Africana Worship

Just finished my first installment for the African American liturgy project I'm contributing to for work. The overall site is at www.africanaworship.com. But if you want to go directly to my first submissions, you can find them here.

I've dragged my feet on my parts of this project, despite my great belief in it. The feet dragging just comes from the work it takes to write liturgy (interestingly, I've learned that the word liturgy means "work"). It's not the natural way I think or write. But I've been thrilled with the opportunity to train my mind in this way, to reclaim my Black Church heritage, and to mine that heritage for the benefit of the Reign of God.

I like this project because I have come to renounce the idea of a disembodied Gospel. Along these lines, Anthony, the postmodernegro has been posting some provocative thoughts here and here.

From my perspective, while our cultures can certainly distort the Good News of Jesus, any truly Gospel message will come culturally contained. We should be careful not to confuse our cultures or our ideologies with the Gospel, but we need not be ashamed of culturally-influenced constructions of the Gospel. All constructions, even biblical ones are culturally-constructed anyway.

End of today's sermon.