{"id":4483,"date":"2020-11-15T22:26:55","date_gmt":"2020-11-16T03:26:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/practicalmattersjournal.ecdsdev.org\/?p=4483"},"modified":"2020-11-19T11:53:33","modified_gmt":"2020-11-19T16:53:33","slug":"love-disruption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pmcleanup.ecdsdev.org\/2020\/11\/15\/love-disruption\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI Love You and There Is Nothing You Can Do About It\u201d: Pastor Miguel Balderas\u2019s Love Disruption of White Hegemonic Church Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Rev. Dr. Miguel Balderas grounds his ministry to majority-white congregations in a decision to love and impose this love upon his congregants, whether or not they return it. This choice is embodied in both the content and form of Pastor Miguel\u2019s lived theological approach, which he terms \u201cliturgia viva,\u201d or living liturgy. This runs counter to what he calls a \u201csocial-club\u201d mentality, shaped by the nostalgia for a \u201clarge (white) church\u201d past and characterized by self-segregating behavior, power struggles between competing factions, and the importance of an individual\u2019s status being based upon merit or wealth. One component of Pastor Miguel\u2019s liturgia viva is the repetition of specific phrases in worship attempting to rewrite cultural habits of the majority-white, English-speaking congregation. This essay focuses on four phrases that Pastor Miguel employed in worship during the author\u2019s ethnographic fieldwork at Millian Memorial United Methodist Church in 2014\u20132015. Using a close hermeneutical examination and critical social discourse analysis of the performance of these phrases, this essay offers a rearticulation of Pastor Miguel\u2019s approach and its lived theological resources for developing anti-assimilationist forms of multiculturalism.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In the spring of 2013, Pastor Miguel Balderas received a call from his superior, the district superintendent (DS). The bishop, the DS\u2019s superior, had received an angry letter from a member at Millian Memorial United Methodist Church, where Pastor Miguel was set to start as lead pastor on July 1 of that year. The bishop had appointed Pastor Miguel there specifically to help Millian with their mission to become a multicultural community that reflected the majority-Hispanic population that lived in the surrounding neighborhood. The letter demanded that the bishop reconsider the appointment of Pastor Miguel to the church, claiming that he was unfit, and included a photograph that had been posted on Facebook as primary evidence for this argument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pastor Miguel had the DS describe the photograph. It depicted Pastor Miguel sitting on a couch, shirtless and draped in a pink robe, with butterfly clips and a tiara in his hair, and a somewhat startled look on his face. As Pastor Miguel told me about the call, I remembered the exact photo\u2014it was hard to forget:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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