Paul and I Will Be Part of a Discussion on Eucontamination!
We would absolutely love to see you there! People who sign up will get a link to a copy of the paper for discussion purposes. Links to sign up for the event are at the bottom of the invitation. Hope you can make it!
EUCONTAMINATION: A DISCUSSION – AUGUST 3, 2023 @ 7 PM CST VIA ZOOM
We live in a particularly polarized moment, where boundary lines are being drawn, and engagement with those on the other side of those boundaries often feels challenging or even impossible. We are often disgusted with one another. And yet Christ calls us to love our neighbors, including those we might consider enemies. So how might we respond to the present moment? What might we do in our personal and corporate discipleship to overcome the liturgies of disgust and division and engage our communities with the reality of the Kingdom among us?
The contemporary church is often inclined to operate out of a framework defined by an overapplied purity/disgust metaphor. Rather than seeing Christians and Christian communities as the Kingdom “yeast” eucontaminating the world with holiness (Mathew 13:33), much of the white American church imagination and culture is caught up in acting as though the Church is in danger of contamination by the world.
By addressing the psychological impact of disgust and the way in which the gospel of Christ inverts the controlling purity metaphors, this paper posits a more embodied faith that embraces the other. Eucontamination thus allows for Christians to address their own internalized systems of oppression and confront the ways in which disgust has allowed ethnocentrism and racism to reign over their imagination of the gospel. The authors explore practical applications of liturgies of eucontamination like the Eucharist, foot washing, and the love feast as basic formational practices for Christians to begin to deconstruct their own disgust reactions.
I found the concepts in this paper to be thought-provoking, and I am formally including them in a working model of spiritual formation that I am using to frame a church planting effort.
If you would like to discuss this with the articles authors, please use the sign-up form below. We only need an email address, and then we can send you a copy of the article before the discussion date. Also, to be included in a brief, one-page primer on a framework for engaging in difficult conversations by Prof. Tim Muehlhof in his book I Beg To Differ, which we will use for any discussion and debate in the Zoom meeting.
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Link to Full Abstract Here
More About I Beg to Differ Here