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Unity of communion in God’s ‘incorrigibly plural’ world

Mark Russ2 Comments

The Spirit of Christ continually surprises me with the 'incorrigibly plural’ nature of God's creation. Christ is ‘drunkenly various’, a vine that outgrows any trellis we might build for her. I know Christ in me, but Christ is infinitely, delightfully strange in others. The way of peace is more a spirit of curiosity and love in the midst of difference. Unity of communion doesn’t mean that our differences disappear, but they are no longer a dividing wall of hostility between us (Eph. 2:14). We remain our ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ individual selves (Ps, 139:14), but we understand each other better.

“Why do you call me good?”: Talking about whiteness and responsibility

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At the 2021 Britain Yearly Meeting Gathering, I gave a talk and workshop on behalf of Woodbrooke called '“Why do you call me good?”: Talking about whiteness and responsibility'. This video is now freely available to watch on the Woodbrooke YouTube channel, and I thought readers of my blog might appreciate it too.

Decentering ourselves: Reflections on Britain Yearly Meeting Gathering 2021

Mark Russ9 Comments

marginalised. When the consumption and comfort of the wealthy is centred, then the world’s poor suffer on the periphery. When whiteness is centred, blackness becomes the ‘other’. When cisgender and gender conformity is centred, gender diversity is seen as ‘deviant’.

Book Review: ‘The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race’ by Willie James Jennings.

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The community formed by and around Christ should be one of strangers brought into intimate communion, a new kind of family. But what has happened to this original vision of the Church?... The Church has moved from being a community of intimacy to a community of strangers, strangers who don’t even recognise one other as fellow Christians. In his book ‘The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race’, Willie James Jennings describes the roots of this ‘distorted relational imagination’.