When We Belong

Reclaiming Christianity on the Margins

Rohadi Nagassar

• Publisher: Herald Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781513810379
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Step into a journey toward liberation, belonging, and a faith that makes you whole again. We need belonging to survive and thrive, but too often the church is an impediment. For Christians who know the pain, isolation, and loss of identity that comes with the ongoing struggle to be seen in churches and institutions full of barriers to belonging, you are not alone. Sometimes it can feel easier to walk away from faith completely. But there is another way. When it feels as though there's no place left to belong, Jesus invites us into a love that knows no bounds and a community that truly liberates. In this hope-filled book, author Rohadi Nagassar brings the margins to the center to help readers rediscover a reality of love, belonging, and beauty through the journey of deconstructing, decolonizing, and reclaiming faith. For those on the margins struggling to find belonging, for everyone who wants to join in building radically inclusive communities where all people can live fully in their own skin—now begins a journey to find this freedom.

Part I

On Belonging

1

The Search
for Belonging

There’s a peculiar thing about belonging: we all need it but it’s just so hard to find.

Do you resonate with the struggle to find true belonging? As if only shreds of belonging are accessible, requiring secret passcodes or special fees for entry? Have you noticed that when you happen to acquire a taste of belonging, it dissipates into a mere temporary occasion of “just fitting in”? Is that enough to fill the emptiness? Or do we need deeper ways to belong despite a world designed to consistently exclude?

Rather than ensuring that belonging is available to all, our society is rooted in foundational barriers. Divisions that determine who’s in and who will be pushed to the margins. People like me, who aren’t white, understand that one of the primary divisions is race. Visible minorities share a deep connection generated from a common suffering and subjugation under the structures of white supremacy. We are reminded daily, and know the feeling in our bones, that finding true belonging will always be elusive.

Ironically, encountering barriers to belonging is a revelation of sorts that would otherwise go unnoticed. Previously disguised features in a world specifically built to marginalized select bodies become known as we encounter them. When we name these hidden pieces, the systems, the cultures, and the beliefs that seek to make us less whole, we begin to tear down the dividing wall. Naming divisions, questioning old ways, and embarking on new paths also has a name: deconstruction. In this way, deconstruction is a pathway unto liberation from all that ain’t right in the world. It’s a process of finding a more beautiful way to belong and live in the fullness of who we are made to be.

Where to find true belonging is the big question. It can feel too big at times and too daunting to even start. So let’s add some framework and bring it closer to home, or closer to faith as it were. You are most likely here because some aspect, or perhaps the whole, of your faith has impinged on your ability to grasp belonging and wholeness in full. In other words, Christianity has become an impediment to finding true belonging. That’s a bold claim, but I know some readers are nodding their head in immediate agreement. People pushed to the margins know. We don’t need an explanation to describe the harm and trouble we’ve encountered in the church, both within the institution and with the people. Just as we name features hidden in society preventing our full belonging, so we must do the same for the church.

What are the impediments?

Is it a particular denomination or church? Just a tradition or two? A particular theology? Or is it the whole thing?

For churches located in the West, and the traditions they come from, the answer is more pieces than we care to admit.

It’s difficult to lump all churches into a single monolith, although we often try when we use the term “the church.” It generally evokes a picture of the dominant variety. There are of course many different traditions, but the differences are only known to insiders. Therefore, to begin, when I refer to “the church,” I will maintain the norm. I’m thinking of a body that includes most of what we would consider mainstream Christianity. The major denominations like Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, some Orthodox churches, traditions like evangelicalism, some Pentecostalism, and any others with European roots. Within this grouping there are enough similarities to warrant lumping them together. So, what do they have in common?

Church impediments

Churches create a finely tuned orchestration of belonging. Assimilation to dominant ways of being and thinking are an expectation. Are you familiar with the struggle? When I asked whether you’ve ever struggled with belonging, chances are you can pinpoint a situation or two, or three, or six hundred. It happens when our bodies and souls can no longer endure destructive messages and incongruent beliefs. For many, receiving blows to our convictions and personhood accumulates to the point that only one healthy choice remains—leave.

I get it. Some of us are just hanging on. I see you. In the midst of our experience one thing should remain consistent: we ought to trust what we feel in our body and spirit. As someone who’s grown up in and been shaped and formed by white evangelicalism, and who even went to seminary, I know there’s not a lot of life available without assimilation. This is not the way things ought to be.

When you don’t fit, you’re pushed to the margins. How does this happen? The primary separation between the margins and the center is the standard of whiteness. Marginalized bodies are dictated by the characteristics determined by the white heteronormative gaze. When you don’t adhere to the constantly shifting demands of whiteness you wind up steps behind. This is not because of a lack of effort or any decision of your own, but rather because one of those hidden obstructions to belonging is being unearthed. The primary structural and interpersonal intersections contributing to marginalization are race and gender. We will focus on race predominantly in this book, but there are other important divisions, including sexuality, disability, neurodiversity, ethnicity, class, nationality, and so on.

The idea that Christianity is an impediment to living out your whole being sounds like the opposite of what it should be. In theory the Christian faith is a grand narrative, from Genesis to Revelation, about God on a mission to bring the world into right relationship. It’s a dream designed to liberate us from all that ain’t right in the world. From all the despair of a pandemic, all the way down to how we belong to ourselves. It may be expressed through a community practicing radical hospitality, inclusivity, unity in diversity, justice, and the pursuit of wholeness in mind, body, and spirit. Sound good so far?

Sure, it’s hard to reflect every one of these attributes. After all, the church is full of people and we are a flawed bunch. I am, however, dismayed by how many churches define themselves by the barriers they preserve over the freedom they should announce. It is not a freedom tainted by the aspirations of Western individualism. Rather, it is a promised dream where we can live out our whole and authentic selves. Yet true belonging in churches seems out of reach even for the insiders.

That’s the other reason why you’re here. You’ve grown up in, or have otherwise been shaped and formed by, a particular way of believing and understanding the world. And then something went awry. Beliefs, ideas, opinions called into question as they became obstacles preventing full belonging and human flourishing. A version of faith that leaves a gnawing feeling that there’s more to life than what’s on the inside. What we lack to make sense of our search and move forward is the language to name the problem and ultimately locate a life-giving alternative.

Finding the right words

I remember a conversation with my friend Lis1 on the subject of patriarchy in the Bible. She had recently read The Making of Biblical Womanhood by professor Beth Allison Barr. “That book finally gave me the language to describe the problems with ‘biblical womanhood,’ that what I knew deep down inside wasn’t right,” Lis said. When we lack the right vocabulary to name what we’re feeling, we often get stuck. Sometimes for a long time. Without the right words, we may struggle to identify why we feel at odds with ourselves. An unidentifiable piece of our being strikes a dissonant chord filled with wrong notes we can’t shake. If we ignore it, we stagnate, burying a voice within ourselves longing to be free. To fill in the blanks we need a renewed hope to confirm the nagging sensation—call it belief—that better is out there. If you wish, you can even call it promptings from the Spirit of God trying to set the captive part of you free.

New vocabulary helps imagine new ways of being and belonging. It offers form to shape a faith that exists beyond the baggage of institutions and their boundaries of belonging. This is not to say we throw away all history and tradition. But it does mean permission to conduct a deep introspection of core beliefs, including where they come from. Some of us need permission to do this work because we’ve learned that the wrong question can push us to the margins. But you may already know that. You are already questioning the ways you were formed to believe. You are asking why your brand of Christianity struggles with compassion, justice, radical inclusion, and the love for the other and the enemy. Why is preserving traditions or appointing gatekeepers to determine who is worthy enough to enter community a paramount concern? I’m with you. I don’t want this brand of Christianity either, because if the “right” version of Christianity is a religion built to associate with the powers of Western thought and empire, then the entire faith from cross, resurrection, and ultimate restoration lacks power and meaning. To quote pastor Mika Edmondson, “When society has its knee on your neck, you need a God who will deliver souls and bodies.”2 We need more than salvation for privileged souls disconnected from the plight of the world, a salvation that escapes this world for heaven in the clouds. No, we need a redemptive story for all of creation in the here and now.

Thankfully, this hope exists, and it specifically includes those on the margins. We have a unique and intimate connection with Jesus and his hope of good news now. I see this relationship emerge when I read stories in the Bible. I am drawn to the ways the last become first, how the meek and the hopeless inherit the earth, how those who thirst for justice will find fulfillment, and those who show mercy will receive mercy. These are all essential characteristics and teachings of Jesus Christ and simultaneously the source to find true belonging. I argue that these stories are worth reclaiming because, like you, I’m tired of struggling to find community in order to be whole. Tired of the exhaustive and elusive search for a church to not just “get by,” but flourish too. Tired of giving up a piece of myself to just fit in.

I stopped running into these deadends nearly twenty years ago. Something in me said, Enough! There’s got to be a better way. And despite a lifetime of trying to fit in, despite seeing how marginalized people are intentionally kept on the margins, I carry a deep faith. Despite twenty years shaped in mainstream evangelicalism (my experience is translatable to most other traditions), I’ve also spent the past twenty years leading church expressions outside of the institution. I have great hope for the church but no vested interest in preserving the institution. We can reject bad teachings in full. That includes ones that have formed beliefs in generations and for centuries, to reclaim good news that seeks to make us whole. Finding this path to ultimate wholeness is the journey before us now. One rooted in a Christian faith that embodies Jesus toward a more whole and liberated existence in community and place. It’s the pursuit of freedom from all that ain’t right in the world, and the reclamation of true belonging.

2

Grasping
True Belonging

Oahu, Hawaii.

I sink my toes deeper into a powder of white sand as the sun begins to set. A barely there breeze whispers past my body as blue skies shift to deep orange and pink hues. They linger above darkening yet calm waters. In the distance, a sailboat bobs along the ocean surface, and just as the sun touches the horizon, the two meet and the ship is briefly contained within the glowing orange orb. Deep breath. Exhale. Something in my soul knows that this space and this moment, on the traditional lands of the Kanaka Maoli, is a piece of heaven on earth. Our bodies have an intuitive connection to the land to spot and appreciate beauty, don’t they?

Kananaskis, Alberta.

I’m standing at the base of a mountain as my head tilts to the summit. Three thousand feet and six hours of hiking await. Leaving the sound of the roadway behind, I plod toward the top, step by step by step. I’m carrying a pack with extra clothes (the weather can change on a dime), hiking poles (for my knees on the way down), my camera (the one you hold with two hands), a handheld compass and a GPS (I don’t know how to use either), lots of water and lunch (ham and Swiss), and some bear spray (in case I’m about to become lunch).

There’s something both alluring and therapeutic in reconnecting with the land by spending hours bathing in a Rocky Mountain forest completely alone. Hiking without any outside distractions or interactions is sublime. Just me in my head where I like to be. It’s also a chance to listen for any whispering voice from God or the trees. I usually don’t leave disappointed. The last part of why bother trouncing up a relentless hill has to do with the mental challenge, coupled with a side of danger. To conquer a peak and see the world—just for a moment—from the very top is worth the turmoil. Little about this exercise is about, well, the exercise.

I maintain a steady pace for the first hour. The incline steepens and will do so until I reach the summit. The higher I go the thinner the air gets. After hour two, then three, I start to question my resolve as my legs grow weary. Why am I doing this to myself? I notice a thinning patch of moss cushioned in a rock crevice as I catch my breath while leaning against my poles. I don’t even like hiking. The doubt and pain begin to creep in, but are met with more steps up and upward. The last five hundred feet are the hardest. I can see the summit but it’s not getting any closer, which intensifies the desire to quit. My pace slows to a crawl on all fours as I traverse tricky rock outcroppings. No point turning back now. With one hundred feet left, my excitement returns. This is the part where the view opens and the sight becomes . . . magic. I stretch out my hand to touch the clouds. Just a little further now . . .

Few things are as exhilarating as standing on a mountaintop. At this height the view extends further than my vision can comprehend. I celebrate by letting out a scream of both triumph and despair that gets lost in grey rock abyss below. Up here things are different. I am fully alive with nobody around me to tell me otherwise.

My dining room.

It took a few trips to the grocery store, but I’m ready. Five pounds of beef (eye of round cut thin by the butcher), fancy breads, and pretty much every vegetable that can be skewered on a prong and then dipped in a pot. Every fall I hold a fondue evening for friends. Two pots of broth sit over open flames as guests cook their choice of foods. I like fondue evenings because they are intentionally slow. It’s a tradition on top of my enjoyment to cook with and for friends. The meal lasts for hours as conversations fill the void. This time someone jumps straight into the deep end: “Do you think God exists despite all the evil in the world?” Smiles break out as the discussion intensifies. It’s these moments, when everyone is connected and engaged, that feel special. I remind myself to take note, remember the people, the aromas, and in particular how my body feels. I feel good. Immersed and cherishing a moment to just be me in my own skin. A grin widens across my face as I sense the affirmation: These are my people—I belong here . . .

When was the last time you inhabited belonging in your entire being? When you heard the heartbeat of the land as the perfect sunset unfolded? When you shared communion with others and felt fully seen? When you sensed freedom in your own body? It’s a tricky question because it presumes you don’t have belonging in all its pieces now. But belonging should be abundant, available to all so we may flourish and be whole. In fact, I want a life that shares and emanates substantive presence within enduring belonging. One that embodies characteristics like love, justice, beauty, and hope. But for many of us, belonging remains sporadic or constantly out ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Prologue
• Part I: On Belonging
• Part II: Deconstruction
• Part III: Reclamation
• Part IV: Beautiful Tales
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• The Author