COMMUNITY EXPLORES RECONCILIATION

To what end does a community of faith strive to be multicultural and multiracial? What does difference have to do with oneness? And what does it mean to be reconciled?

Those are questions on the minds of faculty, staff and students this year at the American Baptist Seminary of the West as the school explores the theme of reconciliation.

ABSW’s mission, in part, is to create a community of learning that is multiracial and multicultural. Yet the seminary – and the church – is called to “a new heaven and a new earth,” says President Dr. Keith A. Russell.

“As we have become multicultural and multiracial, we have focused on difference,” Russell says. “But we also need to talk about how the new thing is born. The biblical way to talk about that is reconciliation.”

Russell says this year’s emphasis is an attempt to deepen the conversation about diversity. Students will engage the theme of reconciliation in their coursework. Staff and faculty will take up the issue in their regular meetings. And the community will reflect on reconciliation through its corporate worship.

“I want to complicate the conversation by doing serious biblical, theological work on the nature of reconciliation in the 21st century in this culture,” Russell says.

“It’s not as simple as ‘everybody just get along.’”

A Complicated Conversation
Lauren Ng, a second-year M.Div. student, says that reconciliation “doesn’t mean assimilating.” It’s not about jumping to oneness and bypassing difference. For Christians, “seeing and understanding difference needs to precede understanding of oneness,” she explains.

Christian identity is about being the body of Christ. But if we’re not understanding difference, Ng says, we’re not valuing oneness and the unique ways God has created each of us. “I don’t think that does justice to God’s creation,” she adds. But can’t we get hung up on difference?

Manuel Magana thinks so. “What’s important is not that I’m Mexican. What’s important is that we need to be one in Christ,” says Magana, who completed his M.Div. last spring and is now working on an M.A. in biblical studies.

For Magana, reconciliation means peace, “breaking down walls, breaking down barriers.” It’s Paul’s word to the Galatians: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

“We need to look beyond the difference and not emphasize the difference,” Magana says.

Dr. James Chuck, professor of theology and church ministry, finds agreement with both Ng and Magana. Difference and oneness are not contradictory emphases, he says.

Christians need to talk about how people reconcile with God and so with each other. Yet reconciliation has to be between equals; it can’t be between oppressed and oppressor, he explains. “That’s the whole thrust of what the Gospel is about,” Chuck adds. “The differences are real.”

The Mission of the Church
Russell argues that reconciliation is the central task of the church. “The mission of the church is not growth," he says. "The mission of the church is reconciliation of all earth.”

In a world torn apart by war, where religious and ethnic strife dominates the headlines, there is an urgency to the work of reconciliation, Chuck says. “With all the differences we have, how do we live together? It’s a survival question.”

Russell agrees. “The mess that the world is in requires the church to take its own reconciliation rhetoric seriously,” he says.

However, the work of reconciliation cannot be solely a church project, Russell adds. “It’s got to have a strong political, analytical component,” he explains. “I not only need to understand the church, but I need to understand the church in the world.”

Reconciliation is a task that resists the simple prescriptions bandied about in some quarters of the church, Russell says. Reconciliation is complicated; it is muddy and messy. But the expectation of something new in Christ draws the seminary community and the larger church forward.

“What’s the glue?” Russell asks. “How do we get from ‘You don’t understand me’ to ‘I can bring my suspicions, but we can create a new heaven and a new earth’?”