I had dreams of teaching in women’s ministry. Then I was rebuked for teaching about justice.
By Abby Nitta
I
n 2016, two events exposed me to the underbelly of American Christianity: Donald Trump’s landslide evangelical support and the end of my women’s ministry teaching endeavors.
I was 23 at the time, a mixed-race daughter of a brown Asian immigrant from the southside of Milwaukee, eager and excited to teach a small session at my church’s first women’s ministry conference.
But the veneer of evangelicalism cracked wide open after I was reprimanded for “failing to submit to the authority of my mentor” in regards to the content of one of my lessons: hospitality and justice.
About a year before, the church leadership recognized my gift of teaching and encouraged me to be mentored by a women’s ministry leader. My mentor was a 40-something, white woman from one of the wealthiest nearby suburbs. Though we had very different backgrounds, I optimistically believed that our shared dedication to gospel-centrality would build a mutually beneficial relationship enriched by our cultural differences.
However, I did not yet realize that my otherness as a token “ethnic and woke” girl would only remain palatable so long as I did not challenge the status quo—and question how deep our church’s “gospel-centrality” went.
When I decided to teach about hospitality and justice, my conference session came under increasing scrutiny from my mentor. She asked for a complete manuscript of my 40-minute talk and picked it apart, point by theological point.
For months, I read books about the theme of justice in the Old and New Testament, studied Bible passages about God’s concern for the marginalized, and enlisted my husband’s undergraduate education in theology to help with Greek and Hebrew translations. But my mentor and I could not seem to agree on a final version of my manuscript.
Tensions peaked on the morning of the conference when my mentor, visibly angry, confronted me. I don’t remember exactly what she said—I was shaken and upset by the surprise confrontation less than an hour before my lesson. I remember feeling the control she was trying to exert over me. I felt hurt and betrayed.
But I pulled myself together and delivered my teaching. I described hospitality as a Biblical mandate (1 Peter 4:8–9, Leviticus 19:33–34) and explained that the New Testament Greek translation of hospitality (“philoxenos”) meant “brotherly love toward strangers.” I talked about the common connotations of the Greek words “philos” and “xenos.” To English-speaking ears, “xenos” usually brings to mind the word “xenophobia” because “xenos” means both “stranger” and “immigrant” in Greek.
I realized that for my mentor, who had shared her suspicions of refugees and Muslims with me, this wasn’t welcome exegesis. After all, she had wanted me to instead narrowly define biblical hospitality as the obligation for Christians within a single local church to gather in one another’s homes. This would effectively deemphasize God’s special concern for widows, orphans, immigrants, and the poor.
After the conference, I texted my mentor and asked if we could talk about what happened. She agreed and suggested we meet during the upcoming church leadership retreat. I was unprepared for what would happen next.
At the church retreat, my mentor, her husband (a church elder), and a pastor pulled my husband and me aside. My mentor had already briefed these other male leaders on what happened at the conference and it became clear that this “conversation” was actually a rebuke.
They told me that my obsession with social justice was a “hobby horse,” divisive, and that I had failed to submit to my mentor and treat her as a “mother” (in reference to 1 Timothy 5:2).
“We shouldn’t say ‘social justice’ because a lot of Republicans are members here,” my pastor said.
It was the single most traumatic church experience of my life. The room felt small and I couldn’t stop shaking. Looking back, I now know that my body was expressing the stress that my mind could not acknowledge.
My biracial husband was the only person of color on the church’s staff, and I felt like I had jeopardized his career. I felt trapped. The rug had been pulled out from under me by people who were supposed to be our shepherds and spiritual caretakers.
I was never offered another opportunity to teach for my church’s women’s ministry again.
In the months that followed, I walked into the sanctuary of our church building every Sunday with heightened anxiety and a deep hurt simmering under the surface. During worship, my eyes would dart to the rows around me, taking in the crowd of white faces.
“What am I doing here?” I silently asked myself. “They clearly don’t want what I have to say. They clearly don’t want me.”
Not seen — not wanted
Though my family had been members for almost my whole life at this majority-white church, I frequently found myself defending what I perceived as orthodox readings of the Bible on issues of justice, race, poverty, gender roles, and more.
Looking back, I realized how “white transparency” (a phrase coined by critical race theory expert Barbara Flagg for white folks’ disinclination for recognizing whiteness or cultural norms that are white-specific) kept me frustrated and isolated within mainstream evangelicalism.
My church’s orthodoxy was steeped in whiteness, and thus, so was their orthopraxy. Out of implicit beliefs of white superiority came constant microaggressions against me and my experience as a poor, second-generation Filipino American.
“Do you ever think you’re so independent because you come from a broken family?” and “I don’t see culture, so stop talking about cultural differences,” were questions and statements spoken by my spiritual family.
I was often told that I was “obsessed” with race or, even worse, racist against white people.
If my own mentor didn’t want to welcome immigrants into our church, how could I ever feel like I belonged? I seriously doubted that I could ever fit the mold of a “good, complementarian, Christian woman” (which theologian Ekemini Uwan aptly reframes as extrabiblical and legalistic teachings of biblical womanhood centered on white middle-class norms).
I was confused by how these gatekeepers of “solid theology” could not (or would not) recognize and name sins like xenophobia, racism, and bigotry with the same vigor with which they decried abortion and gay marriage.
Losing face; finding myself
For immigrant families, assimilation means survival. Children of immigrants witness their parents radically bend themselves to adjust to cultural norms that are invisible to the dominant group. But, this adjustment doesn’t come without a cost. I’ve seen my fellow Filipino American church-goers bear that burden alone, storing up the microaggressions, jokes, and burden of one-way, cross-cultural communication.
Church should be a place of rest, but for Asian Americans perpetually in a fight-or-flight response, it becomes another test of their assimilation. We operate in survival mode to maintain face, all the while telling ourselves (and our children) that ease and rest are reserved for white people.
For so long, I tried to filter my unique, God-given voice as a multicultural person through the lens and requirements of white, western, euro-centric Protestantism. In my attempts to appeal to whiteness, I adopted insider language and framed my theological arguments in nonexistent objective and acultural exegesis—always supported with quotes by theologically conservative old or dead white men.
Without realizing it, I had adopted an underlying belief in the cultural superiority of whiteness. When I began the difficult work of dismantling those beliefs (and implicit feelings of inferiority because of my brownness), it felt like I was losing my faith.
But, I’ve come to believe that God has more to offer to me than the scarcity mentality that white evangelicalism offers to people of color.
Paraphrasing Pastor Mika Edmondson, a temptation of scarcity mentality (in which we view life as a competition for limited resources) is to believe that more justice for other groups somehow means less justice for us. A mindset of scarcity pushes us to view our neighbors as threats to be avoided or eliminated rather than people to be loved.
The years following my departure from the church that said “no” to my unique identity as a Filipino American woman were filled with a deep sense of loss. But they were also a time of renewal and reimagination of what the Kingdom of God should look like here and now. I submitted myself to the teaching, music and works of Black, first nations, Asian, and immigrant brothers and sisters in the faith—and I found abundance.
Soong-Chan Rah wrote in his book, “The Next Evangelicalism,” that “it is for the Church that Jesus was willing to lay down His life… It is for the Church that Jesus has a greater promise beyond Western, white cultural captivity.”
In my personal experience, the path beyond cultural captivity—beyond assimilation to whiteness—is marked by trust in a God who does not demand that I shed all the distinctions of my ethnic and cultural identity in order to be welcomed into His Kingdom.
The sting of loss is still with me. However, I try to allow space for grief. It’s part of my humanity and a piece of the Incarnation to carry with me. During times of both societal and personal upheaval, I remind myself that the intricate mingling of sorrow and joy can edge me closer to the Divine.
Photo by Cate Ponce Ferrer Mahnke
Abby Nitta is a marketer and journalist from Milwaukee, WI with Visayan ancestors. She believes that storytelling can be a force for good and that the Divine shows up in surprising ways. She's written for award-winning news publications and currently works in content strategy in the tech sector. She lives in Grand Rapids, MI, with her son and husband, where they're learning together how to honor their family's Filipino-Japanese-American heritage. Instagram: @abbynitta | Twitter: @abbynitta | Website: www.abbynitta.com