God Does Not Give Up

Two things we've been seeing so far in our Genesis series. . . . 1.) How we see the world shapes how we live in it, and 2.) God tenaciously pursues a broken world, refusing to abandon it, refusing to destroy it, not willing to give up on it.

I stumbled on to two articles this morning. The first was this World Mag article while drinking my coffee this morning that illustrated both points. Its entitled "The Horror, the Hope: Africa needs the transforming power of the Holy Spirit."

I thought, too, the article highlighted the inherent brokenness of the world and ourselves, seen so clearly beneath the thin "veneer of civilization."

The second article, which the first references was this article from the London Times Online entitled "As an Athiest, I Truly Believe Africa Needs God". This is an amazing article.

I've posted both articles in-line this morning, because I think they are both worth your read and I didn't want to risk you not clicking to their original sources.

My kids need to be fed, changed and home schooled this Friday morning, so I gotta go, but I'd love your thoughts. . . .

From The Times

December 27, 2008

As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God

Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset

Matthew Parris

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.

Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.

THOUGHTS | "Schock factor" January 31, 2009

The horror, the hope

Africa needs the transforming power of the Holy Spirit | Janie B. Cheaney

Africa isn't called the Dark Continent for nothing. That title dates back hundreds of years, referring in part to a vast and unexplored geography. Known but unknown from ancient times, Africa remains sullen and seething while the rest of the world moves forward. What ails Africa? There's an abiding resistance that colonialism doesn't entirely account for (though colonial history plays a part). Nor does race. But looking at its history, all the way up to today, one could almost believe the continent is cursed.

Since her European overlords departed, Africa gains stability in one area only to collapse in another. Last year Kenya erupted; now the Congo. Slaughter continues in Darfur and the deterioration of Zimbabwe, which could get no worse, nonetheless gets worse. Africa fatigue infects the world, manifested in the mechanical forking-over of money, most of which slithers on well-greased tracks into the hands of dictators.

Two days after Christmas, a commentary appeared in the London Times Online by Matthew Parris (see WORLD, Jan. 17), a regular columnist and an urbane surveyor of the contemporary scene. Parris was raised in Africa and had just returned from a visit to his home state of Malawi. He came to the opinion page with an uncomfortable conclusion, stated in his title: "As an atheist, I am truly convinced that Africa needs God."

Moreover, Africa doesn't just need God—Africa needs Christ, and the transformation of the Holy Spirit. Parris has seen it too many times to doubt: Faith in Christ sets captives free. "Anxiety—fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, or a tribal hierarchy, or quite everyday things—strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity." The African Christians he knows are much more open, friendly, courageous than the non-Christians. They try new options, they cross tribal lines. They recognize evil and resist it.

Reaction to the article in the Times comment section was voluminous, and about equally split between agreement and skepticism. Most readers with African roots or experience seconded Parris' conclusion. Objections were predictable: Africa doesn't need more "superstitious nonsense," having more than enough of the homegrown variety. Africa needs education, fair trade, contraception! Yes, "those who don't have education need religion to guide them," but Christianity is at best a "halfway house" for benighted natives to get up to speed before pressing on to modernity; funny how "Christianity carries with it, probably as a historical accident, the values of the European rennaisance [sic] and enlightenment," but if not curtailed, "religion is likely to increase passivity, leaving the corrupt free to take more." And oh yes, do we really need to revive the "white man's burden"?

In a key scene of Hotel Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina and his driver Gregory turn inadvertently, at night, onto a road that they gradually discover is strewn with corpses. "Why do these things happen?" Paul cries. Gregory answers, not too profoundly, that hatred has somehow broken loose. The unspoken question is, Why hatred?

The real question is, Why love?

We know by now where human nature often ends up: A wrong turn down a dark road, and suddenly we're bumping over bodies in a late-model van. Africa is where chaos consistently chooses to rule these days, and the reason for that is too complicated for me. But Africa is the world, in that the veneer of civilization is thin everywhere, and what is not vigorously upheld will inevitably slide. Even hatred doesn't last because it takes energy; once vented, it lapses into less muscular vices like resentment, covetousness, sloth, indifference—all of which are scarcely unknown in "the West."

"Africa does need God," wrote one respondent. "Unfortunately, I think God has given up on Africa." God does not give up. And we, who know that transforming power Matthew Parris can only talk about, must not give up. Why love? Because He first loved us.

If you have a question or comment for Janie Cheaney, send it to jcheaney@worldmag.com.

Copyright © 2009 WORLD Magazine
January 31, 2009, Vol. 24, No. 2