True Inclusion

Creating Communities of Radical Embrace

Brandan Robertson

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780827237193
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Discover how to move your church beyond mere welcome to radical embrace.

So your church website says you're welcoming, a rainbow flag flies out front, worship uses gender-inclusive language, and you make sure you greet the stranger next to you on Sunday mornings. But is all of that really enough? And what if those welcoming gestures actually keep visitors from returning and exclude dozens of other groups or people in your community?

In True Inclusion, public theologian and pastor Brandan Robertson shares how to move your church from mere welcome to radical embrace. Pointing to a clear biblical imperative for radical inclusivity in the sanctuary and in the public square, Robertson presents a paradigm-shifting vision of community, "where nothing is simple, nothing is easy, but everything is beautiful." Learn practical, step-by-step approaches to becoming deeply, robustly, and richly inclusive of all people regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, political affiliation, and socioeconomic status.

Written for people and communities at every stage of the journey, True Inclusion will challenge and inspire you to embody a gospel of radical embrace for all.

1: Explaining Exclusion

We’ve all been excluded from something before. Upon realizing that we were not invited to an event with the rest of our friends, or being told quite blatantly that we are not welcome to participate in some group or activity, we are overcome with a deep sense of shame: shame that we are not good enough; shame that we must have done something wrong to merit this exclusion—or, worse, that we must be something wrong. We question who we are, our place in our friend group or community, and sometimes even our fundamental self-worth. To be deliberately excluded is one of the deepest pains a human can experience, because we are fundamentally wired for community. That is how we begin to develop an individual sense of self, and how we craft the worldview and narrative by which we will live our lives.

Belonging is one of the most fundamental needs of human beings. Leading psychological researcher Brené Brown is right: “A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.”1

According to Christian theology, our need to belong is a direct reflection of the God in whose image we’re made. In orthodox Christian teaching, God is understood to be a trinity: three persons, one substance, in eternal relationship with one another. Creator, Christ, and Spirit (or Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in more traditional language) exist as the three faces of God, three individuated parts of the same whole.

It is from these fundamental relationships at the heart of God that Love is generated, and, from Love, all of creation bursts forth. If God is fundamentally an interconnected, triune relationship, then it follows that those made in the image and likeness of God are also fundamentally wired for such relationships. As the renowned Franciscan writer Fr. Richard Rohr notes: “Everything exists in radical relationship, which we now call ecosystems, orbits, cycles, and circulatory systems… God is relationship itself... The Way of Jesus is an invitation to a Trinitarian way of living, loving, and relating—on earth as it is in the Godhead. We are intrinsically like the Trinity, living in an absolute relatedness.”2

If belonging is truly an “irreducible need of all people” and “we are intrinsically like the Trinity, living in absolute relatedness,” then exclusion and rejection from our communities of belonging is a fundamental assault on the humanity of a person. It is an assault on the fundamental order of creation, an attack on something generated from the very essence of who God is. From the Christian perspective, to exclude another person from relationship, and especially relationship to God, is perhaps the most blasphemous and destructive sin we could commit. To isolate another human being is to cut them off from the relationships that are so fundamental to what it means to be a human, and degrades the very essence of their humanity.

Furthermore, when we exclude a person or group of people, we are degrading our own humanity, acting not in the spirit of Christ, and not even acting like good humans. By perpetuating dehumanization, we dehumanize ourselves. Think about it: the more exclusive a community becomes, the more immorality tends to increase in those communities. Think of the most exclusive cults or secret societies in our world, and almost every single one of them has been plagued by abuse and immorality. Why? Because, whenever we exclude, we are pushing others away from their fundamental nature, and we are also degrading our own nature as humans.

Isn’t it ironic, then, that those who have been commissioned with the “gospel of inclusion” have, more often than not, become people of the most exclusive communities and theologies? Throughout our two-thousand-year history, Christians time and time again have fallen into the trap of dualistic thinking, declaring who is in and who is out, who is saved and who is damned, who can join communities and who is to be expelled. These behaviors have absolutely no place in the Christian narrative. Yet ask almost any passerby and they will confirm that we Christians are known more often for our exclusion than for our radical embrace of all.

Why We Exclude

Exclusion is clearly incompatible with the gospel of Christ. And yet all of us will exclude and be excluded in some way over the course of our lives. On one hand, exclusion is important to maintaining a unique identity within a family or community. We’ll explore this a bit more later. When we exclude in this way, it is to preserve a unique culture or identity. This type of exclusion is not meant to marginalize others, but rather to preserve distinct values or practices of a community. The exclusion that we’re focusing on is instead exclusion based on fear of difference and the human impulse to find a scapegoat for our problems.

French anthropologist René Girard has written extensively about the “scapegoating mechanism” that nearly every religion and culture throughout history adopts as a means of creating cohesion within a community.3 By identifying an enemy that they can blame for their collective problems, whether a single person or a group of people, entire nations can be unified. Just think of moments in your lifetime when you experienced such unity. For example, on September 11, 2001, the United States—and, indeed, the Western world—experienced a unity that has rarely been reproduced. But this unity, rooted in fear, was grounded in a hatred of Islam and Muslims, who were seen not just as the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., but very quickly as the cause of all of our problems—economic, social, and spiritual. By identifying a group of persons whom we believe to be dangerous and to pose a threat to our collective wellbeing, we create a cohesive unity driven by a desire to exclude and often destroy those we regard as the cause of our problems.

In Scripture, this scapegoating mechanism is seen clearly from the Hebrew Bible through the New Testament in the distinction between “clean” and “unclean.” In the Hebrew mind, the Jewish people were the chosen and “pure” race of people, set apart by God to be the rightful rulers and brokers of justice for the world. Everyone outside of this ethnic, cultural, and religious group were regarded as “unclean” and as posing a threat to the cause of the Hebrew people. It was this exclusion and marginalization of all other cultures, races, and religions that unified the Hebrew people and enabled them to commit acts of mass murder as they fought to obtain lands that they believed were given to them by God, but were occupied by allegedly “unclean” peoples. For a Jewish person to mingle even socially with a Gentile was to become defiled, and caused at the very least a temporary exclusion from the life of the community.

This distinction between “clean” and “unclean” is carried throughout the New Testament and is seen most clearly in chapter 10 of the book of Acts. In this chapter, the apostle Peter falls into a trance, and is told by God to “rise up, kill, and eat” (v. 13b) unkosher (unclean) animals that were forbidden by the purity codes of the Hebrew Bible. Peter, being a faithful Jew, argues with God, claiming that he has always been faithful about remaining pure and separate from all unclean beings. It seems that he believed that God was testing him. But then the Scriptures say that God uttered revolutionary and infamous words to Peter: “Do not call unclean that which I have made clean” (v. 15b). In this singular phrase, we see one of the key ethical movements of the New Testament, a movement away from the distinction of “clean” and “unclean” and toward an ethic of radical inclusion. In this moment, the Spirit of God is tearing down the artificial barriers that had been created to separate humanity into divided factions, and, instead, was working to create what the apostle Paul calls “one new humanity” (Eph. 2:15, NIV).

Theologian and ethicist Miroslav Volf writes about this distinction between “clean” and “unclean” in his groundbreaking and award-winning book Exclusion and Embrace. It is something he knows about personally, as a Croatian public theologian: “Sin is…the kind of purity that wants the world cleansed of the other rather than the heart cleansed of the evil that drives people out by calling those who are clean ‘unclean.’”4 In Volf’s analysis, the distinctions between clean and unclean, the included and the excluded, are matters of the heart, not a literal state of reality. We divide, marginalize, and exclude based on an inner “evil,” which I think is simply fear. The solution to this inner fear is never to drive out the “unclean” person, but rather to rid ourselves of the “uncleanness” of our own hearts. We exclude only because of our own fear and desire for self-preservation, rooted in ignorance of the “other.” It is this same fear that drove the Hebrew people (and most other cultures, both ancient and modern) to declare the people in other nations and cultures “unclean,” and to create fantastic mythologies about the wicked practices of these other cultures. In this collective exclusivity and superiority, a strong, cohesive bond is formed. But that bond perpetuates a system of fear that brings destruction to everyone.

This is why God’s w...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Praise for True Inclusion
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Explaining Exclusion
• 2: Missing the Mark
• 3: The Inclusion Imperative
• 4: The Importance of Inclusion
• 5: The Problem of Patriarchy
• 6: The Ingredients of Inclusion
• 7: Inclusion in Context
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• About the Author