Transcript
Speaker: And welcome to the CCDA podcast.
Speaker: In today's episode, a conversation about Brown Church, five centuries of Latina, Latino social justice, theology and identity with Robert Chow Romero.
Speaker: Hosting our conversation is Lisa Rodriguez Watson.
Speaker: We join them for this webinar.
Speaker: Welcome folks to CCDA Institute's webinar for the month of June.
Speaker: My name is Lisa Rodriguez Watson and I am delighted to get to host and facilitate today's conversation with Robert Chao Romero.
Speaker: Bula, good to see you.
Speaker: Hi Cheryl from LA.
Speaker: I'll let you guys continue all of your welcomes in your chats just to in the interest of time and to make sure that we have
Speaker: plenty of good conversation with Robert and a chance to hear fullest from him.
Speaker: I'm going to go ahead and move us into the content of our webinar today.
Speaker: Again, my name is Lisa Rodriguez Watson and I am the Director of Leadership Development and Training Department at CCDA.
Speaker: If you don't follow us yet on social media, I would love to invite you to follow us at I am CCDA on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Speaker: Also, would love to let you know that today, as a special offer for being part of this webinar, you can get 30% off and free shipping on Robert's book, The Brown Church.
Speaker: So you can use the code OFFER20S.
Speaker: We'll go ahead and drop that in the chat for everybody.
Speaker: And feel free to use that code at ivypress.com.
Speaker: All right, so I have the grand pleasure of getting to introduce Robert Chao Romero, a close friend of the work of CCDA and someone who's been a really important voice for us over the last several years.
Speaker: Reverend Dr. Robert Chao Romero is an Asian Latino and has been a professor of Chicano, Chicana studies at Asian American studies at UCLA since 2005.
Speaker: He received his PhD from UCLA in Latin American history and is Juris Doctor from UC Berkeley and is also an attorney.
Speaker: Romero has published 15 academic books and articles on issues of race, immigration, history, education, and religion, and he received the Latina O Studies Book Award from the International Latin American Studies Association.
Speaker: He's also an InterVarsity Press author, is a former Ford Foundation and UC President's postdoctoral fellow, as well as a recipient of the Louisville Institute's sabbatical grant for researchers.
Speaker: Robert is an ordained pastor.
Speaker: Together with his wife, Erica, he's the co-founder of Jesus for Revolutionaries, a Christian ministry to activists.
Speaker: as well as the co-chair of the Matthew 25 movement in Southern California.
Speaker: It's a joy and a privilege to have you with us today, Robert.
Speaker: Thank you so, so much for being part of this webinar.
Speaker: I'm honored to be here, Lisa, and thanks CCDA.
Speaker: As I saw all the different places where people are watching from, it got me really nervous.
Speaker: But CCDA is my peeps, and there's a lot of different orgs out there.
Speaker: But my heart, I think, definitely is closest to CCDA.
Speaker: So, honored to be here.
Speaker: Yeah, thanks.
Speaker: Well, let's go ahead and jump in.
Speaker: So, you know, we heard in your bio that you've published numerous books over the years.
Speaker: Share with us a bit of your story and why you decided to write Brown Church at this season of your life.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Well, I never would have imagined writing Brown Church.
Speaker: Just a little bit about my testimony.
Speaker: when I went to law school many years ago, I thought I was on track to become a rich corporate lawyer, drive a Ferrari, be rich and famous and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker: And that's where Jesus got a hold of my life radically and changed everything.
Speaker: And from there, it was a journey of discernment and I felt Jesus kind of putting in my heart the vision to become a professor and to use that platform to address issues of race and Christianity.
Speaker: And so,
Speaker: I started at UCLA with that vision, but my original research had nothing to do with Brown Church.
Speaker: But for the first maybe eight to 10 years of my time as a professor, I was doing ministry with Erica, working with activist students, community development work and advocacy.
Speaker: But my academic research was all about Asians in Latin America.
Speaker: That's like my first book and my first work was all about Asians in Latin America.
Speaker: But after I got tenure, praise Jesus,
Speaker: I was listening to a Lauryn Hill song.
Speaker: It was a Lauryn Hill MTV album.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Where she kind of comes out of the closet, the Christian closet.
Speaker: And I'm like, and in interlude five, Lauryn Hill says, I'm tired of leaving two thirds of myself outside the door.
Speaker: And so at that point I'm, I said, I'm tired of leaving two thirds of myself outside of the academic door.
Speaker: And I want to work on a project that brings together, you know,
Speaker: in an appropriate way, my academic research, my ministry, advocacy, and who I am.
Speaker: And that led to the journey of the Brown Church.
Speaker: Wow, that's great.
Speaker: Your book sets up a theological foundation in the first chapter that may reframe for some the good news of Jesus.
Speaker: It's called El Plan Espiritual de Galilei.
Speaker: So tell us a little bit about that and how would you think that it might reframe?
Speaker: What is the plan and then how might it reframe for some folks?
Speaker: My context, you know, most of the time is in ethnic studies, Chicana, Chicano studies.
Speaker: I'm proud to say that we are the Cesar Chavez Department of Chicana, Chicano studies and Central American studies now, which is great.
Speaker: But within the context of ethnic studies, most people have only heard a fatally flawed gospel.
Speaker: They've only heard the gospel that says, oh, yeah, Jesus is the God of white colonizers who went around the world for 500 years.
Speaker: and genocided Native Americans and enslaved people and the God of Donald Trump.
Speaker: That's the only, that's the gospel that they've heard, sadly.
Speaker: And of course it's fatally flawed and unbiblical and everything, but sadly, historically, it's 80% true.
Speaker: 80% true.
Speaker: For the last several hundred years at least, again, the gospel that most of my colleagues have heard is that Jesus came,
Speaker: to forgive us of our personal sins so that we might know Jesus and go to heaven when we die.
Speaker: Now, each of those individual pieces are okay, are fine.
Speaker: I mean, thank God for Jesus dying on the cross for my personal sins and God's grace is overwhelming and has transformed me.
Speaker: And I look forward to heaven when I die.
Speaker: But that's just an incomplete gospel because that gospel allows most of life on planet earth to be untouched.
Speaker: You can believe that limited gospel and still commit genocide.
Speaker: You can believe that limited gospel and still leave all of our schools inequitable and leave, you know, inequitable access to healthcare and so on and so forth.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But that's the only gospel that most of my colleagues have heard.
Speaker: So to reiterate, those aspects of personal relationship with Jesus and forgiveness in heaven are critically important, but it's not the complete picture.
Speaker: It's not the message that Jesus preached.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: In Chicano-Chicano studies, or in the movement of the Chicano movement, there was something called El Plan Espiritual de Aslan.
Speaker: El Plan Espiritual de Aslan.
Speaker: And that was the Chicano Movement Manifesto, the Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement Manifesto of the 1960s.
Speaker: And I thought to myself, in writing this book, did Jesus have a manifesto?
Speaker: Did Jesus have a plan?
Speaker: And that got me thinking about, you know, how could you frame the gospel in a biblically faithful way, right, as a manifesto?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I called it El Plan Espiritual de Galilee.
Speaker: And if you look at Mark chapter one, I'm going to read some very familiar words from Mark chapter one.
Speaker: It says, Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the good news of God.
Speaker: The time has come, he said.
Speaker: The kingdom of God has come near.
Speaker: Repent and believe the good news.
Speaker: And as I reflected upon that very familiar passage, I thought,
Speaker: Gosh, what's behind that historically that has gotten lost over the years?
Speaker: So let me walk through some of those key concepts and sort of the framing of the gospel as El Plan Espiritual de Galilee, the Manifesto of Galilee.
Speaker: So it says Jesus went into Galilee.
Speaker: Let's just stop right there.
Speaker: What Latino, Latino theologians have told us is that Galilee in its day was the hood.
Speaker: Galilee was the hood of Jesus's day.
Speaker: Galilee was where
Speaker: The people there were looked down upon for being mestizo, for being culturally mixed race, for being bilingual.
Speaker: They spoke Aramaic.
Speaker: They probably had to learn some Greek.
Speaker: They had to learn Hebrew for religious purposes.
Speaker: They lived encroached upon by Roman and Greek sort of cultural forces, historical gentrification, if you will.
Speaker: The centers of religious, political, economic authority were in Jerusalem.
Speaker: And people from Jerusalem looked down upon the people of Galilee, right?
Speaker: And especially of Nazareth, right?
Speaker: And you could spot someone who was Galilean because they spoke with an accent, right?
Speaker: So Galilee back then was East LA.
Speaker: It was the hood of Florida.
Speaker: It was the hood of New York.
Speaker: And so first of all, you know, Galilee, like when God came in human flesh,
Speaker: and came to walk upon this earth to embody human flesh, it was not an accident that he did it.
Speaker: He chose to do it as a Galilean, as a person, a marginalized person.
Speaker: And one brown theologian, Virgilio Elizondo, he called this the Galilee principle, the Galilee principle.
Speaker: And the Galilee principle is this.
Speaker: Those that human beings reject, God calls his very own.
Speaker: So wonderful.
Speaker: Again, I keep saying it over and over all day.
Speaker: Those that human beings reject, God calls his very own.
Speaker: So it says, Jesus went into Galilee, went among those that human beings rejected, proclaiming the good news of God, proclaiming the good news of God.
Speaker: Now, good news, that term good news historically, it's so loaded.
Speaker: It's a super loaded term.
Speaker: We just say good news, good news today, like we don't have the context, but good news was limited to Caesar Augustus, right?
Speaker: Caesar of the greatest human empire that anyone's ever known, right?
Speaker: And good news, they'd say this, they'd be like, good news, we have a new emperor who's born.
Speaker: This emperor will bring peace and prosperity and salvation to the world.
Speaker: Good news, the Roman empire just destroyed, defeated its enemies in battle.
Speaker: And Jesus said, Jesus is proclaiming the good news of God.
Speaker: And the early church, the good news of God, know that Caesar is not Lord.
Speaker: Caesar is not the savior of the world.
Speaker: Caesar is not son of God.
Speaker: And those are all titles that Caesar appropriated for himself.
Speaker: No, Jesus is son of God.
Speaker: Jesus is Lord.
Speaker: Jesus is king.
Speaker: And only Jesus can bring true shalom.
Speaker: So the good news of God and proclaiming the good news of God, it's so subversive in this context.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.
Speaker: The time has come, he said.
Speaker: The kingdom of God has come near.
Speaker: The kingdom of God has come near.
Speaker: Jesus is the Messiah of Israel and therefore Lord of the world.
Speaker: And through him and his kingdom, he has come to make us and the whole world new.
Speaker: Nothing, no one is left out.
Speaker: The kingdom of God, not just heaven when we die, as important as that is, the kingdom of God is Jesus making us and the whole world new now.
Speaker: And when Jesus comes again, praise God, that process will be completed.
Speaker: And then this last part, repent and believe the good news.
Speaker: Repent.
Speaker: I love this.
Speaker: I love this.
Speaker: Repent.
Speaker: Metanoeti in the Greek.
Speaker: Repent.
Speaker: Metanoia, new mind.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Repent.
Speaker: Get woke.
Speaker: Get woke.
Speaker: Conscientization, get a new mind.
Speaker: You're not going to change yourself according to the patterns of the world.
Speaker: You're not going to change the world according to the patterns of the world.
Speaker: You're going to change yourself as you allow the Holy Spirit and Jesus to transform us and all of our brokenness and frailty.
Speaker: And the world is going to be changed through Jesus and his methods of nonviolence and love of enemy and his death and resurrection on the cross.
Speaker: Repent, get woke.
Speaker: So it's like a new, it's a new kind of framing of repent, right?
Speaker: So once again, just to close, in light of this context, Jesus went into Galilee, the hood of his day,
Speaker: proclaim the good news of God.
Speaker: Jesus is Lord, not Caesar.
Speaker: The time has come, he said, the kingdom of God has come near to make us in the whole world new.
Speaker: Get woke and believe this good news.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that's so good.
Speaker: That is so good.
Speaker: And that's, that's the theological foundation for the rest of the book.
Speaker: And so I wanted to start out with that.
Speaker: So you write about the Borderlands experience.
Speaker: And, and that's part of a lot of what you talk about is a Borderlands experience.
Speaker: Tell us what, what is that and who might fit into that category?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I think the best way to explain the borderlands experience is through a story or a parable or what we say in critical race theory, a critical race counter story.
Speaker: And I'll tell the story about Rosa.
Speaker: And Rosa is based upon the experience of a true person that I have met.
Speaker: And also it's based upon, it's a parable, different people that I've met.
Speaker: So Rosa grew up in the hood.
Speaker: And, you know, she was, imagine like,
Speaker: the top person in your youth group in the hood, right?
Speaker: Who's like smart, valedictorian, loves Jesus, right?
Speaker: Comes from an immigrant family.
Speaker: And Rosa went off to like one of the most prestigious liberal art colleges in the world.
Speaker: And of course, everyone's proud of her, right?
Speaker: Rosa did it, right?
Speaker: Then Rosa goes to her first Chicano studies class and her professor says,
Speaker: Christianity is a racist, classist, sexist religion.
Speaker: It's the religion of the colonizers who cannot care about justice.
Speaker: And it's a source of tens of Christians who care about justice.
Speaker: Then she went to find friends who are also first-generation college students, Latino, Latina, and they tell her the same thing.
Speaker: Then that launches Rosa into this experience of being in the borderlands, being in between on the one hand, the world of activism and justice and ethnic studies and the world of the Christian world she grew up in, right?
Speaker: She's stuck in between.
Speaker: She doesn't know what to do.
Speaker: And when I met Rosa, she was literally seen a psychiatrist for this deep dilemma that she was experiencing, being stuck in between.
Speaker: That's the borderlands.
Speaker: And so the borderlands, this Christian social justice borderlands, something that again, it's typified in that experience of first gen college students.
Speaker: But also I think in this historical moment, it's being experienced by millions of Christians of every ethnicity, millions, right?
Speaker: Like as we're like, as we were here and we're like, oh my gosh, I love Jesus.
Speaker: I'm part of CCDA.
Speaker: And how come my local church is saying that it's okay to say Kung flu, right?
Speaker: How come my local church is saying nothing about the George Floyd murderers?
Speaker: How come my local church said nothing when kids were put in cages, right?
Speaker: And so there's millions of us that are in between in this borderlands.
Speaker: And this book, Brown Church, is written for all of us in the borderlands to provide a sense of belonging, to say that if we're stuck in that middle, in between space, it's okay.
Speaker: We're not alone because the Brown Church has been stuck in that space for 500 years.
Speaker: following Jesus, hearing about justice.
Speaker: I know we'll talk a lot more about that, but the Brown Church has written to kind of bridge that gap.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think that's so helpful that, that liminal space, um, that so many of us occupy of, man, I, I am so grateful for the, the heritage of faith and for the faith that I have discovered or grown up with maybe from my own family experience.
Speaker: But what does that have to do?
Speaker: I mean, heaven is great one day, but what does that have to do with today?
Speaker: What does that have to do with my neighbor?
Speaker: What does that have to do with the human suffering that I see and that I experience every single day?
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: And that Borderlands experience is really, really critical and does, just as you say, provide a space and a place for us to belong.
Speaker: And so does, too, the Brown Church.
Speaker: So, you know, in a really colorized, especially here in the United States, but this may be true more globally, but in a colorized world where we're racialized and colorized so much, I'd love for you to explain what is the Brown Church?
Speaker: What is her place and her work in the world?
Speaker: Who is the Brown Church and what is the Brown Church?
Speaker: Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker: Amen.
Speaker: Amen.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So at its simplest level, the Brown Church is the 500-year history of Latino, Latina, Christian social justice.
Speaker: 500-year history of Latino, Christian social justice.
Speaker: Now, the Brown Church began in
Speaker: actually the Protestant Reformation when a priest by the name of Montes in the way had been enslaving natives on the Sunday before Christmas in 1511 he went to preach to draw that chapel to the Spanish elites on the island and he says the words I'm about to preach will be the strangest you've ever heard he says I am the voice crying out
Speaker: the wilderness and then he proceeds to say again in 1511 he says Spaniards your your exploitation enslavement of the natives is a sin against God if you do not repent God is going to send you to hell right and punish the whole Spanish nation right and that began the tradition of the brown church in 1511 again before Luther nailed his famous theses right before the Protestant Catholic divide since then
Speaker: The brown church in this 500 year tradition has challenged colonization, has challenged misogyny, even in the colonial period with Sor Juana y Ernesto de la Cruz, has challenged the US-Mexico war and the colonization of the church in the United States, has challenged Jim Crow segregation, has challenged the exploitation of immigrants and on and on and on, dictators in Latin America.
Speaker: But in general, before going into specifics, the brown church is this 500 year history.
Speaker: And so the brown church didn't start, I'm sorry, Christian social justice
Speaker: For us as Latinas and Latinos, it's not new.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It didn't start like in 2007 with some fancy evangelical conference.
Speaker: We've been wrestling with these issues and walking with Jesus for 500 years.
Speaker: So that's one definition of the Brown Church.
Speaker: I know that there's folks from Missio here, and Missio, like some of the nerdy kind of theological stuff, right?
Speaker: So I'll share a more academic definition too.
Speaker: The Brown Church, a prophetic ecclesial community of Latinos and Latinas,
Speaker: which has contested racial and social injustice in Latin America and the United States for the past 500 years.
Speaker: As such, Brown Church is a multivalent category, encompassing ethnic, historical, theological, spiritual, and socio-political dimensions.
Speaker: So that's Brown Church.
Speaker: Now, Brown, when I'm talking about Brown here, it's a metaphor for what you said before, that liminality.
Speaker: It's a metaphor, on the one hand, for
Speaker: cultural, ethnic, racial liminality.
Speaker: So liminality is like feeling in between, right?
Speaker: There's a great book written by Sung Hyun Lee, an Asian American professor at Princeton Theological Seminary that's called From a Liminal Place.
Speaker: And he's an Asian American ethicist.
Speaker: But liminality is this in-between space.
Speaker: And as Latinas and Latinos, we have been in between black and white in the United States.
Speaker: for the last several hundred years at least, right?
Speaker: Where when black and white come to the table to talk, we're left out, right?
Speaker: When social justice remedies are discussed, we're kind of an afterthought.
Speaker: When denominations and church institutions are being formed, again, we're kind of an afterthought, right?
Speaker: We're kind of in between.
Speaker: And so actually one way to kind of demonstrate this Brown is through a historical example.
Speaker: During the time of Jim Crow,
Speaker: During the time of Jim Crow segregation in the U.S., there was Latino segregation as well.
Speaker: So that's sort of, most people don't know about that.
Speaker: But we were segregated.
Speaker: Our kids were segregated into Mexican schools, Latino schools.
Speaker: We couldn't, certain communities, we couldn't, the school, local neighborhood, and parks.
Speaker: And in the courts, we'd say, again, picture it in the 1940s.
Speaker: We go to the judge and we say, judge, you cannot,
Speaker: The city of Pasadena cannot segregate our kids.
Speaker: The city of LA cannot segregate us into Mexican schools.
Speaker: But our legal argument of the time, 100 years ago, was you cannot segregate us because we're white, actually.
Speaker: That was the argument.
Speaker: But we're a special kind of white that still experiences discrimination.
Speaker: And the judges would sit there.
Speaker: The judges would call in expert witnesses from UCLA or USC or whatever, anthropologists, and say, are they white?
Speaker: The judge would listen to all the evidence for a couple of days and would say, I guess you're right.
Speaker: I guess they are white.
Speaker: But then we just go back to our communities, Pasadena, LA, wherever, and they'd still segregate us anyways, right, and discriminate against us.
Speaker: But they would just find, instead of legal ways, they would find kind of more social conventions and ways to discriminate against us, right?
Speaker: And so that's sort of a kind of a good example of what I mean by brown, this in-betweenness where
Speaker: Again, some of the privileges of whiteness, yet most of the time sort of still relegated to the edges.
Speaker: And in that same way, Jesus was brown in that same way.
Speaker: Jesus was brown in terms of the metaphor of Galilee.
Speaker: It's the metaphor and the historical Galilee that we talked about, right?
Speaker: In between Greek, Jewish, and Roman worlds, right?
Speaker: You know, part of Israel and Jerusalem get marginalized and so on and so forth, right?
Speaker: So brown is sort of a metaphor for that liminality.
Speaker: It's a metaphor also for, as Latinas and Latinos, our cultural mixture, right, our rich cultural mixture.
Speaker: So Latin America, we are so diverse, right?
Speaker: We have Asian, European, indigenous, African, Jewish, Middle Eastern, and every combination you can imagine, right?
Speaker: And brown is also a metaphor just for that mixture, not a literal brown,
Speaker: Because as Latinos and Latinos, we come in all shades, right?
Speaker: So it's not a literal brown, but more of a metaphor for that.
Speaker: I will next finally say that brown, it's not just for Latinos.
Speaker: Brown is a metaphor for anybody that feels in between.
Speaker: So as I've shared about this framework with my friends, for example, who are the Asian American community or the South Asian community, a lot of people resonate.
Speaker: They're like, oh yeah, I'm brown too, right?
Speaker: metaphorically.
Speaker: So anyways, like that's, that's the Brown church.
Speaker: And as I've shared that, that framework, I'm not the first to say Brown person to say Brown church, but this is a unique framework.
Speaker: I think that is by God's grace, original as I, as I've shared it, people have found a spiritual home.
Speaker: I want to share a quote here because there's thousands of Latinos and Latinas, maybe more, maybe millions who are
Speaker: Stuck in between in the brown, when they learn about the brown church, they're like, oh my gosh, I finally belong.
Speaker: So here's a quote from someone who read brown church and they said, I cried all night.
Speaker: No podía dejar el libro.
Speaker: I couldn't put the book down.
Speaker: I finally found a home.
Speaker: What's amazing is that that home has been there this whole time.
Speaker: Honestly, I've struggled so much all these years.
Speaker: While I'm fairly versed on liberation theology and other movements, I never considered the fact that other brown people are wrestling to find their place as Christians as I have.
Speaker: I woke up feeling so proud of being who God created me to be in such a time as this.
Speaker: Amen.
Speaker: And so that's, praise Jesus, like that's the brown church is a home for those many of us who have not had a home.
Speaker: We'll be right back.
Speaker: But first, a word from our sponsor.
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Speaker: I can imagine that all of the hours of research and writing and everything that surfaces when you put a work together, all of that labor was so worth it.
Speaker: I mean, I'm sure that it's not the only quote, but for that one quote, for that one person that says, I finally found pride in who I am, how God has made me to be, and a place to belong.
Speaker: It just brings me joy just to think about what that must have felt like for you and for that reader.
Speaker: So, wow, that's really beautiful.
Speaker: It gives me chills just even just thinking about it.
Speaker: I mean, that's what it's about.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And that's like the, for me, the ultimate purpose of academia is
Speaker: is to be able to, I mean, to be able to use it for those types of purposes.
Speaker: That's what it's, that's what it's about.
Speaker: That's what it's about.
Speaker: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: So let's talk about, about deconstruction of faith for, for a few minutes, right?
Speaker: Because when we come to realize that, like maybe we haven't gotten the whole story on the gospel or the faith or the good news, but
Speaker: We often go through this process of deconstruction, and so many folks are actually deconstructing faith right now, and that is good, and it is right, and yet there is, while that is important, there also needs to be reconstruction.
Speaker: So what does healthy deconstruction and reconstruction look like as you think about it?
Speaker: Amen, and that is a big, one of my, it probably is my biggest pastoral concern
Speaker: it's what keeps me up at night is thinking about the fact that there is some unhealthy deconstruction happening and there's a very little reconstruction happening, very healthy.
Speaker: And that keeps me up at night.
Speaker: But one helpful thing I think about just the history of the Brown church is that we have been deconstructing and reconstructing for 500 years.
Speaker: So there's, there's a lot of hopeful examples of how we could do that in a way that will,
Speaker: in a way that at the end of the day by God's grace we will be stronger than ever and so one example is from Latin America in the 1960s and 70s and 80s called Mission Integral or Integral Mission Integral Mission and I'll just tell a story about it and you know folks can
Speaker: learn more about it.
Speaker: But key figures in this story of Mission Integral are Rene Padilla, Rene Padilla, Samuel Escobar, and many others, but those are some of the key folks.
Speaker: And Padilla and Escobar, they worked for InterVarsity, right?
Speaker: InterVarsity, and they were kind of helped found InterVarsity in Latin America.
Speaker: As a side note, my Chinese grandparents founded InterVarsity in China in the 1930s, but it's a different story.
Speaker: And Padilla and Escobar and others like part of Latin America IFES, many of them trained in the United States.
Speaker: So like Padilla went to Wheaton and got an undergrad and grad degree at Wheaton.
Speaker: They probably went through all the different intervarsity trainings.
Speaker: And they received a lot of good things.
Speaker: And I'm to this day very close to intervarsity.
Speaker: But they received a lot of good things, but they received a very individualistic gospel.
Speaker: a very individualistic American gospel of the good news of Jesus's transformation of us as individuals, but very little about Jesus's transformation of society.
Speaker: So they went back to Latin America, they went back to Peru and Ecuador and all over the place.
Speaker: And they shared this individualistic gospel with their students.
Speaker: And the students were like, chale, man, like, you know, what is this?
Speaker: That's just my own, that's just my own elaboration in Chicano Spanish.
Speaker: But, but, but, but they're like,
Speaker: what does this individualistic gospel have to do with the fact that my uncle just disappeared yesterday, right?
Speaker: And my whole community has nothing to eat.
Speaker: And there's all this big, huge gap between rich and poor and these dictators funded by American government.
Speaker: And then Escobar and Padilla, they kind of had to, they reflected upon that, right?
Speaker: And they said, oh my gosh, we need to deconstruct the American individualistic gospel that has been exported to Latin America.
Speaker: take what's good, but reconstruct it based upon our own situational context, right?
Speaker: But in a way that keeps Jesus at the center, in a way that is guided by God's word, right?
Speaker: And some of their deconstruction, I'll just share some quotes that are super powerful.
Speaker: And these are hard words, but sadly, they very much apply to our experience in the US right now.
Speaker: And keep in mind, this is in the 60s and the 70s that they're saying this.
Speaker: Here's one quote.
Speaker: According to American cultural Christianity, quote, the racist can continue to be a racist.
Speaker: The exploiter can continue to be an exploiter.
Speaker: U.S. culture Christians were the kind of people who, quote, opposed the violence of revolution, but not the violence of war.
Speaker: You could say in the U.S. who opposed the violence of protests.
Speaker: but not the violence of police brutality, right?
Speaker: And quote, condemn all the sins that well-behaved middle-class people condemn, but say nothing about exploitation, intrigue, and dirty political maneuvering done by great multinational corporations around the world.
Speaker: So it's like, that's more relevant than ever, right?
Speaker: But again, they're going through this deconstruction in the 60s and the 70s.
Speaker: Padilla and Escobar, they used another metaphor.
Speaker: It's harsh, but it's true.
Speaker: they called it ropa anglo-sajon anglo-saxon cultural clothing and they said that the gospel that they had been received in latin america was clothed in anglo-saxon cultural clothing and not all that is bad but when it led to those horrible when it led to the perpetuation of racism then it's bad right and so um escobar and paria and others
Speaker: They gathered a group of Latin American theologians and pastors and ministry leaders in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1970.
Speaker: And they met for several days and they processed this.
Speaker: They said, what do we do with all this?
Speaker: How can we create a theological framework?
Speaker: Again, that's for the whole church, but it's also for us, right?
Speaker: And they came up with this notion of mission integral, integral mission or holistic mission.
Speaker: And Mission Integral is the mission of the whole church to the whole of humanity and all of its forms, personal, communal, social, economic, ecological, and political.
Speaker: In other words, it's just a biblical gospel.
Speaker: Like the kingdom of God transforms everything and everyone, right?
Speaker: Nothing's left out.
Speaker: And they use this metaphor of two wings of a plane.
Speaker: They said the gospel is like
Speaker: or biblical mission is like two wings of the plane.
Speaker: On the one hand, you have the verbal proclamation of the good news of Jesus.
Speaker: On the other hand, you have the embodiment of that good news in justice, mercy, compassion, right?
Speaker: On the one hand, you know, we have a personal relationship with God.
Speaker: On the other hand, we have to love our neighbors, so on and so forth.
Speaker: And if one is missing, the plane is not going to fly, right?
Speaker: And in most U.S. churches, I think today, in most U.S. churches today, one wing or the other is missing.
Speaker: And you need both, right?
Speaker: You need both.
Speaker: And what's happening now is I think the plane, the gospel plane in the U.S. is crashing.
Speaker: Everyone's bailing out, right?
Speaker: And we're like, right?
Speaker: And I think that Mission Integral has a wonderful, wonderful...
Speaker: message, wonderful, instruct and reconstruct in a healthy way.
Speaker: And it's been proven.
Speaker: Again, you're talking about the 1960s and 70s here.
Speaker: And I want to sort of also, before I, while I'm on this, just talk about the amazing examples of Latina theology and Latin American female theologians like Elizabeth Conde Frazier, like Ruth Padilla de Boer's,
Speaker: who have also been developing these amazing theological frameworks that are important for the whole church and also in relationship to the expression of women in the global church, right, and the U.S. church, and also Maria Isasi Diaz.
Speaker: And so there's this whole
Speaker: treasure of Latina theology and Latin American female theology, womanist theology that I encourage everyone to listen to.
Speaker: And I'll just close this part by saying like, according to Latina theologians, God has a preferential option for women.
Speaker: God has a preferential option for women in a world that is broken and fractured by sin.
Speaker: Men take advantage of women and abuse women and
Speaker: God does not stand for that.
Speaker: And God takes the side of women in their oppression.
Speaker: Wow, that's powerful.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: How do we reconstruct on an institutional level?
Speaker: You and I had talked before about community cultural wealth.
Speaker: Keeping in mind that we want to leave plenty of time for our Q&A, is there a way for you to be able to address that revelations passage that you and I spoke of and talk about community cultural wealth?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I can do that in a concise way.
Speaker: I'm
Speaker: So Revelation 21 verses 26 and 27 are some of my favorite passages.
Speaker: In that passage, John is describing the new Jerusalem, right?
Speaker: After Jesus comes back and makes all things new, what is that going to look like?
Speaker: And in verse 26, he says that the glory and honor of the nations will be brought into the new Jerusalem forever.
Speaker: The glory and honor of the nations.
Speaker: The community cultural wealth of every ethnic group will be brought in and
Speaker: Typically, in our Christian institutions, the glory and honor, the community cultural wealth of different ethnic groups is not reflected in the leadership.
Speaker: It's not reflected in the curriculum.
Speaker: It's not reflected in virtually anything.
Speaker: Instead, based upon historical racism, people tend to view us minority communities as just being culturally deficient.
Speaker: that we just have a cultural deficit as Latinos, as African Americans, as Asian Americans.
Speaker: And in order to reform our institutions, we need to make everybody middle-class white Americans.
Speaker: I'm just being real, right?
Speaker: And that as long as our institutions, Christian institutions, reflect the values and culture of middle-class white America, that's the solution.
Speaker: That's why we're in this mess, right?
Speaker: And so we need to, by God's grace, invite leaders of color into these institutional spaces so that the gospel and the deconstruction and the reconstruction can take place
Speaker: with the full breadth of the community cultural wealth of the kingdom of God.
Speaker: Yeah, that's true.
Speaker: So, so good.
Speaker: Hi, my name is Christina Fore.
Speaker: And what I love about CCDA is that our faith is part of communities flourishing.
Speaker: Welcome to the CCDA podcast.
Speaker: I've got a few questions.
Speaker: We're going to start Q&A.
Speaker: That first question actually was from Diana and it was the definition for Brown Church, I think.
Speaker: The definition for Brown Church.
Speaker: Can we drop that in the chat?
Speaker: And I'm happy to restate it too.
Speaker: You want to restate it?
Speaker: Yeah, why don't you restate it?
Speaker: We did drop a link in that is to brownchurchmovement.org.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But yeah, let's hear it again.
Speaker: So the simple definition, and then I'll say the more elaborate one is the Brown Church is the 500-year Latino, Latina, Christian social justice tradition.
Speaker: So the 500-year Latino, Latina, Christian social justice tradition, the more elaborate one is a prophetic ecclesial community of Latinas and Latinos, which has contested racial and social injustice in Latin America and the U.S. for the past 500 years.
Speaker: Brown Church is a multivalent category, multivalent category, encompassing ethnic, historical, theological, and
Speaker: spiritual and socio-political dimensions.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: I didn't catch every word of that.
Speaker: Where can we find that?
Speaker: Is it somewhere in your book?
Speaker: And I can maybe have someone do some research and drop it back in an email.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh yeah, it's in the book for sure.
Speaker: Chapter one.
Speaker: And yeah, it's on page.
Speaker: I'll just find it right here.
Speaker: I'll find it, but we can move on and I'll find the page.
Speaker: Yeah, okay, perfect.
Speaker: That's fine.
Speaker: And yeah, thank you for that.
Speaker: All right, here we go.
Speaker: The two winners of our book giveaway, Sylvia Comande and Tiffany Gonzalez.
Speaker: Yay, congratulations.
Speaker: I wish I had a sound machine.
Speaker: I would push a button and everything would sound really fun like a game show.
Speaker: So congratulations to you guys.
Speaker: Email me, lwatson at ccda.org.
Speaker: Send me your address and I'll get the books out to you.
Speaker: Okay, question number one.
Speaker: Where would you recommend starting if we want to learn more about the Brown Church's history or liberation theology, et cetera?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So, and this is not just self-promoting, but like the Brown Church book has, it's intended, it's an introduction and overview of all of this that we're talking about.
Speaker: So it says like, okay, it's kind of, again, it's like,
Speaker: it'll tell you, this is how liberation theology started.
Speaker: This is how Mission Integral started.
Speaker: These are a few key authors.
Speaker: These are a few key books.
Speaker: So, Brown Church, if you want to learn about, try to think of, like, liberation theology, and again, that's as a formal concept.
Speaker: There's a book by Leonardo Boff, B-O-F-F, you know, Brazilian theologian, and he has a great book that's an introduction book
Speaker: to liberation theology.
Speaker: And all those, I quote from all of them here.
Speaker: So, I mean, I would look at the bibliography of Brown Church as an example.
Speaker: And I'm happy to post the whole bibliography, but in terms of like Latin American liberation or Latin American, like, again, look up, it's very easy to look up the writings of Samuel Escobar, Rene Padilla, in terms of, again,
Speaker: There's specifically Latino, Latina theology from the U.S. That's in the U.S. context.
Speaker: It's like 40 years old.
Speaker: Read Justo Gonzalez.
Speaker: Many have heard of Justo Gonzalez.
Speaker: Read Elizabeth Conde Frazier and Lloyda Martel Otero and others.
Speaker: An amazing book is called Latina Evangelicas.
Speaker: Latina Evangelicas is an amazing book.
Speaker: Oh, my gosh.
Speaker: It's a deconstruction and reconstruction of theology from a Latina Evangelica Pentecostal perspective.
Speaker: amazing work.
Speaker: Those would be some of the places that I would start.
Speaker: But again, like Brown Church, like as a resource, it refers to all those, many of the, most of the key titles.
Speaker: Yeah, cool.
Speaker: That's perfect.
Speaker: That actually answers a couple of questions for us because you've named some names and some folks have asked, who are some of these other folks that we should be reading and, you know, connecting with to educate ourselves?
Speaker: Here we go.
Speaker: Naomi, thanks for this question.
Speaker: Hi there.
Speaker: I loved the talk and received your book this week.
Speaker: Well done, Naomi.
Speaker: I haven't read it yet.
Speaker: Don't worry, there's time.
Speaker: I've seen there's a chapter on Mexico and Guadalupe.
Speaker: Feminist philosophers like Gloria Anzaldúa emphasize the cultural mestizaje and even syncretism of this figure are an important part of post-colonial resistance to a form of religion that was very totalizing.
Speaker: So I'm really interested in your thoughts on syncretism generally in relation to Brown church theology.
Speaker: Oh, that's a good one.
Speaker: It's a good one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Syncretism is such a loaded word, right?
Speaker: Syncretism is such a loaded word.
Speaker: So I would, I would say that I would talk about like, I mentioned a revelation 21, the glory and honor of the nations, the glory and honor of the nations.
Speaker: And maybe it gives me a chance to elaborate a little bit more on that.
Speaker: So by God's design,
Speaker: I think from a biblical perspective, every ethnic group has cultural wealth, cultural glory and honor that is God ordained, God created even.
Speaker: So I can think about like, you know, what's some of the glory and honor of my Mexican culture?
Speaker: Well, I think that there's this incredible like sort of cohesiveness, like beautiful interrelatedness of the family and of like sort of a corporate sort of
Speaker: The beauty there, there is a certain way of understanding the world, seeing the world of certain perspective.
Speaker: There is, of course, all the tangible aspects of culture that is glory and honor, you know, from the food to the music, right?
Speaker: But there's this concept of glory and honor, and every ethnic group has glory and honor, right?
Speaker: That's, again, Revelation 21, 26.
Speaker: Revelation 27, though, says, even though all the glory and honor is going to come in, 27 says,
Speaker: that nothing that causes sin will be brought in.
Speaker: Nothing that causes sin will be brought in.
Speaker: So in my understanding, I think that every ethnic group has distinct glory and honor, but also distinct sin.
Speaker: So I'm so thankful that machismo is not going to make it in, but the glory and honor of my Mexican culture, Latino culture is going to make it in, right?
Speaker: I'm thankful that the glory and honor of my Chinese culture is going to make it in, but not the sin, the glory and so on and so forth.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I think that
Speaker: when Christianity is viewed as it's just this Western religion that comes in and takes over, that's not a biblical understanding of what the good news is, right?
Speaker: I think a biblical framework, so I understand like Anzaldua and others are saying when they say that, but I think like a biblical view is the good news of Jesus, right?
Speaker: The good news that came from Galilee, from the hood of Jesus's day, right?
Speaker: From the marginalized people
Speaker: Galilean Jesus, the colonized Jesus, comes into a new community, starting with the poorest and most marginalized, and gives hope to the poorest and the marginalized, right?
Speaker: The kingdom of God in Jesus.
Speaker: Not the colonial master coming and forcing it, right?
Speaker: But when the gospel comes the way that Jesus brought it, and the early church brought it first to the poor and then to everybody else, and gives hope and life,
Speaker: then the kingdom of God begins to express itself in new ways through the distinct glory and honor of that new culture, that people.
Speaker: And that glory and honor shines more brightly than ever.
Speaker: And Jesus sanctifies that culture of its sin because we all have sin.
Speaker: So I think that, so I understand the framing of like, you know, Christian, you know, European colonizers bringing the gospel in,
Speaker: to Latin America and then syncretism as a way of sort of being sort of a, you know, a rebellion.
Speaker: But again, I think that that's not the way that I see the gospel, the way it's supposed to act, the way it's supposed to manifest itself.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Oh, that's good.
Speaker: That's good.
Speaker: All right, we've got another question here.
Speaker: This will be really hard for our white brothers and sisters to hear.
Speaker: How would you recommend this resource, your book, being used in teaching, discipling, and leading white brothers and sisters?
Speaker: So which part will be really hard?
Speaker: Well, I don't know.
Speaker: It doesn't say right there.
Speaker: I can take a guess, Ed.
Speaker: I would say that the Brown Church book, the goal of the Brown Church is the beloved community.
Speaker: It's about...
Speaker: you know, how can we all the different ethnic groups of the world be united and all of us bringing our glory and honor to the table, our dignity, our so forth, right?
Speaker: So the Brown Church is not a nationalistic book.
Speaker: It's not an ethnocentric book, but it's simply saying, we're God's children too, and come learn about how God has, you know, and, but it's just, it's a different entryway to the beloved community.
Speaker: It's a different entryway.
Speaker: And typically, honestly,
Speaker: The entryways to the beloved community so far in U.S. history have been through the white church.
Speaker: But we've hit a wall.
Speaker: We can't get to the beloved community using the methods of the white church because we've hit a wall.
Speaker: Like, we can't get past it anymore, right?
Speaker: And so that's where the body of Christ comes in.
Speaker: We're all the body of Christ, right?
Speaker: We need one another.
Speaker: We belong to each other.
Speaker: And as another part of the body of Christ, we're saying, here, here's this 500-year history of how we have known and followed God.
Speaker: And the whole body of Christ can learn and we learn just as we learn from the rest of the body of Christ.
Speaker: Yeah, that's good.
Speaker: That's a good word.
Speaker: Another question we have here.
Speaker: Can you give a few examples of what would be considered values and cultural characteristics of white middle class America?
Speaker: Values and characteristics?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Earlier I spoke about like sort of glory and honor versus sin of individual cultures.
Speaker: I'm not sure if they're wanting me to sort of tie those two together or just say some of the values.
Speaker: But I think maybe you made like in order for us to sort of represent Christianity, it looks like everybody should just middle class evangelical culture.
Speaker: What do you mean specifically when you say that?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I'll give an example.
Speaker: When a lot of like, let's say,
Speaker: first-gen college students go to, let's say they go to, okay, I'm just going to say it, like, no, I won't say it.
Speaker: Let's say they go to a Christian college, right?
Speaker: They come from an urban, someone said, just say it, right?
Speaker: Okay, let's say,
Speaker: Someone comes to a Christian college and it's election season and people are saying, build a wall, build a wall, blah, blah, blah, right?
Speaker: And a Latino student is in a political science class and then the student gets the call and they're like, oh my gosh, my mom just got deported, right?
Speaker: To fit in with all their classmates, they're supposed to say, oh yeah, Trump's not bad, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: He's just blah, blah, blah, right?
Speaker: Or to try to like water down the offense, right?
Speaker: That's sort of middle class white kind of values.
Speaker: Or just maybe another way is to say, how do many of us as people of color, Christians, succeed in evangelical organizations?
Speaker: Ooh, that's a close one, right?
Speaker: That's close to home, right?
Speaker: What do we have to leave outside the door?
Speaker: How do we have to change the way that we talk?
Speaker: How do we have to watch the comments that come out of our mouth, right?
Speaker: Because if we push too hard, we're going to get fired.
Speaker: Or if we push too hard, we're not going to get hired even, right?
Speaker: And those are, I think, in generality, some of those examples.
Speaker: But I'll give one more thing and I'll stop.
Speaker: A friend of mine who was involved with Christian urban youth work was talking to a donor, big donor, million-dollar donor.
Speaker: And that donor said, oh, yeah, our goal is to make these kids middle-class white kids.
Speaker: That was the goal.
Speaker: That was what the, out of the donor's mouth, right?
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: That's profound.
Speaker: And it's disturbing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's true that that's, that's in reality, that's what we're up against, right?
Speaker: It's, it's how do we, how do we get to actually bring all of who we are to the table because we are created by God and, and uniquely still on purpose with intention.
Speaker: Amen.
Speaker: Okay, I think I'm just gonna, we really only have time for one more question, unfortunately, and there are many questions still in our Q&A box.
Speaker: I love this last question that I'm going to ask.
Speaker: And I think because I think that your gift, and I'll just kind of show the cover here, the Brown Church, your book is a gift in this moment to the church.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: And I hope that everybody that is on this webinar will read the book.
Speaker: Here's the question.
Speaker: What do you think the place of the Brown Church is in revival?
Speaker: I think that this is possible and it's something that I want, I want you to articulate with us together that we can all think about from your perspective, but also have in our own mind is what does revival look like in light of the Brown church?
Speaker: Amen.
Speaker: Amen.
Speaker: I think that the Brown church has, again, we have a 500 year history of passionately following Jesus and crying out to him and worshiping and speaking in tongues.
Speaker: And at the same time,
Speaker: fighting against the worst of social injustice and racism, right?
Speaker: And we don't separate the two.
Speaker: We don't separate the two, right?
Speaker: When Pastor Noé Carías, you know, a few years ago, some of you might remember Pastor Noé Carías, Assemblies of God pastor, no criminal record, came as a child refugee, was about to be deported.
Speaker: It was so beautiful to watch Latino Pentecostal church throughout the country come together
Speaker: and being on a Friday night in prayer service, laying hands and crying out to God and doing prayer vigils and worshiping and crying out in the same way that I imagine the Israelites cried out to God in their slavery in Egypt, right?
Speaker: And we saw God respond, right?
Speaker: And I think that that holistic revival, that's one of the things that we offer
Speaker: to the rest of the church, that holistic revival.
Speaker: And maybe that's how I would say.
Speaker: I would also say we've been wrestling with race issues for 500 years as well.
Speaker: And we've messed up so much, right?
Speaker: And this is where I want to quote a friend of mine, a friend of mine from Dr. Tony Lynn from New York Theological Seminary.
Speaker: I'm going to make it very clear this is not my idea, but Dr. Tony Lynn from New York Theological Seminary.
Speaker: He's Asian Latino too, like me.
Speaker: But what he told me, what Dr. Lin said, in the United States, it's just a racial binary.
Speaker: The conversation is always black and white.
Speaker: And the American cultural imagination can't see outside of it.
Speaker: But for 500 years, for better or for worse, our cultural imaginations as Latin Americans is beyond a binary one.
Speaker: And I think that that we have to offer as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's good.
Speaker: That's good.
Speaker: Oh man, I hate to stop taking questions.
Speaker: The conversation is so rich.
Speaker: I just want to say thank you so much.
Speaker: And for our audience, I want to offer a few resources that you can take advantage of on the CCDA website.
Speaker: And these resources, if you are a member of CCDA, they are, most of them are at no cost to you because you, you know, you get that as a member benefit.
Speaker: Otherwise, they're five and $10 respectively.
Speaker: Puentes is another workshop that was done rooting the leadership of bilingual bicultural millennials, a really important topic that he discussed back in Chicago.
Speaker: And then finally, Brown Christianity, way back in 2016, Brown Christianity taking root in the Latina, Latino, Christian identity.
Speaker: So you can find these resources on our website in our store.
Speaker: Again, if you're a member of CCDA, they're available to you for free.
Speaker: If you're not a member, I'd encourage you to check out membership on our website.
Speaker: We want to be a resource for you and your work as you begin to engage ethnic identity and
Speaker: and asking questions of faith and justice and all of those things.
Speaker: I want to thank you so much.
Speaker: Thank you, Robert, again, for being with us today.
Speaker: Thank you for sharing the heart of your work with us, for sharing all of who God has made you to be and brought you to the table, putting it in a book, and then giving us the chance to talk with you today.
Speaker: It's been so amazing.
Speaker: Thank you, Lisa.
Speaker: No, it's been a privilege.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: And thank you for all the important work you do and that CCDA does.
Speaker: God's blessings on you.
Speaker: And thank you for listening to the CCDA podcast.
Speaker: And thank you to Robert Chow Romero and Lisa Rodriguez Watson for Brown Church, Five Centuries of Latino, Latino Social Justice, Theology and Identity.
Speaker: I'm Paul Miles, President and CEO of We Raise Foundation.
Speaker: We Raise invests in people and organizations that serve at the intersection of poverty, violence, and inequality.
Speaker: We start by acknowledging that change begins with we.
Speaker: We are in this together.
Speaker: And it's going to take our love and our compassion and dedication to solve the problems facing communities today.
Speaker: We invite you to be part of that with us and encourage you to visit WeRaise.org to find out how you can become involved and be a partner with WeRaise.
Speaker: Thank you for listening to the CCDA podcast.
Speaker: Don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker: This podcast is produced by Dan Portnoy in association with Scott Overpeck.
