Hoop Roots and The Christian Imagination

This post is inspired by the introduction of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, by Willie James Jennings. You can read it at the link above.

In the parking lot of First Christian Reformed Church, the post of an old basketball hoop watches the seasons come and go. The hoop was taken down several years ago because it was on the boundary of several gang territories, and wasn’t serving the peace of the neighborhood.  Now, the post is regularly bumped into by the cars of Calvin College students living in First CRC’s old parsonage.

Many years ago, before the hoop was taken down, a young African American boy named Willie Jennings played basketball in the First CRC parking lot. He lived just down the road on Franklin Street. He attended New Hope Baptist Church and spent time helping his mother garden in his back yard. Later, he grew up to attend Calvin College—the college started by the CRC denomination—and go on to become a theologian at Duke and then Yale.

As a theologian and professor, Dr. Willie Jennings wrote a book titled The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. The introduction of the book tells a story of his childhood, including how he laid his “hoop roots” in the parking lot of First CRC. He begins by describing his mother and father and their intimate connection with Jesus.

“The stories of Jesus and Israel were so tightly woven into the stories my parents told of themselves, their lives in the South and in the North and then with their youngest children in the North, that it took me years to separate the biblical figures from extended family members, biblical sinners from the sinners all around us, and biblical places of pain from their places of pain. I was never able to separate biblical hopes from their real hopes.” (Jennings 2)

One day as he was gardening with his mother in their back yard, two men from First CRC approached them up their gravel driveway. His mother instinctively stood in-between him and the strangers. The older man began talking about the church, its programs, and their hopes for the neighborhood. The younger man got tired of the other talking and bent down to try to talk to the future Dr. Jennings, asking him if he liked school. The whole experience made the future Dr. Jennings very uncomfortable. He thought it very strange that they never asked if his mother was Christian or already had a church. The rest of his book traces key theological figures in colonial history to try to understand why the missionaries from First CRC did not know them—fellow Christians who lived down the street and whose children played in the church parking lot. You can read the full description of the interaction in the introduction here: The Christian Imagination

If you don’t have time for that, I want you to at least read the point Jennings is trying to make with this story. He is not condemning First CRC in particular but just trying to understand why that interaction was so awkward and why Christians at First CRC didn’t know the black Christians of the neighborhood. He writes,

“I am not asking why they weren’t familiar with us, and I am certainly not asking about the logistics of their mission operations. The foreignness and formality of their speech in our backyard signaled a wider and deeper order of not knowing, of not sensing, of not imagining…. In the small space of a backyard I witnessed a Christianity familiar to most of us, enclosed in racial and cultural difference, inconsequentially related to its geography, often imaginatively detached from its surroundings of both people and places, but one yet bound to compelling gestures of connection, belonging, and invitation.” (Jennings 4)

Jennings sees the branch of something good and beautiful in the actions of the two men from First CRC, something rooted in what it means to be Christian. He sees the Christian social imagination, if it can be healed to transcend racial and cultural difference and commit itself to a geographic area and place, as hope for a disconnected world.

“There is within Christianity a breathtakingly powerful way to imagine and enact the social, to imagine and enact connection and belonging. I could sense that power not only in the courageous yet wooden display of those neighborhood missionaries but also in the beauty and ease of my mother as she worked the ground, the earth.” (Jennings 4)

If you have been reading the other posts, notice the connections to the God Dance. Our identity is formed in God who draws us into community and connection with the people of God in the place that we find ourselves. Jennings argues later in the book that our identity must be formed more powerfully by our identity in Christ and the places that we are in than by our race and culture. We cannot be connected in the abstract, but must root ourselves in a real place just as Christ became flesh and blood in Bethlehem. 

And what if our identity in Christ rooted in our relationships with the particular people of a particular place was more powerful in shaping our fellowship than where we make money or the color of our skin? Maybe it's time we laid our roots together in a particular soil and see what grows come springtime. 

Jennings, Willie James. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. Ann Arbor, Sheridan, 2010.

The God Dance: Community Development

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." --Martin Luther King Jr.  

The effort to eliminate poverty from the globe grew out of the post-World War II desire to re-build the world. Large amounts of money were successfully invested in Europe to return countries to the path of booming industrial progress. As the United States and Russia battled for influence around the world, they sought to apply the same economic principles to the so-called “Third World.”  The efforts did not work as well as anyone intended, forcing development workers to consider more than pure economics as the solution to global poverty. Issues of agency, empowerment, local ownership, conflict resolution, environment, politics, culture, and power dynamics all made community development more complicated. A pure economic logic collided with realities of the human heart as well as cultural and ecological realities.

Community Development, like ecology, economy, and theology, is a truth seeking discipline which attempts to encompass the totality. When we begin seeking to eliminate poverty, we begin pulling on a thread connected to everything. We are confronted with social realities, ecological networks, political systems, available technologies, geography, and spiritual powers. All of these are part of the one world that God made--a part of the same cosmos.

To address the economic issue of poverty, these other issues have to be understood and addressed as part of a unified whole. Thoughtful community development practitioners are forced to ask the question, “Community Development towards what?” What does a world without poverty look like? When given the resources to build their own world, peoples around the world have not always wanted to answer these questions in the same way the USA has: to build a liberal democracy, an industrial society, and a free market system. The American answer to a fundamental question of Community Development—“What is a good life and what is keeping people from it?”—was not agreed upon by everyone. Not everyone has been dreaming the American Dream, but we offered lots of money and military support if they would. We offered military resistance if they didn’t.

The American Dream is an individualized answer to the question, “Community Development towards what?” A world without poverty looks like a self-reliant and independent nuclear family who own their home with a white picket fence. Financial security and access to material goods has been the American answer to the question, “What is a good life?” And to the question, “What is keeping people from it?” we often say lack of investment, lack of hard work, and lack of American values.

If we truly empowered local community members to be the agents of their own change and invited ownership into the processes of change, the residents of South Hill may dream the dream we have been told to dream. We would continue to seek to build spaces of ownership and effective control where we could operate without having to be dependent on anyone. I often run into neighbors who can’t stand those people who throw trash everywhere, those people who won’t get to work and find a job, those kids who just hang around. Those people are always the problem. But if Community Development is a truth-seeking discipline, is the American Dream really true? Are we really developing towards a community of autonomous, secure individuals? Or have we been caught up in a lie about what is the good life?

The American Dream contains several inherent contradictions that force us to seek a different answer to the question of what we are developing our communities towards. If we claim that we own our own land and have achieved independence from our own hard work, where did the land come from? Our ancestors took it, because they could, and our government broke promises to Native Americans to protect the self-interest of its citizens. And was it all our own hard work, or was much of the wealth the result of indentured servitude and slavery? Was our wealth the result of the government giving your parents or grandparents a free education after World War II? And of all the material abundance we now enjoy, what of it has really been the work of our hands? Was it made by factory laborers in China or by immigrant laborers in California? Is the metal in our cell phones from the wars of the Congo and our chocolate from child slaves in West Africa? Is our money that good, that it could justify these things? If we are happy, is it really because we have achieved everything by ourselves? 

This is what Bob Dylan, recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for literature, has to say about all of this: 

The wealth of the American Dream has failed to account for its debt in the bank of justice. I do not advocate the bringing about of this justice on others. Only God can do that, and he will. I do advocate for recognizing that nothing we own is ours and that we are caught up together in more ways than we can understand—economically, ecologically, socially, and spiritually. None of these are separate. If we believe that everything is a gift made in the pattern of a self-giving creator--glorified by God to give glory back to God--we are free to make our part of the story right. We can examine the truths of what got us to where we are, and apologize to those we have wronged. We can seek to understand how we participate in a single fabric and what is a good life in which we all belong.

If we seek a world in which no one is poor, we must first acknowledge that we may be part of the problem. And if we know grace, we don’t need to fear the truth. If we claim to know the Gospel, we know that repentance is the first step. It may not be that we have excluded the poor from the world of wealth, but that our individualized vision of the good life has excluded us from the beloved community. As Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

The God Dance: Economy

Like ecology and theology, economy is a word that attempts to represent the totality—if we let it. The economy focuses on money and through the lens of money sees the whole world. In economic terms, something is significant when it has a price tag. More and more, our relationship with money is the means by which we interact with other people and with our environment. Just as seeking to understand ecology reveals our participation in the cosmos, seeking to understand our global and local economy reveals how we relate to one another and to the environment. The economy is a merely a part of the environment and another step in the God-Dance.

The divine community described in the last post can also be thought of as a divine economy, in which all things of value are a gift and each gift multiplies in giving. Out of God’s creation, we draw what we need for food, shelter, and living as a gift. The modern economic narrative claims that what we draw out of the land is the right of the owner, but this has never been the case. If we participate in the divine economy, we take from the land as a gift and we re-create what we take for the benefit of others and for the land itself. In short, we glorify God.

When we spend our money in a thriving local economy, every dollar spent multiplies. If I decide to sell the radishes I planted in my new garden box and earn 2$, I have 2$ of income. If I use those same dollars to pay my neighbor for moving the dirt (which we did), my neighbor has 2$ of income. If he gets a haircut with a local barber and the barber buys food from the local corner store, both the barber and the shopkeeper have 2$ of income. This can continue until the money ends up in the bank or is spent outside the neighborhood. If the money circulates 10 times, the 2$ that my radishes earned do 20$ of work. We can garden the land to make it richer and spend the money to make our neighbors richer. When money serves relationships among people and the land, the economy takes its place within the God-Dance. 

In an urban neighborhood like South Hills, money flows in through wages and social services and flows almost immediately out to suburban businesses. The monetary value coming in presumably comes from somewhere--some environmental resource or someone's labor. The money going out is invested in other places. According to cridata.org, while residents of the South Hill neighborhood spent $4,525,145 in 2014, businesses in the neighborhood only sold $209, 647 worth of goods and services. These are the lowest of any neighborhood in the city, largely because of its size, but it is also the lowest ratio in the city of sales fulfilled by resident purchase. Only 4.63% of the money residents are spending in South Hill actually goes to local businesses on Franklin Street. This means that only 4.63% of my 2$ or only 4 cents out of every dollar stays in the neighborhood. As 95% of money spent in South Hill is spent outside the area, the multiplier effect goes to places such as the mall or big box stores or car dealerships.  This is evident merely looking at the landscape—the quality and size of the buildings and space businesses in the suburbs can afford compared to an urban area. 

Abandoned home in 2013, before it was fixed up
and re-valued by the market. 

In 2013, 54.1% of people in South Hill were below the poverty level, the highest percentage of any neighborhood in Grand Rapids (also one of the smallest neighborhoods in Grand Rapids). Though we are in need of each other, we could provide for each other. People who are labeled poor by statistics have talents and abilities, and many of them are running small businesses or working odd jobs. If we spent our money to value our neighbor’s gifts rather than our corporation’s products, perhaps we could begin to rebuild trust in one another and participate in a place in which we all belong.

Of course, getting to know one another and what each person has to offer takes time and context—board game nights, potlucks, and shopping locally. Getting to know the ecology in which we participate and what this land and this place offer freely takes time as well. We do not need to be disheartened that the neighborhood is not what we want it to be, but can celebrate what it already is. If money passes over this place, perhaps that is because we have failed to see what is valuable here and failed to invest in what is good. Participating in the God-Dance also involves participating in the pattern of Jesus Christ, facing rejection and humiliation with confidence in resurrection. But every part of this pattern is another step. The invitation to participate, wherever you are, is open.

The God Dance: Theology

Perichoresis by Peter Cahill

At the end of the last post, I asked who could bring about a spiritual and cultural transformation necessary to address our environmental crisis rooted in our greed, apathy, and selfishness, and I promised a Christian response. As we think about South Hills and seeking a commonly shared story for so many diverse people to identify this place as home, we have no easy answers.

Great love is the only force that can overcome greed, apathy, selfishness—those human traits that cause ecological destruction and divide ‘us’ into ‘us and them.’ Experiencing love invariably changes us, especially a love which willingly sacrifices and suffers. Great love willing to suffer is the only force which can re-unite us and transform our greed into generosity, our apathy to compassion, and our selfishness into selflessness.

There are no short cuts. There is no systemic solution to the problem of the human heart. Great love and suffering is the only way, so who can love enough and suffer enough for us to transform our spiritual and cultural situation? Only Jesus can.

We can only participate in the love revolution Jesus started 2000 years ago, first letting Jesus transform our own hearts. We are invited into the social order held not by power and fear but by love, servanthood, and sacrifice. We are invited into the kingdom of God, to participate in what God has been up to before the world began.

What does this look like? Jesus prayed this prayer as he ate with his disciples for the last time, before he was betrayed to his death.

After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed:

“Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. ² For you granted him authority over all people that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him. ³ Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. ⁴ I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. ⁵ And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began. (John 17:1-5)

My friend Peter sketched the painting above while learning about the Trinity and Perichoresis—the theological concepts that this passage suggests.  Perichoresis refers to the way in which the members of the Trinity relate to one another, constantly making space for one another in service and praise. Perichoresis suggests an eternal God-Dance in which members of the Trinity continually love one another. Jesus shows how this love involves willingly giving up power and suffering rejection and even death. As I study South Hills and consider the ecology, the economy, and the development efforts in this place, I have these images in my mind about who God is. He is a diverse unity, three in one, a united community.

Such a concept of God has big implications for how we relate to one another and the world. Jesus explains it in his prayer. God the Father glorifies the Son and the Son glorifies the Father. They have what we refer to in Christian ABCD parlance as Dignified Interdependence. Both receive from one another and are dependent on one another. Both give to one another. In this relationship, Jesus obeys the Father and the Father honors Jesus. The three persons of God celebrate one another, and because they are so busy celebrating each other, there is no room for fear or shame or apathy in God. Instead, the celebration flows over. Out of that abundant love, God created the cosmos.

Take a moment to look outside at your small corner of this grand work of delight, and you will see what kind of God we serve. The ecological patterns, the geological foundations, and the spinning of the cosmic spheres speak back the celebration with which they were made.

God also created us as he created the cosmos, glorifying us so that we could glorify God. He made us as part of the God Dance, participants in a community of trust and mutual celebration. Our calling as created beings is to play our part in this cosmic love movement, to be a people who give glory back to God in who we are.

You may also notice out the window some destruction: an excessive amount of concrete and asphalt, road kill, a big box store, or some other sign that doesn’t seem to fit a universal pattern of sacrificial love.

Unfortunately, we stepped out and continue to step out of this community of trust. God had the knowledge of good and evil covered, but we still wanted it for ourselves—to be the judges of right and wrong. We take the gifts that God has given us and try to store them up and to hoard them. We fail to give glory back to God. We are afraid that he will stop giving. We are afraid of each other. We are afraid of dying.

The reality is that people have hurt us, and we have experienced the need to defend ourselves. Often people in the church and people closest to us hurt us the most. Or perhaps it is those people destroying the environment with their greed and apathy. Perhaps it is those racists or those gentrifiers. Perhaps it is those Muslims or those rich people. Or perhaps it is those immoral poor people. Perhaps it is everyone else’s fault that this world is so dangerous, so we keep others out of our lives and live out our faith alone.

We even say that with all this hurt and suffering in the world, perhaps it is God’s fault. Many people judge God, punishing him with exile from our little lives. Having exiled God, we find ourselves alone. We may either feel that we have everything together by ourselves or reality confronts us with a strong sense of an abyss.

In our pride, our apathy, our greed, and our shame, we have broken the harmony of God’s world.  The result is our own isolation. The ecological destruction and economic inequality are physical manifestations of our spiritual condition.

God has every right to leave us there, destitute. But what does our maker do? He gives to us again even in the face of our hostility. He loved us so much that he became one of us and accepted our punishment, letting us drag him out of the city of peace to crucify him for threatening our sense of order and our own plan for salvation. He lets us do this again and again, but death cannot hold God.

By accepting our punishment, Jesus welcomes us back into the divine community and reconnects us to the God-Dance. His unearned suffering is redemptive, by which I mean, pride quickly crumbles before someone willingly dying for you. We can no longer be apathetic, but when we see how much has been given, we care very much. We no longer need to keep so much for ourselves. Where we have condemned ourselves, we see that God himself does not condemn us but rather would die for us. We are reconciled to God and to the whole God-Dance of loving, giving, and receiving.

This is good news, and because of it, we are free to love and to welcome others as God loved and welcomed us. We know we can trust God, so we can risk the suffering that comes along with love. If we allow Jesus to change us to look more like him, this should have social, ecological, economic, and geographical implications as he redraws the dividing lines. As we seek to get to know Jesus and follow him in South Hills, these are the implications we are seeking to understand so that God's will might be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Let’s refer back to the first story I told when I started talking about participation and the God-Dance. A seminary student, an ex-felon, and a community connector enjoyed a fellowship to create a garden. We experienced a literally creative fellowship of different people, and this may be the most important implication about who God is and what he has done for us. No matter what social systems or ecological realities come and go, no matter what powers oppress or disasters fall, we are invited to participate in a communion which continually creates and celebrates to give glory back to God. Jesus said that eternal life is in knowing him, and in knowing him, we are joined to a communion stronger than death. 

The distant, judgmental God becomes our father. The convicted God-man becomes a brother. The imagined Spirit becomes a felt presence. We participate. 

Jesus finished his prayer like this:

²⁰ “My prayer is not for [my disciples] alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, ²¹ that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. ²² I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— ²³ I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
²⁴ “Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

²⁵ “Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. ²⁶ I have made you^[e] known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.” (John 17: 20-26)