I joined Christianity Today not as a trite multicultural experiment but to contribute to the wonderful weirdness of constructing the dominion.
The word weird is weirdly being thrown around by politicians as if it’s an official political critique. Once that label is hurled at someone, they return to middle school ethics and recite the gospel of rubber and glue. Most people don’t wish to be weird.
However, I can’t help but consider the strange predicaments that Yahweh has put his people in: Noah constructing an uncanny boat, Ezekiel’s dramatized prophecy, John the Baptist as a pre-modern hipster wandering the desert, and lots of more. It’s very peculiar for enslaved people to sing of God’s goodness and provision on plantations that attempted to designate them as worse than weird—inhuman.
Maybe to be set apart is to be weird and peculiar. However, many individuals have auctioned off their weirdness to cultural lobbyists for relevance and power.
Then I believe of myself and the explanations I’m joining Christianity Today because the editorial director of the Big Tent Initiative. They sometimes feel peculiar. I feel weird that I still carry hope. I feel docile once I speak of reconciliation. I feel lonely still having an amazing amount of affection for the bride of Christ. But then I feel content that I’m bringing my peculiar self and lots of other descriptives to CT.
I bring complexity. I’m a Canadian-born man with a Swahili name, who was raised by a Black Panther within the suburbs of Southern California. I’ve known privilege and poverty. I even have bobo tendencies with a militant’s temperament, but I’m a pacifist on paper. I’d slightly discuss the implications of rap beefs than political beefs because at the very least there may be poetry involved. I’m a theological nomad who tries his best to permit Jesus to take precedence over all my …
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