My history and experience is in African American churches where many congregations and their leaders suffer from oppression sickness. Oppression sickness is a legacy of cultural oppression suffered by African Americans and passed down from generation to generation. Religious authorities with a history of rejection turn into oppressors by excluding and condemning those of whom they disapprove. The doctrines and tenets of Christianity currently practiced by African Americans in this country were learned in the context of chattel slavery where classism, racism, and sexism were the rule. Over time, the institution of the African American church itself has contributed to populating the margins of society by this mode of oppressive exclusion. Many African American churches have achieved substantial power and influence within their respective communities and denominations by marginalizing certain segments of society. Furthermore, this external marginalizing is often mirrored within the very structure of authority of churches, which typically are patriarchal and rigidly hierarchical.
Recently, however, there has been a growing movement to challenge the theology that allows churches to be private social clubs and calls on them to become more involved in the life of the community. This enables the celebration of diversity and inclusion of all peoples, especially those who have traditionally been marginalized by religious institutions. Yet there is often a heavy price to pay for individual pastors and their congregations who make this courageous change: congregations become bitterly divided, membership decreases, financial stability is lost, leaders are removed from their positions of authority, and social ostracism is unleashed on the pastors and their congregations alike. The end result, however, is the creation of true Christian community.
True community—true church—comes when marginalized people take back the right to fully “be.” A people must be encouraged to celebrate not in spite of who they are, but because of who their Creator has made them. The balm that heals oppression sickness is the creation of accountable, responsible, visible, celebrating communities on the margin of mainline church and dominant society.
PART ONE
1
CREATING COMMUNITY
IN HIS EFFORT to define the church of the future Loren Mead makes this statement about community:
We need to belong—to be part of a larger world. The need to belong drives us to community, a place where we know we belong. It is also a place where we will be safe—a kind of “home base” in the world’s chaotic game of “tag.” It is a place where you are valued for what you are in yourself. All of this is wrapped up in the word community, and all of it is a mix of people and places, memories and values.1
When access to existing communities is not available, marginalized people must seek to develop community for and among themselves. Where people are giving birth to a fresh, emerging Christian community, old barriers exist and must be overcome.
OVERCOMING OPPRESSIVE THEOLOGY
The theology of those at the center of society often seeks to characterize people on the edge as enemies of God. This is especially true when individuals or groups unrepentantly refuse to conform to the dominant definition of normativeness. Overcoming internal and external oppressive theology, or a theology that excludes certain people, is primary in creating a Christian community for people visibly on the periphery. Those who promote theologies that exclude certain races, cultures, sexual and gender orientations, and classes in the name of Jesus would do well to remember that Jesus was himself from the edge of society with a ministry to those who were considered least. Jung Young Lee, describing the marginality and the ministry of Jesus, states that
Jesus’ public ministry may best be characterized as a life of marginality. He was a homeless man with a group of homeless people around him. The people Jesus called to be his disciples were marginalized people. None came from the religious establishment; they were not elders, high priests, or Judaic-law teachers. Most were fishermen, except for a tax collector and a clerk, Judas, who betrayed Jesus. His other associations were primarily with the poor, weak, outcast, foreigners, and prostitutes.2
Marginalized people, now as in the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry, respond to a community of openness and inclusivity where other people from the edge gather. Such an atmosphere welcomes people to feel it is safer to be who they are. A liberating theology of acceptance must be embodied in the atmosphere of a liberating Christian community. Contempt for the church and all things religious often stems from exposure to oppressive theology, biblical literalism, and unyielding tradition. A person, church, or society can do extreme harm when that harm is done in the name of God and virtue and with the “support” of Scripture. In The Good Book, Peter Gomes reflects on an old aphorism he heard from a friend: “A surplus of virtue is more dangerous than a surplus of vice, because a surplus of virtue is not subject to the constraints of conscience.”3 Many people rejected by the church got their burns from Bible-believing Christian flamethrowers.
In the African American Metho-Bapti-Costal4 tradition there is an example of oppression sickness that masquerades as virtue. The ancestors of present-day African Americans were taught to cover up in the daylight and were often sexually and physically abused behind closed doors at night. This brought about shame and guilt regarding the body, but what was worse was what went on behind those doors, under those clothes, in the dark, late at night. Africans came to realize that virtue was a white thing for white people that did not extend to the slave; the rules came in different colors. Sin and evil were black; goodness and virtue were white.
Peter Paris says of the “Christian” slave trader:
Slave traders saw no contradiction between being Christian and being engaged in the sale of human cargo. Although Christians espoused a universal doctrine that God created all humans, their theology did not imply the equality of all humanity. On the contrary, their refusal to acknowledge the full humanity of African peoples implied the absence of any moral issue with respect to slavery. Consequently, slave traders saw no contradiction between being Christian, on the one hand, and the buying and selling of human slaves on the other hand.5
The slaveholders were the people who taught Africans who were brought to the Americas about Jesus, a Jesus who loved Africans as long as they were content to be slaves, a Jesus who supported the snatching of babies from their mothers’ breasts and selling them down river. Good religious folks, who could sing “Amazing Grace” on the deck of a slave ship or at a burning, beating, or a lynching, were the examples of good moral Christians. John Kater in his book Christians on the Right is correct in his assertion that all theology serves someone. The question is whom does it serve? Who benefits and at whose expense? When we are finished cooking up and serving our theologies, who reigns and who suffers? Kater describes the state of the slaveholding