Archives For ethics

Missionaries, cultural imperialism, and The Poisonwood Bible

November 15, 2012 — 2 Comments

I recently read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, a true modern classic. In the novel we’re introduced to Nathan Price, a fierce Baptist missionary with an independent streak who took his family to the Congo in the late 1950s. Narrated by his wife and four daughters, it is simply a spellbinding story. It’s also a brutal story, particularly in its indictment of Price for his selfishness, legalism, heavy-handedness, arrogance, and callous disregard for the wellbeing of his family and of those he has purportedly been sent to serve. He’s not only an ugly American, he’s also an ugly Christian.

Kingsolver’s own childhood included a brief stint in the Congo as the daughter of an American physician, and this experience undoubtedly shaped the way she sees the world. Interestingly, though, in the Author’s Note she writes:

I thank Virginia and Wendell Kingsolver, especially, for being different in every way from the parents I created for the narrators of this tale. I was the fortunate child of medical and public-health workers, whose compassion and curiosity led them to the Congo. They brought me to a place of wonders, taught me to pay attention, and set me early on a path of exploring the great, shifting terrain between righteousness and what’s right.

As a son of missionaries, and one with a particular interest in matters of faith, ethics, and justice, I’d wanted to read The Poisonwood Bible for a long time, and I’m glad I finally had the chance. It really is a great novel. And while the damning portrayal of Nathan Price is admittedly a caricature, an honest look at the history of Christian mission reveals that self-identified followers of Christ have at times been involved in some pretty awful stuff.

Which raises an important question: Do missionaries destroy cultures?

Veteran missionary Don Richardson, best known for his books Peace Child and Eternity in Their Hearts, addresses this question in an article in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader (article available as a PDF here).

“There have indeed been occasions when missionaries were responsible for needless destruction of culture,” Richardson writes. “Whether through misinterpreting the Great Commission, pride, culture shock, or simple inability to comprehend the values of others, we have needlessly opposed customs we did not understand. Some, had we understood them, might have served as communication keys for the gospel!”

Me as a kid with some friends in the community where we lived in Guatemala.

But Richardson goes on to argue – convincingly, I think – that missionaries who destroy cultures are the rare exception; most are far more often hard at work preserving languages and cultures, and serving communities in practical, tangible ways through education, public health, or other community development initiatives.

My own parents served in the highlands of western Guatemala for many years as missionary linguists, and far from seeking to destroy the local culture, they honored and respected it, while teaching us to do likewise. Eventually we did.

For better or worse, remote communities no longer have the option of remaining “undisturbed,” even if that’s what they’d prefer. It’s well known that in the Amazon region, for instance, loggers continue to encroach on indigenous land all the time. And as self-described atheist Matthew Parris famously wrote a few years ago regarding another continent, “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.”

It’s true that people who more or less resemble Nathan Price exist, and some of them call themselves missionaries. But when missionaries are at their best, Richardson writes, they “are advocates not only of spiritual truth, but also of physical survival.” He describes how his own service in Indonesia included persuading his neighbors to give up the practice of cannibalism, knowing that if they didn’t do so willingly, the Indonesian government would have forced the point through more aggressive means. In that way, he had a hand in changing the culture, which in turn kept it from being destroyed:

Do missionaries destroy cultures? It’s true that we destroy certain things in cultures, just as doctors sometimes must destroy certain things in a human body if a patient is to live. But as we grow in experience and God-given wisdom, we must not – and will not – destroy cultures themselves.

Once again, you can read the entire article here, which I’d recommend you do – right after you read The Poisonwood Bible for yourself.

[Photo credit: "Canoe in the Congo" by Michael Nichols via nationalgeographic.com]

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Carl F.H. Henry on evangelism’s connection to personal and social ethics (The Lausanne Series, Part 3)

May 9, 2012 — 1 Comment

After a one-week hiatus due to a big writing deadline and the publication of another big project, we’re back with the third part of our series on the Lausanne Movement and its lessons in regard to faith, development, justice and peace. In the first two installments, we learned from René Padilla and Samuel Escobar.

Now we turn to the late Carl F.H. Henry. In North American evangelical circles he’s kind of a big deal, having helped to found both the National Association of Evangelicals and Fuller Seminary, and served as the first editor of Christianity Today. From his bio at the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals:

Henry desired to rescue conservative evangelicalism from the hands of fundamentalism, and in 1947 he published his controversial work, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, where he argued for evangelicals to develop a worldview which included social and political dimensions.

His presentation at Lausanne 74 was titled “Christian Personal and Social Ethics in Relation to Racism, Poverty, War and Other Problems.” His message, he says, is intended to move in two directions: first, to explore how contemporary understandings of personal and social ethics either hinder and further the proclamation of the gospel; and second, to look at the gospel’s ethical implications in the areas of sex, wealth, race and political power.

We live in a world that was created good but that has been corrupted by the fall. Our proper posture towards “civilization,” then,  is neither complete acceptance or complete rejection, but rather faithful discernment. As soon as someone starts urging evangelicals to care about social issues, though, there are sure to be objections that doing so will inevitably lead to ignoring, or at least minimizing, the importance of individual salvation and personal holiness. In this essay Henry clearly affirms the role of the individual within the larger role of the church:

Not only are individual believers, dispersed throughout many nations, to be inwardly conformed by the Spirit to the holy image of God’s obedient Son, but also the church as a community is to exemplify that public righteousness which God desires in society.

There are some who would wish to promote their understanding of public righteousness in society through the culture wars, led by the conviction that God is on their side and that the God-ordained ends justify any means, however unsavory, unethical or un-Christian. Perhaps worst of all, these culture warriors all too often fail to embody the biblical alternative, shalom — human flourishing and restored relationships in all directions. As Henry puts it,

It will not do to confront current [radical cultural] views… with anything less than the equally radical alternative of the biblical revelation of the will of God and its definition of the good life… From the very first the Christian message has emphasized the need of totally new selfhood, has called men to love of God and fellow man, and has stressed concern for public no less than for private righteousness.

The bulk of the essay consists of Henry’s understanding of what this means in specific matters of personal and social ethics. I’d encourage you to read what he has to say about each of those areas, but for our purposes here I’ll wrap this up with a paragraph I consider to be a truly compelling vision for the connection between evangelism and ethics in all of life:

In brief, Christian evangelism must do far more than speak only to the emotional vacuums in the lives of men; it must also help shape the intellectual mood of the day, deal with cultural idolatries and national priorities, confront the problems which erode a sense of human worth and dignity, cope with the moral paralysis that emboldens multitudes to shameless vices, uncover all the subtle and alluring masks that man wears in an age which believed itself at the gates of Paradise only to discover a desolation and a waste.

Does Henry’s essay challenge your understanding of evangelism and the mission of the church? If so, how? As those who believe Christ is making all things new, but who live today in the midst of so much desolation and waste, what might it look like to articulate and embody the good news of the kingdom?

[Photo credit: wheaton.edu]

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Rene Padilla on evangelism, ethics and the “teeth” of the gospel (The Lausanne Series, Part 1)

April 18, 2012 — 1 Comment

Last week I introduced this new series on the Lausanne Movement and its contributions to a better understanding of the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As I mentioned in that post, I’m going to begin with a presentation from René Padilla titled “Evangelism and the World.” Padilla is originally from Ecuador, and along with Samuel Escobar (who we’ll turn to next week) he was a pioneer of what became known in Latin America  as “integral mission.” He was also a leader of the Latin American Theological Fellowship and has written a number of books including Mission Between the Times: Essays on the Kingdom.

Taking a look at the spectrum of Christian belief and practice at the time, Padilla saw two “extreme positions.” On the one hand, adherents of the social gospel in North America, and proponents of liberation theology throughout Latin America, understood salvation to be limited to the physical, political and social realm. Meanwhile, fundamentalists and evangelicals were reducing salvation to the future destiny of the soul. Both views of the gospel are incomplete, Padilla argued, saying that Christians must embrace “the whole Gospel for the whole man for the whole world.” He continued:

On the one hand, the Gospel cannot be reduced to social, economic and political categories, nor the church to an agency for human improvement… On the other hand, there is no biblical warrant to view the church as an other-worldly community dedicated to the salvation of souls, or to limit its mission to the preaching of man’s reconciliation to God through Jesus Christ.

In this presentation in 1974, I’m sure Padilla ruffled some feathers, though he believed that for the most part he had a sympathetic audience (he was, after all, speaking to a room full of people committed to the gospel and its global implications). Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer a generation or so before him, Padilla issued a devastating critique of superficial evangelism, what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” Padilla argued that evangelism is about more than just getting people to believe a certain set of doctrines to ensure a future reward:

The aim of evangelization is… to lead man, not merely to a subjective experience of the future salvation of his soul, but to a radical reorientation of his life.

This radical reorientation of one’s life, he goes on to say, has unavoidable ethical and social implications. Padilla doesn’t deny the relationship between the gospel and personal holiness (and neither do I!), but knowing his audience, he was zeroing in on a huge blind spot. Evangelicals had all too often concentrated on “microethics” while tending to shy away from anything having to do with “macroethics.” People being shaped by the gospel ought to be concerned about both, he argued.

What’s more, he critiqued the pervasive problems of worldliness in the church, adapting the gospel to the “spirit of the times.” While evangelicals were quick to decry secularization, he said, they often failed to recognize the ways in which their understanding and practice of Christianity was shaped more by the prevailing culture than by the gospel. This isn’t a problem unique to North American Christians by any means, but given American Christianity’s influence around the world, confusing Jesus’s offer of abundant life with the American Dream presents a serious problem for Christians everywhere.

Recognizing our propensity to confuse the gospel with our culture’s understanding of “the good life” should lead us to a process of prayerful discernment, seeking to contextualize without becoming syncretistic, to use a couple of big missiological terms. When we fail to contextualize well, we either withdraw from the world we’re called to love, or we become no different from the world; both represent unfaithfulness to our Lord. In ethical and social terms,

When the church lets itself be squeezed into the mold of the world, it loses the capacity to see and, even more, to denounce, the social evils in its own situation… A Gospel that leaves untouched our life in the world — in relationship to the world of men as well as in relationship to the world of creation — is not the Christian Gospel, but culture Christianity, adjusted to the mood of the day. This kind of Gospel has no teeth.

By marching along in the world’s parade, favoring quantity to quality, and embracing technological efficiency in our churches and ministries without question, Padilla argued, we reduced the gospel to a “cheap product” and “turned the strategy for the evangelization of the world into a problem of technology.” Technology and efficiency have their place, he said, but “it is to this absolutization of efficiency, at the expense of the integrity of the Gospel, that I object.”

For those of us who would say we take the Bible seriously, we’d do well to examine our understanding of the gospel to see whether, in light of Scripture, these critiques have merit. What cultural values or norms have we absolutized at the expense of the integrity of the gospel? How have we adjusted the gospel to the mood of the day?

For those of us who are part of the church in the U.S., who can’t simply shake off our culture, we’d do well to ask how we can overcome the temptation to settle for cultural Christianity. At the same time, for those who are part of the church in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere, the challenge is to be proactive, to avoid creating your own culturally-modified, toothless Christianity.

The gospel is to be incarnated in culture wherever we are, affirming what is good, resisting what is evil, and discerning, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, where that distinction lies. I’m grateful to René Padilla for helping us begin that process of discernment.

I shared this video last September, but here René Padilla and Samuel Escobar, as Latin American leaders, reflect on the Lausanne Movement’s accomplishments and shortcomings. Next week I’ll take a look at Escobar’s presentation at Lausanne in 1974.

[Photo credit: Latin America Mission]

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Principles of engagement with indigenous peoples

March 14, 2012 — Leave a comment

Recently I rediscovered an article that for some reason I never got around to blogging about when I first read it last December. But once again it struck me as something really important to consider for anyone working (or supporting work) among the poor, and especially among indigenous populations. While the article focuses specifically on NGOs, I’d suggest it’s just as applicable for traditional Christian mission organizations as well.

Summarizing a talk at Harvard’s Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations given by Cornell University’s Carol Kalafatic, Elisa Peter writes about the need for NGOs to consider the principles underlying the work they do among and alongside indigenous peoples. As Kalafatic said, “It has become profitable to look ‘indigenous peoples friendly’ but many NGOs only pay lip service to the priorities and rights of indigenous peoples, especially if they don’t fit into the NGO’s organizational goals and culture.”

So, what would it look like to do community development or mission work in these contexts while truly honoring the dignity of indigenous peoples, not just paying lip service to the idea? Kalafatic suggests we consider four principles:

1. An honest examination of power relationships. NGOs are often the ones initiating cooperation with indigenous communities. Most of them already have a set agenda, which may not correspond to indigenous peoples’ needs and priorities. It is important that indigenous peoples are able to enter the relationship on their own terms and at their own pace, in keeping with the principle of self-determination.
2. A readiness to question assumptions. NGOs and indigenous peoples have different ways of setting and achieving goals, different paradigms, knowledge systems, governance institutions, worldviews, working cultures, etc. It is important that the transfer of knowledge is bidirectional with all parties willing to truly listen and learn.
3. A shift from viewing indigenous peoples as stakeholders to rights holders. Some NGOs view indigenous communities as victims, recipients of social services or one group among others to be consulted during a project. Others idealize them without understanding the complex nature of indigenous peoples’ unique history, culture and socio-political heritage. This too often leads to cooptation and a breakdown in the relationship. Indigenous peoples have universal human rights and collective rights based primarily on the special relationship they have with their traditional lands and territories. A rights-based approach is key to a successful collaboration between indigenous peoples and their partners.
4. A long-term commitment to trust and relationship building. Many indigenous communities may be distrustful of the purpose of collaboration. NGOs may get frustrated by the need to follow the decision making protocols of indigenous peoples’ customary governance systems, which does not nicely fit into the NGOs’ and their donors’ logical frameworks, timetables and deadlines. But sacrificing relationship building in the name of efficiency often leads to more mistrust and a failed collaboration in the long run. NGOs need to allocate the time necessary to meet indigenous peoples on their own terms. This may involve a fundamental shift in the NGO organizational culture.

As I said, I think any organization that’s serious about honoring the dignity of those they serve would do well to give serious thought to these principles. And Christians, in my view, should be leading the way. If we believe that every person, regardless of religion or socioeconomic status, is created in the image of God and that each culture can glorify God in unique ways, we already have all the motivation we need to take this seriously.

We need to guard against abusive power relationships that rob the gospel of its radical message of grace and love; we must be willing to question assumptions rooted in our Western mindset that may be more harmful than helpful; we need to consider how a rights-based approach might go further than a typical stakeholder model; and we need to do the long, hard work of building trust in relationships.

If you work for an NGO or a mission agency, does your organization prioritize these kinds of principles? If you support the work of any NGOs or other ministries working among the poor, do you know how those organizations ensure that they affirm the dignity and full participation of those they serve?

[Photo credit: tennessean.com - the photo shows Jars of Clay in Kenya as part of a slideshow of the band's work with Blood:Water Mission; I chose the photo because I think it portrays the dignity of those being served by Blood:Water's work, and shows Westerners joining in the "dance" of the local community, rather than outsiders expecting the local community to simply march to the beat of their own Western drum.]

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