feminist ecclesiology – Feminism and Religion

Photo by Chris Pinkham. (I recently shaved by head again – I’ll get an updated photo soon!)

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…

In the last post about rethinking church communally, I ended with reference to the fact that those who do not identify with an organized religion – nearly 70% of the religiously unaffiliated – think that churches “focus too much on rules,” “are too concerned with money and power,” and “are too involved in politics.”

I found this to be the case also among participants of “Emerging Church” congregations, which I researched for my dissertation. Many participants of the congregations I visited had previous negative and damaging experiences of church – experiences that caused them to become unaffiliated from church and Christianity all together. But, when discovering or happening upon an “emerging” congregation, some were pleasantly surprised by the experience of an open, welcoming, and justice-oriented community of faith that was creative in form and ritual, and egalitarian in leadership.