The mid-twentieth century marks the shifting of the center of Christianity from the global North to the global South. Related to this is the discourse that Lutheranism has already claimed the Global South as its locus. One of the fastest growing Lutheran churches is located in the Eastern African country, Ethiopia. An ever increasing migratory wave has brought a significant number of Ethiopian immigrants of Lutheran heritage to North America. These immigrant Christians who were affiliated with the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus, which sees itself as a charismatic Lutheran church, encounter a new challenge soon after relocation.
Beyond leaving behind their home church and society due to enforced migration, lack of intentional engagement in theologizing contextually causes tensions that lead the congregations to emerge and develop in isolation from the local churches. Therefore, this paper is intended to suggest that the Ethiopian immigrant churches’ impactful existence in the world depends not just on how advanced their institution is in dealing with organizational issues, but on how clear and adaptive their theology is to cope with the social fluidity circumscribing the communities in diaspora. To this end, I would argue that launching an integration of Lutheran tradition and charismatic experience provides a hermeneutical context for Ethiopian diaspora churches in North America so that they can deal with the synthesis, tension, syncretism, and “mestizaje” which diaspora always entails.
American Catholic theologian Stephen Bevans’s themes of contextual theology include the translation, the praxis, the anthropological, the synthetic, the transcendental, and the countercultural models. This paper not just promotes some of Bevans's themes, but also suggests a diasporic method of doing theology in a multi-cultural environment. On the one hand, the nature of the community involved—the very strong charismatic leaning of the Ethiopian Lutherans in North America—motivates considering a diasporic theology as a framework in this endeavor. On the other hand, the nature of what we are going to integrate—the grammar of Lutheran theology and the experiential elements signifying charismatic expressions. The need for critical integration and hybridization of charismatic experience with the Lutheran tradition calls for a diasporic theology.
Consequently, we will engage in a constructive conversation with Stephen Bevans’s models of contextual theology not just to uphold some of his themes, but move beyond and propose an exercise of the diasporic approach as another model of contextual theology in the first section of this paper. Then, to avoid confusion, it is important to engage in analysis of various uses of the term diaspora and outline the fundamentals of diasporic theology. The task of the second section is to describe the diasporic theology envisioned and what constitutes the theology that in consonance with the Lutheran tradition promotes a gospel-centered, mission-oriented, and service-driven understanding of the church and its relation to the world in the context of immigration.
This paper deals with doing theology in context—diasporic theology, which, in its first section engages in a constructive conversation with Stephen Bevans’s Synthetic and Countercultural models of contextual theology. The second section, under the theme of diasporic theology, is committed to establishing a more flexible working definition of the term diaspora through analyzing its origin and diverse usages in interdisciplinary scholarships in its first subcategory. Then the fundamentals of the diasporic theology, an example of critical integration and hybridization of traditions, cultures, and experiences within which the Lutheran grammar and charismatic experience acquire a new synthesis, are discussed in the second subsection. I would argue that diasporic theology is the antidote for the crisis of self-alienation arising from fear of assimilation with others, which enables us to leave our comfort zone in obedience to the Holy Spirit and leads us to transition of thoughts from fear of contamination by others’ culture toward embracing people in love and treating their culture with respect for the sake of the gospel.