What would your ideal family reunion look like? You probably have some fascinating ancestors you’ve never met.

But what if we could all be family? Many of us have a chosen family. Family that we were not born into, but dear people who choose one another to make our way through the ups and downs of life’s journey.

What would you be without your companions?

And what if you could expand your chosen family? What if you found more folks who would fall in love with you, and you with them?

Some of your closest chosen family have very different lived experiences. The fact that you have so little in common shows you that anything is possible. That a global family can be realized.

A host of scholars, like Howard Thurman and Justo González, have helped me, along with Black Liberation theologians James Cone and Jacquelyn Grant, several Latin American Roman Catholic liberation theologians, plus Dalit theologians on the Indian subcontinent, and a few Asian and Asian American authors. In some ways, I was lost, and they, among others, helped point me in the right direction.

They showed me the way to the hope of a new global family.

Indigenous sources have inspired me, like my friends Cheryl Bear and Randy Woodley, whom the late Richard Twiss influenced.

But before I read any of the authors I mentioned earlier, there was Lamin Sanneh, who died in 2019. He renewed my hope. I even got to meet him once.

Dr. Sanneh was Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School and Professor of History at Yale University. He was born in the Gambia in 1942, when Africa was still under colonial rule.

It’s not just academics who have been there for me. I’ve always watched people, most of them not famous, not all of them poor, whose authenticity and resilience have inspired me. They have been bright lights. People like yourselves. Seriously. And I am so grateful for you. Additionally, I have been there for myself as a relentless curious seeker.

Many people reject Christianity, not without reason, because it was the vanguard for colonization, genocide, the slave trade, and an exploitative economic system, one that tries to push us into a lack mentality, which we are increasingly starting to refuse. But Dr. Lamin Sanneh wrote about what he called “The Western guilt complex as it relates to Christian Missions.”

Dr. Sanneh has determined that:

“Much of the standard Western scholarship on Christian missions proceeds by looking at the motives of individual missionaries and concludes by faulting the entire missionary enterprise as being part of the machinery of Western cultural imperialism.”

Dr. Sanneh pointed out how Enlightenment values all but erased many important Christian values, including the idea of conversion, and that academic Christians were embarrassed by the idea. This embarrassment is why Dr. Sanneh frequently told the story of his own baptism.

“I felt inexorably driven toward it. On the night of my baptism, I was overcome with emotion, finding it hard to believe that my wish was being fulfilled. Not even the thousand tongues of Methodist hymnody could have given utterance to the avalanche of thoughts and feelings that erupted in me.”

Lamin Sanneh felt like he was responding to Good News. Seven words contained the Gospel for him. Paul’s words from 2 Corinthians 5:19 are “God was in Christ, reconciling the world.”