These papers discuss how many whose labor contributes to the life of the church often go unknown, unappreciated or underappreciated, and unacknowledged. They discuss the relations between centers and peripheries in the churches. The papers address blue-collar participation in the church, the history of HIV/AIDS in the work of an unacknowledged theologian, the work of church volunteers during Covid-19 lockdowns, and the work of mothers and "othermothers" in marginalized communities. They all address how the work of church building, so often assumed to be dependent upon the work of its leaders, is more often a creative bricolage that is the work of many hands, using many different means at hand.
Church work is often assumed to rest with preachers, pastors, elders, and worship leaders. However, before the doors open on Sunday morning, the ecclesial space has already been established and maintained by the work of laborers often overlooked—plumbers, electricians, janitors, construction workers, landscapers, and others. This oversight is mirrored in the broader Faith and Work movement, which itself prioritizes white-collar vocations over blue-collar labor. At the root of this oversight lies a particular ecclesiological assumption of what it means for work to be “spiritual” or “ministerial”, an assumption tied to privileged ideas of enlightenment and self-actualization. This paper will interrogate this assumption for its lack of biblical and theological warrant and then offer a working ecclesiology for blue-collar participation based on a more grounded understanding of ecclesial and faithful labor, one in which the facilitation of communal space is at the heart of the work of the church.
Kevin Gordon was a lay gay Catholic theologian. After starting a PhD at Union in the late 1960s, he moved to the Castro, where he worked as an analyst while teaching, writing, and organizing a task force on homosexuality for the Archdiocese of San Francisco. In the 80s, Gordon returned to New York and assembled a group called the Consultation on Homosexuality, Social Justice, and Catholic Theology, which included John Boswell, Mary Hunt, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and others. He died of AIDS before completing his dissertation. This paper will examine two elements of Gordon’s work—his ecclesiological legacy found in his work on the World Council of Church’s document “The Church as Healing Community” and his influence on later AIDS ecclesiology, and his skepticism of premature meaning making—to press on a tension at the heart of the church and its metaphors: that between fragmentation and wholeness.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, considerable attention has been given to the changing role of clergy, as congregations often shifted exclusively to online worship. What has received less explicit analysis were the ways in which many lay people adapted and responded to help their communities navigate the challenging restrictions of the lockdown. This paper draws upon qualitative studies of eight congregations that focused on the impact of the lockdowns on the experience of church during the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus of the discussion will be on ways in which lay people, sometimes for the first time, took up leadership roles to respond to the needs of their community. The second concern of the paper will be to analyze the challenge that the re-opening of church buildings post-pandemic represents to such new initiatives, as many of the newly engaged lay people have sometimes experienced their ideas and interests being left behind or disregarded.
The term “othermothers” was first coined by Patricia Hill Collins to refer to the Black cultural phenomenon where individuals “actively and positively assume responsibility as role model, mentor, protector, and provider to children who are not biologically their own.” In my research for the Missing Voices Project, which centered and empowered marginalized youth to start new ministries, we found that mothers and “othermothers” of all racial and ethnic identities were active advocates, allies, and accomplices for marginalized youth in and beyond their congregations. Mothers and othermothers acted as public theologians, living their theological beliefs on behalf of their (and other) children. Using a practical theological framework and an ethnographic approach to research, this paper will analyze the lived theology of these mothers and othermothers through the theology of motherhood presented by Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder in order to critique the gaps and failures of our political system.