The first step toward love is a common sharing of a sense of mutual worth and value. This cannot be discovered in a vacuum or in a series of artificial or hypothetical relationships. It has to be in a real situation, natural, free.
The experience of the common worship of God is such a moment. It is in this connection that American Christianity has betrayed the religion of Jesus almost beyond redemption. Churches have been established for the underprivileged, for the weak, for the poor, on the theory that they prefer to be among themselves. Churches have been established for the Chinese, the Japanese, the Korean, the Mexican, the Filipino, the Italian, and the Negro, with the same theory in mind. The result is that in the one place in which normal, free contacts might be most naturally established—in which the relations of the individual to his God should take priority over conditions of class, race, power,status, wealth, or the like—this place is one of the chief instruments for guaranteeing barriers.—Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited
In his seminal book written over 45 years ago, Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurman posed the question as to why Christianity seems powerless to radically deal with the issues of racial, ethnic, and religious injustice among marginalized people. Tragically, this impotency is most clearly evident within the walls of its own ineffective churches. Two decades ago, feminist author, bell hooks, incriminated Western Christianity’s inherent dualistic ideologies of right/wrong, good/bad as the “foundation of all forms of group oppression, sexism, [and] racism.” Womanist author Jacquelyn Grant asserted that black women’s three-dimensional experience of racism/sexism/classism calls for a liberating theology that brings dignity and humanity to marginalized people. Despite these longstanding prophetic voices of dissent for justice in the Church, Elizabeth Edman decries that “some of our most visible denominations cling to regressive and oppressive theologies and practices—hostile to women, LGBTQ people, non-Christians, urban dwellers, and the list could go on and on—increasingly rejected by common sense and basic human compassion.”
Although the writings of Thurman, hooks, Grant, and Edman share a hopeful vision for a peaceful, just, and liberating spirituality, change in the Church has been minuscule and painfully slow over this past half-century. Jesus disrupted injustice all the time by rupturing simplistic dualisms including life/death, human/divine, sacred/profane, pure/impure, Jew/Greek, slave/free, male/female. Yet, the Church continues to be ineffective in following their Rabbi. Perhaps Thurman is correct in saying that the essence of justice is love birthed out of a “common sharing of a sense of mutual worth and value” which is natural, free, and grounded in real-life situations.8 If that is so, what are the barriers in our church cultures that prevent them from fostering a transformative environment that will “let justice roll down like waters?”9 How can our churches be more welcoming, hospitable spaces for conversations around the table about race and gender equity? This paper will discuss the challenges of language, space, and ritual as potential barriers for addressing social inequity in our churches for people of race, gender, and sexual minorities in order to facilitate awareness for a more welcoming, hospitable church culture for conversations intersecting spirituality and justice.
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