Re Unable To Act, July/August
When I read Ruth Houtby’s piece “Unable to Act” (July/August pages 30-31) ideas began to swirl around in my head. One of them, not the first, arose from her references to the debate over designating lay missionaries and the proposal to plant ten new churches a year over the next few years. The idea came to me from hearing the tag end of a David Suzuki item on the CBC. Suzuki’s piece was about the tar sands.
You drink wine from generous flagons,
You perfume yourselves with the finest oil,
But you are not concerned over the ruin of Joseph.
As he makes clear elsewhere in the book, the ruin of Joseph had to do with the destitution of the poor. The Israelite aristocracy was doing very well by the boom times, but like boom times everywhere lots of people were left behind, and the wealthy couldn’t seem to care less.
The exploitation of the tar sands is a major contributor to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and therefore to climate change. The scientific consensus is that the world is getting warmer, and a significant part of that change is human activity, the direct result of our penchant for the good life. We adults will probably have gone to our reward before times get really tough, but our children and especially our grandchildren will still be around. They are the modern equivalent of the biblical widows and orphans.
Yet we debate how to provide communion services in “rural and remote” places and whether we should try to plant ten new churches a year. As Amos said a few chapters earlier,
Take from me the noise of your songs,
To the sound of your harps I will not listen,
But let justice flow down like waters,
And righteousness like an ever flowing stream.
Perhaps we should expend our energy on speaking truth to power, a truth that grows out of our knowledge of Jesus Christ, and not worry about songs and harps. We can do better than tag along after the likes of David Suzuki (as I have just done).
The other idea arose from an exercise I set my students in the early sixties. They were all candidates for the ministry in Nigeria, Anglicans, Methodists and Presbyterians. I asked them all to prepare over the Christmas break a history of the church in their home villages. One of the things that struck me was that out of the forty odd churches described, one was founded before 1900 and two after 1920. What happened in 1900 that set off this rush of church planting? The answer was the British conquest. The conquest set people asking fundamental questions and they came to the churches looking for answers.
Since then I have been a demand side missiologist. Our plans and strategies are all very well and good. They may even be necessary. But we won’t know if we have got it right till people start showing up in church. We may still have it wrong, but people come anyway. Mission begins with the action of God stirring the hearts of people to look for his grace and his wisdom. Mission begins when God changes the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, the prevailing climate of opinion. In that day the pervasive secularism which now seems so plausible will begin to lose its charm and, God willing, folk who normally spend Sunday morning in bed will appear in the pews looking for something better.
