I grew up in the Church and Christian circles my whole life. Literally. In Taiwan, we lived on the top floor of a multi-story building while the church my father pastored in was on the first few floors. For most of my childhood, my parents were teaching in or attending in a seminary, in Singapore, Boston, and Philadelphia; I even attended Christian school for a few years in elementary school. I have been going to church since I was a child, Sunday services and Sunday School on Sunday’s, youth group on Friday’s, retreats during the summer — you name the Christian thing, I was involved in it.
But in my time in the Church, I wondered at all of the things that I do not hear about or was taught to ignore. I was taught that which is “sacred” should be privileged and is more correct and more valued than what is outside in the “secular” world. Implicitly, though occasionally explicitly as well, I was taught that what is “true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise” (Philippians 4:8) was what was inside the Church. Or more put another way, value what is inside the Church more because it was those things; but the things outside the Church are not to be valued because they are less true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, or worthy of praise.
But influences and realities outside the Church like tradition, worldviews, experiences, and cultures inevitable shape how we view the sacred, how we interpret Truth, and how we live out our faith.
How we understand God is embedded in who we are, the spaces we live, and who we are outside the Church. Jesus was a Hebrew man living in a time of Roman occupation in Galilee, and we cannot ignore his “secular” Hebrew identity, background, and historical context when we seek to understand His divinity. My understanding of God is shaped by my intersectional identifies of a Taiwanese man living in upstate New York with advanced graduate degrees, a multiracial family, and diverse church experiences. And the Church is not an ideal that we construct, but a real place and where a community of people come together, each of us bringing our specific sins, brokenness, experiences, joys, and sorrows.
We don’t need to look very hard to see that the secular things we permit within the Church are the same secular things we prefer outside the Church, and the secular things we reject from the Church are the same things we would usually reject outside the Church.
Put another way, what we like outside the Church is reflected in what we favor inside the Church, whether in style of worship music, what we wear to church, the pastors we look up to, the arguments we find persuasive, the people we count as friends, or types of sermons we find most relevant.
And so I want to consider the stuff I did not learn in Church because their exclusion tells me something about the Church. I want to examine how the naming of something as “Christian”, or a perspective as “Biblical”, or a behavior as “godly”, and its opposite as “secular”, is not in fact distinguishing between the sacred and secular but an intentional choice of a secular thing over another. I want to unpack why we as a Church have rejected certain secular things but allowed others in, and consider the consequences of the excluded on how we understand that which is included.
What is the stuff I want to reconsider and reexamine?
· I want to talk about why I was never taught that the Puritans, elevated as exemplars of American faith, owned slaves and defended the practice of slavery.
· Or the history of the modern Church and how it has been complicit if not active in perpetuating systems and practices of injustice and inequality.
· I want to challenge why so many in the Church are afraid of concepts and lenses like critical theory, intersectionality, social theory, and epistemology.
· I want to know why the only social justice that is “Christian” is abortion, or why so many Christians still believe that you cannot love God and vote for a Democrat.
· I want to consider why I was not taught that you can believe the world was not made in six days and still hold to biblical inerrancy, or that Adam and Eve was not the first humans on earth and still believe the Genesis account as true.
· I want to consider the Christian argument for why mothers should work outside the home, why the Church should encourage learning and science, and how insights from secular fields of study can inform our theology and study of God.
· I want to learn from non-white non-male theologians and scholars, learn from non-European African and Middle Eastern early church fathers, and hear the prospective of the invisible minority men and women of God who are not heard or have left the white dominated Church spaces I live in.
· I want to hear from contemporary voices instead of ancient teachings from culturally foreign spaces being anachronistically presented as the key to understanding current events.
And I want to do so, humbly and graciously, because I love the Church and want her to better reflect, however incompletely, the image of God. I believe that the stuff I did not learn in the Church can help me individually and us corporately better understand who we are and who God is.
And I want to make sure we as a Church are letting in the right secular things and excluding the right secular things. I’m excited to start. I hope you join me in this journey.
