The Project on Lived Theology
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The Lived Theology and Community Building Workgroup

group all together

Meeting Highlights

Fourth Meeting
Charlottesville, VA
October 12-14, 2001

Narrative

The weekend began on Friday morning, October 12, with a presentation by Project director, Charles Marsh entitled, "Theology and Social Movements: Karl Barth on God's Revolution." Taking as his lead Timothy Gorringe's recent book, Karl Barth: Against Hegemony, Marsh gave an account of the implications of Barth's theology for the church's social existence and for the work of lived theology. He offered a historical sketch of Barth's pilgrimage from socialism to his discovery of "God's revolution" "Our concern is God," Barth wrote in 1919, "the movement originating in God, the motion which he lends us--and it is not religion." The Spirit "does not knock at the hard shell of politics. It bursts it from inside!"

Marsh suggested that, following Barth, the task of "lived theology" might be considered that of a probing and careful narration of life inside the "the movement of God" in the world. Lived theology is what you experience, see, and hear in the free and miraculous spaces of "God's revolution"--a new world that creates rather than diminishes human solidarity, intensifies rather than weakens the protest against cruelty and invigorates campaigns or movements for human flourishing. Its task is a difficult one, for it must avoid making any particular social movement a theological theme in itself, and in each instance instead locates any given social movement in the panoramic sweep of God's movement into time and history in Jesus Christ-which, as Barth says, "cuts through all other movements for human flourishing and social healing "as their hidden sense and motor, the movement of God's history." To understand theologically, to do theology, means, "to take the whole situation upon us in the fear of God, and in the fear of God to enter into the movement of the era. To understand means to be given in order to give."

two men discussing issuesNext, workgroup member, Manual Vasquez, professor of religion at the University of Florida, delivered an extremely helpful paper on globalization and urban religion entitled, "Saving Souls Transnationally: Pentecostalism and Gangs in El Salvador and the United States." Vasquez compared and contrasted the ways in which gangs and Pentecostal churches helped young Salvadorans and urban youth in Los Angeles to respond to dislocation resulting from war, migration and economic conflict. Vasquez claimed that gangs provide a social context "where the self can be recentered in an intimate setting, where loyalty and collective identity are central". However, at the same time, evangelical Protestantism and Pentecostalism represent "an alternative space" to gangs, which offers a more embracing "hermeneutics of movement", of exile and migration. "For many of these migrants, pilgrimages of the soul framed by narratives of exile, diaspora and captivity, of exodus and the search for the promised land, or of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus become the interpretive lenses through their transnational migration is understood." The task of lived theology, said Vasquez, is to see these religious narratives with greater clarity and to understand the particular allure of Pentecostal conversion to gang members beyond functional descriptions of religious transformation.

Following lunch on Friday, Christine Pohl led a discussion of her book in progress on community building, which she considers to be an amplification of her wonderful book on Christian hospitality, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition. Hospitality as a moral practice ingredient to theological life disappeared in the eighteenth century, Pohl explained. In this manner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together offers a rare account of Protestant theological community in the modern age. Hospitality is a practice central to community building; indeed the practice of "hospitality to strangers" would have little meaning outside of community. Pohl discussed a variety of practices that either make or break community including: promise keeping and betrayal, gratitude and entitlement, hospitality and hostility; and truth-telling and deception. Hospitality needs to be appreciated as a habit of grace. As any Christian worker knows, the first blush of community building often brings an exhilaration that obscures a harder truth: "A life of hospitality is much less about dramatic gestures than it is about steady work--faithful labor that is undergirded by prayer and sustained by grace."

On Saturday morning, the group gathered in Pavilion VIII on the Lawn. Mark Gornik, co-director of the group and founder of City Seminary in New York, spoke directly to the matter of a theological narrative of the city. Drawing from his fifteen years of living and pastoring in the west Baltimore neighborhood of Sandtown, Gornik discussed the necessity of a historical sensibility and sense of analytical honesty in the church's attempt to understand and address the concerns of inner city America. An appreciation of the history of a neighborhood such Sandtown-Winchester helps church people rediscover the value of theological categories such as creation, fall, and redemption.

Gornik spoke with particular passion on the theme of exclusion, which in practice can foster false narratives of human sociality. An exposure of these false narratives and an embodiment of a Biblical counter-narrative of peace and plenty can restore hope to the lives of the underprivileged and prophetically propel the state towards a more humane set of social practices. "For the apostle Paul, the basis of a new community is not established by achievement, status, efficiency or might, but by grace through the death of Christ. This is made clear in Ephesians 2:8-9, where we read, 'For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God-not by works so that no one can boast' (cf. 2:10, 2:5; Phil. 3:9; cf. Rom. 1:17; Gal. 2:16). While the message of the world is that all who dwell in the inner city are unworthy, unclean, unneeded, the gospel is a message of acceptance based not on 'works of law', social status, or position, but divine mercy and love. In profoundly redemptive ways, the grace of the cross is deconstructive of a world based on such markersŠ.Grace deconstructs the hierarchies of status and position that have destroyed not only self-worth and identity, but also community."

lively discussionNext, Amy Sherman, Senior Fellow at the Welfare Policy Center, Hudson Institute and Urban Ministries Advisor at Trinity Presbyterian Church, spoke on a theology of community building as based on her work as President of Abundant Life Ministries in Charlottesville, located in a low-income neighborhood and housing project called Prospect. Seventy percent of the residents of the community are "working poor"; the rest are unemployed. Eighty-nine percent of the population is African America and ten percent is Hispanic; the remaining one percent is white. Single mothers who work numerous jobs to make ends meet raise most of the children in the Prospect neighborhood. The result is social immobility and, as one of the Project's student volunteers wrote, "the haunting reality of second and third generations still renting from what was intended to be transitional housing."

Dr. Sherman discussed Abundant Life's mission, philosophy of ministry, relationship to the church, programs and strengths and challenges. She cast her work and vision in terms of a theology of the Kingdom. "The Church and its ministries should be understood as offering foretastes of the Kingdom of God. We know the content of that Kingdom-peace, safety, security, belonging, sufficiency, meaning, wholeness, community, unity amidst diversity, absence of suffering." Dr. Sherman presented a compelling and richly detailed description of "God's pattern for community renewal," and allowed that one of the biggest challenges of Christians involved in ministry to the poor is that of being able to celebrate upward mobility while preaching against the dangers of Mammon. She also spoke briefly of her work as a national spokesperson for President Bush's faith-based initiatives and a much-in-demand consultant on Charitable Choice.

Following Sherman's presentation, the workgroup traveled to the Blue Ridge Commons Apartment complex and met with Rydell Payne, Director of Abundant Life, and community representatives and volunteers at the ministry. More than fifty undergraduate students serve in various capacities at Abundant Life in the course of the school year. Mr. Payne asked the members of the workgroup to assess the current dilemmas facing the ministry and to offer insight based upon their own research and their experiences as a workgroup.

On Sunday morning, the workgroup rolled up its sleeves and spent two hours in a planning session for the Conference on Lived Theology to be held in Charlottesville in June 2003.

Readings

  • Gorringe, Timothy J. Karl Barth: Against Hegemony (Christian Theology in Context). New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Perkins, John. Let Justice Roll Down. Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1976.
  • Pohl, Christine D. Making Room; Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999.
  • Sherman, Amy L. Restorers of Hope; Reaching the Poor in Your Community with Church-Based Ministries that Work. Wheaton: Crossway, 1997.

Papers/Presentations