Myers Park Baptist Church: Theology Upstream Podcasts

We kick this episode off with another throwback-to-youth-minsitry tune by Audio Adrenaline, Big House, because these chapters (5 and 6) are all about God’s expansion of human concepts of inclusion and exclusion.  In chapter 5, Ched helps us understand that there’s even disagreement in the Bible about who should be allowed in the house of God; there has always been tension between “faithful covenant-keeping” and “self-righteous gate-keeping,” (p.105).  In the episode we explore some moments in our own lives where we’ve had to stand in that tension between “purity”/”dignity” and God’s call to welcome all outsiders.  In the next chapter, by Matthew Colwell, we meet Amalia Molina.  Her moving story calls us to consider how we are participating in the expanding love of God, even in our most difficult and challenging moments.   Enjoy the episode!  Send us your thoughts, we’d love to know how these stories are making an impact on your lives!

In this episode we encounter stories that are difficult to read.  From the Genesis call to protect the murderer, to the Judges account of the concubine who clings to the threshold as she takes her last breath, and finally to the heart-breaking (and yet inspiring) tale of Amalia and Gil… these two chapters were so difficult to read (and discuss) that they reminded us of our journey through Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.  As disturbing as these stories are, we felt responsible to hold them up and to sit in the discomfort for a while, knowing that we live in homes and worship in a sanctuary with many “thresholds”.  These chapters force us to reckon with questions like: Who is on the other side of our thresholds?  Whose bodies do we blindly and ignorantly step over each day as we go about our lives with blinders on?  And, How might we begin to open those physical and metaphorical doors to welcome and love those who we find on the outside?Listen in… it’s rough, I’m warning you.  We’d love to know what you think!

DC Talk kicks off our second conversation about Our God is Undocumented​, with their brilliant song “Colored People”.  After spending some time reflecting on our memories of youth group and DC Talk, Ben and I delve into the first two chapters: (1) Cultural Diversity and Deep Social Ecology and (2) Journey to the Margins: Delle McCormick. In this episode we talk about two well-known biblical stories: the Tower of Babel and Pentecost.  And then, we’ll hold up the themes from those texts along with the story of Delle McCormick’s life.  Finally, we wrap up the conversation by turning our attention toward you (and/or us).  Who are we (individually or collectively)?  Who is God calling us to be?  Where is God calling us to be?  And how are we (individually or collectively) pushed and pulled by the centrifugal and centripetal forces of empire and Spirit?Listen in and add your thoughts in the comments section!

On the day of Tom Petty’s death, Ben and I recorded this podcast episode, which begins with his song, “Refugee.”  We didn’t know that he’d had a heart attack; but his was the first “immigrant” song that came to mind.  You’ll hear us mention that in our opening comments on the episode. RIP Tom, thanks for helping us kick this off with your amazing music.In this introductory podcast about the book, Our God is Undocumented,​ we discuss the authors and the major questions that the book calls us to reflect upon.  How does the Bible speak to issues of immigration and boundless welcome?  How is God Undocumented?  What does it mean to be a church without borders?(Please forgive the shameless plug for Miguel De La Torre… we were experiencing technical difficulties earlier this month which prohibited us from posting when we’d planned to post.)

This week our study of Liberation Theology for Armchair Theologians comes to an end.  It’s a little sad, I know, but there’s so much content in these final chapters, we will have plenty to think about in the days and weeks ahead.  Some highlights from this podcast episode include: a brief discussion of the Israel-Palestine situation, Doctrine of Discovery, a critical examination of the notion of promised land, and an eclipse joke… I couldn’t help myself. The most important piece of the episode is that we ask you to share with us how this book is changing you.  What has it meant for you?  How has it disturbed or disrupted you?  We want to know.  Until next time…

This week we get into the liberation movements in North America.  In just one short chapter, Miguel introduces us to liberation movements related to feminist, African American, Hispanic, and Asian American spiritualities and theologies.  It’s a quick overview with a lot of content, and critique!  So if you’re new to liberation thought, take your time with this chapter.   We had a ton of fun recording this episode so we hope y’all enjoy it!Spoiler alert: The best part is when Ben explains “mansplaining.” Public Service Announcement:  Ben has some well-deserved vacation coming up, Chrissy is prepping to preach later this month… we’re going to take a brief hiatus from the weekly episodes but we look forward to returning in a week or so.  We’ll wrap up our conversation about Liberation Theology for Armchair Theologians when things return to normal (whatever that means).  In the meantime, carry on the conversation in the comments section.  I (Chrissy) will try to keep up and chime in every now and then.  But don’t wait for one of us to reply, engage one another in some healthy theological debate!!!

Many of us are learning the stories of Gutierrez, the Boff brothers, Segundo, Sobrino, Ellacuria, and others for the first time.  This week, while we were reading their stories, I had the opportunity to sit down with Rev. Dr. Peter Wherry of Mayfield Memorial Missionary Baptist Church to listen to his first encounters with Jon Sobrino, sitting in the very room where Ellacuria and four others were murdered (story we read about in Ch. 4).  The words Peter uses to describe how he felt, “their blood cried out from the ground.”  These words echo the Genesis text in which God says that Abel’s blood cries out from the ground, after he’d been murdered by his brother, Cain.  These words haunted the Deep South Pilgrims as we traveled through rural Alabama on the Deep South Pilgrimage, knowing that the very trees we saw could have been the execution site for African Americans who were lynched in the Jim Crow era.  Dr. Wherry’s application of this Genesis text to both the lynching era and the beginnings of Latin American liberation thought is a powerful connection that makes me wonder, when will we ever learn?  When will we bring an end to the senseless violence, oppression, and death that results from greed and insecurity?During our conversation, Peter also engages Miguel’s theology of sin and pushes back a little to the notion that liberation theology always has an orthopraxy to orthodoxy structure.  AND… continuing the conversation about where liberation theology actually begins, Peter goes WAY back and finds the origins in North Carolina!  Tune in to learn more!

We promise, this time we will actually talk about chapter 2!  From the School of the Americas to Vatican 2 and the Christian Base Communities, we’ve got a lot of content in this chapter.  Yale theologian Miroslav Volf says that Americans have a “pervasive sense of innocence” and “optimism,” that we see ourselves as “good people” and therefore tend to see others as “bad people”  (http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/america). While many of us do see ourselves as generally good people, I suspect we would struggle to unanimously claim that in seeing ourselves as good means that we see others as automatically bad people.  However, this chapter lifts up for us how the assumption that Americans and American policy leans toward good and leans toward justice, might be blinding us a little when it comes to the real picture of what our involvement in the global economy is doing to people in other countries.  What do you think?  Do you agree that Americans have a pervasive sense of innocence?  Also in this chapter, we begin to see similarities between the ways that Christian Base Communities in Latin America and African American Churches in the U.S. are beginning to organize in ways that would forever change theology, the Church, and the world.  Seeing the power of faith communities to move the arc of justice makes us wonder, where and for what is the church organizing today?

Alright, we couldn’t wait any longer to share some thoughts about Capitalism (and Democracy).  Don’t worry we don’t spend the whole time there…we also break down the theology of Manifest Destiny.  That’s right, we’re calling it a theology!  Now, we know It may seem like a little excursus from the book (hence the name of this post) but we feel like it is critical to go ahead and identify some of the philosophical strands that have created this knotted-up-ball-of-yarn situation we’re discovering as we begin to learn about the origins of liberation theology.  Hopefully this episode will be uncomfortable at times, hopefully it will lead you to more questions, hopefully it will stir up some healthy group conversation as we wonder together: Can capitalism and democracy co-exist?  ​Listen in and tell us what you think!

From Communism to Capitalism to Colonialism . . . to BANANAS, this chapter would have been forbidden fodder for table conversation even if religion was never mentioned! But Miguel does not let up with hard hitting information about the politics of our past, he layers in the role of Christianity and the Church in the development of the New World. In so doing, he establishes the historical context within which liberation theology emerged in the 1960s. This chapter sure is hard to fully comprehend, so (lucky for us) Ben likens some of what we’re reading to Disney movies we may be a little more familiar with. But even Disney’s interpretation(s) illumine some of the problems with how the stories of colonization are told and retold. Even still, we can’t escape the philosophical and practical problems that our capitalist & colonial mindsets impose upon our theological conclusions and ethics. Listen in as we attempt to walk through the chapter and raise some of the complexities that have emerged for us along the way . . .