This paper will draw on the author’s doctoral dissertation, “Embodied Cohesion: A Framework for Fostering Race-Ethnic Unity in Local Churches.” It will argue that local churches have a missiological responsibility to understand and to engage the embodied racial and ethnic narratives of the community in which they are embedded.
The paper will first draw from contemporary social scientific theory to briefly describe the conditions that create ethnicity and race in the world as embodied narratives. As such, racial and ethnic identities will be defined as social constructions that both shape and are shaped by the cultural contexts in which they exist.
The argument will then describe important theological implications of this sociological account of race and ethnicity, interacting especially with James K.A. Smith’s theological analysis of culture. Smith describes the dynamics through which culture is always conditioning the lived faithfulness of Christians by shaping their affections and their doxological commitments. This paper will show how the embodied narratives that animate racial and ethnic identities work similarly to impact the lives of Christians and the church communities to which they belong.
Against this theoretical backdrop, the paper will then describe how a local church’s missiological obligations relate to the conditioning dynamics of race and ethnicity in and around it. This section will interact with a variety of theologians, especially a trio of African Americans, Brian Bantum, Willie James Jennings, and J. Kameron Carter. These three authors, independently of one another and with individual nuance, suggest that local churches are uniquely situated to generate productive theological responses to the social challenges that consistently, across time and space, adhere to racial and ethnic identities. The paper will argue that this generative potential is missiological in nature and an important aspect of a church’s relationship to its local cultural context.
The paper will conclude by briefly describing a framework that local churches can embrace to pursue the missiological imperative described in the previous section.