Let the Church die, here's why

I was nine years old the first time someone asked me, “What are you?” Fast forward twenty-five years later, and I’ve been asked this question more times than I can count. I am Chicana. I am Filipina. I am the color of the earth. I am a dark haired, dark eyed, brown skinned woman. Throughout my life, I have been profiled because of these features. I have experienced blatant forms of racism. I have been the recipient of all sorts of micro aggressions. My identity has been the butt of jokes by strangers and friends alike. People have spoken degradingly about my ethnicity right in front of me, with complete ignorance of the fact that they were speaking about me.

On the “bright” side, because of tokenism, I’ve been offered speaking engagements and board positions. Although people are usually disappointed when they discover I don’t actually speak Spanish. Personally, this has long been a source of deep shame. It has taken me several years to begin to understand the intersections between this deep-rooted shame I carry and the white evangelical-influenced culture I grew up in.

The truth is, the more I consider it, the more I am convinced my language was stolen from me long before I was born. Seventy-three years after the Mexican-American War created a new national boundary at the Rio Grande River, my grandmother was born in the border town of Brownsville, Texas. She was a product of what her ancestors experienced first-hand when their land was stolen and their culture left on the other side of an unwanted boundary line.

“The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it.” (La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa) My grandmother was a part of a people forced into a new paradigm over the course of generations. It was a culture marked by “in between-ness.” No longer fully Mexican, but unwanted and unvalued by American society and government.

Because of this liminal space my grandma inherited, she spoke a Spanish unique to the borderlands. She was fully Tejana. But she never taught her children her language. Instead in the late 1940’s, along with countless other Mexican-Americans of their time, she and my grandpa became migrant fruit pickers as a way to travel north. Chicago is where my dad was born and raised. He is part of a generation of young Latinos in middle America who were physically punished if they were caught speaking Spanish in school. White supremacy stole both language and culture from him and his siblings, by means of societal assimilation.

My dad married my mom, a second-generation Filipina, and by the time I was born, they had relocated to Louisiana. Eventually my parents divorced, and my mom moved back to the north, leaving my dad to raise me and my two older sisters. We grew up in a small, rural town where everyone identified as either “white” or “black.” So it didn’t take long for the teasing and questions to begin. “What are you?” teachers and students would ask me. Through my experiences with racism as a young child, I came to subconsciously believe that my skin was ugly.

I didn’t have words for this then, but now I realize that falling asleep to my brownness was required of me in order to be accepted. By adolescence, I had become a pro at it. By college, I was able to laugh along at the jokes directed toward me. By graduate school, I quit thinking about it at all. It wasn’t until I became an adult, a pastor, and mother, that I began to look back and process my experiences with racism. I began to remember, and I began to wake up.

So, “What am I?” I am Chicana. I am Filipina. I am the color of the earth. I am a dark haired, dark eyed, brown skinned woman, and throughout my life, I have been profiled because of these features. Does my name sound like I speak Spanish, and do I look like I speak it? Yes. Definitely. Do people assume I speak Spanish? All time and from every direction. But I do not. I don’t speak Spanish, pero estoy aprendiendo! I am learning!

The fact that I can say these words is important because they are a symbol of my awakening and inner liberation. They represent a great undertaking of courage. They are a rejection of shame and assumptions. Estoy aprendiendo! I will claim my autonomy and self-worth. I will reclaim what was stolen from me. My grandmother may be gone, but her story and my father’s story are mine, too. In them, I find identity and power. I find language. I find home.

In the past I would not have been brave enough to even believe it, but my story and experiences are relevant to the future of the Church. Over the last several years, there has been a shift in society, including in many progressive white churches. For the first time, white people are attempting to make significant room for black and brown voices.

But, alongside this beautiful work is something white people were not prepared for. Many have been caught off guard by the collective pain of black and brown people. They don’t understand it, egos become fragile, and they become reactionary and defensive when confronted by it. This is happening everywhere, including in the Church. The progressive white church can be among the most difficult places for progress because it commonly assumes it is not complicit in the racist foundations and tendencies of our social structures.

Regardless, the tides are changing. And as a woman of color who is also a pastor, I have been taking notice. My assessment is that Christianity and its Church can either join the flow of justice or flail against its changing tides. This flow is happening with or without you. Spirit is moving, creating a path of love, equality, and peacemaking in its wake. If you are of the mind to jump in to this divine current, then I have several points of advice for you.

First, people and communities of faith: listen to people of color. In listening, make room for our stories, understanding that they won’t be pretty. Most likely, they will sound like pain; like grief; like anger. And it will be difficult to hear some of it without feeling offended. It will be hard to absorb the anger without getting angry back. But the challenge is to listen, to empathize, and to question how you might contribute to the wound, instead of denying the wound exists. It’s a lot to ask, I know! But listen. Become a practitioner in radical empathy and bear our burdens.

And then, do something totally radical: put us on your staff and leadership teams. Actively value our perspectives, and highlight our opinions. For the first time ever, center our voices. Make room for all of what we bring to the table, not just our black and brown skin, our exotic names, and our smiles. Do the hard work necessary to get and keep people of color in the room.

Become truly inclusive. The inclusive church environment should be willing to engage multiple diverse perspectives in such a way that will define organizational policy and practice. I learned this from my cousin, Hanif Fazal, who is the co-founder and CEO of The Center for Equity and Inclusion in Portland, Oregon. Hanif has spent over two decades addressing issues of equity, diversity and inclusion in organizations, and he says inclusion is about more than a sense of belonging. It’s not enough that someone feels welcome or seen. Inclusion is a shift in power so that diverse voices are shaping the culture.

When Christianity and its Church become truly inclusive of marginalized voices, be prepared for the image of God to evolve and expand. God is transformed because God is freed from her box now. Make space; make room. It will deepen your faith to hear from the God of a person of color. The change will likely be uncomfortable. It will be different. Make space; make room. Let this liberation happen.

Avoid copying and pasting. It is a tool that prevents good change. I have been very attuned to the way church culture will often try to “copy and paste” their expectations onto pastors, especially women and people of color. This is often unintentional, so becoming aware of these tendencies is really important. I can’t preach with the same style, tone and intonation as the mainly male preachers I learned about in seminary, because I am not a male. I can’t pastor like a white man when I’m a brown woman.

When I try to do anything other than be fully who I am, my creativity is stifled, and my imagination is held hostage. It may seem simple, but realizing I no longer have to conform to this “copy and paste” mentality was like being set free. Churches, set your pastors free! When they thrive, you thrive. The Church thrives. And if it’s not obvious by now, let me be clear: the Church must change in order to thrive. It has to do more than change. It has to die.

In fact, the church is already dying. Evangelical Christians are grasping at thin air, desperate to protect oppressive traditions from “secular” culture. Politicians have combined their power hungry paradigms with a destructive, patriarchal image of God, and are using it to manipulate the masses. The teachings of Jesus are being completely abandoned for the sake of Christian nationalism. And yet, young people aren’t buying the institutionalized hate, and people of all ages are quitting church in droves. The flailing isn’t working. The pews are empty. The Church is dying, and I say: let it die.

But letting the Church die doesn’t mean we abandon it. Instead we need to sit with it, hold its hand and keep vigil, ushering it from one life to the next. We need to let it die, so it can be reborn. This isn’t easy, but I believe rebirth is possible. On the other side of this rebirth is the transfigured Church. Transfiguration literally means a complete change of form or appearance into a more beautiful or spiritual state. At his own transfiguration, Jesus shone so bright that his dirty travel clothes became sparkling white, and his face shone like the sun. He must have been nearly unrecognizable.

A transfigured church would also be unrecognizable. It would mean that it experienced a complete change of form or appearance. It would mean that everything old has passed away, and everything has become new (which sounds a lot to me like making room, by the way). What if we made changing and transforming until we didn’t even recognize ourselves anymore the work of the Church? What if we stopped at nothing until that work was done?

The future of the Church has big implications. It has been the catalyst for much good, but also so much evil. Its power continues to be used to sustain oppressive domination systems, propping up -isms and phobias. The power of the Church is immeasurable, and because of this, I have come to realize that it is not enough to abandon ship. If we leave, not much will change. But if we work to reclaim, reimagine, and recreate, then people can be set free. People need permission and a safe space in which to shift their theological paradigms. These same paradigms influence their social understanding all the way to their political vote. We need to be a part of the Church’s rebirth, so that we can offer this important and sacred space. If I could sum up kingdom work, it would be this: Let the Church die, so it can be reborn as a catalyst for change.

I’ve lived a lifetime of isolation from my heritage. I have lived in a house of shame that has kept me from moving, from doing my work in the world, from believing and sharing my own truth. I know shame when I see it, and I can recognize its mark permeating throughout the Church. Instead of owning how we have wounded people of color, women, and the LGBTQIA community, the Church has kept its head down, pretending these wounds don’t exist. Instead of acknowledging the ways in which racism continues to inform American Christian culture, the Church’s actions reveal a refusal to listen and an underlying assumption that the past is not our shared responsibility.

But I think of my grandmother and her ancestors’ stolen land and culture. I think of how this shaped the trajectory of lives for generations, including my father’s. Including mine. For years I thought I was unique in my pain; alone in this liminal space. I was too ashamed to find my people, much less share my experiences with them. When I finally did, I realized they carried the shame, too. Every person I’ve asked: pain. We’ve all inherited it, and like it or not, we each carry it with us daily. The evils of white supremacy have kept us isolated and silenced. Pero estoy aprendiendo! But I am learning! No more! I will reclaim the language that was stolen from me. I will take back my voice.

~ Rev. Aurelia Dávila Pratt