This is very interesting, I would argue, as I argue in my context. It is very different when the community invites you to minister with them. Sadly, for most white people, they felt a call from God to move overseas or to the inner city, when in reality there was never an invitation from a local leader to join their efforts. As a result, when there is no invitation, the risk is to have some of those white Savior ideas in mind. In addition, there has been an idea within movements that advocate for relocation and cross cultural missions that whoever is going to another context is bringing the good news. When in reality, we all should be looking to bear witness of what is already happening in any location.
So, should a white person move to another context to bring the gospel? My answer would be, no. Should a white person accept the invitation of a local leader in a different context to join what the spirit is already doing and submit to local leadership? My response to that would be, if the spirit is directing both to join efforts, absolutely yes.
I think this is a helpful factor to consider, in an ideal world such relationships would be possible within which invitations would occur. However, many churches and leaders in my neighborhood are unwilling to partner with each other, let alone those from the outside. If we only ever wait for invitations, we may be ignoring several other reasons to consider.
For example, we should not consider inner city neighborhoods as static entities. As I describe in my previous article, many inner city neighborhoods are under constant change. In the last sixty years, my neighborhood has changed due to influx of White European immigrants, African Americans, Latinos, White Appalachian transplants, and now many immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. Many residents only live here for 2-3 years; it is under constant turnover. Leaders who could get out of the neighborhood do and won’t move back. Surely these are important factors to consider.
Thah makes it indeed difficult. What would it look like to find the few who are older residents? An in person conversation with you about this topics would be quite fascinating. We need to make it happen! Thanks for writing!
In my experience, it is very difficult to get those conversations with older residents until 1) you move into the neighborhood so you have some skin in the game and 2) you’re patient enough to allow relationships to naturally develop. The language I use is you need to move from being simply an outsider to an accepted outsider.
In other words, that invitation likely won’t come until you’ve moved in and you have invested in the community. This is why I believe White pastors/churches should wait at least three years to start weekly worship services. Their first few years should be generously investing in the neighborhood to demonstrate they are not there to build an institution for themselves but to become a part of the neighborhood organism.
I'm working on an essay this week about this sort of thing and I think a Universality Principle would be helpful here. Our ethnic, mimetic cultures either matter, or don't matter in the spread of and growth in the gospel. What's true for one ethnic group would have to be true for all ethnic groups, in which case (if we trial the claim) all forms of cross-cultural missions would be suspect. I am more inclined to say that the gospel is as cross-cultural as it gets though we might only understand it in our context, we never truly understand it until we expand it outside of our particular situations. We don't want to slip into some kind of missional nationalism but neither is it altogether helpful to accept missional colonialism. There does exist a middle point; a kind of missional cosmopolitanism that accepts that we are all citizens of the Kingdom and that our ethnic and mimetic cultures are fine, but unnecessary in the efficacy of the gospel
Doing Work in racial "reconciliation" is exhausting . I have found, after many, many years of doing such work on a college campus as a professor and in K-12 schools-person-to-person, I still make mistakes that set me and others back. It takes tenacity, humility to admit mistakes, love, and consistency. You have to take respite and rest to recharge.
Regarding your piece-it is interesting as usual! It makes me think of mission work over the years and the controversial role evangelism has played in cultural identities. For example, if we look at the Aborigines in Australia, we find that "Christians" with supposedly good intentions of evangelizing the indigenous people took the children of said people to camps to teach them English. As with Native American Boarding Schools, they sought to replace their culture and values not acknowledging their ontological perspectives as having merit. (Note: a good movie that illustrates this is "Rabbit Proof Fence") . I think it is available on Amazon, and I recommend it. I digressed....So, my question is: Is a white pastor going into the inner city analogous to mission work throughout history? In Hawaii, in Australia, in Indonesia, the list goes on. There is that ever blurring line between sharing the gospel and shaping culture into a myopic expression uniquely white, and Christian. I argue, as does Miroslav Volf, a Croatian Theologian, that we must leave room for "Exclusion and Embrace" (his book) of one's culture. That is, we have to allow for individual cultural identity -and embrace it. He suggests we need space for divergent cultures to co-exist, He posits:
"Distance means that we become strangers, forsaking a given culture to follow the God of all cultures as Abraham was called to do. Distance helps us make space for others out of allegiance to God, by helping us see the truth about our own culture and how others can enrich it.
Belonging means that we are aware of our cultural heritage, as Paul was, but do not allow it to become sacred, making us unable to leave it in our pursuit of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We each have a particular racial and cultural identity that is brought to the foot of the cross, but we are not accepted by God based on these different identities. Rather, we are accepted through grace and faith in Jesus Christ. We are not asked to deny our racial and cultural differences, but to become new creatures in what Volf calls our new universality."
Given Volf's experience in communist Yugoslavia, I do not find it surprising that he advances the notion we all have a cultural identity, and we need to allow that to be a part of who we are while at the same time working to spread the gospel to those who are different than we are.
I'd be curious to read the article you mentioned. I wonder how similar the arguments made are to those who argue that white parents shouldn't adopt non-white children. Maybe an aside, but it reminded me of He Has Your Eyes (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5256722/). Good movie! But I digress...
One thing that I even now continue to wrestle with is how I as a white pastor in a predominantly AA community by my mere presence may have unwittingly contributed to the gentrification of that neighborhood. Food for thought...
But to those we interacted and ministered alongside of, all we received was love. Why? I hope because we did our best to humbly listen, learn, and love them. Posture is everything.
And btw, you actually have grass! We didn't have that in Philly! :)
Quick thought on gentrification: Did you unwittingly contribute to it? Of course you did. But the powers behind gentrification are too big to be stopped. They can be slowed by people who care and invest in the neighborhood. As I tell my neighbors often, “Someone was going to move in to this neighborhood. Better someone that gives a damn.”
This is very interesting, I would argue, as I argue in my context. It is very different when the community invites you to minister with them. Sadly, for most white people, they felt a call from God to move overseas or to the inner city, when in reality there was never an invitation from a local leader to join their efforts. As a result, when there is no invitation, the risk is to have some of those white Savior ideas in mind. In addition, there has been an idea within movements that advocate for relocation and cross cultural missions that whoever is going to another context is bringing the good news. When in reality, we all should be looking to bear witness of what is already happening in any location.
So, should a white person move to another context to bring the gospel? My answer would be, no. Should a white person accept the invitation of a local leader in a different context to join what the spirit is already doing and submit to local leadership? My response to that would be, if the spirit is directing both to join efforts, absolutely yes.
I think this is a helpful factor to consider, in an ideal world such relationships would be possible within which invitations would occur. However, many churches and leaders in my neighborhood are unwilling to partner with each other, let alone those from the outside. If we only ever wait for invitations, we may be ignoring several other reasons to consider.
For example, we should not consider inner city neighborhoods as static entities. As I describe in my previous article, many inner city neighborhoods are under constant change. In the last sixty years, my neighborhood has changed due to influx of White European immigrants, African Americans, Latinos, White Appalachian transplants, and now many immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. Many residents only live here for 2-3 years; it is under constant turnover. Leaders who could get out of the neighborhood do and won’t move back. Surely these are important factors to consider.
Thah makes it indeed difficult. What would it look like to find the few who are older residents? An in person conversation with you about this topics would be quite fascinating. We need to make it happen! Thanks for writing!
In my experience, it is very difficult to get those conversations with older residents until 1) you move into the neighborhood so you have some skin in the game and 2) you’re patient enough to allow relationships to naturally develop. The language I use is you need to move from being simply an outsider to an accepted outsider.
In other words, that invitation likely won’t come until you’ve moved in and you have invested in the community. This is why I believe White pastors/churches should wait at least three years to start weekly worship services. Their first few years should be generously investing in the neighborhood to demonstrate they are not there to build an institution for themselves but to become a part of the neighborhood organism.
I like the idea of listening to the context. Jesus waited 30 years before ministering for 3 years.
Yes!
I'm working on an essay this week about this sort of thing and I think a Universality Principle would be helpful here. Our ethnic, mimetic cultures either matter, or don't matter in the spread of and growth in the gospel. What's true for one ethnic group would have to be true for all ethnic groups, in which case (if we trial the claim) all forms of cross-cultural missions would be suspect. I am more inclined to say that the gospel is as cross-cultural as it gets though we might only understand it in our context, we never truly understand it until we expand it outside of our particular situations. We don't want to slip into some kind of missional nationalism but neither is it altogether helpful to accept missional colonialism. There does exist a middle point; a kind of missional cosmopolitanism that accepts that we are all citizens of the Kingdom and that our ethnic and mimetic cultures are fine, but unnecessary in the efficacy of the gospel
For those interested: The Unadulterated Gospel
https://open.substack.com/pub/dlbacon/p/the-unadulterated-gospel?r=2v2ne0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Doing Work in racial "reconciliation" is exhausting . I have found, after many, many years of doing such work on a college campus as a professor and in K-12 schools-person-to-person, I still make mistakes that set me and others back. It takes tenacity, humility to admit mistakes, love, and consistency. You have to take respite and rest to recharge.
Regarding your piece-it is interesting as usual! It makes me think of mission work over the years and the controversial role evangelism has played in cultural identities. For example, if we look at the Aborigines in Australia, we find that "Christians" with supposedly good intentions of evangelizing the indigenous people took the children of said people to camps to teach them English. As with Native American Boarding Schools, they sought to replace their culture and values not acknowledging their ontological perspectives as having merit. (Note: a good movie that illustrates this is "Rabbit Proof Fence") . I think it is available on Amazon, and I recommend it. I digressed....So, my question is: Is a white pastor going into the inner city analogous to mission work throughout history? In Hawaii, in Australia, in Indonesia, the list goes on. There is that ever blurring line between sharing the gospel and shaping culture into a myopic expression uniquely white, and Christian. I argue, as does Miroslav Volf, a Croatian Theologian, that we must leave room for "Exclusion and Embrace" (his book) of one's culture. That is, we have to allow for individual cultural identity -and embrace it. He suggests we need space for divergent cultures to co-exist, He posits:
"Distance means that we become strangers, forsaking a given culture to follow the God of all cultures as Abraham was called to do. Distance helps us make space for others out of allegiance to God, by helping us see the truth about our own culture and how others can enrich it.
Belonging means that we are aware of our cultural heritage, as Paul was, but do not allow it to become sacred, making us unable to leave it in our pursuit of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We each have a particular racial and cultural identity that is brought to the foot of the cross, but we are not accepted by God based on these different identities. Rather, we are accepted through grace and faith in Jesus Christ. We are not asked to deny our racial and cultural differences, but to become new creatures in what Volf calls our new universality."
(https://spu.edu/depts/uc/response/summer2k3/embrace.html#:~:text=Volf%20challenges%20his%20readers%20to,is%20realized%20in%20adversarial%20relationships.)
Given Volf's experience in communist Yugoslavia, I do not find it surprising that he advances the notion we all have a cultural identity, and we need to allow that to be a part of who we are while at the same time working to spread the gospel to those who are different than we are.
Food For Thought...
'
I'd be curious to read the article you mentioned. I wonder how similar the arguments made are to those who argue that white parents shouldn't adopt non-white children. Maybe an aside, but it reminded me of He Has Your Eyes (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5256722/). Good movie! But I digress...
One thing that I even now continue to wrestle with is how I as a white pastor in a predominantly AA community by my mere presence may have unwittingly contributed to the gentrification of that neighborhood. Food for thought...
But to those we interacted and ministered alongside of, all we received was love. Why? I hope because we did our best to humbly listen, learn, and love them. Posture is everything.
And btw, you actually have grass! We didn't have that in Philly! :)
Quick thought on gentrification: Did you unwittingly contribute to it? Of course you did. But the powers behind gentrification are too big to be stopped. They can be slowed by people who care and invest in the neighborhood. As I tell my neighbors often, “Someone was going to move in to this neighborhood. Better someone that gives a damn.”
Ha, that’s fair. 😂