I truly believed that there were differences in people and how they viewed that world that fit with my constructions of God. Then I started feeling God leading me in another direction. Even after sensing God’s call in my life my worldview was unwavering. I understood my call in the context of the community of which I was a part. I felt God was calling me to pick up the battle that He was initiating in this country. God had called me to return the church and the country to its Christian heritage. All the time I was living in this world of separation and superiority I had a sense that something was not right. Then I felt that God was leading me to attend seminary. After careful consideration of many schools, I decided Northern was the place. My first quarter I was overwhelmed with the information I was receiving. I learned that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, that there are many ways to preach and many ways to see God. The world I had walked into was not the world I knew. Then there were all the international students with unnerving views of God and life. I was sinking fast and felt that seminary would destroy me and my faith in God. However, in meeting so many other people with so many other views of God I began to learn some different strokes to stay afloat. I was being awakened to God and his view of the world. It was not going to be an easy jump from my closed view of the world and God, but I was gaining the courage to make an attempt.

I lived in two worlds at that point. There was the seminary world where I walked at many times with trembling feet and there was my Cincinnati world where I was told not to let Northern kill my faith. The tension between the two was at times unbearable. I was unable to use the things I was learning in my Cincinnati life because no one had a structure or tools to understand. Then came Noah and James Cone. My world was shattered. I sat one morning holding this baby, biracial and fresh to the world in one hand and God of the Oppressed in the other. I felt as if I would explode. Then from nowhere it seemed it hit me. My context, my worldview, my faith had been shaped by a culture that wanted to dominate and control how I saw the world and God. As painful and agonizing as it was I celebrated the change in my understanding of God and the creation.

It was clear to me that my culture had formed my faith and when the cultural construction was challenged it collapsed. There were many times during that collapse that I questioned why I believed in God. Why had I been so stupid and bought the story. My culture had a model of God that only fit if the world was a controlled and forbidding place. God was the general and I was the soldier. The enemies were many and the most insidious were those within the faith. My culture, with its romanticized view of the past and God was destroying me and I never saw the disease. By grace, I was able, when confronted with a new cultural view of God and Christianity, to respond with change and flexibility. I still have friends who will not hear my story and they see me as selling out to the “liberal” view. But, I see clearly that any form of Christianity is shaped and at times destroyed by the culture that engulfs it. I now see my call as one of helping and sometimes forcing people to see how their cultural view of the world and their faith needs to be expanded, if not exploded. It is in that stretching that we encounter God. We are all called to be aware of our world and how it influences our understanding of reality. Thank God, I was able to build a new model.