In one of my classes, we were asked to write a letter to a congregation that was largely white and middle class concerning the influx of a large group of Hispanic immigrants in the community due to the opening of a meat packing plant. Here is my response; it is largely devoid of references to secondary literature due to the nature of letters.
I’d love to entertain your thoughts and critiques. :: We serve the Kingdom, not the Republic
We, as the North-Western Church, must tread carefully as we awaken to the present, past, and future realities of the Eastern and Southern Churches. This post is a collection of some helpful ideas to that end. In many ways have many things which these other Churches lack. Chief among these are education, history, wealth, and political influence. This is not to say that we are exclusive holders of the Christian tradition or the exclusive keepers of the true truth which is truly true… as we have done in the past and do to ourselves so very often. The question before us is how to speak and listen without overpowering the Christian Other. We need to invest, tell our stories, plant and support seminaries, rethink missions, and place political pressure on our governments the whole while seeking the cause of Christ and listening to the Spirit while submitting to the Father.
Terminology and imagined hegemony
Just as there is no monolithic North-Western Church, there is likewise no monolithic Eastern, African, South American, Southern, South Eastern, Asian Church. This is the case for two very important reasons, internal diversity, and external unity. Each movement, denomination, congregation is unique to itself and lumping them together is dangerous and inaccurate.
It is dangerous insofar as it serves to maintain old and create new stereotypes.
It is inaccurate because the Cherubim and Seraphim movement has little to do with Musama Disco Christo Church though they are both in West Africa and neither of them have much to do with or connection to the congregations in the various disparate countries in South America or Asia.
We are better equipped to use such terms as Northern Church, Southern Church, African Church and the like as geographic containers rather than activators of essential features. However, despite this, Jenkins builds an undeniable case that the center of Christianity has and will continue to shift South and East. We in the West in the Church and the Academy are barely aware of this situation.
Investment, not Profit
In both Christian and Secular circles, dumping is the most common way we seek to help those in need. However, dumping aid upon people only serves to enslave them to our aid, replacing their dependence upon hunger with a dependence upon us while we pat ourselves on the back.[1] What we need instead is a de-emphasis upon aid and an emphasis upon investment in their congregations and societal structures. This can happen on several levels, individuals through micro-finance organizations such as Kiva or Opportunity International, at the congregation or denominational level, and finally on the governmental level as wield our political clout.
While we are doing this, let us remember the Biblical distaste for usury and let our investments be motivated by Kingdom building, not the great and powerful god ROI.[2] Let us be satisfied with 90% of the world’s wealth.
Gathering around the Campfire
Jenkins did a great job detailing the ancient roots of Christianity in Africa and Asia, which often hundreds of years older than our own faith trajectories. [3] As many of my fellow students said, we would be wise to listen to their stories and their wisdom.
They are correct, though we often sacrifice our stories at the altar of the unknown god paying our colonial debts.
However, we Western Christians have a long tradition full of stories, conflicts, mistakes, and triumphs as well. We can and should offer up this collection of stories to the rest of the body of Christ, not as authoritative, but as wisdom. We have faced many of the problems our sisters have faced. We were once persecuted; we were once poor.
We once drank from the cup of political power and are stained in blood by that sin.[4]
Our wisdom can be offered, though it cannot come without us listening to their stories. Once we think we own the wisdom, we have truly lost it. We can listen to their Now; they to our Not Yet.
The most difficult area here is the formulation of doctrine. Orthodoxy in middle America will look different than Orthodoxy in South Korea both of which will look different than Orthodoxy in the Congo. We have to remember that the Spirit speaking though the Bible is our prime authority and even then the revealed truths contained therein were formulated inside a specific geographic, temporal, cultural, linguistic location.
Teaching People to Fish
To help foster the growth and development of Christians in other areas of the world as loving siblings we need to found and support seminaries across the globe. And not just the seminaries themselves, we need to support students themselves.
In these seminaries scholars should be encouraged to write their traditions to give them a voice which can be exported to other areas of the globe.
While we are at it, it would be profitable to create some sort of interchange program wherein global seminaries send scholars to seminaries in other parts of the world. This would aid in a truly global conversation.
Curbing Missionary Redundancy
Central to recognizing the agency of Other Christians is the acknowledgement of and noncompetition with Other Christian missionary endeavors. Jenkins notes that this is one of the prime sources of inter-Christian conflict and we would do well to avoid it.[5] Unless there be a true heart of darkness that the gospel has not infected, we should focus our missionary efforts here at home where we are the most effective (where religion is dying)or partner with existing churches in the area.
Abusing Political Power for the Good of the Kingdom
If we truly see ourselves as one organ in the global-historical Body of Christ then let our allegiance be to it and it alone. May we seek the good of Christians rather than the good of the State. We can encourage our governments to restrict policies which exploit other nations and move to block others, such as China, from doing the same. Additionally, we can use our political clout to relive persecutions. We have the power; we should use it for the good of others instead of ourselves.
Conclusion
Our western post-colonial guilt and historical ignorance has blinded the Bride. We need to open our eyes adjust to the light, and seek the good of our global brothers and sisters. This will take careful thought, cooperation, grace, and wealth. It will not be easy but will require sacrifice. However, such is the way of Kingdom building.
Works Cited:
Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Revised and Updated. Oxford University Press, USA, 2007.
Knutsen, Torbjørn L. The rise and fall of world orders. Manchester University Press, 1999.
Mwaura, Ndirangu. Kenya Today: Breaking the yoke of Colonialism in Africa. Algora Publishing, 2005.
[1] Ndirangu Mwaura, Kenya Today: Breaking the yoke of Colonialism in Africa (Algora Publishing, 2005), 81.
[2] Return on Investment.
[3] Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Revised and Updated. (Oxford University Press, USA, 2007), 16-21.
[4] Torbjørn L. Knutsen, The rise and fall of world orders (Manchester University Press, 1999), 51.
[5] Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 155.
From Julia Esquivel in Threatened with Resurrection: Prayers and Poems from an Exiled Guatemalan (Elgin: The Brethern Press, 1982), 79-91. I love how it uses Biblical language and themes to remind us at what price our comfort comes. I’m thinking hard this holiday season about the intersection between religion, politics, exploitation, and thankfulness. I pray that we can slow our lives down to the point that we loose our lusts of luxury.
In the third year of the massacres
by Lucas and the other coyotes
against the poor of Guatemala
I was lead by the Spirit into the desertAnd on that eve
of Thanksgiving Day
I had a vision of Babylon:The City sprang forth arrogantly
from an enormous platform
of dirty smoke produced
by motor vehicles, machinery
and contamination from smokestacks.It was as it all the petroleum
from a violated earth
was being consumed
by the Lords of capital
and was slowly rising
obscuring the face
of the Sun of Justice
and the Ancient of DaysEach day false prophets
invited the inhabitants
of the Unchaste City
to kneel before the idols
of gluttony
money
and death
Idolaters from all nations
were being converted to the American Way of LifeThe Spirit told me
in the River of death
flows the blood of many peoples
sacrificed without mercy
and removed a thousand times from their lands
the blood of Kekchis, of Panzos
of blacks from Hati of Guaranis from Paraguay
of the peoples sacrificed for “development”
in the Trans-Amazonic strip
the blood of the Indians’ ancestors
who lived on these lands, of those who
even now are kept hostage in the Great Mountain
and on the Black Hills of Dakota
by the guardians of the beast…My soul was tortured like this
for three and a half days
and a great weariness weighted upon my breast
I felt the suffering of my people very deeply!In tears I prostrated myself
and cried out: “Lord, what can i do?
Come to me Lord, I wish to die among my people!
Without strength, I waited for an answer.
After a long silence
and heavy obscurity
The One who sits on the throne
to JUDGE THE NATIONS
spoke in a soft whisper
in the secret recesses of my heart:You have to denounce their idolatry
in good times and in bad
Force them to hear the truth
for what is impossible to humans
is possible for God.
A while back, after reading Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, some friends and I decided to stop dumping and start investing the in poor. We (well, I) had (ve) always bemoaned the idea of dumping aid. I really felt like giving a man a fish every day kept him dependant upon me for the fishes.
He’d become my slave.
My slave to my generosity.
It was almost as though my guilt was fueling my giving so that my conscious could be satisfied.
Oh my, “My” showed up a lot in those sentences, didn’t it? That’s just the problem. While we have the most abundant educational and monetary resources on earth, we want to free people, both from poverty and aid. (We don’t want a newer, nicer, colonialism, right?)
What Christian have done in the past is turn to education. If we empower people with knowledge, they can build a better lives for themselves and their communities. What we found was that people, once educated, left their impoverished homes and went West. There was no credit, no opportunity in their homelands. Our education was actually a brain drain on the poor!
You can teach a man to fish, but if there is no pond and no fish in that pond, he’ll go find such a pond.
Opportunity International builds ponds and stocks them with fish.:
Opportunity offers a mix of loan products, including individual loans, group loans, and loans tailored to clients in areas such as education and agriculture. A typical first point of entry, the Trust Group brings together 10 to 30 entrepreneurs who elect leaders, receive training and pledge to guarantee each other’s loans. Because the group guarantee replaces the need for collateral, credit becomes available to those previously locked out from formal financial services.
Libier Flores Lopez opened a sewing buisiness near Guadalajara, Mexico, with no White Savior TM in sight.
Because they lend to a group of people, they become accountable to one another and to the group itself. This, in my opinion, is the genius here. Not only are the opening credit to people who can’t get it through other means, they are creating trust and accountability in these communities. Furthermore, because the individuals have to pay back the group, and the group, Opportunity International, the gift of 1,000 to the organization is given time and time again.
While other aid organizations do good work, I encourage you to take a look at microfinance institutions such as Kiva and Opportunity International. They don’t dump, and they don’t exploit. The teach people how to fish and give them the tools to succeed.
The folks over at Wired worked up the following maps purporting to visualize the density of the seven deadly sins among our united states. Their methodology is… interesting to say the least. I’ll let you head over there to see how they went about graphing the most slippery of deviations from God’s will.
Saw Transformers Revenge of the Fallen last night. It wasn’t that horrible of a summer-stupid movie. Well, the 1.5 hour editing down of the 2.5 hour monstrosity on screen wouldn’t have been that bad of a movie. Excepting therefrom the gratuitous everything, the only thing that really bothered me was the two blackface characters, Skids and Mudflap (everything else was chalked up to a Michael Bay movie adapted from a toy line and was therefore somewhat excusable, I knew what I was going to get when I walked into the theater).
Pictured: Skids, Mudflap, and Blackface
From The ISS Takes on: Transformers 2 by Doktor Maxwell von Puppykicker the Third:
It’s a robot in blackface. What the hell people?
Director Michael Bay and his proponents (typing that hurt me more than you will ever know) have defended the Little Black Sambots by claiming that they were meant to be comic relief characters and that any racial connotations were entirely unintentional. So apparently, it’s just a coincidence that these robots possess apelike features, have flared nostrils and comically enlarged ears and lips, are shown to be unintelligent, speak in an "urban" dialect, carry decorative "bling", and mention not reading very frequently! And that one of them has a gold tooth!
This sums up 98% of all comic storylines. From Atomic Robo,volume 1.
Meredith and I stopped using ethanol-laced gas a couple of years ago because we have a hard time burning food for gas. Came across the following today: The Great Ethanol Scam. Here are some selected quote to entice you to read the three page article:
First, the primary job of the Environmental Protection Agency is, dare it be said, to protect our environment. Yet using ethanol actually creates more smog than using regular gas, and the EPA’s own attorneys had to admit that fact in front of the justices presiding over the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in 1995 (API v. EPA).
Second, truly independent studies on ethanol, such as those written by Tad Patzek of Berkeley and David Pimentel of Cornell, show that ethanol is a net energy loser. Other studies suggest there is a small net energy gain from it.
Third, all fuels laced with ethanol reduce the vehicle’s fuel efficiency, and the E85 blend drops gas mileage between 30% and 40%, depending on whether you use the EPA’s fuel mileage standards (fueleconomy.gov) or those of the Dept. of Energy.
Fourth, forget what biofuels have done to the price of foodstuffs worldwide over the past three years; the science seems to suggest that using ethanol increases global warming emissions over the use of straight gasoline. Just these issues should have kept ethanol from being brought back for its fourth run in American history.
Don’t let anybody mislead you: The new push to get a 15% ethanol mandate out of Washington is simply to restore profitability to a failed industry…
Of course, all of this excludes a subtle discussion on the impact of the various types of ethanol.
Book Review: The Patriot’s Bible (part 2)
I find myself utterly confounded as to how Christian commentators can agree that a military combatant is “the noblest development of mankind.” Since Christ is the perfect illustration of what it means to be “in the image of God,” and since he is our Lord and the one we are called to imitate, shouldn’t he be the criteria for what constitutes “the noblest development of mankind?” Yet, he refused to buy into the Jewish nationalism of his day (despite the fact that Israel, unlike America, actually had been sanctioned by God in the Old Testament). And he laid down his life for his enemies rather than engage in violence against them (Mt 26:53) or allow his disciples to do so. (Jn 18:10-11, 36).
Catch up on the review by reading part one.
From The Rise of Christianity: [1] by R. Stark:
Free-rider problems are the Achilles’ heel of collective activities. […] “Truly rational actors will not join a group to pursue common ends when, without participating, they can reap the benefit of other people’s activity in obtaining them. If every member of the relevant group can share the benefits… then the rational thing is to free ride… rather than to help attain the corporate interest.” [2]
Do you see this being the case? The Canonical Church certainly faced these issues and attempted to put measures in place to limit freeloading. We see it in the Pastorals, James, Peter, etc. In our zeal to be an Acts 2 Church, do we ever miss out of the pragmatics of the Acts 2< church?
Quote from Timothy Price in Is the Father of Jesus the God of Muhammad? :
Some scholars have argued that monotheism is inherently racist, oppressive and violent – witness the many holy wars waged in the name of the one true god. But it just as well be argued that these tendencies, though real enough historically, represent a de facto denial of true monotheism. In other words, when we elevate a particular race, tribe, or ideology to the place that rightly belongs to God alone we slid back I to a kind of practical polytheism – the worship of blood and soil, black or white, left or right.
Sometimes I reuse parts of my own writing. However, nothing like this:
See the post over at Cinematical for more.
There is blood, blood, actual human blood,
Spilled in the name of the Lamb.
There is blood, blood, street staining blood,
Spilled in the name of the Lamb.
I am not an expert on Calvin and Geneva. Hank asked me to supplement the claim about Geneva’s blood stained streets that I made on my April’s Fools post where I claimed to convert (or to realize I was a convert) to M. Driscoll’s New Calvinism. In it there was a critique of Driscoll’s whitewashing of Geneva. To be honest, I remember being horrified in one of my old Christian history classes by descriptions of its Calvin-dictated theocracy. However, since this is not what I primarily study, I am open to being awfully wrong in my appraisal. Below is the source that I used in the class, A History of Christianity in the World: From Persecution to Uncertainty by Manschreck, pages 188-191.
…[B]etween 1532 and 1534 Calvin underwent a conversion in which he, like Isaiah, experienced the glory of God and the sinfulness of [hu]man[s]. In 1533 when Nicolas Cop assumed the rectorship of the University of Paris, Calvin assisted in the writing of the inaugural speech, which called for a return to the pure Gospel. Both he and Cop [subsequently had to] flee Paris. Calvin, disguised as a vinedresser, escaped in a basket. In the following year, 1534-1535, the zeal of the Paris reformers brought on a persecution in which two hundred were arrested and twenty martyred. [Short discussion on the development of the Institutes of the Christian Religion from a short work prompted by the before mentioned persecution to the expanded final version, which is a the product of a lifetime theological thought.] Calvin prefaced it with a plea to Francis I of France [1515-1547] to end the persecution of his loyal subjects.
Almost overnight Calvin was hailed as the new champion of the French protestants. When Calvin’s travels brought him to Geneva in 1536, Farel induced him to stay and help make Geneva, which had recently pulled away from Roman Catholicism, a model Christian community. The next two years were rough. Although Calvin produced the Genevan Confession of Faith, 1536, and his first Catechism, 1537, Roman Catholics, liberals, and libertines mustered sufficient opposition in 1538 to force him and Farel to leave Geneva precipitously. […] [I]n 1541 [Calvin] was invited to return to Geneva to restore order and stave off the drift to Rome. From 1541 until his death, Calvin molded Geneva, seeking to make it a model Christian community to the glory of God. For 23 years he preached, organized, disciplined, and wrote, more in the spirit of the Old Testament than the New. Geneva was a theocracy, directed in the will of God by Calvin.
[Jesus teaching a young couple on their wedding eve]
And if you have children, for their sakes you will become oppressors and robbers and smiters of orphans and wrongers of widows, and you will be grievously tortured for their injuries. For the greatest part of children are the cause of many pains; for either the king fall upon them, or a demon lays hold of them, or paralysis befalls them. And if they be healthy, they come to ill either by adultery or theft, or fornication, or covetousness, or vain-glory; and through their wickedness you will be tortured by them.
Dang. Basically, Thomasine Jesus of the 3rd century CE Edessa is saying that having kids will make you oppress others to feed them. And beyond that, you will be grieved when they die young. If they are, by chance, healthy, then they will likely be degenerates whose evil will wretch your soul. Thanks Apocryphal Jesus. Thank you very much. I’ll stick with Canon Jesus, who loves the little children.
(Pictured: Picard off’ing Wesley Crusher for getting a 98% on his Astromadeup Physics exam.)
Spoken of; Spoken for – Women in the Thomasine community. While women, their needs, and their concerns feature prominently in the narrative, they are almost always written about from the male point of view.
My Theological and Academic Musings My Xbox Speaketh
Resident Aliens by Hauerwas and Willimon
To Know and Love God by David Clark
Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell
The Wesleyan Quadrilateral by Don Thorsen
Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? by James Smith
Sex God by Rob Bell
