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.”