesty. “It’s such a multi-faceted conversation,” she mused. “I find myself leery of setting some kind of standard, that everyone then thinks, ‘This is God’s standard.’ We all would love to have, at our core, standards to follow so we could either look good or judge someone else or say we did it, but it was never like that for God. He was about our heart.” Raising her own daughter, and modelling Christ-likeness as a church leader, Rachel’s relationship to clothing is definitely on her mind. But her perspective is wisdom driven—not rule based. “There’s also the aspect that I want to do as Galatians 5 says—if I live by the Spirit, I will walk in step with the Spirit and bear the Spirit’s fruit in my life,” she explained, pointing back to scripture. “How do I do that? Well, let me ask questions that probe my heart, and get to the root of why I wear what I wear, and why am I choosing this.” This perspective rightly defines clothing—as an element everyone interacts with, that for the believer, needs submitted to Christ as any other area of life does. This perspective does not elevate clothing to what it is not—the telltale sign of a Christian’s character or righteousness.

Shay summarized it well: “Righteousness never had a color scheme, a style, a corset, a big baggy hoodie. It’s a manner of life that God has called us to live.” Clothing both covers and communicates. Just as the righteousness we wear communicates Christ to the world around us, clothing communicates the uniqueness of each person’s story, the diversity of our backgrounds, and the many pieces of our contexts. Getting practical with modesty starts with wisdom and continues with learning to love the Body of Christ in its many stripes and colors, baggie hoodies and all.

[1] All names of interviewees changed for privacy.

---

About Emily C. Alexander

A first generation college graduate of a rural working class family, Emily C. Alexander recently completed her undergraduate degree in Ministry to Women at the Moody Bible Institute. Emily lives in Chicago where she enjoys long walks admiring architecture and pondering theological and sociological issues. Her hope is to impact the lives of women and the flourishing of the church through thoughtful theological engagement.

Too Much or Not Enough

“The distance between one person and another is really a story.””

— Karen Figueroa, The Mestizo Podcast, Ep. 2

I don’t remember what I said. Whatever it was, it made an impression on him. He pressed again, asking, “Where did you learn that?” “I don’t know,” I responded. “It’s just something we say all the time back home.” “I haven’t heard that since my Abuela died years ago,” he said, speaking more to himself than to me. It was as if he was reliving a memory; he was transported somewhere else. So was I. He was an elder at the church I recently joined in Chicago, a Puerto Rican who spent nearly the entirety of his life in this city.  I was new to Chicago, returning to the Midwest after a decade in Central Florida. Whatever I said, sent him from the city to the Island, but the words didn’t have the power for a joint trip. I landed just short of the island. Close, but not close enough.

The irony of this exchange is that it endeared me to this elder. It made me an insider, someone who understood the “old tongue.” He made a habit of inviting me to Sunday meals where his wife cooked “a lo antiguo.”[1] Arroz con gandules. Carne guisada con arroz y habichuelas. These were contidiano (ordinary) in my house growing up. What was not ordinary was the impression it made on this elder. Apparently, he was surprised to see a young man still eating this way. I wasn’t used to being treated like I was “authentically” Puerto Rican, yet there I was each Sunday being celebrated by a man and his wife for doing simple things like enjoying tostones.

In Chicago, with this elder, I was celebrated for being “more authentic” than some of the other Puerto Ricans in my generation. To my shame, I reveled in the admiration. Back in Florida, where an estimated 34% of Osceola county’s population identified as Puerto Rican and a large portion of these residents are recent arrivals from the Island, I was never “authentic” enough. My Spanish sounded learned in comparison. My taste for traditional Puerto Rican dishes was refined, but my rhythms, my “flow” was never quite right. Pero en Chicago, I was to my peers what the Ricans in Florida were to me. I was “authentic.” Or, at least, in the eyes of this elder, I was close enough.

Distancia y Dynamica

The Mestizo Podcast is a project that came with an emotional risk. I was nervous about publishing content from a uniquely Latina/o perspective and how that would be received. For my white peers in evangelical academia, I worried it would turn them off to the content, but the greater fear was related to how my Hispanic peers would receive it. Would it be welcomed as an answer to prayer? That was my hope. I prayed regularly for an outlet for conversations about interstitial identities. Experience taught me, however, that whomever starts these conversations gets evaluated, measured against the listeners’ perceptions. For some, I would be too Hispanic to be relevant. For others, I wouldn’t be Hispanic enough. I would be perceived as too white, too Americano, “de afuera” (from the outside). Exiled from one. Not welcome by the other.

During the second episode of the show, Karen Figueroa said, “The distance between one person and another is really a story.” I wondered weeks later about the amount of distance a story could cover. Could a story really tie the two generations of Hispanics together? Could it bridge the distance between Florida and Puerto Rico? In my experience, your proximity to the Island defined how Puerto Rican you were. How often did you visit as a kid? Did you live there at any point? Were you born there? Did you speak Spanish? If so, how was your accent? These questions represented the hermeneutic for deciding your Puerto Rican-ness. But Karen made me wonder, could a story relativize the island? Could narrative beat land the way paper covers rock?

A recent chat with a friend brought these questions to greater focus. After making a joke about the phrase “sin pelos en la lengua”[2] not making sense to me, we debated the image and origin of the phrase. She reminded me that these kinds of expressions are “formed en los barrios de la isla por gente con mucha oralidad.”[3] Then she concluded by saying that the idiom is not meant to be convenient for “gringos” or “una generación que no está conectada a ese contexto.”[4] Admittedly, the joke may have offended her as an Island-born Puerto Rican. In our chat, I felt I was perceived as an outsider mocking something I couldn’t understand. I felt I was perceived as lacking the connection that led to understanding. That may be true, but there is also another possibility. Is my connection strictly related to my physical distance to the Island, or is it possible I am connected via something else?

Oral Cultures and Exiles

In his Nobel-prize-winning book, El Hablador (The Storyteller), Mario Vargas Llosa tells of a young man named Saul, who abandons Peruvian society to become an Hablador of the Machiguenga. The Machiguenga is a tribe that lives as scattered family camps across the Peruvian-Amazon rather than live together as one complete community. In this unusual, dispersed way, the Machiguengas claim the entire forest as theirs, each family taking up their own corner of it and moving as food would require. Only one person traveled from family to family connecting them together. El Hablador.

For the Machiguenga, the storyteller is of sacred, indeed religious importance. The storyteller’s job was simple enough: to speak. “Their mouths were the connecting links of this society that the fight for survival had forced to split up and scatter… Thanks to the storytellers, fathers had news of their sons and brothers of their sisters … thanks to them they were all kept informed of the deaths, births, and other happenings in the tribe.” The storyteller did not only bring current news; he spoke of the past. He is the memory of the community, fulfilling a function like that of the troubadours of the Middle Ages. The storyteller traveled great distances to remind each member of the tribe that despite their miles of separation, they still formed one community, shared a tradition, beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes, and joys. The storytellers, writes Vargas Llosa, were the lifeblood that circulated through Machiguenga society, giving it one interconnected and interdependent life.

The Machiguenga storyteller is “tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment … something primordial, something that the very existence of a people may depend on.”

Vargas Llosa’s book highlights the importance of the story for exiled portions of a people group. What makes the Machiguenga a single people isn’t their proximity to a center or place of origin. There is no required pilgrimage for the Machinguenga that reinforces their identity. The story, and their regular submersion in it, is what makes every member, even those born on the outer limits of the jungle, part of the tribe. For persons like me, this makes sense as an explanation of my identity. Yes, as my friend rightly noted, Puerto Rican phrases come from an oral culture, but many of us US-born Puerto Ricans understand that far more than we are given credit. We know that our Rican-identity is rooted in this oral tradition. We aren’t Puerto Rican by the simple fact of an Island birth. Our identity relies on something more complex; it relies on our live connection to the oral tradition – stories, bombas, dichos, bailes, poesías, and even phrases like the one I lightheartedly teased. Like the people of Israel in the Old Testament, we are a people because of a shared narrative.

Generational Responsibility

Many of my Chicago friends who identify as Puerto Rican don’t speak Spanish. For a long time, I put on airs because I did. This is typical among 2nd and 3rd generation Hispanics, to judge and be judged. Those who rank higher on the Puerto Rican-ness scale usually take on the role of gatekeeper, withholding the right to claim certain parts of Puerto Rican identity from others lower on the scale. There are so many stories about the pain caused by this kind of intercommunity conflict. Here are just two snapshots of how it makes the non-Spanish speaker feel.

Both tweets reflect infighting between LatinX people based on judgments about what it means to be LatinX. There are myriad reasons why this kind of conflict continues, and some are legitimate and worth addressing; the colorism in our community primary among them. However, there are also several reasons why linguistic ability should not be held against the diaspora’s children. As Gina Rodriguez, star of Jane the Virgin, stated, many parents refused to teach children Spanish, hoping they would lose the accent and be offered greater opportunities in the “white world.” Learning Spanish was not an option. It was discouraged.

I sympathize with parents who made this tough decision in hopes for a better life for their children. They could not foresee the way the Hispanic community would boom and gain influence today. Of course, this is one of many possible reasons for the loss of the language and culture. I am not accusing parents or blaming them for this loss. An individual’s flourishing (or diminishing) ability to access their cultural resources is in large part affected by the community. If the immigrant generation made a mistake by not passing the language down, there is still enough time and resources for it to be restored by the community. Once more, this is where the Machiguenga teach a vital lesson. Cultures survive because of storytellers not gatekeepers. We need a new way forward in the restoration and preservation of the Latinos’ community wealth, one that removes the judgment and includes the diversity of the diaspora’s children. We need more Habladores and fewer gatekeepers.

Galatas and the First Gatekeepers

Again, a gatekeeper is someone who “takes it upon themselves to decide who does or does not have access or rights to a community or identity.”[5] Gatekeepers may do this intentionally or by instinct – an impulse taught to them by the culture. I acted as a gatekeeper in my hubris about speaking Spanish. Whether with the intention of keeping the culture “pure” or the instinct to establish their standard, gatekeepers devalue “other’s opinions on something by claiming they’re not entitled to the opinion because they’re not qualified, … [or] a part of a particular group.”[6]

One of the earliest accounts of cultural gatekeepers is the small letter included in the Bible as the book of Galatians. The conflict that inspired Paul to write this letter was the arrival of Jewish believers to the region of Galatia. These new arrivals argued that non-Jewish Christians had to adopt Jewish practices and customs to truly belong to the people of God. Paul wrote with passion, reminding the church of his past as a zealous follower of Jewish tradition. He writes, “I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers” (Gal. 1:14). Like the generational ranking that happens among LatinX people today, Paul was highly ranked as a Jew among Jews, yet he relativizes the Jewish Law by reminding the church of the essential element that identifies them as Christians – the gospel.

Paul is an Hablador. He knows the stories and focuses on the central narrative that ties this people together as one. Paul acknowledges the wisdom of the Law but presses the point that the Law was insufficient. It is faith in Jesus Christ that makes them sons and daughters of God. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). The good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection births a mestizo Church. It also enables a new form of relating between mestizos. “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other” (Gal. 5:25-26).

The gospel is a unique story in that it has the power to birth community across disparate and even enemy groups. Paul’s argument is also instructive for people within the same group. Puerto Ricans in the diaspora already know the importance of storytelling. While we may not understand every practice nor practice every custom, Habladores like Paul help us stay connected to them. They also help grow the story’s community to include the diaspora’s experience. Among young US-born Latina/os, there are some recording our history, researching our dances, and writing new poetry. These represent a collection of new Habladores, storytellers who bring new life to the older generation, demonstrating that the culture isn’t dying. The culture has always been close to the diaspora, not because of their proximity to the Island, but because of their rehearsal of the stories.

About Emanuel Padilla

Emanuel Padilla is President of World Outspoken, a ministry dedicated to preparing the mestizo church for cultural change through training, content, and partnership development. He is also an instructor of Bible and Theology at Moody Bible Institute. Emanuel is committed to drawing the insights of the Latina/o church for the blessing of the wider church body. He consults with churches on issues of diversity, organizational culture, and community engagement.

---

Footnotes

[1] Trans. - Old school or traditional.

[2] An expression that generally means, “When you’re so blunt not even hairs could soften the words.”

[3] Translation: “formed in the hoods of the island by people with an oral tradition.”

[4] Translation: “a generation that isn’t connected to that context.”

[5] “Urban Dictionary: Gatekeeping,” Urban Dictionary, accessed May 24, 2020, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gatekeeping.

[6] “Urban Dictionary: Gatekeeper,” Urban Dictionary, accessed May 24, 2020, https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gatekeeper.

Should It Stay or Should It Go?

As humans, our history is marked by wounds of the past. We fight one another. We exploit one another. We kill one another. Our history is shaped by human injury; so, it makes sense that in a retelling of this history we would perpetuate injury. Injury begets injury. History-telling always runs the risk of aggrandizing someone’s story at the expense of another’s. That is the tension that exists between history and injury. This tension can even find its home in tangible spaces. Today, that tension found a home at the sites of many U.S. monuments. One of these homes is in Brandenburg, KY.

“On April 29, 2016, Louisville announced the removal of the Confederate monument, but attorneys stopped the city by filing a temporary injunction to stop demolition, and a lawsuit.”

– “New Monument History” Plaque in front of “Our Confederate Dead” statue in Brandenburg, KY.

“Our Confederate Dead” monument, which once stood in Louisville next to the Ohio River, is now situated about 45 miles south of the river in Brandenburg. The plaque, quoted above, stands in complement to two others. The one mentioned has a heading that reads, “New Monument History,” which tells the story of the new placement of the old monument. The second contributes a haunting echo of history by commemorating a quote from Basil Duke, a Confederate General Officer, on the folly of forgetting history. And the third, a plaque titled “Southern Causes for the Civil War,” offers a 248-word proof of the South’s motivation for entering the Civil War. In the shadow of that monument, all three plaques—not yet 5 years rusted—make clear that we are still fighting remnants of a war that ended 151 years ago. As the third plaque alludes, the Civil War was a war of sentiment.

I still remember my first time hearing the history of the Civil War explained to me by someone not from the South. It was like being told of a new war, one that was completely different from the Civil War that I had learned about. Having grown up in Florida, under the careful tutelage of southern evangelical curricula, my understanding of the Civil War was that it was a war of rights and not of slavery. Slavery was a footnote to the overall question: Who gets to enforce the rights of a man—God himself or man’s governing body? In fact, when reading the “Southern causes for the Civil War” plaque, it was like being reintroduced to an old memory. The plaque reads,

“Northern abolition movements with a goal to end slavery threatened to undermine the entire southern economy and culture free from northern interference, the south under pressure from the aristocratic plantation owners, seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America.”

According to the South, the North has painted over (or overwritten) the true economic and political issues behind the war with a manipulative picture of an evil slave state. The sentiment of the South is that they and their confederate kin are misunderstood, and the story of their fight is unfairly eclipsed by a history of slavery. Granted, it is quite hard to fit all that on one plaque, but this sentiment cannot be overlooked. Here is a history marked by injury. However, this injury is multi-faceted. What is not portrayed on this small plaque, is the exploitive reality of a South built on the backs of slaves. This an obtuse and glaring omission, which explains the contention of the very existence of the monument. For understandable reasons, the African American communities in the South want this monument torn down. Which brings us to our question: Should monuments like “Our Confederate Dead” stay or go?

Ghosts of the Past

Before we venture into the ethics of monuments, perhaps it is best to first ask: What are monuments? Why do we build them? What is their significance?

The monuments in our parks that we tend to overlook are not unassuming artifacts. Monuments capture history that we believe merit our remembrance in a significant, permanent way. Presumably, we create monuments to share memories with the generations that follow us. Built in stone, iron, or some other precious element that we believe can stand the test of time, we erect our monuments with the intent to provide a witness to history, but not just any history: our history, our nation’s history, our land’s history. Or at least, that is what we could hope for in our monuments. Through monuments, we attempt to speak beyond the grave. In a way, our statues surround us like ghosts begging to tell us a story.

We fashion our monuments with respectable facades, all so that we can bring resolve to the actions of our ancestors and expound their sentiments in hopes that they will still be relevant in the future. That is what I hear in the whispers of Southern Confederate statues, a plea to remember them in a perspective that regards their own inclinations and their own sentiments. I hear a cry of a people who never had the chance to publicly mourn the loss of their dead. The fallen confederate soldier wants to be remembered as having died a death that had purpose. This is indicative of a South that argues that it fought a war righteously regardless of its accused sins.

I think it is difficult for the South to dismantle its monuments because she has not yet grappled with her loss, both the loss of her dead and the loss of her conviction. Herein lies the problem; The South remains in limbo. She has not nursed her wounds. She continues to replay them over and over again like a trauma not processed. To nurse wounds would be to recognize them, and she has not quite reached that level of awareness because the world moved on after simply indicting her of her sins and leaving her destitute. While the work force she had was obtained by exploitive means, once the South lost the war, she had not a penny to her name and no means in which to gain it back. The South had nothing left but injury and history. So, she built monuments, erected legends, created myths to make it bearable to move forward in a new world.

This is history marked by a wound that was never dealt with, and now the buried grief resurfaces as generations pass and questions begin to be asked. There are other parts of the South’s history, not just the Confederacy’s, that have not been dealt with. Drowned out by the pleas of the dead proud confederate, is the forgotten cry of disenfranchised black slaves.

There must be a better way to build monuments that honors all of our histories and allows all of us to grieve the loss and the injury perpetuated on our kin.

Rest in Peace

In Washington DC, there is a memorial dedicated to the Veterans of the Vietnam War, which is arguably one of the most controversial wars of our modern day. The erection of a Vietnam Memorial caused a public outcry, and to add to the controversy, the architect chosen to design the memorial was an Asian-American.[1] Maya Lin, who was at that time 21-years old and unknown, created a stir in DC as she designed a memorial to look like what many could only describe as a wound in the earth.[2] Lin was attentive to everything from the material (black granite with a polished finish), to the way the names were displayed (chronologically by the deaths of the veterans and not alphabetically), to the way the memorial stood (sunk below the ground). She did all this so that we as a country could be attentive to the wound of that war. On the 35th anniversary of the memorial, then acting President Obama said this of the memorial:

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has changed the way we think about monuments, but also about how we think about sacrifice, and patriotism, and ourselves. Maya’s pieces have changed the landscape of our country and influenced the dialogue of our society, never more profoundly than with her tribute to the Americans who fell in Vietnam by cutting a wound into the Earth to create a sacred place of healing in our Nation’s capital.

I am a daughter of immigrants. This land I grew up in does not know my family line. My family’s history in the United States is young. When I look up at most monuments in this country, I have no ancestral blood tied to it. There are, however, some monuments that do hold more weight to me as an Asian-American. The Vietnam Memorial is one such monument. A monument dedicated to a country’s fallen for a war of interference in a land nearer to mine echoes the sentiment of the third plaque from the statue of “Our Confederate Dead. The difference is that Lin’s monument, with all its raw ugliness, brings into greater focus the pain of warring sentiments and the human loss we create by our sins against one another. She allows the dead to truly rest by making us, the living, contend with the past. To her, monuments are more analogous to scars, in that they should be reminders of a past injury that have healed but forever marks us.

I believe that what Maya Lin’s monument provides for us is a better way forward. Her monument is a reminder that wounds can only heal if allowed to be exposed to air and sunlight. Moreover, it is strong proof that it is important to allow all parties of conflict and injury to have their say in the way we portray history. Imagine what the monuments in the South could look like if we had both Confederate descendants and African American kindred in open dialogue and empathetic construction. I think, if we employed both collaborative imagination and gracious sympathy more often and more earnestly, the monuments in our country could look much different.

It is time to restore our US monuments in a way that honors all parties. A collaborative restoration. Perhaps it is audacious, but I believe that in our world there is enough physical space for all of our dead to rest in peace, but only if the living are willing to fight for it.

“The absence of a narrative in which people of color are recognized for the contribution to society is dangerous because it leaves unquestioned the dominance of white people of the planet today, thus tacitly endorsing the notion of white superiority. People of color receive no credit for being an essential, although coerced, part of the development of the modern world.” ”

— Carl Anthony, Earth-City, 2017

About Jelyn Leyva

A Second-generation Filipina born in Tampa, FL, Jelyn Leyva graduated Moody Bible Institute in Chicago on May 2017 with a Bachelor’s degree in Women in Ministry and an Interdisciplinary in Theology. She is currently in Los Angeles, CA pursuing an MDiv at Fuller Theological Seminary with her emphasis in Christian Ethics. Having lived in various places in the US, Jelyn’s interest lie in the complex history and multi-ethnic life of the Protestant Church in the US. Her hope is to serve this church and its many colors with the consideration of traditional and contemporary theological scholarship.

---

Foootnotes

[1] https://www.biography.com/news/maya-lin-vietnam-veterans-memorial

[2] http://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/photos/maya-lin-ceremony-marks-35th-anniversary-vietnam-memorials-healing-power/

En La Sala and All Along the Way

En La Sala and All Along the Way

Welcoming the Next Generation into Faith Through Storytelling

“See, a long time ago, there was this family.” ”

— Miguel Rivera, Coco

Family always begins with a story. Grandma, eyes shining, recounts how Grandpa made a fool of himself asking her out. Dad remembers how hard life was that first year in America. Auntie laughs at the mistakes she made the time she changed the rice recipe. While cultural artifacts—a photograph, blanket, or dish—spark the telling of a story, the words themselves, repeated by a loved one, trace familial origins and teach values. The act of remembrance through story—an often unidentified ritual—binds subsequent generations together in shared experience.

Disney Pixar’s 2017 film Coco begins with the story of a family. A happy, music-loving family forever altered when the beloved Papa never returns home with his guitar. Miguel, a young boy and the protagonist of the film, cannot change the fact that his great-grandfather abandoned the Rivera family for a music career, leaving his great-grandmother to survive by starting a shoe business. Though extreme, we are not surprised to learn that the Rivera family now hates music, a fact often repeated as a concluding value of the family story and highlighted alongside great-grandmother’s resiliency. As the evening of El Día de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead) commences, the story of the Rivera family comes alive for Miguel, as he enters the world of the dead in search of not only his family, but validation of the values passed down to him. Miguel’s journey is one of remembrance, which solidifies his identity as a Rivera.

Storytelling is something the Latino community does well. Chicago native Jose Gonzalez highlighted this in his standup production series this summer entitled, “La Sala: Cuentos from the Latino Living Room.” Bianca Sanchez, in her Chicago Tribune article, shares the significance of story and poetry in Gonzales’ upbringing, taking place in the living room or on the front porch, as his Nicaraguan immigrant father shared Bible passages, parables, and stories of the past. Gonzalez expressed that key to his production was: “that feel, that ambience, that you are actually at home in la sala (the living room), just listening to stories and tales as if they were from your mom, your dad, your uncle or your aunt.”[1] Familial stories and proverbs, of tragedy, hope, humor, and lessons learned, serve as a means of teaching core family values from one generation to the next. The social capital of character, faith, and loyalty extend outward from the family to the community in which they reside. Yet, as Sanchez emphasizes in conclusion, “before being told outside the home [stories] are first shared in la sala.”[2]

Storytellers Carmen Agra Deedy and Karla Campillo-Soto concur on the impact of storytelling in Latino families and the Hispanic community at large. In their interview with Stephen Winick of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, Deedy and Campillo-Soto share stories from their Cuban and Mexican upbringings, including immigration and transition to the United States. As storytellers, Winick points out that these Latinas choose to focus on family stories. Deedy explains: “It’s so cultural for us, you know, the [sic] everything begins at home. And the most tragic story you could ever read, write, sing about, would be about the child who has no home. Inevitably my stories weave back to home.”[3] Storytelling is by no means specific to Hispanic families and communities, but in every family, Deedy explains, there is a storyteller. These individuals carry on the remembrance of the past, welcoming the younger generation into a living example of that which the family holds dear.

Storytelling takes on new meaning for God’s people when looking at the development and furtherance of faith in the Old Testament. Standing on the border of the land of promise, after forty years of waste and wandering, Moses looked out at a people marked by the choices and stories of their parents and spoke these words:

Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children's children— how on the day that you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb… he declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, that is, the Ten Commandments, and he wrote them on two tablets of stone."[4]

God gave his people a commandment of remembrance—by recounting the stories of the past, they would invite the next generation into the continual and living story of obedience to God’s faithful love. Further instruction was given in Deuteronomy chapter six, explaining that in all of life, while sitting in la sala, while walking along the way, when going to bed and rising in the morning, parents are to teach their children the words of the Lord, with the intent of the multiplication of God’s people in the land.

And so, Jesus too delivered a command of remembrance. This command is lived out weekly as we, the Church, gather to break bread and sip wine. These physical elements of communion, like blankets and photographs, recipes and furniture, prompt the telling of the story of our faith. We remember both the physical body of the incarnate Christ, broken to allow all people into the living story of God and our personal stories of redemption. It was during this moment in a recent church service that I watched a mother give her daughter the bread and juice. Jessie is only six, but her thoughts in children’s church display an inner understanding of the gospel, as she retells the truths she learns at home when talking and praying with her mom and grandmother. Jessie is the youngest generation of the Church, being welcomed into the living story of the gospel through her mother’s faith and faithful storytelling.

On October 31st El Día de los Muertos will commence and many Mexican families will leave photos of their loved ones on the ofrenda.. On November 28th, American families will gather to give thanks, remembering the goodness of the year with food, laughter, and football. Memories will be relived, stories told. These special days are known for storytelling. But so is today. While cooking dinner or driving to soccer practice, God has given parents and grandparents the unique opportunity to welcome their children into the shared experience of a living faith. A hospital bracelet becomes a reminder of a story of God’s healing. An old journal or sketchbook an opportunity to retell a critical moment in your faith journey. Driving by my mom’s first apartment this summer, prompted her to share the powerful impact of Christian community in her life as a young adult with no believing family. A story I resonate with, living far from my own family support system. Her story welcomed me into the journey of faith we both share. Just as the elements of communion remind the older generation of the faithful love of God, let them be the spark for the words, the stories of His provision, an honest recounting of the challenges of walking in obedience. So then, as the youngest of the Church step out of the security of la sala, they will know who they are—members of the family of God.

About Emily C. Alexander

A first generation college graduate of a rural working class family, Emily C. Alexander recently completed her undergraduate degree in Ministry to Women at the Moody Bible Institute. Emily lives in Chicago where she enjoys long walks admiring architecture and pondering theological and sociological issues. Her hope is to impact the lives of women and the flourishing of the church through thoughtful theological engagement.

---

Footnotes

[1] Sanchez

[2] Sanchez

[3] Latina Storyteller Oral History, Library of Congress

[4] Deuteronomy 4.9, 10b, 14.

Life In the Fastlane: With Ten Items or Less

Shopping can really work up an appetite. Thankfully, Costco has a food court, and on this day of grocery shopping, my husband and I had our hearts set on a Costco chicken bake. There are two wonderful things about the Costco food court. One, the food is ridiculously cheap. Two, they are ridiculously fast at taking your order and getting you your food before you can even blink. On this particular day in the world of Costco, I observed a new addition sitting conspicuously in the center of the food court. At the same time, I also observed a heightened level of chaos within the kitchen that lay beyond the order/pick up counter. Workers were waving order tickets with furrowed brows, rearranging orders on the counter, and consulting one another with frustration written on each face. The culprit of this chaos seemed to be the little addition located in the center of the floor, the self-service checkout kiosk. This kiosk enabled customers to electronically submit their order. My husband and I wondered to ourselves why Costco would go through the trouble of trying to improve a system that was already efficient. Did this technology actually improve the system or did it simply wreak havoc?

The trend of self-service technology is expanding its reach not only into the world of grocery stores and Costco food courts, but even into movie rentals, airports, and beyond. This self-service culture has a lot to tell us about the quickening pace of our society and the high value we place on time and efficiency. An exploration of this trend will bring us to grips with the reality of our own finiteness and God’s expressed desire for how we use our time. 

The World Behind the Kiosk

The very first self-service grocery scanner to make its appearance in the patent world was invented by David R. Humble in 1984 (Justia). The idea supposedly came to him as he was waiting in line at the grocery store observing an interaction between the customer in front of him and the cashier. The man supposedly grew so frustrated at the clerk for taking too long that he reached over the counter and began scanning his own items. This caused Humble to wonder why people could not scan their own groceries (Dilanardo). From the very outset, the concept of self-service technology was brought into existence as a response to the culture’s high value of time efficiency and perceived time deficit.

Like the man in the grocery store, we often find ourselves feeling time pressure, as if there is not enough time in the day to do everything we would like to do, which causes the feeling of being rushed or hurried constantly (Waicman, 62). The cause of this busyness mentality is attributed to an accumulation of factors which include “overchoice,” the blurring of work/home boundaries, and the physiological perception of time caused by work schedules (Anderson, 157). Our culture is flooded with an abundance of choices for how one spends their time, all while still only having the same twenty-four hours we have always had to experience these different choices.

In our current society, we also lack the distinct boundaries of work and home, as one sphere bleeds into the next. This is a tension that my husband experiences daily, since his job provides him the option of working remotely. Because he can work from home by means of a laptop, there is no distinction between work and home life. Though it is often a blessing to work from home, this ability also enables him to carry work stress into all spheres of life without respite. The rhythms of our lives are now no longer defined by the natural rhythms of the day (e.g., the rising and setting of the sun) that drive agrarian societies, but rather we are driven by technology and post-industrial revolution work schedules (Anderson, 158). Our sense of time is dictated by how much we accomplish, and we feel that there is always more that could be accomplished. This perpetuates the feeling of constant busyness. It contributes to the quickened pace of our lives; we are driven by a heightened level of activity and speed (Anderson, 159). The man at the grocery store so valued his time that the lack of control over the effectiveness of how his time was being spent drove him straight to frustration. Thus, the concept of a self-service checkout was invented.

The World of The Kiosk

The world of self-services is one that operates under the assumption that time and efficiency are king. Because we live in a fast-paced society that strives to do everything quickly and efficiently, the self-service mentality seems to accommodate this need for speed. The underlying belief is “I myself need to possess control over my time because I am too busy to wait on someone else.” Self-service technology intends to give you the power to bypass lines and thus, shave off moments of standstill time. At the airport you are now able to check yourself into your own flight, print your own boarding pass, and head off to security without the hassle of waiting in line for an attendant to do it for you. The stress of missing your flight on account of standing in a line is altogether done away with (until you find yourself stuck waiting in line at security, that is. Then the stress magically reappears). The allusion of control and efficiency is the heart of self-service technology. According to Mortimer and Dootson, “Shoppers also gain value from taking control of the transaction – being able to ring up their own goods and pack them the way they want. A sense of control over their own shopping can lead to greater customer satisfaction and intent to use and re-use self-serve technology” (Mortimer and Dootson).

While self-service technology works off the premise that it will be faster and more efficient, what is there to be said concerning instances such as the one my husband and I observed at Costco? Because physiological time in our culture has quickened to a rapid pace, the perceived element of controlling what one waits on is highly valued. Those at Costco who normally would have to wait in line to place an order were now able to walk up to a kiosk without waiting to place their own order. The sad reality of the Costco situation was that the disruption of the system actually caused the same amount of waiting as orders were being jumbled and chaos in the kitchen slowed down the other end of the process. While the hope offered by self-service technology is promising, we need to assess which aspects of daily life are improved by technology and which areas need human skill.

This leads to another aspect of the ideal world of self-service technology. By quickening the pace of our lives, we are limiting our interactions with other human beings. The self-service world is a world where waiting on others is unnecessary. For example, a self-service kiosk is used so that the variable of waiting on another human being to do a task (to place an order or scan grocery items) is removed. The speed at which we are going does not need to be halted by another. The world of self-service is one that no longer requires that we wait on another to complete tasks for us. It cuts out societal interaction, allowing for someone to go to the grocery store, bank, or movie rental box, without interacting with a human being at all if they do not so desire. Technology promises much, especially in the world of self-service, but we must wonder what it will cost.

The World in Front of the Kiosk

The rapid pace of our culture is only perpetuated by self-service technology. There is a whole new self-service trend that is permeating all aspects of our culture. What was invented for a quick trip to the grocery store has now spread to restaurants, airports, libraries, banks and movie rentals to help bypass waiting time. This only perpetuates the frenzied pace of life. Concerning grocery stores alone, it is estimated that self-checkout terminals will increase to 325,000 by 2019, worldwide (Mortimer). Studies show that 65% of Americans believe that within the next 20 years most retail interactions will be fully automated and involve little or no human interaction between customers and employees (Pew).

This is not an outrageous statement considering Amazon’s new way of doing retail. Since the beginning of this year, Amazon has opened four Amazon Go locations where customers are able to walk into the store and purchase groceries, snacks, breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and walk out without ever having to stand in line or checkout (Amazon). Customers simply download the Amazon Go app, grab whatever products they wish to buy, and simply walk out, while Amazon’s “Simply Walk Out” technology keeps track of items and builds a virtual cart. Amazon is taking self-service technology and creating an entirely new retail experience, “so you never have to wait in line” (Amazon).

This trend is expanding in areas that “can afford to be transactional rather than relational” (Gavett), namely the world of retail. There are some areas where technology cannot replace humanity entirely. Sherri Turckle has much to say concerning the way our culture is replacing humanity with technology and the ways it is changing us. She notes that we desire to “insert robots into every narrative of human frailty,” a comment that resonates with the story of self-service technology which promises that you, plus technology, prove to be faster and more efficient than relying on another human being (Turckle, 10). Turckle urges that for all technology offers, it cannot replace the raw authenticity that humanity provides.

Theological Evaluation

What are we as Christians supposed to make of the self-service trend that perpetuates this hurried pace at which we live our lives? We all find ourselves caught up in busyness culture, always striving to do more in a day than is humanly possible, while feeling that we are not doing enough with the hours we do have in a day. Let us look at this trend from a theological standpoint, teasing out what Scripture reveals about the underlying issues of busyness culture.

The world of self-service promotes the belief that we are in control of our time, when truly God is the author and keeper of time. When we are consumed with controlling time we are functionally saying that we are God over time, growing frustrated when our time is not spent to our preference, like standing in line at the grocery store. God commands in the ten commandments that His people cease from their work for a day in order to rest (Exodus 20:8-11). They do this to follow the example set by God when he rested after creating the world. In the book, The Rest of God (which ironically has been sitting unread on my shelf for over a year now, as I keep telling myself I will read it “when I have time”) Mark Buchanan states that a good definition of sabbath is “imitating God so that we stop trying to be God. We mirror divine behavior only to freshly discover our human limitations” (87). Buchanan also draws out the differences between those who hold tightly to time and those who hold it loosely saying, “those who sanctify time and who give time away – who treat time as a gift and not a possession – have time in abundance. Contrariwise, those who guard every minute, resent every interruption, ration every moment, never have enough” (Buchanan, 83). This introduces us to a positive evaluation of time.

How do we treat time as a gift, using it wisely yet not demanding control over it? One way this may be done is to follow the example that God has modeled and rest. We must recognize that God is Lord over time and the world will not fall apart if we take time to rest. Another important heart posture that we are called to take on is being “eternally minded,” as Paul speaks of in Colossians 3 when he reminds us that every moment is an opportunity to “walk in wisdom toward those who are outside, redeeming the time” (Col. 4:5).  Suddenly the prospective of potentially spending an extra ten minutes in line at the grocery store is exciting as we seek to redeem the time by engaging the clerk at the register.

About Bridget K.

Bridget is currently a student at Moody Bible Institute—Distance Learning. She is in her Junior year studying Theology and Cultural Engagement. Bridget and her husband, Matte, serve in their local church in the college ministry, where they host a Bible study and help disciple college students. Bridget and Matte have a vision for global ministry. Specifically, they hope to encourage local churches, equip future generations for ministry, and reach communities with the good news of Christ. Bridget enjoys reading, doing anything outside, and coffee, so the Pacific Northwest makes a fitting home while she finishes her degree.

---

Works Cited

Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=16008589011.

Anderson, Charles A. The Business of Busyness. Everyday Theology: How to Read Cultural Texts and Interpret Trends. Baker Academic, 2007.

Buchanan, Mark Aldham. The Rest of God Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath. W Pub. Group, 2006.

Dilonardo, Robert. Self-Checkout Reaches Critical Mass, Loss Prevention Magazine January 1, 2006. https://losspreventionmedia.com/insider/retail-industry/self-checkout-reaches-critical-mass/.

Gavett, Gretchen. “How Self-Service Kiosks Are Changing Customer Behavior.” Harvard Business Review, 11 Mar. 2016, hbr.org/2015/03/how-self-service-kiosks-are-changing-customer-behavior.

Justia, David R. Humble Patents, Justia.com https://patents.justia.com/inventor/david-r-humble

Mortimer, Gary, and Paula Dootson. “The Economics of Self-Service Checkouts.” The Conversation, The Conversation, 11 June 2017, theconversation.com/the-economics-of-self-service-checkouts-78593.

Smith, Aaron and Monica Anderson Automation in Everyday Life http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/10/04/automation-in-everyday-life/.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: why we expect more from technology. Basic Books, 2011.

Wajcman, Judy. “Life in the fast lane? Towards a sociology of technology and time”, The British Journal of Sociology, 2008. Volume 59 Issue 1.

Babylon By Choice

In 1965, four years before Neil Armstrong took a low-gravity step on lunar soil, my friend Dr. Martin Marty published Babylon By Choice. It’s a booklet about the mission of the Church, and in it, Marty makes two claims: 1) the new environment for Christian mission is urban, and 2) the basic reality of urban life is its secularity. Fifty years later, Marty’s voice reverberates all-round the Christian community. Popular evangelical pastor, Tim Keller, insists the “very models for ministry must become increasingly urban.”[1] Redeemer City to City, a ministry he co-founded, recently had an inaugural North American conference where they hoped to “accelerate and support gospel movements in North American cities.” Sean Benesh, former Developer of Urban Strategy and Training for TEAM, coined the word metrospiritual to capture the “urban-centric approach to faith and Scripture.”[2] Prominent evangelical universities are providing degrees, creating centers, and implementing new models of education that focus on the city. These all form the chorus that echoes Marty’s words; the city is the mission field of the Church.

Marty’s second claim is equally prescient and relevant to contemporary discussions among Christians. Erwin Lutzer’s recent book, The Church in Babylon, is one of many books preparing believers to engage a world that no longer supports decades of comfortable Christendom. These recent publications resemble the voices of Marty’s day, bringing forward the same posture that led churches to suburbanize and flee the city.[3] As Marty reports, the urbanizing world of the late 60s and early 70s saw a society where the influence of the Christian faith was rapidly diminishing, and churches were slow to adjust. Keller writes this about Western churches in the 70s:

“While many Christian leaders were bemoaning the cultural changes, Western churches continued to minister as before – creating an environment in which only traditional and conservative people would feel comfortable … All they preached and practiced assumed they were still in the Christian West, but the Christian West was vanishing.” [4]

Both the focus on the city and the fear of its influence reveal that Marty properly esteemed the significance and power of “Babylon,” an ancient city that now symbolizes all cities and their corruption. In his booklet, Marty challenges his readers to choose Babylon, to commit to a sort of “lovers quarrel” with it, to make it the Church’s home. The World Outspoken tagline, “The City We Make,” is yet another echo of Marty’s voice. Our project reflects a commitment to Babylon, a love for it. It also reflects a commitment to a future city, one “with foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Heb. 11:10).

My goal in this article is to explain our mission to make the city, tell a different story, and contribute to the culture-making. Our urban-centric focus has generally caused one of three reactions. Some immediately feel our work does not include them because they do not live in a city or live in an urban community that doesn’t compare in size to cities like Chicago. Others are suspicious of our ideology, and they divide into two possible groups. They either suspect we are optimists promoting the creation of a utopia, or they suspect we are aligning ourselves with specific political and theological agendas contrary to the gospel. To these three communities, I’d like to provide a response by considering three question: 1) What is the City, 2) How does it work, and 3) Why should we choose it?

What is The City?

By asking this question first, I am not trying to be overly philosophical. The reason this question is even being asked is because of the resistance to the city and its ways. Most evangelicals (particularly white-evangelicals in the US) are still wary of urban places. Many Christians still tie the gospel to a rural mythology. They believe the myth that “only people in contact with the soil can have real spirituality.”[5] They think “the Christian message’s interest in developing real and authentic persons makes sense only in traditional societies and not in the modern city.”[6] We see this in the way they talk about spirituality. For these faith-people, God is a horticulturalist who made and cares for the natural world, and the city is a wicked construction of corrupted humans.

In Theology as Big as the City, Ray Bakke remembers an article entitled, “Why Evangelicals Can’t Survive in the City” (pb. 1966; one year after Marty’s booklet). The author of the article suggests the Bible is fundamentally a rural book that shows shepherds and farmers as God’s favorite people. According to the author, David was God’s chosen one while he remained a shepherd, but his life as king in the city corrupted him. The lesson presented in the article was simple: Christians should stay away from the city.[7] In a more recent example, Jen Pollock Michel writes this referring to the sin of man in building the Tower of Babel: “They reject the good gift of land and choose as a substitute the domestication of a city.”[8] Her comments suggest that building a city at all was a sin rather than connecting sin, the rejection of God and corruption of man, to the telos (i.e. purpose) of the city that was built. The problem with this mythology is that it misreads the book of Genesis, and ultimately the full arch of the Bible story.

We need a more complete image of the city. We see in these examples that many still see the city as the place of vice, violence, and evil. To this group, the city is only ever Babylon, the place of the Tower of Babel. Today there are others, however, who envision the city as Utopia, the place of power, recognition, and freedom. The first group seeks escape from the city, and the latter flocks to it. Neither vision captures fully what a city is, yet together they reveal the partial beauty and brokenness of it. To help us see an image that captures the city’s very real propensity to violence and its equally real power for fostering human flourishing, we must first recall the backgrounds for the words “urban” and “city.”[9]

Urban life recalls the Latin background of our language in the term urbs. To most thinkers this word represents “the world man builds for himself.” It is the largely physical side of man’s own creation. “Urban” refers to the form or structure of life. It is, so to speak, the apartment that man has to furnish.

The word “city,” on the other hand, carries the memory of the Latin civitas, a word that immediately throws the idea of civilization into our minds. Civitas refers to the psychic or mental and spiritual side of man’s world. It implies not the form of the city but the activity in the city. It does not represent the furnished apartment but the working and thinking of the people who live in the apartment.

Our image of the city needs to account for its two dimensions. The city is both the world we choose to build for ourselves and the spirit with which we relate to it, each other, and those transcendent realities we call goodness, truth, and beauty. The urban, meaning the conglomeration of buildings, streets, parks and plazas – the furnishings in the human apartment – is an agent in service to the city; it supports the city in forming the minds and spirits of its people. This reveals the first of two images I think account for the city’s complex dimensions. The city is an incubator for culture-making.

The City as Incubator

In his day, Marty observed the power of media and entertainment in promoting a very urban image of life. He writes, “Truly, because of the power of mass media of communication [sic], the whole world is becoming a city.”[10] Keller, again a contemporary echo of Marty’s voice, similarly argues that globalization and the internet have strengthened and expanded the reach of urban culture, making it more difficult for rural areas to continue unaffected by the urban world. In 2010, Edwin Heathcote noted that cities like Laos were growing and absorbing smaller cities and suburbs in their growth. He observes that these bigger, “metacities” needed greater connectivity, and he writes, “digital networking has not, as was forecast, led to a decline in the city. Rather, it has led to an urbanisation [sic] of the rest of the planet.”[11]

My point is that it is no longer possible to ignore or distance ourselves from the influence of the urban world. The apartment is nearly fully furnished, and the only questions now are: what kind of world did we make and what does it do? “If the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself …”[12] We have to contend with the urban world as a real force capable of engaging all of us. Lewis Mumford, attempting the remarkable task of writing a history of “the city,” concludes this:

“From its origin onward, indeed, the city may be described as a structure specially equipped to store and transmit the goods of civilization, sufficiently condensed to afford the maximum amount of facilities in minimum space, but also capable of structural enlargement to enable it to find a place for the changing needs and the more complex forms of a growing society and its cumulative social heritage.” [13]”

— Lewis Mumford, The City in History

As I already stated, the urban world, increasingly large as it is, is an agent, a servant to its other dimension: the city. The structure is uniquely made to hold and promote the goods of civilization. Therefore, thinking of the urban as an incubator is helpful. The urban world is a node of cultural power. It captures and sustains the spirit of its citizens. It can do so for good or for the detriment of humanity. The urban world is as good as it is built to be, and that reveals its inherent flaw. It will only ever reverberate the character of its maker. In my studies of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, I discovered the research of Kristin Schaffer. She argues that Burnham believed the urban world is:

An iconographic reservoir that is capable of inspiring belief in the larger social body and in one’s duty to it. Thus, the city is a physical as well as representational realm that organizes the life of its citizens and promotes them to social affinity and proper behavior in public spaces. The citizen would be instructed to be sure, in the schools, the day-care centers, the orphanages, and the adult citizenship classes given at the neighborhood park field houses, but the citizen would also be taught symbolically through architecture. [14]

With the incubator image still in mind, we should consider the second image for the city.

The City as Fire

The ancient Greek philosopher, Lycurgus, claimed the city was the only unit of government capable of establishing a relationship with the individual strong enough to make it (the city) a formative agent.[15] In other words, the city is of greater influence on the character of its people than the state or nation. This explains why people in cities like New York, Tokyo, Seoul, and London are likely to have more in common with each other than with the non-urban citizens in their own countries.[16] Remember, these global cities are connected to one another and are promoting (i.e. incubating) a similar form of life.

In a previous article, I argued that culture is what we make of the earth. It is what we make in two senses: 1) it is the stuff we produce from the natural resources around us (i.e. the urban apartment and all its furnishings), and 2) culture is the meaning, the sense, we make of the worlds that we create. This is where the name, World Outspoken, originates. Culture is the world we make and live in together. We already saw that this world is urban in design, and its built to foster human culture-making. Now, I want to turn our attention to the meaning, the sense we make of this urban world order.

The cultural world can be broken down into four spheres: story, space, community, and time; the most important of these being the story. Stories are foundational to human life. We cannot make sense of our actions without the stories that guide them. These stories, however, are not enacted in a vacuum with no regard to space and time. The city, then, is not merely a dense collection of buildings made of brick, glass, and steel. It is the setting, or space (second sphere), where a community of persons (third sphere) live out a story (first sphere) according to a specific rhythm of life (i.e. time, the fourth sphere).[17] Urban environments help us act out our stories.[18] They also serve as instructors for new community members, helping them understand the values implicit in the community narrative. The objectification of virtues – the work of making ideas and values concrete in objects – is part of the city’s program for the formation of its people. Values are embedded in narratives and narratives take form in places. The human spirit is externalized in stories that give shape to life and setting alike. To return to the original metaphor, the urban incubator is powered by the fire of the human spirit. The city dimension, then, is this fire.

In her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs uses this metaphor to explain what a city is. For Jacobs, a city is a large field in darkness being illuminated by scattered fires of varying sizes, each representing intense, diverse, and complex human community. As the community works for mutual support and benefit, they give shape to the “field” around them; their life together brilliantly reveals the necessary form for the space they coinhabit. As the community teems with flourishing people, a city is born. It is important to acknowledge that this fire is intended to benefit the citizen. It’s meant to illuminate a good way of living. As Aristotle once wrote, “Men come together in the city to live; they remain there in order to live the good life.”[19] The pursuit of this good life is the end of the city, the revelation of this fire. This image reveals three basic functions for the city that we can now explore in our next question.

How does The City work?

I will only briefly detail the functions of the city since many of them have already been described in the answer to the initial question. First, cities are places of human advancement. Human advancement is a phrase meant to capture the reality that cities are not full of poor people because they “make poor people, but because cities attract poor people with the prospect of improving their lot in life.”[20] Secondly, cities are places for technological advancement. Finally, cities are places that enable human cooperation.[21] Of course, these functions can and generally do become corrupted. The city can enable systems for human oppression, the development of technologies that result in human harm, and the cooperation of a society that sustains a city resembling Babylon. Park’s ominous warning is worth remembering: if the city is the home we build, it is the world we are condemned to live in together.

As the incubator and burning focal point for cultural power, the city maintains the basic functions of society. Political legislation is written in the city. Cultural trends begin in the city. Economic enterprise is run from the city; even the farmers travel into the city for their market. Its influence is felt emanating through the suburbs and out into the rural communities of the surrounding region. So, the culture we make in the cities of the world has the potential to shape whole regions for good (or evil). Therefore, we must choose the city. We choose to intentionally make the city according to a better, truer, more beautiful story than those that created Babylon.

Before moving to the final question, I want to address the secularity of the city. The truth is that the city runs on the interface of several stories. Immigrants move to the city with narratives from their home culture. The rich and the poor each present their own vision for life in the city. Religious groups proclaim their meta-stories, and the social elite and media outlets (journalists, entertainers, artists, etc.) channel stories directly into the family’s living room. For these narratives to coexist the city maintains a a variation of a secular, or non-religious, dominant story. The modern city is pluralistic. Secularity, as Marty notes, is the basic reality of urban life. This presents challenges to the Christian mission. However, there is no reason for Christians to fear this reality. Instead, we must adapt to and embrace the new context for Christian mission.

Why should we choose The City?

In the Bible, there are two important images for the city. I’ve introduced the first image already: Babylon. This ancient city was a display of power for its kings, who often boasted great conquests and war victories.[22] It was the symbol of their ability. It was an expression of boast. In City of God, Augustine presents the City of Man – an image synonymous with Babylon – as governed by libido dominandi (the lust for mastery). This lust to dominate others is a perversion of power. Indeed, Mumford notes that many of the cities of the ancient world grew into their full form on the parasitism of surrounding areas and the use of slaves. He argues that capital cities like Babylon expanded by imposing required tributes and “by bringing about a negative symbiosis based on [the] terrified expectation of destruction and extermination.”[23] Babylon, and all the cities after it, harbors this base abuse of power. Cities can and are the places of great injustice, severe violence, and deep-seated inequality.

However, the Bible has a second image for the city, an alternative that drives Christian mission. This city is called Zion. Just as Babylon is an image that captures a certain behavior, so too Zion is an image that drives a Christian ethic. This is vital to the Christian mission in the city, but we must be careful not to present our message as nothing more than a Utopian future. To present Zion as simply a hope for a future heaven will not suffice in the context of the secular modern city. Instead, Zion introduces a dual identity for the Christian in the here and now. In fact, I argue that Zion is the urban future for a present city that is inherent to the Church’s very character. Allow me to explain.

City on a Hill

Jane Jacobs’ image of the city as an illuminating fire resonates in one sense with the city-image in the Biblical story. Jesus connects the nature of the Church with the nature of the city by envisioning the Church as “light of the world … city set on a hill” (Matt. 5:14). The Church is the radiant-city. It stands in a fire that burns but does not consume, illuminates but does not destroy. In the darkness of the field, the Church is built as part of a city all-together good, beautiful, and truly conducive to human flourishing. In their life together as resident aliens and travelers, immigrants, the Church is given space and instruction to make their current place resemble a future urban place, one built by God (Heb. 13:14). The Church is God’s alternative to man’s failed attempts at building an urban world and the modern city’s plague of loneliness, rootlessness, alienation, and injustice.

In one provocative piece of writing, famed missiologist Leslie Newbigin argued for the possibility of a Christian government. “He contends that the logic of the cross should lead such a government to be non-coercive toward minorities, committed to the common good of all, and therefore could still allow a pluralistic society to flourish.”[24] I am by no means advocating for a Christian government or the literal construction of a Christian city, but Newbigin’s “logic of the cross” presents the way for Christian mission in the modern city. We should choose Babylon that we might reveal to Babylonians a way of life that fits their aspirations. For instance, people all over the world desire justice and societies of equality, but the cities they make are built on stories and uses of power that cannot engender commonwealth. This is essentially Augustine’s critique of Rome. In City of God, Augustine critiques another writer named Cicero for suggesting that Rome is, in fact, a commonwealth. He does this on the basis that justice is part of the very essence of a commonwealth. Augustine suggested, however, that Rome only created a semblance of justice. It is his contention that Rome, like all other earthly cities, is still inherently charged with humanity’s self-love and the libido dominandi.[25]

Conclusion

In 1965, before the world exploded into urban life, Marty concluded his booklet with a simple charge to the Church. He observed in his own day that the modern city “cut off” the Church from “the kinds of decisions in which basic life … is affected and formed.”[26]  Christian leaders and pastors are relegated to specialized roles in modern cities and kept from engaging more and more in the public elements of life. Marty notes that many conservative Christians have accepted this new place in the city, saying “that the only responsibility of the Christians toward the environment is to rescue and snatch people out of it.”[27] These same sincere Christians, observes Marty, “then turn around to criticize most vocally the secularizing of life to which they abandoned society and its people.”[28] Instead, Marty proposes a different way of engaging Babylon with the Christian message.

Because the pastors of the world are marginalized from many of the public and powerful functions of the city, Marty suggests the Christian lay person - the scientists, teachers, historians, artists, marketers, chefs, and bankers – are the necessary workers for Zion. They must carry on the Christian Mission and lead the exodus from Babylon to Zion. “They will be effective from the human way of speaking to the degree that they penetrate the varieties and definitions of urban life.”[29] Secondly, Marty challenges the Church to deep unity in a city of frayed relationships. “While “we” work in division, the city “closes itself off” without us.”[30]

World Outspoken is an echo of both moves in Marty’s charge. Our mission is “to inspire, train, and equip culture-makers speaking good news into the cities they make.” We focus on culture-makers because they are the leaders in Christian mission. We also work with Christians and non-Christians alike because we are committed to the common good of the cities of the world. Finally, our desire is that the city we make resemble the unity born from the death and resurrection of King Jesus. World Outspoken is the city we make.

---

Footnotes

[1] Timothy Keller, Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City, 8.9.2012 edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012).

[2] “Books | Sean Benesh,” accessed September 27, 2018, http://seanbenesh.gutensite.net/Books.

[3] For more on this phenomenon, see Eric O. Jacobsen, William Dyrness, and Robert Johnson, The Space Between: A Christian Engagement with the Built Environment (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012).

[4] Keller, Center Church, 253.

[5] Martin E. Marty, Babylon by Choice: New Environment for Mission, 4th Printing edition (Friendship Press, 1965), 18.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Raymond J. Bakke, A Theology as Big as the City (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Academic, 1997).

[8] Jen Pollock Michel and Katelyn Beaty, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Books, 2014), 83.

[9] What follows is an excerpt of Babylon by Choice (pg. 10).

[10] Ibid., 16.

[11] “From Megacity to Metacity,” Financial Times, April 6, 2010, https://www.ft.com/content/e388a076-38d6-11df-9998-00144feabdc0.

[12] Ralph H. Turner, ed., Robert E. Park on Social Control and Collective Behavior: Selected Papers, 2nd Print edition (Phoenix Books, 1969).

[13] Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (San Diego New York London: Mariner Books, 1968), 30.

[14] Kristin Schaffer, Introduction to Plan of Chicago, by Burnham and Bennett, First Edition (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), xiii.

[15] Burnham and Bennett., xii.

[16] Keller, Center Church, 155.

[17] Time can be understood as the plotline, or rhythm of life, for the story. Jacobsen suggests one could ask, in light of human life understood as the actions of people in a drama, “When are you” with regard to their position in the story (i.e. opening scene, climax, resolution). Each story lives according to a different rhythm.

[18] Note: Because cities are the physical settings for cultural narratives, they can be created with unique forms. In other words, cities have peculiarities and nuances just as people have peculiarities that distinguish their unique personalities.

[19] As quoted by Mumford, The City in History, 85.

[20] Sean Benesh, Blueprints for a Just City: The Role of the Church in Urban Planning and Shaping the City’s Built Environment (Urban Loft Publishers, 2015).

[21] Benesh.

[22] Genesis 10:8-10 identify Nimrod, a mighty man and hunter, as the founder of Babylon.

[23] Mumford, The City in History, 160.

[24] As noted by Keller, Center Church, 223.

[25] Augustine, Augustine: The City of God against the Pagans, ed. R. W. Dyson, y First edition edition (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), xviii.

[26] Marty, Babylon by Choice; 61

[27] Ibid., 62.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid., 63.

[30] Ibid. Marty is quoting Roger Schutz here.

Why We Make Culture

We don’t understand culture-making because we don’t really make culture. We make artifacts. Single artifacts like the refrigerator and systems like education (see previous article) are the products of human skill,1 and they are imbued with meaning and significance. They share in the storytelling of their makers; they become part of the dialog of the world, communicating and helping humanity re-imagine life on earth. Artifacts are the building blocks of culture. By making artifacts, humans make sense of the world we inhabit. We create a cultural world, a World Outspoken. Too often, however, we make with little to no reflection on the kind of world that would be truly good and beautiful. Even worst, we don’t consider the stories at the core of our making, and we dutifully live into stories that are destructive. Culture-making is an active use of power, and we fail to use our power well.

The Church has a tenuous relationship with both culture-making and power. There’s an elevated discomfort and awkwardness whenever Christian’s attempt to discuss either subject. My students are a good microcosm of this reality. Most of my students are studying cultural engagement, the response to and interaction with existing cultural products and systems. For those unfamiliar with these kinds of programs, forgive my technical explanation, but it will help later when we explore reasons for culture-making. Students in a cultural engagement program will take at least one course titled something like “Theology and Culture,” “Cultural Hermeneutics,” and “Christianity and Culture.” In such courses, H. Richard Niebuhr’s seminal book, Christ and Culture, frames the conversation. His work presents five “types” of Christian responses to culture. My students don’t fit perfectly into Niebuhr’s types, but we’ll begin by summarizing the “types” in my classroom to better understand the importance of culture-making and how it differs from traditional models of cultural engagement.

Two Types of Students

Students in my courses divide into two types. The first wants to retaliate, to “go to war against the culture” for the sake of the gospel in public life. They want the city governed by “Christian principles,” and they have a hard time relating positively to any artifact of culture that isn’t created by Christians, particularly entertainment artifacts (movies, music, books, etc.). This type considers engaging culture mostly in political terms or retreating from culture in defensive compounds.

The second type is interested in operating in the cultural world alongside people pursuing justice and equality. In a way, this type is also “at war,” but the fight is rooted in different values; It’s a different fight. This type is listening with empathy to oppressed people and responding with action. They work alongside service groups, regardless of faith background, because they believe God is at work through their shared efforts with others. It is not that this group has forgotten or abandoned evangelism; it’s that this type of student sees a need for the Church to involve itself with the afflicted. If the first type sees cultural decay and retreats while pointing to the blots of mold in the culture, the second sees a different set of spots on everyone, Christians included, and extends a balm.2

Despite their differences, both types share the common assumption that right engagement with existing culture(s) is the only action available to Christians operating in the world. So, whenever I suggest that Christians empowered by the Holy Spirit should transform the earth and create new worlds rooted in the gospel, I inevitably have one or two students from either type who resist the idea. In response to my students and as a way of progressing the mission of World Outspoken, here are five reasons for culture-making. Again, before continuing, I recommend readers review what we mean by “culture” at WOS.

Five Reasons for Focusing on Culture-making

1) The Cultural Mandate

In The Social Construction of Reality, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman make the fascinating observation that all animals live in “closed worlds.” Humans, on the other hand, have “no species-specific environment.” Humanity’s “relationship to [their] environment is characterized by world-openness.”3 Mammals like Koalas and Pandas have limited habitats based on their biological makeup, but the entire earth is open to development as the human home. How is this relevant? It highlights the reality that humanity, from the beginning, had to cultivate, to create a world for their shared living. The earth is, in fact, open to humans in a way that it simply isn’t to any other creature. This, of course, forces questions on the human community. The mystery of this open world with all its possibilities compels us to ask: Where are we? Who are we? Why are we here? These questions direct us toward the existence of a transcendent, Divine being, and we begin to tell stories.

Christians believe the Bible makes this creative Being known in its first few pages. The Bible begins by telling us the story of God’s creative act. He made all that exists from nothing but His word. Then, at the climactic end of His work, He made man and woman “in His image,” so they may rule over all His creation (Gen. 1:26). He set the first couple in a garden and gave them the task of working (cultivating) and caring for the ground (Gen. 2:15). These three tasks: ruling, working, and keeping, are known as God’s cultural mandate for humanity, his appointed purpose for us. The story of the Bible invites us to see this world-openness as an invitation from God to share in making something more from the earth.

Cultures begin as stories. The astounding part of the Bible’s beginning is that God created, from His word alone, a good and beautiful world vested with potential and tasked us with developing it further. In other words, He commissioned us to make more culture. The key word here is "more." Remember, the first couple was set in a garden not an uncultivated, wild forest. God also used language, the connecting web of culture, to give them instruction, orienting them toward Him, the earth, and each other. Culture precedes the first couple. The first culture-maker is God. Made in God's image, we are tasked with continuing to share in His work by making in ways that reflect His character. Unfortunately, we don’t, but the mandate hasn’t been canceled. Culture-making is still the human purpose.

2) The Great Commission

The primary directive of all Christians is to preach the gospel, the true story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. This gospel reminds us that Jesus gathers to Himself a people that He then sends out to be witnesses, living testimonies of His power to transform what is broken and corrupted into something healed and new. Jesus introduces new cultural horizons to a corroded world. As in the beginning, the work of God precedes the work of His people. He sends His followers after him to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19). To do this well, we must think holistically about what disciples are and what it means to “make disciples.”

Disciples are followers or students. They follow their teacher in all senses of the word. They follow by obeying his/her instruction, and they follow in that they imitate their teacher’s character. “Disciples best learn how to practice [beliefs] through paideia, an apprentice-based pedagogy that involves following the examples of (i.e. imitating) others who are further along.”4 This imitation-style of learning directly connects disciple-making with culture-making. People become disciples as cultural-memes get translated into their way of being.5 Disciple-making is more than “converting” people to Christ. Making disciples means “cultivating in [people] the mind of Christ, “teaching them to observe” the supreme authority of Christ in every situation (Matt. 28:20 KJV).”6 Remember, in the previous article, we noted that culture enables this cultivation.

Culture-making allows us to care for the corporate dimension of disciple-making. We cannot disciple each person we encounter, orienting them correctly toward the good, beautiful, and true world available to them in Christ. However, by making culture, we extend our ability to give shape to the lives of our community. This does not mean that culture can save people. Individuals still need to share the gospel, but culture can help all people see more clearly the world enlivened by the gospel.

The cultural mandate and the great commission go hand-in-hand. Enabled by Christ and the power of His Spirit, we are once again sent to make as representative images of God. Dr. Vanhoozer reminds us that “the Church is thus not only the “people of the book” but also “the (lived) interpretation of the book.”7

3) Our Implicit Theology8

Already, this is a much wider vision for relating to culture. We tell stories and make as members of a cultural world, sharing in or damaging the work of God. Every artifact we make is embedded with our assumptions about our place, ourselves, and how life should be lived. These artifacts then communicate these assumptions to us and our community. In this sense, it can be said that culture is theology made concrete. Studying culture reveals that theology is communicated in two ways: Explicit and Implicit theology.

Explicit Theology is all that we teach, preach, write in doctrinal statements, pass on in catechisms, and teach in Sunday school curriculums. Explicit theology is our stated theology. It’s the explicit stories about God and the world. Implicit theology, however, is the subtle ways our culture reveals our stories and orients us to them. For instance, the refrigerator subtly communicates the theological belief that “humanity has the power to overcome natural processes.” The fridge is an artifact that reveals our implicit theology, our embedded beliefs. Note that if explicit and implicit theology are ever at odds, people will operate according to implicit theologies. For instance, I explicitly believe (this statement is proof) that the rate of food production and consumption in America is unsustainable and destructive. However, I haven't joined a CSA or another alternative food system. I still rely on the refrigerated supermarket. For now, the habits of culture overpower the ideals I value. If I’m going to make a change, I must consider culture-making; I must consider changing the culture that communicates an implicit theology I want to resist. "How” we do this is explained in the final point below.

4) The Longevity of Our Work

Simply stated: Culture has a longer shelf life than any isolated sermon or speech about anything from religious belief to food consumption. Christians who both reflect the gospel through preaching and culture-making, extend their work to future generations. The pastors in my classroom often wonder if I am supplanting their role as preachers with their role as culture-makers. I am not. Instead, I am arguing that, as preachers, they are uniquely positioned as storytellers to shape the culture of their congregations long after their ministries come to an official end.

In his award-winning novel, The Storyteller, Mario Vargas Llosa tells the story of a scattered Peruvian-Amazonian tribe known as the Machiguengas. The tribe has one member that connects them all, the storyteller. The storyteller is of sacred, indeed religious importance. The storyteller's job is simple enough: to speak. Storytellers' "mouths were the connecting links of this society that the fight for survival had forced to split up and scatter … Thanks to the storytellers, fathers had news of their sons and brothers of their sisters … thanks to [storytellers] they were all kept informed of the deaths, births, and other happenings in the tribe.”9 The storyteller did not only bring current news, he spoke of the past. He is the memory of the community, fulfilling a function like that of the troubadours of the Middle Ages. The storyteller traveled great distances to remind each member of the tribe that despite their separation, they still formed one community, sharing a tradition, beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes, and joys. The storytellers, writes Vargas Llosa, were the lifeblood that circulated through Machiguenga society giving it one interconnected and interdependent life.

The Machiguenga storyteller is “tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment … something primordial, something that the very existence of a people may depend on.”10 Like the Machiguenga storyteller, the preacher who intentionally speaks to shape his cultural world extends the life of his local congregation.

5) New Culture as Cultural Engagement

If forced to pick a “type” to identify with, I suspect most of my students would chose the “Christ transforming Culture” type from Niebuhr’s typology. I share my students’ disposition. The question for those interested in transforming culture is this: “Can the Church’s demonstration of the gospel change the world? If so, does this have more to do with changing human hearts or social structures, ideas, or institutions?”11

As a careful reader, Andy Crouch emphasizes the language in Niebuhr’s type: Christ transforming Culture. The transformation work is done by Christ, not the church.12 This sets us free from pressure and should inspire our boldest creativity. Our vocation is simply to be witnesses “and to be the embodiment of the coming Kingdom of God.”13 To bear witness and embody the Kingdom is to make new cultural worlds. The only way to transform the culture, to change our implicit theology, is by making more culture, displacing existing forms of culture.14 By making more culture, Christians create opportunities to invite people into a new world with new possibilities unseen in other cultural worlds.

Conclusion

World Outspoken exists to support Christian culture-makers seeking God's city. I’ve argued for the importance of culture-making as a way of continuing cultivation of earth, obeying the great commission, intentionally shaping implicit theology, extending the life of our work, and engaging existing cultures. Christians today will almost never make culture without incorporating elements of existing cultures. Indeed, this is the “already not yet” tension described by theologians. We are already in the new world, the Kingdom of Christ, but we are still residents of the old cultural worlds we inhabit. The local church makes as citizens of the world to come and as images of Christ in their resident world. My hope is that the Church would make with boldness and vigor.

Culture-making “power is “the capacity to define what is real.” The Church does this by enacting God’s word in particular times and places, for it is God’s word that defines what is ultimately real.”15

---

Footnotes

1. “Artifact” is a unique word built from the Latin words for human skill (arte) and objects or goods (factum). “Definition of ARTIFACT,” accessed July 12, 2018, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artifact.

2. It should be noted that these types, like most if not all other types, are generalizations. Of course, there are exceptions to these rules, but these represent the overall themes present in my class discussions.

3. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor, 1967), 47.

4. Vanhoozer, 7.

5. Again, see our article, “What is Culture,” for more information on memes.

6. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding. Italics are my own.

7. Vanhoozer, 2.

8. The following section is developed based on ideas found in the following work: Nancy Ammerman et al., eds., Studying Congregations: A New Handbook (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998).

9. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Storyteller: A Novel, trans. Helen Lane, First edition (New York: Picador, 2001).

10. Llosa.

11. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding.

12. Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, Edition Unstated edition (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Books, 2008), 182. 

13. James Davison Huner as quoted by Vanhoozer.

14. I’m indebted to Andy Crouch for the ideas in this article. His book gave shape to my thinking here. Crouch, Culture Making.

15. Vanhoozer, Faith Speaking Understanding, 8.

16. Cover Photo by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash