White Christians Crossing Borders: Between Perpetuation and Transformation

Abstract

‘Crossing borders’ is an important metaphor in Christian theology. While it has been expanded upon in numerous contexts, one of the primary spheres in which we have found theological reflection on the metaphor and Christian practices of crossing borders has been in churches’ mission work and theological reflection on mission. Historically, when white Christians in South Africa spoke about ‘mission,’ it referred exclusively to the white churches’ and missionaries work among black communities. When individual members of churches were involved in mission, it involved ‘reaching out’ to black people in particular. Missionaries and mission work played an important role in the construction of whiteness, however, the close relations between black and white Christians developing in mission contexts at times also destabilised whiteness in the minds of white Christians. Under apartheid the experiences of crossing borders associated with mission was often the first place where white Christians were confronted with the reality of black South Africa and the cost of white privilege. Post-apartheid South Africa remains largely segregated, and churches continue to facilitate encounters where racial borders can be crossed. The chapter focuses on the reappropriation of language on crossing borders in the post-apartheid white Dutch Reformed Church. The chapter will draw on earlier examples of how mission as crossing borders has both reinforced and destabilised whiteness in order to highlight the ambiguity of contemporary use of language on mission and crossing borders. The growing body of research on how whiteness is being reconstructed in post-apartheid South Africa is then used to analyse the way in which contemporary Christian talk about crossing borders might work to entrench white superiority while still, as in earlier times, contributing to transforming and destabilising whiteness.

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