Open friendship in a closed society: Mission Mississippi and a theology of friendship

This dissertation is a study of Mission Mississippi, the largest model of intentional ecumenical church-based racial reconciliation work in the United States today. It examines Mission Mississippi's lived theology of racial reconciliation in dialogue with the work of theologians including Jurgen Moltmann, Miroslav Volf and John DeGruchy to understand the place of friendship in a Christian understanding of reconciliation.; Founded in 1992, Mission Mississippi strives to facilitate relationships between individuals and partnerships between churches across racial and denominational lines. The work of sociologists Michael Emerson and Christian Smith suggests Mission Mississippi's emphasis on relationship building between individuals ignores the forces that perpetuate systemic issues of injustice in a racialized society. Mission Mississippi avoids talking about the demands of justice in racial reconciliation, but its African American leaders believe reconciliation starts with friendship before it can move to the weightier issues of justice.; This work locates Mission Mississippi's resistance to addressing issues of justice not only in a natural resistance of whites to costly reconciliation and as a result of cultural individualism, but through a study of the history of First Presbyterian Church, Jackson to the distinctive Southern Presbyterian doctrine of the spirituality of the church. In this study a particular theology of open friendship emerges that is robust enough to address issues of systemic injustice and inequity in a racialized society. This study shows how Mission Mississippi instantiates this open friendship in its practice of intentional interracial intercessory prayer.