CATEGORY: Mission Engagement

Refugees, Resistance, and the Next Christianities

We have come a long way from the “sending model” of mission and the Western Christendom worldview. Covid-19 introduced a new reality that challenged many of our cherished assumptions around mission, missions, and missional. It has shown us a way forward to faithful witness in our life and experience as church.

Telling Our Story: Resistance Literature and the Biblical Narrative

The translation of the Hebrew scriptures to Greek and the production of other scriptures in Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew were also practices of resistance against hegemony. Resistance literature holds out images of an ideal past and a utopian future. Do we not also feel a similar tension when we do a critical reading of biblical texts?

Refugees in Liminal Spaces

I argue that liminality describes the experience of refugees living in camps, detention centers, and border-crossings. Here, they navigate between “what was” and “what is,” and struggle between “what is” and “what will be.”

How Jesus Organizes and Agitates to Build Movements

This has always been the work of the Church, to continue and organize the Jesus Movement, bring in new followers and build leaders and power through relationships, and perform in-the-world-but-not-of-it actions to agitate the status quo and move the world toward change for the Kingdom. We just forgot what movements look like because we fell in love with institutional power. 

Do Not Forget That You Are In A Holy Place

The following is a re-stating of my testimony to the Southampton Town Board, August 22, 2009.  11 years later almost to the day this same political body has finally agreed to observe a 6 month moratorium on construction, and to enact legal protocols when human remains are unearthed; which hardly resembles NYS Penal Law pertaining to cemetery desecration.  Justice by its nature cannot be divine to one group while denied to another.

Deep Rural

Churches in the deep rural were decades ahead of what churches in larger towns and cities are experiencing now (numerical decline and struggles with building maintenance), and they may be decades ahead of us in how to be church.  The discipleship coach model of congregational empowerment is one that we need to consider as a creative possibility and not a sign of defeat.  

Mission as Resistance and Struggle

In many ways, border crossings performed  by refugees/migrants today is an act of resistance against nation-states who consider it their absolute right to decide who may or may not enter their borders. Refugees are resisting not having  voice or visibility by breaking the silence and showing up in huge numbers at international borders, even in the midst of the current pandemic.  While this kind of resistance may not be enough to improve their situation or change the system, at the very least they hope to raise awareness that something needs to be done. I believe our God struggles with them as they travel through liminal spaces.