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.