Day Three

This was the final day of the conference. Today I will make my summaries of the sessions brief, to allow space for a conversation I saw as especially significant.

Morning worship: Absent the Spirit of God, true unity cannot happen. When you start talking about taking down barriers between groups, the devil gets busy.

Andrea Smith: Indigenizing Salvation

Smith described how the history of missionization is a history of genocide. When speaking of revolutionary change, she asked, what if instead of focusing on all we must lose, we consider what we gain? She noted how a secular change of policies will be insufficient to destroy white supremacy; we must be born again, which requires a total epistemological and ontological shift. Ours is a God of the impossible. Through God, we can imagine the unimaginable.

Andrew T. Draper: The End of “Mission”: Christian Witness and the Decentering of Whiteness

Draper outlined five practices white Christians must engage in, in order to decenter whiteness: 1) Repent for complicity in marginalizations; 2) Learn from traditions not our own; 3) Learn to be humble guests in others’ spaces; 4) Practice tangible submission to black and brown leadership;* and 5) Practice speaking and hearing the word of God in unfamiliar cadences. When we worship the living Word, whiteness is decentered.

* Draper stressed that when we use the language of submission, we must make clear that only Christ is the head. This form of submission encourages mutuality. Otherwise we are left to individualist morality.

In her response, Erin Dufault-Hunter made the point that we don’t take the demonic seriously, and this is especially ironic when we talk about race. If we aren’t calling it out as idolatry and demonic, we’re being neither honest nor prophetic.

Race, Theology, and Mission: Pastoral and Mission-Practitioner Perspectives

This was a panel discussion where pastors discussed how to live the missional work they had been discussing. It was here I felt the most important conversation was raised, and it was not directly related to race. Throughout the conference, I had been asking, what about sexuality? What if the evangelical church could be as open to re-examining assumptions about sexuality as they had been with race, at this conference? Then came a question from the audience: how do we move to loving the LGBTQ community, moving from doctrine to loving relationship?

One panelist noted it would be difficult to address, since there was no queer person on stage to address it. For him, it came down to Jesus and the gospel; everything else in the Bible is arguable. We cannot come in with preconceived notions about what people should be. This person came from a fundamentalist background, and called out “love the sinner, hate the sin” as “bullshit.” He asked, what is it about sex that trips us up so much? (This is a question I cannot escape from, given my own religious background.) Hearing this response on the stage of an evangelical conference was a fresh breeze of the Spirit.

His view was not universal, though. Another panelist claimed that scripture clearly calls gay sex sinful (no mention of relationship, only sex), but could not speak of sin from a place of hypocrisy. A third noted the hypocrisy in a group that rejected an LGBT policy, in which the pastor had been divorced and remarried. Another, who worked with InterVarsity, noted the difficulty involved. She stated that inconsistencies in exegesis must be examined. Such analysis is important at a theological level.

For those of us on the progressive end, it is easy to be hurt by the lack of LGBTQ acceptance in the evangelical church. So many of us have been wounded that we no longer want to talk to those who disagree with us. But conversations like this one give me hope. Hearts and minds are shifting. Other conversations I had today pointed out how quickly progressives tend to move to emotional or social arguments, rather than scriptural ones. As Christians, we are united by our understanding of the Bible as foundational to our theology. If we are to move forward together as the body of Christ, grounding our arguments for LGBTQ acceptance in a solid theology rooted in scripture, alongside compassionate relational encounters, may be more helpful. I believe the Spirit is with us in this.

The closing remarks are available here, and again, are well worth watching. Thanks again to MTSO for this amazing opportunity. I will see you on campus.