Reconciliation as Mission: How Vulnerability Enables Us to Think Beyond Integration

Speaker: Dr Marcus Grohmann

Churches in post-apartheid South Africa have rightly emphasised the need for reconciliation and intercultural relationship building. For white people, this has often translated into strategies of inclusion and of sharing. For all their value, though, such approaches usually build on linguistic, cultural, material and spiritual resources that are the norm for the historically privileged. What could togetherness look like that seeks to meet others where they are in all these respects rather than bringing them to where we are?

This online seminar will focus on some of the narratives that keep us from making ourselves vulnerable to others in South Africa. Reframing mission as an activity that places a high value on learning from and with those who are different to ourselves. Including reflections on building up the body of Christ in contexts that are rooted in Afrocentric rather than in Eurocentric traditions.

About the Speaker:

Marcus Grohmann recently completed his PhD in Reconciliation Studies. In this ethnographic project, he studied how White people in a multicultural church in Cape Town seek to work for reconciliation – while mostly being in dominant positions. Marcus is a postdoctoral researcher at the Beyers Naudé Centre for Public Theology at Stellenbosch University, focusing on areas such intercultural theology, decolonisation, cultural linguistics and vulnerable mission. A member of The Message church in Mowbray, he is also involved in an isiXhosa-speaking branch of the Zion Evangelical Bible Schools (ZEBS) in Khayelitsha as well as the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission (AVM)