book report: Liberating Church

WHEREAS this is the shelf of books-I-intend-to-read *after* I did a clean-out, and that's not even all of them because there's a stack of already-started books by the bed and a bunch in German on the next shelf down and this is getting a bit out of hand; and

WHEREAS the weekly screen-time report on my phone is shocking because I tend to idly scroll Facebook in the hours before bed; and 

WHEREAS I need to get back to writing here, even if it's only for me to read later;

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that I put the phone away in the evening and read instead, and every time I finish a book I'll write a little book report. 

Will my latest Grand Plan last longer than one book? We'll see!

First up, because it looked like a do-able read (and it was): Liberating Church: A Twenty-First Century Hush Harbor Manifesto edited by Brandon Wrencher and Venneikia Samantha Williams. 

I can't remember where I read about this book (possibly through idly scrolling Facebook, see above) but "the future of church" is kinda My Thing these days and this looked up my alley. The conceit is that it's a study of the parallels between a group of Black-centered spiritual communities that are experimenting with new/old ways of being church, and "hush harbors" - secret religious gatherings of slaves where Christianity and African religion mixed in song, dance, and fellowship. From the project's website:

We hope to deepen kinship with the church in its riskiest and holiest incarnation, and nurture continued courageous ministry. It is also our hope that the 21st century hush harbors will inspire others to steal away from plantation church, to discover the God waiting among the wild things, bringing risky freedom still.

The authors identify eight marks of liberating church - the short descriptions here are mine:

• Ubuntu - acknowledging our interconnectedness, mutual care
• Stay Woke - ever-evolving awareness of injustice and focus on liberation
• North Star - imagining and building a better world
• All God's Children Got Shoes - collaborative, collective responsibility for the community
• Steal Away - valuing authenticity and safety over custom and authority
• Sankofa - safeguarding the wisdom and tradition of the ancestors
• Joy Unspeakable - the ecstatic, transcendent, mystical experience
• Talking Book - the Bible as a liberating, not enslaving, text

There's a short essay on each of these marks followed by descriptions of the six communities that took part in the project. It's a bit low on detail, but high on vision. I were trying to start a community I'd absolutely print this list out and stick it in a prominent location because: yes. this. 

Is it even possible to have a church that is liberative given the current container or does the container just need to be demolished? - Helms Jarrell

The crazy radical feminist theologians of Switzerland couldn't have put it better. There is lots here that translates well beyond the Black American church - trying to move away performance and towards authentic community, breaking down hierarchical structures and building up participatory leadership, thinking critically about the wisdom and traditions we want to practice and pass on, cracking open the concept of "sacred text"...

The anti-racist narrative that makes sense in an American context doesn't entirely translate into Swiss and in general I get twitchy when Europeans claim liberation theology - I feel like...well I won't involve anyone else here, *I* still have a long way to go in the area of naming who has been oppressed and how, not to mention shutting up and centering their voices. There's surely plenty of injustice to keep us all busy, though. This project isn't titled "Liberated Church," the authors say, because "no one is liberated until all the people and the planet have been set free." 

In other news, the On Being episode this week was Krista Tippet's conversation with Ocean Vuong, who talked about language as technology, and something he said connects here for me. Technology, in the ideal case, moves forward with time: I don't need to know how my toilet works in order to use it, and if toilets get better in the future my kids will be able to use the improved ones without being any wiser than me. But humans aren't technology: unlike toilets, we always start our lives at zero, no more advanced than the babies of our cave-dwelling ancestors.

As it happens, I do know how my toilet works, because I once had a job for which I built a test apparatus for a urinary flow meter that ended up looking like a computer-rack-mounted toilet. My failure at that job (not the failure of the test apparatus, which worked fine) was the nail in the coffin of my belief that technological problems were the biggest and most interesting ones out there. As we try to survive and transform our way through an existential environmental crisis of our own creation, the stories, practices, and language that we use to exchange and pass on our life-by-life-earned wisdom deserve great thought and care. Surely the work of liberating community.