Institution Racism?

I've been on the blah... tout for this past week, it's been superb. Really good to connect with people and be able to share the story of Sanctus1 and to offer some theological reflections on it. At the end of each day we've been taking questions and the question that we've had each day is 'Is this just a movement for white, middle class people?' There is deep validity within this question, my response is to say that we need to ask the question to the wider church as well as the emerging one and then to comment that Sanctus1 reflects the place in which it is situated...However, I'm becoming more and more uncomfortable with my answer.

One of the nine practices that Ryan mentions in the book emerging churches is being welcoming. I think that this is where the challenge lies for emerging churches - yes, we are welcoming on the individual level, when a new person comes along we give them coffee, muffins, chat with them etc. However, I am wondering whether as an institution there are patterns and practices that make it harder for people who are 'not-like-me' to access the emerging church. In short has the emerging church unintentionally become institutionally racist? For example Is the music and film that we use sourced from a diversity of ethic and cultural backgrounds? If not then it will favour one ethnicity above another and these practices can exclude.

I'm pondering this one as I'm not sure - institutional racism maybe putting it too strongly, but i think that we need to reflect on our patterns and practices and ask the question corporately and individually.

Technorati Tags: emerging church

Comments

[Steve Litchfield]

I was at the first Blah day in Bristol along with a few other guys from Swindon. Really enjoyed it, especially the stories you, Paul and Karen brought. Thanks.

I think it is significant that welcome and generosity are both presented as distinctive values in the Emerging Churches book. But surely an authentic, incarnated community/church has to represent one main 'culture' otherwise it develops a 'church' identity that over time begins to be separate and removed from those a round it? This is the situation of many established churches today.

If the emerging church movement has geniunely missional DNA, some individuals and groups within it will intentionally identify with others outside their culture and start in incarnate the gospel there too.

Does your concern with the ethnic mix of music and film you use at Sanctus 1 make sense because of the existing diversity of the city centre? If so, the question becomes specifically about the context of your (emerging) church or community, rather than a general one?

[Ben Edson]

Hi Steve, thanks for teh comments.

My concerns are not specifically to do with Sanctus1 but the emerging church generally. I do not know of any emerging churches that work indigeniously within the black community and I only know of Pall Singh working in the asian community.

I think that there maybe practices and structures in the emerging church that make it harder for leaders from ethnic groups to grow into leadership...maybe...

[Michael Hamblin]

My thoughts.

First, institutional racism is a loaded term that is emotion laden, unclear, and more often a rhetorical buzzword than anything. It'd be better to unpack the meanings and discuss them individually.

With that said, is the emerging church too racially and culturally homogeneous? Well, in some ways we could say that the emerging church is trying to define its own culture, so any culture that is brought in will be redefined or reinterpreted. Racially speaking, I think that there are a lot of white males and not much racial diversity, but in some ways this is more cultural than racial. A subculture tends to attract culturally similar people, so it should surprise us that the emerging church looks a lot like the old culture in many respects.

In the United States in particular, racial history is complicated by institutional forms of racism - namely the institution of racial slavery, segregation, and laws that permitted if not actually enforced racial stereotypes and injustice toward a particular race of people. We should note that this caused a particular subculture to develop that refused to be part of the American melting-pot. African Americans have defined themselves by the struggle against the culture imposed on them from the dominant culture that was actively imposing its own identity on the sub-culture. In effect, African Americans are their own culture, with significant differences from the otherwise dominant culture.

While the emerging church is just now responding to post-modernism, the African American community is almost the enthymatic case of post-modernism in culture, given the kinds of changes that the community has experienced since the 1970s. They won their freedom from institutionalized racism, and began looking for their roots and heritage, changed their clothing styles, learned African dialects, instituted new holidays and festivals, and even changed their religion in an attempt to identify more closely with their African heritage. The side effect, of this, is that visitors from Africa to the United States shake their heads when they see what amounts to mangled attempts to reinstitute and borrow haphazardly aspects of African culture while remaining, in the African sense, a totally American culture divorced from African concerns.

In effect, the so called black/white divide is not so much a racial division, as a cultural division. There are white people who have crossed over successfully into the African American community and identify with their culture. However, there are many black people who have left the African American community and define themselves by the dominant culture, and these people are often seen by the African American community as traitors to their culture, race, heritage, and identity, since all these concepts are conflated as a single understanding. As a result, there is not as much room within the African American community for counter-cultural thinking, as thinking counter-culturally is consider subversive of the values of the community, diluting the identity of the community, and even capitulation to what is still seen as the dominant white culture that is imposed upon them.

It shouldn't be surprising then that the emerging church, in reflecting its own culture, is not attractive to African Americans whose self-identity is tied in with their own culture rather than the larger U.S. culture.

All of this is a bit interesting to me, since I've never particularly identified with the culture of the United States, and have always felt the need to stand a step apart from it rather than with both feet immersed in it. Emerging folks have criticized me because I am not willing to embrace culture wholeheartedly - to jump in with both feet. However, the same could be said with the African American community, in that I have not jumped into their community with both feet either. My concern with emerging folks is that they don't seem to understand the African American community as a particular sub-culture, and in the more general sense tend to see all post-modern culture as a unified amalgum rather than as a large number fragmented and fractured sub-cultures each with their own particular missional needs. Missional approaches that work for a predominantly white post-modern sub-culture in a particular city in particular districts are great, but may not work when applied to other sub-cultures, such as the African American community, or on a University campus several states away. Too often I have seen people borrow ideas from one particularly successful post-modern ministry, apply them in the local setting without adequate contextualization, and then scratch their heads and give up on post-modern ministry when it "doesn't work". Meanwhile, trying to pin "institutional racism" on the emerging church seems absurd if for no other reason than that the emerging church is so adverse to institutionalism that it is basically impossible to make such an accusation stick.

I'm hoping to post more on my blog at some point on the African American sub-culture and how Evangelicals can more effectively engage in cross-cultural ministry there. Andre Delay also has much to say on this subject from a slightly different cultural perspective.

[Paul Fromont]

Ben, a thoughtful post. Thanks.

I wonder about the relationship between "diversity" and "inauthencity" - when do we lose connection with the realities of our own uniqueness; lose our depth of self & identity; and give ourselves over to the unreal and the illusion that "I" can become all things to all people?

Steve Collins makes a related point (I think)...

I wonder if the best that we can do is remain open to the activity of God/Spirit; deeply trustful and honestly hospitable to "what" and "who" might blow in on the wind of the Spirit (thinking here of the movie "Chocolat"); open to the ways in which we might be blown on that same wind...

Hope the houseshift goes well.

Paul

[Richard Sudworth]

As you know Ben, I feel strongly that your question is an important question that needs to be regularly raised within the emerging church. It is a question that has especial validity because, whether we like it or not, the emerging church is a sector of the national and global church of privilege. That is why the kneejerk response of "well little parishes full of white old dears are monochrome aren't they?" is inadequate. Ours is the church of energy, skills, dynamism, technology....The fear that we act counter to our authenticity is surely to be overriden by our fear that we act counter to the gospel, which has to move out, intentionally and deliberately, to the marginalised. Waiting for them to float in on the winds of the spirit and giving a warm welcome if they do is just decadent tosh. In some of these conversations, I wonder that we are following rather too closely a culture obsessed with a new gnosticism of self-realisation which serves to underpin our personal desires and actually has absolutely nothing to do with Christ and his mission.

[thea]

Cultural diversity isn't achieved by serving a muffin and having a conversation with them. It's by sincerely looking into a person's soul and looking at them as a person. Our choir director is black, our intern Pastor is Chinese, we have Koreans, Japanese, Blacks, etc in our congregation. We call them, pray with them, eat with them, laugh, cry and worship with them, just like everyone else.

Karen Ward is pastor of our nearby emergent conversations. All the pictures on her web sight are of young white people. She is the only black. That says a lot. She is in middle of a very culturally diverse area and we are in an area that diversity is way behind, yet in our traditional Lutheran Church, we have diversity.