Abstract
In Nogales, Arizona, on the corrugated iron and barbed wire fence that announces the border between Mexico and the United States, an array of artwork arrests the attention of passersby. From crosses pinned in an ad hoc fashion to the fence—some marked starkly with the names of those who have died trying to cross the border—to colorful murals depicting the brutality of the border patrol and spiky metal sculptures portraying the dashed hopes of would-be immigrants to the United States, the fence is covered with symbols of hope and despair. Many of these symbols are Christian. This collage of visual images offers viewers shocking and poignant windows into the experience of those who have sought to migrate to the United States.
Are the churches willing to hear the voice of the Spirit that speaks through the too often broken voices and experiences of immigrants? Are ecclesiologists ready and willing to do that? Are we ready for the transformation that these stories can trigger in our ecclesiologies? Or are we afraid to be transformed by them?’
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. (Eph. 2:19–20)
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Notes
Gioacchino Campese, “‘But I See That Somebody Is Missing’: Ecclesiology and Exclusions in the Context of Immigration,” in Ecclesiology and Exclusion: Boundaries of Being and Belonging in Postmodern Times, ed. Dennis M. Doyle, Timothy J. Furry, and Pascal D. Bazzell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012), 71–91, 81.
Duncan B. Forrester, Theological Fragments: Essays in Unsystematic Theology (London: T & T Clark, 2005).
See http://esa.un.org/unmigration/wallchart2013.htm; Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, Age of Migration, 4th ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
In reality, there is a continuum of choice and force—or “push” and “pull” factor—in all forms of migration. For a discussion of different categories and this spectrum, see Susanna Snyder, Asylum-Seeking, Migration and Church (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2012).
Roger Haight, Christian Community, Volume 3: Ecclesial Existence (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008), 233, 235. Nicholas M. Healy suggests ecclesiologies need to “respond to the ecclesiological context for which and within which they are made” ( Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 49).
Manuel Visquez, More than Belief A Materialist Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 294.
Kwok Pui Lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (London: SCM, 2005), 2–3.
Carmen Nanko-Fernóndez, “Alternately Documented Theologies: Mapping Border, Exile and Diaspora,” in Religion and Politics in America’s Borderlands, ed. Sarah Azaransky (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 33–55, 33.
Examples include Ananda Rose, Showdown in the Sonoran Desert: Religion, Law and the Immigration Controversy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Fabio Baggio and Agnes M. Brazal, Faith on the Move: Toward a Theology of Migration in Asia (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008); Orobator E. Agbonkhianmeghe, From Crisis to Kairos: The Mission of the Church in the Time of HIV/AIDS, Refugees, and Poverty (Nairobi: Paulines Publications Africa, 2005); Kristin Heyer, Kinship across Borders: A Christian Ethic of Immigration (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012); Daniel G. Groody and Gioacchino Campese, eds., A Promised Land, a Perilous Journey: Theological Perspectives on Migration (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2008); Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, God’s Heart Has No Borders: How Religious Activists Are Working for Immigrant Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Snyder, Asylum-Seeking.
See, for example, Gerardo Marti and Gladys Ganiel, The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Phyllis Tickle, Emergence Christianity: What It Is, Where It Is Going, and Why It Matters (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2012).
Cheryl M. Peterson, Who Is the Church? An Ecclesiology for the 21st Century (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2013), 1.
Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), 8. On Christianity in the Global South, see also Elijah J. F. Kim, The Rise of the Global South: The Decline of Western Christendom and the Rise of Majority World Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012).
Examples include Peggy Levitt, God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape (New York: New Press, 2009); Olivia Sheringham, Transnational Religious Spaces: Faith and the Brazilian Migration Experience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Afe Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora: New Currents and Emerging Trends in World Christianity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); and Diana Eck, A New ReligiousAmerica: How a “Christian Country” Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002).
Mélisanda Lorke and Dietrich Werner, “Migration and Inclusive Communities,” in Ecumenical Visions for the 21st Century: A Reader for Theological Education (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2013), 271–96, 276.
World Council of Churches, A Moment to Choose: Risking to Be with Uprooted People (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1995), http://www.wcc-coe.org/wcc/what/international/uprooted/momentl.html, accessed June 15, 2014.
See Agnes M. Brazal and Emmanuel S. de Guzman, “Seeing beyond the Religious and Social Divide: Intercultural Church in the Migrant Context,” in Where we Dwell in Common: The Quest for Dialogue in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Gerard Mannion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Pete Ward, Liquid Church (London: Paternoster, 2002); Stephen Pickard, Seeking the Church: An Introduction to Ecclesiology (London: SCM, 2012), 233.
William Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 42.
See Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Readings from the Edges: The Bible and People on the Move (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011); Daniel Carroll R., Christians at the Border: Immigration, the Church, and the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008); Snyder, Asylum-Seeking.
John H. Elliott, A Home for the Homeless: A Social-Scientific Criticism of 1 Peter, Its Situation and Strategy. new ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005), 23–25.
Richard Giles, Always Open: Being an Anglican Today (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2004), 26–27.
Nancy Bedford, “To Speak of God from More than One Place: Theological Reflections from the Experience of Migration,” in Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation, ed. Ivan Petrella (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005), 95–118, 103–4, 113.
Paul Trebilco, “Why Did the Early Christians Call Themselves xid,goa?,” New Testament Studies 57 (2011), 440–60, 445.
Stephan Bevans, “Mission among Migrants, Mission of Migrants: Mission of the Church,” in A Promised Land, a PerilousJourney: Theological Perspectives on Migration, ed. Daniel Groody and Gioacchino Campese (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2008), 89–106, 93.
See Gerard Mannion, “What Is Comparative Ecclesiology and Why Is It Important? Roger Haight’s Pioneering Methodological Insights,” in Comparative Ecclesiology, ed. Gerard Mannion (London: T T Clark, 2008), 13; Haight, Christian Community, 40.
Mary McClintock-Fulkerson, Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 43, 251.
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© 2016 Susanna Snyder
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Snyder, S. (2016). Introduction. In: Snyder, S., Ralston, J., Brazal, A.M. (eds) Church in an Age of Global Migration. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137518125_1
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