INTRODUCTION
IN HER BOOK Church in the Round, Letty Russell’s image of church community is a communion table around which people are seated in a circle. There is no pulpit, altar, or front or back seat. All are seated equally and everyone has equal access to the table. She calls this feminist ecclesiology or woman-church, where women and all those who have been exiled to the margin are welcome at the table. Russell emphasizes this image stating that:
The critical principle of feminist ecclesiology is a table principle. It looks for ways that God reaches out to include all those whom society and religion have declared outsiders and invites them to gather round God’s table of hospitality. The measure of the adequacy of the life of a church is how it is connected to those on the margin, whether those, as the NRSV calls “the least of these who are members of my family,” are receiving the attention to their needs for justice and hope. (Matt 25:40)1
This “table principle” is an explicit call for the inclusion of the marginalized, and it offers a challenging notion of what it means to be a Christian community. In order to create a viable community, hospitality and inclusivity are essential. I draw on those principles and seek to extend those fruitful ideas. I believe, however, that inclusivity and hospitality must be coupled with accountability to and responsibility for the community if it is to be sustained. To that end, I offer the metaphor of village life, attempting to capture by it the dual ideas of inclusivity and accountability.
The village metaphor reflects the indigenous tribes of Africa, South America, and other parts of the world that live in villages made of dwellings that surround a central meeting place or hearth. I have visited such villages or encampments during my frequent visits to Africa. They lie both on the outskirts of cities and in the interior. A common custom in the village is to live in dwellings or kraals often without doors and to use the central hearth as the place where all are welcome. The village life is a life that balances openness and privacy. Tribes, people of Africa and South America, often have no doors on their dwellings, yet they know when and where it is appropriate to enter and exit. Nothing is hidden to the living or to the ancestors, yet everyone knows where the invisible boundaries are. I use this metaphor as a model for creating, sustaining, and celebrating Christian community among people who are marginalized by church and society and cannot or choose not to hide the cause of their marginalization.
The creation of Christian community among people marginalized by the church and society requires that the community maintain a presence of cultural familiarity while actively fighting and overcoming oppressive and exclusive theology. Sustaining community among people who visibly represent marginalized groups necessitates (a) the use of village ethics or knowing where the boundaries are when all things are exposed and (b) the importance of village table theology or giving everyone a seat at the central meeting place or the welcome table.
In this book I will use examples of persons most marginalized by church and society to illustrate the use of village ethics and theology. I will reexamine sexual and relational ethics, demonstrate the importance of radical inclusivity, and show the need to destigmatize our view of any group of people.
Finally, because visibly marginalized people are together in community does not mean that each affirms the other, or that their common marginality will hold the community together. Conversely, people who have been oppressed often learn to oppress by assimilating the oppressor in an effort to gain power and influence. There must be glue to hold the community on the margin together, something that continuously defines and strengthens the essence of the community. If community is to celebrate, it must be reminded that its existence is something to be glad about.
I suggest that preaching is one tool that defines, reinforces, and supports the collective theology of the community. Preaching tells and retells the community story. It is the primary glue that holds the fragile, fragmented, marginalized community together. Preaching in the call and response method of the black church is a circle experience. I will include sermons and stories that reinforce a theology that is radically inclusive while encouraging responsibility and accountability.
As I reflect and elaborate upon the metaphor of the village, I will draw upon my own extensive pastoral experience with marginalized people and bring that experience into critical conversation with relevant theological and pastoral literature.
I have been a pastor in the inner city for twenty years. Marginalized communities have always been overrepresented in the churches where I have served. The church where I currently pastor is predominantly African American, with roots in the Pentecostal, Baptist, and Methodist churches. Represented in our membership are persons who are recovering from substance abuse, in therapy, undocumented, physically and emotionally disabled, recently incarcerated, living with HIV/AIDS, same gender loving (SGL) persons,2 transgendered persons, and a number of people in the helping professions who serve these populations. The people in our church who do not fit any of these categories indicate by their presence their support of people who are living on the edge of society.
VISIBILITY AND OPPRESSION
People who are not representative of a visibly marginalized group can remain invisible until they choose to disclose their issues, even if those issues would qualify them as part of a marginalized community. If they are on the edge, they can hide it. There are people who have issues that, if known, would make them unacceptable in their churches, their families, or their jobs, but because their issue of “unacceptability” is not visible they can keep it hidden until they choose to reveal themselves in less threatening surroundings. The disparity between people’s real life stories and their outward appearance is frequently surprising.
However, many marginalized people are visible and therefore vulnerable. The visibility of the characteristic for which they are marginalized is often the cause of the marginalization. Most marginalized people, such as people of color, transgendered people, and persons with certain disabilities, cannot hide their otherness in the dominant society. There is no hiding place, no privilege of being mistaken as one who fits. One cannot maintain anonymity.
What do people do when the dominant society forces them to the margin? In order for visibly marginalized people to have real community they must develop community while exposed—naked, with their “marginality” in full view—often learning to celebrate the very thing that separates them from the dominant culture. In recent years many aboriginal and indigenous people have increased their cultural pride and identity by celebrating the way of life lived in their villages before the colonials came. On a recent trip to South Africa I was invited to a gospel music concert where a pastor joined the singers and danced in traditional Zulu dress, with his full torso and legs completely exposed. It was a powerful moment of identity for the largely Zulu audience. They had found renewed life in the very thing the colonizer called heathen, primitive, and barbaric.
Albert Memmi in his book The Colonizer and the Colonized refers to the colonial as a usurper, who, having come to another’s land and culture, “succeeded not merely in creating a place for himself, but also in taking away that of the inhabitant, granting himself astounding privileges to the detriment of those rightfully entitled to them.”3 Memmi states further that the colonial does this, “by upsetting the established rules and substituting his own.” When a people are colonized the community is destabilized and forced to accept values and exist in a paradigm foreign to it. The colonizer, by a show of force or use of religion, asserts power over those he/she seeks to control. Then the oppressor can cull a few from the colonized and teach them the art of oppressing their own for power in the new system. Generations become infected with an oppression sickness that manifests in detachment, dislocation, classism, and further marginalization.
The European explorers and missionaries who colonized Africa, Polynesia, and South America taught an enduring lesson of secret keeping. They came equipped with the skills to make clothes and doors and secrets. They did not acknowledge