I used to know how to preach to my church during Black History Month. We'd dress in our finest garb and process to the beats of DNA-memory in our bones, singing the songs that have brought us through. It was the one time a year to celebrate being black; to remember ancestors gone by and saints still present...These services were cultural icons for me.
Or at least they used to be. That was before my church's pilgrimage from 100 percent African American, to now 70 percent African American and 30 percent other (white, asian, bi-racial). I can no longer assume any shared gut-DNA. Even my sermon themes are different.
Take a few weeks ago. I was preaching reconciliation, trying to make the experience of the church at Corinth--the struggles to build gospel koinonia across ethnic, class, and religious lines--real to my congregation. "What do you feel when folks of different races and classes move into this neighborhood?" I asked, almost innocently. "Do they become friends?"
Pain in the room, but honesty, too. "No."
"Why not?"
"Because they have come to 'help.'"
The response of our African-American congregants was visceral. It speaks powerfully of the inequality of social relationships between groups in this nation.
Whether real or perceived, we don't feel like equals. There's long history in some of our bones of being viewed as lower-status, incapable persons whose needs are met by getting something from higher-status persons. There's a long history in some of our bones of feeling privileged, and needing to assuage that karmic good fortune by sharing resources (money, education, energy, and even ourselves) with the "underprivileged."
Theologians and activists Ched Myers and Elaine Enns suggest that in his two letters to the Corinthians, Paul advocates "patronage from below"--upside-down relationships where power, prestige, and privilege are turned around to create space for "social solidarity." Corinthians is our book of radical desegregation and reconciliation.
Social solidarity is relationship, and relationship is radical. It is very different from reverse patronage, which is what I call the dynamic when racially-aware and well-meaning pilgrims of privilege try to balance power by staying in the background, avoiding leadership, and consciously or subconsciously withholding resources. Reverse patronage is usually at work when folks of privilege move in to serve or live in a low-income neighborhood, bringing their wealth and social resources to an area devoid of them. It's behind emails and Facebook postings in which those well-meaning folk tell stories of how much more they have received (from the apparently lower-status crew) in response to their offering. In exchange, they receive character gains to their account: love, instruction in some of the realities of poverty, the coolness of slumming it, and admiration from their community.
I sometimes hear well-intentioned, privileged parents admonish children who are embarking on a mission trip to "elsewhere" (some urban, rural, or foreign working or poor community): "You will get so much more out of the experience than you give." I cringe. We are caught in the terms of barter, and my people are again at the bottom of the equation: still giving more.
Simply sharing neighborhoods with one another doesn't work to create the radical beloved community articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr. and enfleshed by Jesus. And simply inviting diverse folk to the meetings, the demos, and the campaigns certainly doesn't work. We need another way.
I believe what works is true friendship--a friendship that comes from empathetic relationship-building over time. Friendship allows for empathy instead of sympathy.
...My elders believed that removing the legal U.S. apartheid system would fling wide the door of hospitality and friendship, casting out the fears fueled by prejudice and replacing them with respect, affirmations of capability, and shared creativity. Forty years later, it hasn't yet worked out that way. U.S. citizens remain separate and unequal by race in all quality-of-life indicators (health, education, housing, jobs, economic development, literacy.) What is a vision that will now move us toward healing?
Downwardly-mobile pilgrims of privilege who relocate to marginalized neighborhoods certainly model relocation strategy that moves us past our centuries of legally enforced desegregation. However, when relationship-building does not occur at a level strong enough to desegregate friendships, we remain segregated.
Our community's experience of relocators is that they usually reside for a season, and typically maintain their original support systems from afar. Eventually, personal variables--or plain old "movement frustration"--cause them to leave the neighborhood for more familiar or homogeneous urban, suburban, or rural surroundings. This "move on" syndrome points to the inescapable power difference between these pilgrim residents and those rooted to the neighborhood. Those who come in have the economic, relational, and social capital to leave when they choose.
We need to build reciprocal relationships while remaining conscious of power dynamics. Empowerment issues are real, but when one group holds back in order to ensure balance of power, benefits (in relationship, resources, wisdom, and strategy) are lost on all sides. We must all give one hundred percent, and we must offer that from friendship and relationship. Friendship is reciprocal. Friendship is meaningful, faithful, and artful. Friendship is challenging. Friendship is loving. Friends make mistakes, but speaking the truth in love, friends forgive, heal, and make mistakes again. We must forge ahead with the social mess of friend-ness.
Ultimately, we will have to learn to gather as friends, as neighbors. We must join organizations not to integrate them (and certainly not to "help" them), but rather because we share their goals. We'll have to hang out. Go to the parties. Attend the weddings and stay for the reception...
Church is a great place to become friends. It offers a unique social environment, rooted and grounded in love, for the purpose of creating family beyond birth-ties. What could happen if Christian communities truly, radically desegregated? Miracles.
This is difficult, and it will cost us. Institutional ethnic churches exist for an important socio-political purpose. They have been places of refuge where we could experience solidarity in our DNA memories, or wrestle with the oppression of systems without having to explain our pain...
But I think the gain will be worth it. The last few decades have seen radical disciples moving into marginalized neighborhoods as part of a very necessary and helpful pilgrim journey towards liberation from oppression. Going forward, our challenge will be to move toward intimacy and rootedness in those neighborhoods. This is a road less travelled, and its pilgrims will experience joy, challenge, pain, misunderstanding, conflict, alienation, recovery, triumph. We can trace the beginning of that story in letters to the Corinthians, but I think it will end in Beloved Community.
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When I first read this piece several months ago, so many things in my heart rang in agreement with what Rev. Jones wrote. There is so much that I have pursued in my life that mirrors her call to the Church, but I have also been the one excitedly proclaiming how much more I received than I gave while living and serving in marginalized communities. I have taken advantage of the subtle power dynamics at play. And none of this was intended as harm, but seeing my self reflected in these words was eye-opening.
I had an experience during my time in Oakland which made me wonder if my neighbors would ever really truly see me as one of "them." Despite appearances and some obvious differences, I really wanted to blend in and become a part of the community. I didn't want to stick out, I didn't want my differences to send a message of superiority. I have seen that while this desire to blend may have been coming from a good place, there is a difference between trying live as poor versus living among the poor. The interwebs tells me that "among" is defined as being surrounded by or in the company of, or being a member of a larger set. And that is what I desire. Of course, to authentically live among any group of people different from one's natural environment, one must take certain efforts to sacrifice or blend to some degree. But the point is not to deny everything I am to become something that my neighbors know I'm really not; the point is to dive in and immerse in a different kind of life in order to be counted as a friend with those who are different from me.
As I look forward to moving into Soshanguve, I must remember the Rev. Jones's points about friendship in order to keep my inclination towards power in check. I know there will be very little opportunity for me to "blend in" with my neighbors, and in fact any attempts to do so will probably stand out even more. But, I am hopeful for chances to become friends, to be given the gift of invitation into another person's life. Not because I have the answers, or because my worth is in helpfulness or access to resources; but because in friendship I can reflect Christ's heart for each one of us...that we would be drawn together, and to Him, in love and humility.
