'They Came One at a Time': Native-led Church Planting and Growing the Body of Christ from the Margins of Culture

Abstract

Nearly twenty years ago a team of native-led Christian missionaries planted an Indian Baptist church in the culturally conservative Absentee Shawnee community of Little Axe. The reputation of cultural conservatism in Little Axe is grounded in the strict maintenance of certain cultural practices and the use of discursive, social and physical boundaries to ensure the exclusivity of the local native cultural institutions. The exclusivity in this community makes it difficult for church planters to form meaningful attachments in their <&ldquo>target community, particularly when such attachments are formed around local discourses about "native culture" that are largely inaccessible to most church planters. The work of church planting situates native church members on the margins of the local native community, and yet it is this marginal position relative to the community and its cultural institutions that ensures the church's continuation.

This research focuses on the processes whereby church members produce discourses of inclusivity and exclusivity to negotiate their uncertain position in the <&ldquo>target community. These specific discursive mechanisms allow church members to redefine and reinscribe their attachments within a community of which most of them are not fully a part. At stake for native church planters working in native communities is the possibility that choosing everlasting life beyond this world means living on the margins of culture while in this world.