An Ambitious Task: A Queer, Feminist, Decolonial Listening to the Gospel According to Mark by Xochitl Alvizo

I was recently invited to give the Castañeda-Jennings lecture via Zoom at the Chicago Theological Seminary. The lecture was yesterday and it was founded to celebrate the the awarding of the Castañeda-Jennings Scholarships, which go to students whose work helps transform Christian congregations from places of hostility to places of support and empowerment for the LGBTQ community. It really was an honor to get to participate and share through a lecture. And, it was an opportunity to do what I don’t often get to do, which is to be fully theological – to present my critical reflection on Christian praxis in light of the scripture, which is considered the word of God by Christians, and in this case, I was specifically reflecting on the gospel according to Mark.

This lecture is a snapshot of the larger book project on ecclesiology that I am working on – a feminist, queer, anti-racist, decolonial theology of church. So here I’ll share some of the highlights of the talk…

The Contexts of Church

We are embedded in a world-system that organizes humans by caste, in hierarchies of supremacy, and it is important to identify them in their particular forms. It is also necessary to identify the counter-movements that intend to contraindicate them: feminist and queer movements of liberation, the movement for black lives, and decoloniality and the movement toward indigenization (the redoing/reaffirming ways of being that include indigenous knowing, thinking, feeling, and being, including with our relationship to the land). 

The contexts I am specifically taking into account are:

• misogyny and the interrelated system of patriarchy: In which women are not accorded the same status as full and complete human beings with the full range of human capacities and dignity, and our political, social, and familial structures are created to reflect such un-truth
• cis-heteronormativity: the dominant reality organizing our world as if everyone is (and should be) heterosexual and the prejudice that being cisgender (that one’s sex and gender are congruent), is and should be normative.
• anti-black racism: the reality of the deeply embedded and organized framework that places black people outside the ontological definition of a human being, and is therefore treated, by individuals, structures, and systems as if there are “no humans involved.”
• coloniality – the legacy and continuation of colonialism, the dominant imaginary that has taken root in our minds, bodies, and ways of being that preserve the modern colonial perspectives and ways of producing knowledge, constructing power, and defining be-ing

All of this is relevant for how Christians think about what it means to be church.

Church – what is at the root of what we call church?

Drawing from Mary Daly’s early work (while she still identified as Christian), the early followers of Jesus clearly witnessed “a certain transparency to the divine” in their encounters with him–for what else could have caused people to drop what they are in the middle of doing to follow someone who said, “Follow me, I will make you fish for people.” A certain transparency to the divine must have surely be at work, because follow him they did, and his growing band of friends grew into a small movement that became a threat to the imperial world-system of their time.  

Since then, the church has sought to transmit this original revelatory encounter – an encounter with transcendent reality –which was, quoting Daly again, “originally sparked by the meeting of a small community living over nineteen hundred years ago with the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth” (emphasis mine).

But what is at the root of what is called church? According to a classic text, “Images of the Church in the New Testament,” written by Paul Minear, there are 96 different images and metaphors used to refer to church (Stone, A Reader, 1). The early Christian communities used the Greek political term ecclesia to refer to themselves; literally meaning, the “calling out.” The term is a reference to the “gathering and association of those with citizen rights of a whole city from their private homes into a public assembly” (Stone, A Reader, 3).

It does raise the question…to what are Christian identified people – those who have the full rights and responsibilities of calling themselves Christian – being called out? What is the nature and purpose of this calling out and gathering?

Bryan Stone, who was my advisor during my PhD studies, makes the point in his book, A Reader in Ecclesiology, that the church, in as much as it is “the body of Christ” or a “living sacrament,” both reveals to the world something of God’s very nature and purpose and is also always “an imperfect, social and historical institution…created, organized, and maintained by particular human being in specific times and places” (Stone, A Reader, 1).

That is to say,
the church changes,
is never fully perfected,
and it is always reflective of the cultures in which it is exists.

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Put a bookmark here, as I will pick back up with the next highlight, which I’ll share in another post, in which I move to the question: What is the relationship between church and what the “called out” call the good news?

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I know I’m being more theological here than what I usually write for FAR, but like I shared with the audience yesterday, hang in here with me, struggle and reflect with me. It’ll sharpen both of our minds.