Church is, Church Ain't: An Ecclesiological Inquiry of Reverend Ken Silva’s Claim that The Vision Church of Atlanta is Not a Church by Biblical Standards
I. Part One: Introduction to the Church in Question
On March 12, 2005, Bishop Oliver Clyde Allen III, his husband Rashad Burgess, and twelve loyal supporters who shared a burden for helping rejected LGBT persons in Atlanta started The Vision Church of Atlanta. In its short eight years of existence, The Vision Church of Atlanta has grown from twelve to more than three thousand members. The predominantly LGBT populated congregation boasts on being a multiracial, welcoming, and affirming church steeped in the African American Pentecostal tradition. With more than 50 active ministries, including children, youth & young adult ministries, counseling services, community food and clothing bank, senior ministries, and much more, The Vision Church of Atlanta proudly rests on over 28,000 square feet of property in the burgeoning Grant Park Community. However, the success of The Vision Church of Atlanta has not gone unchallenged. Bishop Allen’s home has been burned and destroyed, he and his family members have fallen victim to numerous death threats, and the church continues to be subject to the scrutiny of mainline Christian churches and hate groups.
B. The Problem
The Reverend Ken Silva is an ordained minister of the Southern Baptist Convention, president of Apprising Ministries, and pastor of the Connecticut River Baptist Church in Claremont, New Hampshire. According to his website, Rev. Silva has “been led of the Lord to move beyond the typical “plus-minus” type of apologetic so common today and to return to more of the aggressive polemic an Irenaeus might use”.[1] The Appraisal Ministry, which is an auxiliary of Connecticut River Baptist Church where Rev. Silva serves as pastor, is the a non-profit, tax-exempt, blog ministry where Rev. Silva bluntly addresses his personal issues with ministries and ministry leaders who he believes to be contributors of what he calls “rampant apostasy”. Rev. Silva describes his ministry as the twenty-first century equivalent to the ministry of Dr. Walter Martin who was the founder of the Christian Research Institute.[2] Other than his blogs and publications, it is very difficult to acquire information about Rev. Silva, the Connecticut River Baptist Church, or the Appraisal Ministry. Although Rev. Silva has been quoted by USA today[3] as being a popular New Hampshire-based Southern Baptist blogger, little is known about the church that he pastors and as of 2013 his church is no longer registered as a member of the Baptist Convention of New England[4].
On December 20th, 2011, Reverend Silva published an article claiming that The Vision Church of Atlanta was a leader in the “evil pro-homosexual agenda”.[5] Reverend Silva, who describes his ministry as one that is “rooted in classic, historic, orthodox Christian theology”[6], argues that The Vision Church of Atlanta is an example of the slippery slope that many mainstream Christians are on which permits them to base their doctrines on their feelings instead of on Scripture.[7] The ecclesiological argument that he makes, which becomes extremely important for this blog entry, is:
As you’ll hear, this social club (The Vision Church of Atlanta)—it’s not actually a church by Biblical standards—was begun in the couple’s living room. It claims to be a vibrant, active and diverse congregation. We are a community rooted in worship, fellowship, diversity, witness, spiritual development, service and justice. The Vision Church congregation offers all people the opportunity to explore and discover their destiny within the context of a safe and nurturing Christ-centered community…………. However, Jesus hasn’t changed His mind; He’s clearly told us, and no matter how nice they may be — You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination (Leviticus 18:22). In this time of timid tolerance and liver shiver theology you can imagine what’s going to happen to faithful Christians who stand upon the Rock of God’s Word while so-called Christ-followers cower before the world…and sooner than we know: Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. (2 Timothy 3:12)[8]
Reverend Ken Silva’s statement that “it’s not actually a church by Biblical standards” forces one to ask two very important questions: (1) What constitutes a church and (2) if the Vision Church is a church, what would be the defining characteristics of its ecclesiology as a black, gay, and Pentecostal congregation?
C. how does this problem bear upon how we are to re-think the nature and mission of the church
It is very important for me to recognize from the onset that one could argue that this blog entry is not academic in nature because it is in conversation with a local pastor who is not apart of the wider academy or the field of ecclesiology. I wish to respond to the previously stated concern by asking, is it possible for the field of ecclesiology to accurately define what it means to be the church without first engaging the ways in which local congregations and current religious leaders define who they are and what they do? Therefore, the method of ecclesiology that I will be engaging in throughout this blog entry is more so contextual than academic. My distinction between contextual and academic should not be interpreted as a subtle critique, which suggests that a contextual approach to an ecclesiological study is not academic. Indeed I am arguing quite the opposite. For instance, my understanding of a contextualized ecclesiology is rooted in my readings of Marthinus Daneel and Father Bénézet Bujo who argue, as it pertains to African ecclesiologies, that ecclesiologists must take the cultural heritage and contextual ethos of a particular place into account when seeking to understand its ecclesiology[9].
Daneel argues in his book African Earth Keepers that a true ecclesiology must allow church life, not scholarship, to serve as the vehicle for theological reorientation. Like Schreiter’s second and third models, Daneel’s method of doing ecclesiology take local cultures and contexts more seriously than the writings of many distant academics who only know their subject matters from an abstract standpoint.[10] Schreiter’s second model situates local leaders as working in cooperate with expatriates to construct local worldviews and a religio-cultural heritage that corresponds with more dominant categories and theological systems.[11] However, this model falls short of perfection in that it neglects the role of the local community because the model is addressed to academics. However, this blog entry is an attempt to appeal to the academic field of ecclesiology by including the voices of local pastors like Bishop Allen and Rev. Silvas by putting their understandings of church in conversation with one another.
Additionally, I would go a bit further than Daneel’s argument and argue that not only must a church be allowed to define itself[12] but the ecclesiology of a place must also be in dialogue with the differing ecclesiologies within its same context. For instance, although The Vision Church of Atlanta may understand what it does as church, how does their definition of church situate itself within the more dominate understanding of church in its context. I want to be clear that in my previous argument, I am not suggesting that The Vision Church of Atlanta must conform or subject itself to the hetero-normative Christian definitions of what it means to be the church. However, I do believe that if The Vision Church of Atlanta wishes to label itself as “The Church” that it must define what it means by church and at least situate itself within the larger grass roots ecclesiological conversation within the black church, the Pentecostal church, and within the wider Atlanta metro area.
This entire conversation, which will investigate what constitutes a church and if the Vision Church is a church, is extremely critical in the twenty-first century when many denominations are attempting to re-think the nature and mission of the church in response to LGBT issues. If The Vision Church of Atlanta is proven to in fact be a church, then that would mean that it is also an equal part of the Body of Christ which would inadvertently cause one to have to ponder the idea of a queering of Christ’s metaphysical and symbolic body. My reasoning here is somewhat steeped in the argument of James Cone who, when faced with the dehumanization of blacks in the nineteen sixties, argued that “where there is black, there is oppression; but blacks can be assured that where there is blackness, there is Christ who has taken on blackness so that what is evil in men’s eyes might become good.”[13] Therefore, he contends that in order for the White church and Christ to remain faithful to the Word, Christ and the White church must become black and accept the shame, which the white society has placed on Black people. Cone’s argument is suggesting that if Jesus is in solidarity with the oppressed, he then metaphysically becomes black. My parallel here is that if the black church is in fact apart of the body of Christ, then it forced the white church to face the fact that the body of Jesus might also contain blackness or, in Cone’s terms, actually be black. Therefore, if one were to compare the disenfranchisement of African Americans with the disenfranchisement of LGBT persons[14], then the acknowledgment of The Vision Church of Atlanta as a church would mean that it is also an equal part of the Body of Christ which would inadvertently cause the heterosexual branch of the church to have to ponder on the ecclesiological idea of a metaphysically and symbolically queering of Christ.
D. Thesis
In the second portion of this blog entry, I will make a more systematic ecclesiological argument about what it means to be The Church in dialogue with the problem I raised in the first section. I will attempt to prove that The Vision Church of Atlanta is a church based upon biblical standards, which is in response to Rev. Saliva’s ecclesiological claim against The Vision Church, and I will examine the follow research question: If the Vision Church is a church, what would be the defining characteristics of its black, gay, and Pentecostal ecclesiology? My dialogue partners will be John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, Anthony Reddie, Horace Griffin, Reverend Ken Silva and Bishop Oliver Clyde Allen, III. Finally, in the third portion of this blog entry I will offer brief prescriptive recommendations for the Christian practice of hospitality and biblical interpretation for mainline hetero-normative Black Pentecostal Churches and Black Churches in general.
II. Part Two:
A. What is a Church According to Yoder, Hauerwas, The Bible, Silva, and Allen and a Systematic Ecclesiological Reflection on the Problem
What does it mean to be “The Church”? According to Stanley Hauerwas, the church is comprised of “the sanctified ones formed by and forming the continuing story of Jesus Christ in the world. In effect the church is the extended argument over time about the significance of that story and how best to understand it”[15] He argues that there is no such thing as an ideal church but rather, the church is an empirical community of people called by God to take the next step of faith in hope.[16] For Hauerwas, the church is a distinctive group of persons who are formed by a tradition that remembers and embodies the story of Jesus Christ. He argues that you know that you have discovered a church when you have encountered a community: “where the sacraments are celebrated, the word is preached, and upright lives are encouraged and lived.”[17] In this same vain, John Howard Yoder defines church as “a disciplined fellowship of those who confess that, if there be one faith, one body, one hope, there must also be one obedience; that God’s will may by known in the church and commitment to its application expected of the church’s members.”[18] Furthermore, he contends that the church can come to know the will of God, as it pertains to making theological decisions, not through the application of moral guidance but through the discernment of the spirit, which happens by way of a “completely finite and human process of open dialogue, arguing from experience as well as scripture.”[19] He argues that there are five social practices that are the marks of the church: (1) discernment and forgiveness; (2) an equalizing but not leveling, the universality of giftedness; (3) democratic openness to dialogue, (4) a sharing of the simple via the Table; and (5) a relativizing of social difference via Baptism. Yoder argues that his ecclesiology, unlike H Richard Neibuhr’s and Karl Barth’s, is straightforwardly derived from scripture.[20] He argues that the church need not seek to understand the normative nature of ethics in theological writings but rather, it should use the Bible to undergird its theology. But the question arises, since Rev. Silva claims that The Vision Church is not actually a church by Biblical standards, what is the biblical definition of a church? Instead of spending a great deal of time investigating how the scripture defines the church, which would be an exegesis blog entry in and of itself, I think it most relevant to investigate what Rev. Saliva means when he talks about the biblical definition of the church. Quoting Acts 20, Hebrews 1:3; 13:17, Revelations 1:16, Jeremiah 23:28, and many other scriptures, Rev. Silva defines the church as
the Body of Christ, consisting of all the redeemed by receiving Jesus Christ as Savior, and united in the Holy Spirit. The local church being an organization of believers in a given area, called out of the world to assemble to worship God and preach His Gospel. This Gospel being summed up in the death, burial and Bodily Resurrection from the dead of Jesus Christ.[21]
Rev. Silva distinguishes between what he calls a true church and a false church. He contends that a true church is one that is “generated by God; preserved by God, and glorified by God.”[22] He goes on to argue that for a church to be generated, preserved, and glorified by God is to make sure that the (1) Word of God is rightly preached and taught, (2) the sacraments rightly administered, and (3) that the church discipline is faithfully exercised. Then and only then is the true church present. He argues that where these marks are absent, these assemblies should not be considered to be a true church of Christ.[23] Furthermore, he argues that if a Church cannot affirm essential truths such as the Trinity or the full deity and humanity of Christ, then they cannot be a true church. He argues is, according to Galatians chapter 1, “a church preaches another gospel, it comes under the anathema (the eternal curse) of God. That is why Martin Luther called the doctrine of sola fide (justification by faith alone) the article upon which the church stands or falls.”[24]
According to Bishop Allen and the doctrines that he and his leaders have established, The Vision Church’s ecclesiology is rooted in the inclusive and welcoming love of God. They define the church as “a group of believers brought together by the Spirit of God to carry out the Great Commandment by practicing the Great Commission, to observe the ordinance of baptism, and to administer the ordinance of Lord’s Supper Matthew 22:37-40; Ephesians 5:23-27.”[25] The Vision Church proclaims that a church should be known for its love, compassion, reconciliation, and liberation for all who are oppressed.[26] Because of its passionate belief in the inclusive teachings of Jesus Christ, The Vision Church of Atlanta acknowledges itself as a “whosoever will” church. By emphasizing the “whosoever” in John 3:16, The Vision Church is critiquing and challenging the fundamental, deep-seated Christian belief systems, doctrines and theologies which have often characterized the church. For the Vision Church, to be the church is to believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ cuts across all barriers in order to love, affirm, and welcome all people regardless of race, gender, affectional orientation, class, or life situation.[27]
According to the Hauerwasian ecclesiological model the Vision Church of Atlanta is indeed a church because it is comprised of persons who are formed by the story of Jesus Christ.[28] According to the doctrines of The Vision Church, they are a people who passionately believe in the inclusive teachings of Jesus Christ.[29] Their ecclesiology is rooted in the inclusive and welcoming love of God and informed by the “whosoever” ideology of Jesus Christ as stated in John 3:16. Like Hauerwas’s ecclesiology, The Vision Church is also an extended argument about the significance of the love, compassion, reconciliation, and liberation of Jesus Christ. In effect, The Vision Church is an empirical community of people called by God who have actually taken the steps of faith and hope[30] in order to critique and challenge the fundamental, deep-seated Christian belief systems, doctrines and theologies that have often characterized the church. As a distinctive group of persons who are formed by a black and Pentecostal tradition that remembers and embodies the story of a Jesus Christ[31] who liberates the oppressed, The Vision Church proclaims that a church should be known for its love, compassion, reconciliation, and liberation for all who are oppressed.[32] The Hauerwasian tradition would have to recognize The Vision Church as a church because it is a body “where the sacraments are celebrated, the word is preached, and upright lives are encouraged and lived.” [33] For The Vision Church, to be upright and to encourage others to live upright is to cuts across all barriers in order to love, affirm, and welcome all people regardless of race, gender, affectional orientation, class, or life situation.[34]
Likewise, the Yoderian ecclesiological model would also reveal that The Vision Church is a church because it is a disciplined fellowship with one faith, one body, one hope, and one obedience, all of which are rooted in radical and unconditional notions of love. Furthermore, because of The Vision Church’s challenge the fundamental, deep-seated Christian belief systems, doctrines and theologies that have often characterized the church[35], it has inadvertently finite and human process of open dialogue.[36] By “arguing from experience as well as scripture”[37], The Vision Church developed a hermeneutic of suspicion about the “immorality or spiritual depravity of women, gays, lesbians, transgendered individuals or any marginalized group” [38]. By prioritizing Yoder’s model of democratic openness to dialogue, The Vision Church came to know the will of God, as it pertains to making theological decisions on the topic of inclusivity and radical inclusion, not through the application of moral guidance but through the discernment of the spirit by the collective.
My initial concern with Rev. Silva’s ecclesiology is that he does not systematically present his ecclesiology from a biblical standpoint. He argues over and over that a true church must rightly preach and teach the Word of God but he does not biblically define the church. Instead, he pulls scriptures together from Acts 20, Hebrews 1:3; 13:17, Revelations 1:16, and Jeremiah 23:28, none of which are connected to one another nor do they define or say what the church actually is from a biblical standpoint. Rev. Silva uses these somewhat arbitrary scriptures to recreate what he feels the true church was during the Biblical times of Jesus and Paul. However, Yoder cautions ecclesiologist and modern Christians about defining the church based upon ancient biblical models because such is actually impossible for one to do without projecting collective and historical memories to our readings of the text. Yoder argues: “What is wrong with fundamentalism is not that it holds too tightly to the text of Scripture (although that is what it thinks it does). It is rather that it canonizes some postbiblical, usually post-Reformation formulation, equating it so nearly with the meaning of Scripture that the claim is tacitly made that the hermeneutic task is done.”[39] He argues that perhaps history and tradition should also be equally taken into account when interpreting scriptures to understand what the church actually is. He argues that “the [biblicist] theological tradition, which in its original age (Wyclif and Hus or of Luther and Calvin) was by no means naïve nor disrespectful of tradition as a hermeneutical matrix.”[40] Therefore, he contends:
The clash is not tradition versus Scripture but faithful tradition versus irresponsible tradition. Only if we can with Jesus and Paul (and Francis, Savonarola, Milton, and the others) denounce wrong traditioning, can we validly affirm the rest. Scripture comes on the scene not as a receptacle of all possible inspired truths, but rather as witness to the historical baseline of the communities’ origins and thereby as link to the historicity of their Lord’s past presence.[41]
Therefore, perhaps Rev. Silva’s argument that The Vision Church is not a church based upon the bible is inaccurate. I say this because none of the scriptures he provides to define the church say anything about sexuality nor do they reject the assembly of homosexuals in Jesus’s name. Before I begin my argument that The Vision Church is indeed a church based upon the Yoderian, Hauerwasian, and Silva models, we must first examine how Bishop Allen and The Vision Church define church and themselves.
B. The Characteristics of The Vision Church’s Black, Gay, Pentecostal Ecclesiology
To this point, I have argued that The Vision Church is a church according to the Hauerwasian and Yoderian traditions. However, if The Vision Church is a church, what then are the defining marks of its black, queer, and Pentecostal ecclesiology? I want to make the disclaimer that the order of adjectives that proceed and describe the vision church are not written in any rack, but rather in the order in which they will be discussed. This is important because the ranking of these three, black, queer, and Pentecostal, may very well changed based upon the congregant that you interview at The Vision Church. Therefore, we will leave the ranking of the proceeding adjectives to the individual members of the Vision Church. However, it is important to state why I have chosen these distinctions to describe the Vision Church. I have chosen to use black, queer, and Pentecostal as distinctions because the Church is predominantly African American and gay. Lastly, it is Pentecostal because it is the mother church of the United Progressive Pentecostal Church, an open and affirming Apostolic Denomination.
I would argue that the marks of The Vision Church’s black, queer, and Pentecostal ecclesiology are: (1) It utilizes a hermeneutic of suspicion that does not adhere to White supremacist and hetero-normative interpretations of scripture; (2) it fuses the belief in an as-if world of Pentecostal mysticism with expressive modes of worship; (3) its pastor/founder and his person centered genre of pastoral preaching that validates the personhood of listeners by utilizing the previously explain hermeneutic of suspicion. I want to make it clear that if I were not restricted by page limitations I would investigate several other defining marks of The Vision Church’s black, queer, and Pentecostal ecclesiology. However, I will reserve my discussion of those marks for a later work. Nevertheless, it is important to note that I chose these three because I see them as the most important marks because they each correspond with at least one of the defining marks that I will explain.
Most black churches have remained wedded to pre-modern/nineteenth-century White Evangelicalism and the post-Reformation beliefs in the exclusive authority, infallibility, clarity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, and self-evident meanings of the Bible. Furthermore, for the majority of black Christians, the Bible serves as the archetypical source of ethical and moral instruction.[42]
The black church has historically been and continues to be a wonderful institution of support, nurture, and uplift. Unfortunately, however, black church leaders and congregants have been resistant and even closed in treating gay and heterosexual congregants equally or, in many cases, offering simple compassion to the suffering of gay people. The black heterosexual majority is presently engaged in a biblical indictment that identifies gays as immoral.[43]
Therefore, one cannot avoid the fact that literalist methods of biblical interpretation are behind the black Christian perspective that portrays homosexuality as an attack on the black family and an assault on the morality of the black community. Horace Griffin argues, “In an effort to receive acceptance from a homophobic society, blacks strongly condemn and deny homosexuality within black communities and churches.” [44] Furthermore, the homophobia of the black heterosexual majority is also rooted “in a biblical indictment that identifies gays as immoral.”[45]Therefore the question becomes, how does a church like The Vision Church of Atlanta handle the historical biblical indictments that have identified homosexuality as immoral? Before answering this question it is important to note that historically, the black church had to be an institution of support, nurture, and uplift for all black people. [46] Traditionally, this support has even contested traditional notions of scriptural interpretation in order to validate oppressed black bodies. For instance, black churches have historically utilized a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ to dispute White supremacist overlays of the gospel that defended the enslavement and brutality of black bodies.[47] However, the majority of black churches have not developed a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ about black sexuality. Instead they continue to mirror the dominant culture and mask the original hermeneutic of suspicion which had defined the black church during slavery. “Black church leaders and congregants have been resistant and even closed in treating gay and heterosexual congregants equally or, in many cases, offering simple compassion to the suffering of gay people.”[48] However, The Vision Church of Atlanta, and many other black, gay, Pentecostal churches within it’s constituency, have made it a defining mark of their ecclesiologies to rekindle and broaden the black church’s historical notion of a hermeneutic of suspicion by ignoring White supremacist and hetero-normative interpretations of scripture.
The Vision Church’s hermeneutic of suspicion is based upon the fact that Jesus expressed amazing acceptance, ignoring the law, by touching and healing the woman with the issue of blood.[49] They pose the question “if Jesus ignores the Leviticus law and becomes unclean himself; can the modern day Church use Leviticus to marginalize the least of these?”[50] In this same vain, Griffin argues that most Christians interpret scriptures inconsistently in that Leviticus is only relevant when it addresses homosexuality. For example, those in the Black Church generally do not believe it is sinful to eat shrimp (Lev.11:10) or pork (11:7), or to wear clothes with mixed fabric (19:19) even though the Levitical code forbids these actions along with male homosexual activity.[51] Therefore because The Vision Church is an institution that follows Christ, they believe that they too should accept those whom even the law condemns. Bishop Allen argues:
“If we are to legitimize Leviticus through a literal read, then we must do so with the rest of the Bible. We must refrain from pork, mixed fabrics, women must not preach, slavery should remain a legitimate institutional for the Bible condones these social taboos. However, we live in a society that chooses what it will condone and also choose its biases. The greatest model for Christianity and who is to be accepted is Jesus Christ. Christ turned no one away, but created an environment for all, especially those on the margins to experience the loving and gentle grace bestowed upon us by a sovereign and compassionate God.”[52]
Therefore, the first marks of The Vision Church’s black, queer, and Pentecostal ecclesiology is that it utilizes a hermeneutic of suspicion that does not adhere to White supremacist and hetero-normative interpretations of scripture.
Secondly, The Vision Church’s black, queer, and Pentecostal ecclesiology fuses the belief in an as-if world of Pentecostal mysticism with expressive modes of worship. Visiting The Vision Church is an interesting experience in that the theology reflects that of a very liberal white northern congregation. However, its worship format is true to the southern Pentecostal tradition. Worshippers at The Vision Church of Atlanta regularly run, shout, dance, scream, and faint under the power of God during morning worship. Additionally, when the spiritual energy in the sanctuary is especially penetrating, individuals begin speaking in tongues and prophesying. Although on the surface level the average person may find the expressiveness of The Vision Church’s worship style to be somewhat excessive and nonsensical, if examined deeper one would see that there is an undeniable sense of theodical meaning-making taking place during these Pentecostal worship services that supersedes the theatricality of the worship genre. For instance, the majority of the Vision Church’s parishioners were members of the LGBT community, which has traditionally been disenfranchised and marginalized from the dominant society. However, the Pentecostal worship style creates what Puett calls an “as if” world which aims to provide hope for its hopeless partakers. African Americans have been marginalized and disenfranchised for centuries. Yet, their indignation and frustration was always filtered through their faith in God. Thus, their pain-influenced theology inclined them to form an expressive worship style through which to channel their heartbrokenness. This expressiveness is not the same in all African American worship services. However, the African American Pentecostal service is quite expressive and it is this expressiveness that creates the imaginative world of “as-ifness”. The “as if” “ceaselessly builds a world that, for brief moments creates pockets of order, pockets of joy, and pockets of inspiration.”[53] It constructs an imaginative world where personal emancipation and eternal peace is conceptualized “as if” it were actually attainable in one’s present reality. The “as if” world of The Vision Church’s Pentecostal ecclesiology gives its LGBT participants strength beyond measure, peace that surpasses understanding, joy everlasting, and courage to face the homophobia in the community outside of its doors. During these worship services the members of The Vision Church forget about their weaknesses, sadness, and pain and they embrace spiritual power, tranquility, and blissfulness as if it were actually reality. When the spirit “hits” the members of The Vision Church, their physical reaction is merely a mystical response to their “moment of pure presence”. To use the language of Jane Bennett in her book The Enchantment of Modern Life, The members of The Vision Church are being figuratively and “simultaneously transfixed in wonder and transported by sense, to be both caught up and carried away.”[54] Although their reaction may seem strange to outsiders, in their world of homophobic rejection this radical expressiveness or enchantment becomes somewhat of an escape from their everyday troubles. It is also helpful to note that the word enchant is derived from the French verb to sing: chanter. “To ‘en-chant’: to surround with song or incantation; hence, to cast a spell with sounds, to make fall under the sway of a magical refrain, to carry away on a sonorous stream.”[55] While most Pentecostals will run from this assertion because of their association with magic and enchantment with the devil or demons, I would argue that their worship services include a lot of spell casting sounds, magical refrains, and enchanting. They often repeat words and phrases in their songs that either sends the congregation into joyful frenzies, what Bennett would call magical refrains, or meditative and worshipful trances, what Bennett would call spell casting sounds.
The third mark of The Vision Church’s black, queer, and Pentecostal ecclesiology is its pastor/founder and his person centered genre of pastoral preaching that validates the personhood of homosexual and heterosexual listeners by utilizing the previously explain hermeneutic of suspicion. This mark is extremely important because at The Vision Church, as with most black churches, “the Black preacher sets the ecclesial settings, reveals the word of God, serves as the prophetic chronicler of the times, and brings “a fresh word for the immediate context without doing violence to the text from which one’s inspiration is drawn”[56]. According to Reddie, Black preaching is one of the defining characteristics of Black ecclesiologies and Black religiosity. For him, black preaching is extremely significant to the definition of the Black church, its intention, and its nature. Furthermore, it is within the personhood of Bishop Allen that we can best see into the black, queer, and Pentecostal ecclesiology of The Vision Church. Any conversation about the theological and cultural understanding of The Vision Church’s ecclesiology must find its start in an examination of its pastor who founded the church and grew it from twelve to over three thousand members. However, in our previous examination of The Vision Church’s theological stances in the blog entry we have inadvertently examined Bishop Allen’s personal ecclesiology and theology as he wrote the doctrines and sets the ecclesial settings of the church.
III. Part Three:
A. A Prescriptive Recommendation for the Christian practice of Hospitality and biblical Exegesis for Mainline Hetero-normative Black Pentecostal Traditions and Black Churches in General
According to Kelly Brown Douglas,
The Black community needs this discourse to help it to understand the role of Black sexuality in maintaining the White hegemonic, racist, sexist, classist, and heterosexist structures. A sexual discourse of resistance is needed also to help Black men and women recognize how the White cultural exploitation of Black sexuality has corrupted Black people is concepts of themselves, one another, and their God.[57]
Therefore, I would argue that The Vision Church of Atlanta’s “whosoever-will” practice of hospitality and its rekindling and broadening of the black church’s historical notion of a hermeneutic of suspicion, which ignores the White supremacist, and hetero-normative interpretations of scripture are Christian practices that should be adopted by the Christian church universal. Mainline hetero-normative Black Pentecostal traditions should not only continue to operate within their ecclesiological mark of as-if world of Pentecostal mysticism but they should stop hiding behind their expressive modes of worship and White supremacist and hetero-normative interpretations of scripture in order to see the pain that they are causing to the souls of LGBT persons. Mainline Black Pentecostal churches, who share marks two and three with The Vision Church, should consider embracing The Vision Church’s first and primary ecclesiological mark, a hermeneutic of suspicion that does not adhere to White supremacist and hetero-normative interpretations of scripture. If mainline hetero-normative Black Pentecostal churches can adhere to a hermeneutic of suspicion as it pertains to eating shrimp (Lev.11:10) or pork (11:7), or to wearing clothes with mixed fabric (19:19) even though the Levitical code forbids these actions along with male homosexual activity[58], then it should also, as does The Vision Church, ignore the Leviticus law and become unclean as did Jesus himself. For it was in becoming metaphorically unclean and touching a menstruating woman that Jesus redeemed humanity unto himself and stood in solidarity with her oppression and suffering.
Mainline hetero-normative Black Pentecostal Churches should use The Vision Church’s first and primary ecclesiological mark, a hermeneutic of suspicion as ecclesiological model for change and acceptance of all of God’s children. Because of its three interdependent and interconnected ecclesiological marks, The Vision Church of Atlanta could become an enormously legendary power in shaping how black religious historians will perceive the Black Church’s present tussle with sexuality in the years to come. The cutting edge and revolutionary redefining of the black family by it’s first family and the theological meaning making that it is developing around discussions of what it means to be a black Pentecostal transgendered person, sets The Vision Church apart as an institution that can speak not only to the field of black religious history but also to Black Pentecostal studies and ecclesiological research on marginalized and disenfranchised groups. Sadly, history is perspectival and whether or not the Vision Church’s legacy will be understood by future Christians as right or wrong is dependent on who will be reading its history, who wrote it, and within which context it is read. But it is my hope that when Bishop Allen’s grandchildren are born that mainline black Pentecostal churches and Black Churches will no longer be hetero-normative in ideology. My hope is that all Black Churches will be forces of love, peace, and a liberated God consciousness where the obstructions of otherness and religion fundamentalism are dissipated and all persons are valued.
[1] http://apprising.org/about-2/
[2] The Christian Research Institute is a fundamentalist and conservative organization which exists to contest teachings that assault or undermine orthodox biblical Christianity. The mission of the Christian Research Institute is to teach the essential Christian doctrine. In the past, the Christian Research Institute has been known for developing evangelical counter-cult methodologies, anti-homosexual rhetoric, Orthodox doctrines, and methods of biblical literalism. http://www.equip.org/about/our-mission/
[3] “Left-leaning Christians to rally around 'Wild Goose'”, USA Today, June 17, 2011 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/religion/2011-06-17-wild-goose-christian-festival_n.htm
[4]http://www.bcne.net/files/Documents/Evangelism/Resources/Internet%20Directory%20July%20PDF.pdf
[5] http://apprising.org/2011/12/20/evil-pro-homosexual-agenda-and-its-vision-church/
[7] Ibid
[8] Ibid
[9] Bénézet Bujo, African Theology in its Social Context. Maryknoll: Orbis. Reprinted by Wipf and Stock Publishers (2006), 5-37, 75-130; Marthinus Daneel, “The Church as Healing and Liberating Institution,” in African Earthkeepers: Wholistic Interfaith Mission. Maryknoll: Orbis, 137-63.
[10] Marthinus Daneel, “The Church as Healing and Liberating Institution,” in African Earthkeepers: Wholistic Interfaith Mission. Maryknoll: Orbis, 137-63.
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
[13] James cone, Black Theology and Black Power. 20th Anniversary Edition. Maryknoll: Orbis, p. 69
[14] This conversation is too extensive to pursue here. Instead of rehearsing previously debated academic works, I will simply supply my reader with supplemental reading and continue my argument with the understanding that I do see the disenfranchisement of African Americans and the disenfranchisement of LGBT persons are parallel.
[15] Stanley Hauerwas ,“The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics” in The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), p. 107
[16] Stanley Hauerwas ,“A Story-Formed Community: Reflections on Watership Down” in A Community of Character: Toward A Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). [The Hauerwas Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 172-173
[17] Hauerwas ,“The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics” in The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), p. 107
[18] John Howard Yoder, Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecumenical and Ecclesiological (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press), p. 228
[19] John Howard Yoder, “Why Ecclesiology is Social Ethics,” in Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecumenical and Ecclesiological (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press), p. 122
[20] John Howard Yoder, “The New Humanity as Pulpit and Paradigm,” in For the Nations: Essays Public and Evangelical (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), 29
[21] Ken Silva, Beliefs, http://apprising.org/beliefs/
[22] Ken Silva, THE VISIBILITY OR INVISIBILITY OF THE CHURCH, Aug 30, 2013 http://apprising.org/2013/08/30/the-visibility-or-invisibility-of-the-church/
[23] Ken Silva, The marks of a True Church, Mar 2, 2012 http://apprising.org/2012/03/02/the-marks-of-a-true-church/
[24] Ibid
[25] http://www.thevisionchurch.org/our-beliefs/
[26] http://www.thevisionchurch.org/our-theological-distinctive/
[27] http://www.thevisionchurch.org/our-beliefs/
[28] Stanley Hauerwas ,“The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics” in The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), p. 107
[29] http://www.thevisionchurch.org/our-beliefs/
[30] Stanley Hauerwas ,“A Story-Formed Community: Reflections on Watership Down” in A Community of Character: Toward A Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). [The Hauerwas Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 172-173
[31] Hauerwas ,“The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics” in The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), p. 107
[32] http://www.thevisionchurch.org/our-theological-distinctive/
[33] Hauerwas ,“The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics” in The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), p. 107
[34] http://www.thevisionchurch.org/our-beliefs/
[35] http://www.thevisionchurch.org/our-theological-distinctive/
[36] John Howard Yoder, “Why Ecclesiology is Social Ethics,” in Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecumenical and Ecclesiological (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press), p. 122
[37] Ibid
[38] http://www.thevisionchurch.org/our-theological-distinctive/
[39] Yoder, “The Apostle’s Apology Revisited in The New Way of Jesus, 116.
[40] Yoder, “The Authority of Tradition,” The Priestly Kingdom, 66.
[41] Yoder, “The Authority of Tradition,” The Priestly Kingdom, 69. Italics original.
[42] Vincent L. Wimbush, “The Bible and African Americans: An Outline of an Interpretive History” in The Theological Interpretation of Scripture, (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997), 75.
[43] Horace Griffin, Their Own Received Them Not (Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 2006), 2.
[44] Griffin, Their Own Received Them Not, 20.
[45] Horace Griffin, Their Own Received Them Not (Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 2006), 2.
[46] Ibid
[47] Anthony Reddie Black Ecclesiologies, 449
[48] Horace Griffin, Their Own Received Them Not (Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 2006), 2.
[49] http://www.thevisionchurch.org/our-theological-distinctive/
[50] Ibid
[51] Ibid.
[52] http://www.thevisionchurch.org/our-theological-distinctive/
[53] Puett, Michael, Adam Selism, Bennett Silman, Robert Weller. Ritual and its Consequences. Oxford University Press. New York, New York: 2008, p.180.
[54] Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life. Princeton University Press. Princeton,
New Jersey: 2001, p.5
[55] Bennet, p.6
[56] Anthony G. Reddie “Black Ecclesiologies,” in The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church. New York: Routledge.
[57] Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church, 142.
[58] Ibid.