661 - Jesus Weeps: Global Encounters on Our Doorstep

Jesus Weeps: Global Encounters on Our Doorstep
By Harold J. Recinos
Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1992. 142 pp. $9.95.

Though not suggested by the title, this second book by Harold Recinos is not only a challenge to churches to see the missiological opportunities in their immediate environs, it is a blunt and undisguised call for doing theological education in a different way. The author, a "Nuyorican," that is, a Puerto Rican reared in New York City, is Assistant Professor of Ministry and Parish Development at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. He knows the city and has earned the right to speak. What he says, however, will not be welcomed by all, for his basic thesis is that if seminary faculties, administrators, and trustees genuinely want to prepare students for living and ministering in the real world-an increasingly urban world-they must redesign theological curricula and after the way teaching is done.

Lip service is frequently given in seminaries, as in churches, to seeing the world as a global village. But the familiar, if not established, pattern for implementing this vision is to send students on a quick trip to Mexico, Central America, or some other foreign place, and then bring them back to the campus pretending that they are now globalized. This approach, says Recinos, is of minimal value unless the cross-cultural exposure is continued in this country. Too often, participants in this kind of mission-education experience assume that their brief immersion has prepared them for ministry in the contemporary world. It may do so in a small number of cases, but not often. One- or two-week encounters with peoples in other cultures, especially in the so-called Third World, hardly inform white North Americans of the issues, much less prepare them for interacting with the increasing number of Latinos, Africans, Arabs, Asians, Native Americans, and poor whites living and often struggling to survive in North American cities. Congregations and seminaries alert to what is happening, therefore, will open their eyes to the readily accessible learning and ministry possibilities around them, and they will seize the chance to make globalization an unending process in the urban contexts so close geographically, but so remote experientially.

Reminiscent of his earlier book, Hear the Cry, in this volume Recinos

662 - Jesus Weeps: Global Encounters on Our Doorstep

describes his own childhood and youth as a Puerto Rican in the South Bronx-the poverty, drugs, violence, racial discrimination, and despair so frequently intensified and so rarely mitigated by religious faith, the storefront churches, or the ever-present street preachers.

The discussions of the city as "God's Sacred Place" and "The City and Globalization" are impressive in scope but likewise are concise synopses of recent urban research. The last two chapters dealing with "pastoral anthropology" contain valuable insights, but I fear they will be of limited use in their present form. The methodology described in the "immersion techniques" is unnecessarily complex and too extensive for most congregational committees or working groups. It can, however, be adapted to individual situations. Recinos rightly advises that the questions he poses be regarded as supplementary to those drawn up by a listening or research group. Sociological jargon such as "cultural 'others,' " "holistic ethnographic accounts," and "cultural meaning systems" is evident but mercifully limited.

The essence and overall message of the book can be synthesized as follows: Globalization for Anglo middle-class North American Christians must be more than a trip or a series of dialogues with culturally different people. Unless it involves "a movement within church life concerned with breaking down the walls of separation between diverse groups at home," it is at best irrelevant and at worst diversionary.

In Jesus Weeps, Harold Recinos provides not only the theological and sociological underpinnings for beginning the globalization experience at home, he likewise offers some practical guidelines for how it can be done effectively.

Interspersed throughout the text are more than twenty poems written by the author. They are intense, earthy, and moving, but their being scattered here and there is distracting. I would have preferred that they be used as frontispieces for the foreword, introduction, and the six chapters, or brought together as the conclusion.

Alan Neely
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ.