The Light of the World Church in East Boston is a minority church that has historically served the Latino immigrant community. Its tight connection to the mother church in Mexico and the continual growth from immigration established its religious identity as a minority church with the social function of ethnic preservation. As a minority church, it also sacralized sociocultural elements from the mother church’s context that were not part of the church’s official theology but helped its growth by providing a cultural safe haven for its immigrant members.
As the church developed and grew, the ethnic religious identity was challenged by the US-born Latino members who were assimilated to American culture and by the church’s own people of God theology, which called for a multicultural congregation. The ethnic nature of the church, on the one hand, and the universal nature the church’s own theology called for, on the other, as opposing views of what the church should be, created an identity crisis. The crisis threatened congregational unity by leading towards the creation of two distinct churches, the ethnic immigrant church and the assimilated American church.
This thesis project begins to close the gap between the culturally conflicted Light of the World Church in East Boston and the multicultural people of God envisioned in its theology, by reimagining identity through the adoption of a Christ-like consciousness, the creation of a multicultural congregational ethos and modified gender power structured within.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/44424 |
| Date | 13 May 2022 |
| Creators | Nunez, Aziel |
| Contributors | Jacobsen, David S |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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