Homeland Insecurity: A Hip Hop Missiology for the Post–Civil Rights Context

North American domestic missions are now situated in a complex landscape of changing faith, ethnic diversity, and racial unrest. But most missiological approaches continue under colonialist assumptions and lack the cultural competency to navigate new realities. Missiologist Daniel White Hodge explores the contours of post–civil rights contexts and focuses on Hip Hop theology as a framework for radical engagement of emerging adult populations. He critiques the impaired missiology of imperialist and white supremacist approaches to modern, urban short-term missions. With keen cultural exegesis of the wild, he explores the contours of a more contextualized Hip Hop Jesus. Reexamining the importance of race and ethnicity in mission, Hodge offers theological space for protest and social disruption and suggests conceptual models for domestic missions within a growing multiethnic demographic. Grounded in Hip Hop studies and youth ministry, Hodge constructs a hybridity of lived missiology where dissent and disruption open new possibilities for Christian faith in the twenty-first century.

Daniel White Hodge (PhD, School of Intercultural Studies, Fuller Theological Seminary) is associate professor of intercultural communications at North Park University in Chicago, where he also chairs the department of communication arts and is research lead for the Catalyst 606__ program. He also serves as editor in chief of the Journal of Hip Hop Studies. He is the author of Heaven Has a Ghetto, The Soul of Hip Hop, and Hip Hop's Hostile Gospel: A Post Soul Theological Exploration.