The greatest joy I have found in helping lead our UCC@ASU ministry is the moment an individual recognizes that we’re there to jump in alongside them, lift them up, and fight for justice. For far too long, Evangelical institutions have dominated the scene at ASU, creating a narrative that demands conformity to strict theology and causes lasting harm. When I was still a member of an Evangelical institution and doing campus ministry, a word that rang in our ears and filled our mouths with distaste was ‘justice’.
This seven-letter word has caused Evangelicalism and white, heteronormative communities around America, to reflexively cringe. This is because seeking justice inherently challenges their positions of power. This is because seeking justice inherently rebukes whiteness, heteronormativity, and strict gender roles. Even in the UCC, a denomination founded on seeking justice, we still find bastions of white supremacy, heteronormativity, and transphobia. We still have much to learn about actually doing the work of justice.
The UCC has largely become inoculated to the word ‘justice’. Sure, it goes on our slogans and marketing campaigns, but from there it fizzles out like soda going flat. It retains some of its taste as sugary juice, and one might still recognize it, but the carbonation is completely gone. The fire, the passion, the zeal to be transformative is gone. Instead, it is flat. Inert. The UCC has a long and storied history of seeking justice on the front lines of national debates, but this obscures the fact that too often local UCC churches distill the message of justice into only putting up a slogan in the building or on the website and separate from the transformation that justice requires. It’s not enough to just do a food drive in your church. It’s not enough to go to the border and help struggling migrants avoid dehydration and starvation. It’s not enough to label your church as Open and Affirming. These things are wonderful, but they are not enough.
The heart of the problem is churches choosing complacency rather than the true, transformative work of Christ. Instead of changing our polity, liturgy, and curriculums we uphold whiteness, heteronormativity, and transphobia. We inject ourselves into public discourse on a few areas to make ourselves feel better when we’re as colonizing as every other invasive non-profit that exists for its own gratification.
Our ministerial call in the UCC is to embrace transformative justice as a catalyst for change. “God is still speaking,” isn’t just a cute denominational phrase, it’s a rallying cry to the spark of change found in the margins. If we yield to the discomfort and withdraw from change because we can’t deal with our own complicity, we reject the idea that God is still speaking. We reject the embrace of justice and trade it for institutional security.
Justice is our call, our urgent need. Transformative justice that embodies the Christ in both the personal and the systemic, both the local church and the universal one. Jesus died, but the Christ lives on in the church. Radical rejection of oppressive systems and powers and total love tempered by communal striving toward mutual servanthood aren’t just attributes of the Christ, but the call of the church. Jesus’ ministry wasn’t a campaign as a synagogue leader or a pharisee to bring more Samaritans and Romans into the fold, but to evolve spiritual praxis into something totally different, radically new.
Justice is an analogous term to the Christ, one that the law cannot aspire to because the law is too often trapped by the oppressive systems and powers to truly strive communally toward mutual servanthood with total love. Too often the church is wrapped up in the opposite side, bogging itself down in what it means to love and communally strive toward mutual servanthood so that its rejection of oppressive systems and powers is watered down to the personal or too weak to make systemic change.
The UCC has an amazing opportunity to embody the Christ through seeking justice, but that means doing the work. We have the chance to do something totally different and radically new, but rather than getting caught up in visions of a restored UCC population: do the work. When we say justice let us truly mean the burning, urgent passion to embody the Christ in all its transformative power.