I will always cherish Dr. Willie Jennings because he is the one I went to for counsel in my first great theological crisis - the one that led me ultimately to move from the United Methodist Church and into Anglicanism. Dr. Jennings was Associate Dean at Duke at the time. For the first time in my life I studied Augustine and Aquinas and struggled to understand their doctrines of election which seemed quite different from the juridical tale of atonement, so heavily influenced by Calvinism, that I had absorbed in my popular piety as a Methodist. I entered a profound crisis as I recognized I was being forced to choose between popular evangelical teaching and that which I intuitively recognized as more true to the gospel of Jesus I knew. I quite literally quit all of my studies for about five days and devoured Karl Barth's more contemporary discussion of election in his Church Dogmatics. Barth's treatment took me down paths so distant from the thinking I knew dominated my local board of ordained ministry, that I realized I had no hope of being ordained in my old Methodist district because of the great theological gulf I had crossed by reading Augustine, Aquinas, and Barth. Dr. Jennings sat with me for a long time in his office, helping me to sort this out and to understand its implications. In a certain sense it was therefore an African-American Baptist theologian who first ushered me to the door of Anglicanism. And so Dr. Jennings will always be dear to me, not only because he is a first rate theologian but because of the kind and wise pastoring he gave me in what I remember as a great theological crisis during my first semester at Duke.

Dr. Jennings has a new book that will be published next year, which I think will be called "Race and the Disfiguration of the Christian Social Imagination." He's interviewed here in what turns out to be a fascinating discussion of how we think about the social enclaves we create, about the doctrine of creation in a world in which we are all immigrants, and about how we ought to think about what it means to be one of those who live between the cracks of our accepted cultural categories (what my friend and mentor, Dr. Brian Bantum, calls a "mulatto existence").

I offer this challenge to all those who are, like me, struggling to think about what it means to be Christian in a world in which not just the categories of race and gender but also the categories we create to talk about our sexuality have drawn us into quite difficult times for the Church: read this interview in its entirety. While reading, allow Dr. Jennings' insights to challenge not just your thinking about race, but also about gender and sexuality.

The question in the background is the same: what is the path of faithfulness for us? How are we to be the Church and not just a band of people who follow our own traditions? Of what must we repent if we are to be/become one, holy, catholic, and apostolic people? And if you are an Anglican concerned about the divisions pervading our Communion these past several years, how might Dr. Jennings' insights on race inform our thinking about own divisions?

I provide a few excerpts from the interview below for your convenience:

Martin Luther King Jr. said it many years ago, and it has been quoted many times, but we still have not gotten our minds around the depth of his statement. He said, “The most segregated hour in America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning.”

The reality of the church, especially in North America, is one that is deeply indebted to a particular vision of ethnic and racial existence so that it is quite natural for us to imagine our church life in a culturally monolithic, racially monolithic way without in any way seeing that as an absurdity. So what you have in many places in the country are churches and different congregations sharing the same church building. There is an eight o’clock service for one particular group, an eleven o’clock service for another, and yet another group meets at noon or one o’clock to have their worship service. We imagine that that is not only quite normal, but in some instances, people actually imagine that to be quite noble—the sharing of one space by multiple communities—without realizing the absolute grotesque nature and absurdity of such a situation.

...the first thing that needs to be done is for people to try to remember and understand the significance of having been immigrants. It is important for us to reflect on how we have changed, how we have been formed, and how we became communities in this country and, in doing so, to recognize what boundaries were set up, what ways of thinking about others were set up, and how we continue to function inside of those rubrics. Now, of course, a part of that is also recognizing the ways we function inside of class distinctions, which are often hidden to us. I think that is going to be the first crucial step. To do that means you suspend any conversation about reconciling various groups because in point of fact, the first issue is to recognize the formation of the groups themselves in order to understand how those things interact with, and in many ways control, the power, reach, and depth of one’s Christian identity.

...The next step begins with opening our eyes and taking notice of those peoples among us who in many ways exist between the cracks, the peoples among us who, to borrow from a wonderful gentleman who just finished his work here at Duke, Brian Bantum, understand the significance of “mulatto existence,” the idea of “living between,” as well as what it means as a Christian to live between. This is something we just have not paid much attention. If you return to Ephesians 2, you find something very interesting in the new body, the new humanity that is constituted in the body of Jesus, bringing together multiple peoples to be something new. It is precisely our failure to imagine our lives inside of this that is the beginning point of thinking about this.

What we have to worry about is that there are so many strategies of escape on the table, especially for American Christians. The first thing we have to do is cut off the routes of escape, which we have all learned so well. An immigrant church is a church that has escaped, and we have yet to come to grips with how we love to escape. So I think the first step is to cut off from ourselves the escape. Then, we can begin to understand the new humanity.