Secondary identities



The first identity of a follower of Jesus is “a follower of Jesus.” The church is an alternative city within the city, a new way of being human and being part of a people centred on Jesus.

Any other cultural or personal markers may be important, but they must be secondary. If we believe there is more after death, we also affirm that those other identities are secondary because they will be removed, healed or fully affirmed in a recreated reality in the life to come.

Here and now, our work at justice, change and growth is empowered by the gracious work of Christ in us through the primary practices of worship, scripture reading, prayer and community. These are ways we keep the centre clear.

The ideologies of our day easily coerce even us “low-control religion” Mennonites into displacing Jesus and not identifying first as a Jesus people habitually formed through the practices listed above.

The letter to the Galatians addresses those who wanted to elevate old identity markers into primary positions. Galatians is a hard rebuke to us when we centre our ideologies at the same level as our growing identity in Christ. The famous summary: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female—for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (3:28) is a denunciation of what would have been culturally core identity markers for the Galatian Christians and an affirmation of a new kind of human—a Christ-centred one.

Similarly, I am not a “Canadian Christian.” I am a Christian—a little Christ in formation—and then I have secondary locations of identity.
Too often we forget this.

When advocacy groups demand that we do this or that and focus on making other identities central, we lose the capacity to love across enemy lines. We turn those secondary identity markers into tools of judgment against those who do not share our understanding. This is particularly acute around issues of politics and sexuality.

Too often, we uncritically take up Western individualism, repackage it, displace Jesus as our core identity, and weaponize our shrunken version of him against our enemies.

I’ve found it helpful to learn the “set” language of missiologists (including Mennonite Brethren Mark Baker). A bounded-set mentality is one in which we measure and get our identity from being inside the lines we draw. Do you believe like I believe? we ask. (Similarly, a fuzzy-set approach is one in which we define identity by the lines we erase.) When we use either way of thinking, we resist the true complexity and tension that love requires. We often perpetuate or create new harms by doing so, even though we don’t name that out loud.

This is not the way of our faith tradition. Our faith tradition is less in-out, either-or. It tells us that we are all in process, that we are both justified and sinners, and that we are healed and wounded at the same time.

Missiologists call such thinking a centre-set approach. A centre-set church is set on a trajectory toward Jesus. That is our focus. A centre-set church approach calls us to name our binaries and/or fuzziness as idolatrous hopes that pull us away from that identity.

We need to get a better theology of love, of tension and of what it means to be in the body of Christ than the current conversations.
Can we embrace the concept of wheat and tares in our hearts? Can we live with the now-and-not-yet? Can we see that “gracious space” is meaningless if we can’t hold it for someone we strongly disagree with?

Love is known in holding tension with the other. Of course, there are boundary violations that are anti-love that we do not need to hold with, but too often we are quick to put everything we disagree with into the cancellation space. Yes, we are to name harms, but not to create an identity from the judgments we make about others who are not where we are.

“Can we keep the tent big?” I asked last time I wrote in this space. If we can, it will be because we choose one identity first—follower of Jesus—and let love hold the church in tension until all is made whole, all is made new. Only Jesus does that.



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