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The Lived Theology and Race Workgroup

participants meeting

Meeting Highlights

Third Meeting
San Francisco, CA
August 3-5, 2001

Narrative

The purpose of the San Francisco meeting was to move our collaborative work beyond the simplistic black-white divide to include Asian American, Latino and other ethnicities illustrative of a changing American racial landscape. Our intention was also to use Christian community initiatives in San Francisco and Oakland as a laboratory for that work. Workgroup member, Timothy Tseng, a Chinese American evangelical who teaches American Religious History at the American Baptist Seminary of the West, hosted the group and organized the weekend's events. The group lodged at the Berkeley Faculty Club and held its Friday meetings in the lovely administrative building of the American Baptist Seminary, located just across from famous People's Park.

Susan Glisson, Assistant Professor in Southern Studies and Interim Director of the Institute on Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi and Ellen Armour, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, Rhodes College, made presentations on Friday.

Dr. Glisson delivered a paper entitled, "'Neither Bedecked Nor Bebosomed': Lucy Mason, Ella Baker and Women's Leadership," and offered an extremely helpful analysis of two Christian social activists in the fifties and sixties and their religious and theological influences. These women organizers "redefined success as the development of healthy human relationships, rather than number of votes received or funds raised or legislation passed; in short, they redefined freedom."

Professor Ellen Armour followed Glisson with an excursion into the complicated terrain of contemporary race theory. Armour's recent book, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology and the Problem of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender, attempts to employ a variety of theoretical discourses of racial difference and perception to illustrate the fluid and non-essential character of racial identity. In her presentation, Armour further explored ways in which race theory might inform and supplement religious communities which seek to overcome racial division and a fractured civic good.

participants in a church On Saturday the group departed Berkeley early to begin what turned out to be one of the most productive days of site visits in the Project's work to date. Professor Tseng, who has conducted extensive research on Chinese-American Christians in the Bay Area, provided ongoing commentary as we drove toward Chinatown. There the group met with Reverend Don Ng in the sanctuary of the First Chinese Baptist Church for two hours, hearing his probing reflections on the theological and strategic complexities of maintaining a monoracial congregation in a changing urban neighborhood and in view of generational differences on the importance of congregational homogeneity. In the opinion of some group members, the church's Protestant liberal identity contributes to its racial insularity insofar as little concern is shown toward traditional Baptist notions of personal conversion and "personal relationship with Jesus Christ", with the result that class and race become by default the source of congregational coherence. Although the former notions have certainly been subject to racial distortions in various historical contexts, the evangelical impulse leads inevitably toward some form of multiracialism-even if that form appears patronizing or hierarchical.

Following the conversation with Reverend Ng, the group hiked a couple of dozen blocks uphill to visit the historic Church of All Nations, founded by the great African American theologian and preacher, Howard Thurman. We were greeted by the current pastor, Reverend Dorsey Blake, and given a tour of the modest chapel and undercroft. The visit to the Church of All Nations was a study of contrasts after our meeting at First Chinese Baptist Church; the former was founded as an intentionally multiracial congregation under the leadership of Dr. Thurman's christomorphic mysticism and has held on tight to its multicultural character while steadily weakening its Christian identity. The result is a congregation of greatly diminished number and financial support which on any give Sunday might feature a sermon by a transgendered convert to a native American religion, an hour of Zen Buddhist meditation, or an interfaith tribute to Howard Thurman.

three participants After lunch the group traveled across the bay to the New Hope Covenant Church and Oak Park Apartments in inner city Oakland and met in the church basement with Dr. Russell Jeung, who has founded a community-building ministry in the housing project, where he lives in a one room apartment.

The Oak Park story is one for the books. Russell Jeung is a third-generation Chinese America with two degrees in sociology from Stanford and a Ph.D. from California-Berkeley. Jeung declined numerous job offers at prestigious universities to move into a housing project, populated by Cambodian and Bosnian refugees, to "share the love of Jesus" and to organize for power.

"If you enter Oak Park apartments," he explained, "you'd immediately feel like you're in a developing country. The smells of Cambodian soups waft through the air. Latino women hand their laundry on lines hung between trees as cart vendors hawk tamales and ice cream. Families with three to nine kids live in one bedroom apartments which all border a dirt courtyard. There, dozens of barefoot brown kids, like flocks of little clocks, skirt to and fro. Actual chicks also wander the courtyard, as well as assorted little pets. This is the place where God has led nine yuppies, all college-educated, to follow in Jesus' footsteps."

Into this forgotten and hopeless place, a group of college-educated Christians moved "to do incarnational ministry". They live in the same conditions as their neighbors and experience the hardships of racism, poverty, and neighborhood violence. For the last decade, members of New Hope Covenant Church have become family with others at the Oak Park Apartments. As a result, the church has established several programs at the request of the families, including weekly tutoring, ESL classes, and discipleship groups. Church members also organized a tenant lawsuit involving 200 of the tenants and 80% of the families. After a four-year struggle, the Oak Park tenants won a landmark housing lawsuit that will enable them to convert the complex to permanent, affordable housing. The "Christians" have since donated their lawsuit funds to purchase a home in front of Oak Park apartments to build a preschool. (Jeung uses the word "Christian" in a way that somehow restores to the appellation a striking sense of its easily obscured vitality and peculiarity.)

On Sunday morning, Michael Cartwright delivered a paper entitled, "Wrestling with Scripture: Can Euro-American Christians and African-American Christians Learn and Read Scripture Together?" and led the group in a discussion of the weekend.

The conclusion of Cartwright's fine presentation might well be a précis of the group's best intentions:

The task of racial reconciliation, like the work of discernment, is an ongoing struggle that must be engaged in all places and in every generation. We can never presume that we have exhausted the riches of Scripture, because we have never read it fully. And that is another way of saying that this side of the new Jerusalem all our readings of Scripture are at best penultimate. That is to say, we know now in part (I Cor. 13:10), even with respect to Scripture, but we will read the text better when we read it in communion with one another as a witness to the capacity of the gospel to reconcile us. I do not believe that we will ever come to the point when we will stop wrestling with Scripture. To do so would be to suggest that we have domesticated Scripture, at which point it no longer comes to us as a Word outside ourselves but only a word that we have captured within one or another ideology. To stop wrestling with Scripture is to forget what it means to read Scripture over against ourselves. To do so would be to give up on our ongoing struggle with the principalities and powers of this dark age and thereby forsake our proper vocation as ambassadors-royal servants-of the God in whom reconciliation was first embodied in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Readings

  • Armour, Ellen T. Deconstruction, Feminist Theology and the Problem of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
  • Cartwright, Michael G. "Wrestling with Scripture: Can Euro-American Christians and African­American Christians Learn and Read Scripture Together?", The Gospel in Black and White: Theological resources for racial reconciliation. Ed. Dennis L. Okholm. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997.

Papers/Presentations