Black Christianity : mackenzian

The first presentation is complete! This afternoon, I responded to Greg Boyd’s treatment of Christian discipleship as the call to live cruciform, in the form of the cross.

Boyd has argued that Christians have a responsibility to shape their lives in terms of self-sacrifice. Grounded in Black history and theologies, I suggested that this teaching could inure the Church to people’s suffering and make it complicit with oppression and abuse. These sorts of teachings, I said, can have unhelpful consequences at the levels of congregations and families.

Boyd clarified his perspective with a great two-liner:

Thanks to Spectrum’s Jared Wright for capturing me mid-sentence!

We demonstrate love for others by preventing violence, challenging empire, Keisha McKenzie says. #2016AFConf pic.twitter.com/yZBWYINbvi

— SPECTRUM (@spectrummag) September 17, 2016

Screen print t-shirt: "Just do it later. Jamaica" The famous swoosh becomes a resting place for a reclining human figure. — I bought a t-shirt like this last year.

International tragedies come to popular consciousness so often now, we know what to expect: a wave of public thoughts and prayers, followed by criticism of those thoughts and prayers, and criticism of the criticism until attention dissipates or there’s another international tragedy to move toward.

One of the most pointed critiques of the cycle came this year in the form of a cartoon by Kristian Nygard. The cartoon flows so well because it captures the distance between speech or comfort and intervention or change: in a material world, we need material actions, and unexpressed thoughts, ungrounded prayers, and well-substantiated doctrines don’t take us far enough.

Black Christianity offers three premises that might help us disrupt this pattern. From Kelly Brown Douglas’ book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God:

1. “Black prophetic testimony calls people to moral participation. This is a participation marked by a commitment to freedom, love, and life. Such participation is a matter of faith.”
2. “To have faith is to accept the invitation to be an ‘active presence in human history.'”
3. “The only way to change the realities of the world is through moral participation in history.”

We can’t change this world through thoughts and prayers that we never express or manifest, but through our active presence and participation, we can play a part in the re-creation of our world.

We just need to do something, and not “later,” but today.