2011 protest against Ugandan government

Excellent BBC article:

“As the people of Egypt and Tunisia mark the first anniversary of the revolutions which toppled their long-time leaders, leading to popular uprisings elsewhere in the Arab world, Malawian academic Jimmy Kainja asks: Is it time for an African Spring?”

Signs of joy and life:

* Amidst the vibrant worship and interaction, the thunder-strike of a major theme already: the cross, claimed here for truth and power to live amidst and make sense of the deep pain. Yesterday an Anglican bishop from South Sudan told me, “I have to remind our suffering people there is no cross without resurrection.” I told him in the U.S. I often have to say just the opposite. This morning’s witnesses/story tellers for the first day theme of new creation — Sister Rosemary of northern Uganda and Bishop Taban, founder of the Holy Trinity Peace Village in South Sudan — both seamlessly connected new creation and the cross in their journeys. Independent of similar witnesses and signs across the world who are unknown to each other, I see a new paradigm emerging of “mission as new creation” (versus mission as justice, as salvation, as church growth, as prosperity, etc). Only through dying to the way things are and receiving God’s new reality can something fresh be born in our lives and communities. As a Burundian put it to me here, “Christians are ones whose lives are noticed in times of turbulence.”

* One surprising item named as an “exhibit of new creation” by moderator Wilfred Mlay (formerly Africa VP for World Vision) was a beautiful, glamorous, silver hand bag/purse Sister Rosemary was carrying, a bit out of place on her I must say. It is made out of caps from soda cans. The girls orphaned by war who live at her St Monica’s home make them now for sale. These things would sell like hot cakes if my friend Chris Heuertz was put in charge of marketing.

* Quotes of the day:

Wilfred Mlay: “New creation is a kind of stubborn madness, refusing to accept the way things are. The result is new life amidst death”

Bishop Taban on his method: “Don’t bring people to the town, take the town to the people” (this is exactly what my mentor John Perkins would say)

Bishop Ochola of northern Uganda: “A leader is someone who when they see the truth will live and die for it. Let us become like Rosemary and Taban, for we can change the world. The church of Christ has refused to live to what Christ was saying. All the big churches around the world, they are not listening to what Christ is saying”

In answer to someone who asked, with laughter, “You are mad and stubborn — are you really Catholic?” Sister Rosemary answered, “Is Christ a Catholic? Is God a Catholic? Did Christ die for Catholics?”

A medical doctor from Kenya: “The church (in Africa) went into comfort. But the gospel came to Africa with sacrifice. I think Africa has a hope, and it is for us to get out of the comfort zone.”

* A place of personal joy: Watching the affection between the 16 Africans here who have been to Duke and the U.S. Duke team of 7 Divinity School students, graduates and staff. Many of us have shared a long journey before this institute. This is a real taste of what missiologist Andrew Walls calls “The Ephesian Moment” of our time, this crossroads in Christian history, where “growing into the full stature of Christ” depends on whether we will cross divides into deep fellowship and interdependence.

Outside now into this beautiful day (about 80 degrees) to the afternoon seminars!

See dukesummerinstitute.com

“I am not myself very much concerned with questions of influence, or with the publicians who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very far in the direction in which the current was flowing, but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.”

Last 5 Reconcilers posts:

• On the Mystery of the Incarnation
• “Seeing Hope, Even in North Korea”
• Pyongyang North Korea 6 a.m.
• 7 Lessons from a Post-Communist Landscape
• Glimpses from Our Romania/Poland Journey

On the Mystery of the Incarnation

It’s when we face for a moment

the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know

the taint in our own selves, that awe

cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:

not to a flower, not to a dolphin,

to no innocent form

but to this creature vainly sure

it and no other is god-like, God

(out of compassion for our ugly

failure to evolve) entrusts,

as guest, as brother,

the Word.

~ Denise Levertov

Even this ordinary woman on a country road wears the omnipresent Kim Il Sung pin.

See story and photos from my 8-day November journey to North Korea at the Duke Divinity School web site.  I have given three talks since returning, and still have trouble finding words to describe the pain and hope I experienced.

I just returned from 8 astonishing days in North Korea, based in Pyongyang and traveling across the southern countryside and cities. Many powerful moments of hope amidst the reality described in this photo in Time magazine. The caption reads: "October 5, 2011. A portrait of Kim Il Sung, founder of the communist regime in North Korea, beams from a government building at 6 a.m. in the pariah state’s capital, Pyongyang. Soon the entire city would be awakened by propaganda songs blaring from the loudspeakers."

Hosts Danut of Romania (left) and Wojciech of Poland, in front of piece of Berlin Wall

Note:  While my posts are usually shorter, this journey merited extended reflection.  I’m interested in your responses.

As much as I have read about communism, its legacy was not visceral until my recent 10 days in Romania and Poland (Iasi, Bucharest, Wroclaw, Auschwitz, and Krakow).  I was surprised by these seven lessons – by what they expose about Christianity in our time, and how they speak to our own life in America.

Lesson 1:  The unfinished business of “post-communism”

I didn’t know how bad communism was.  This was first plunge into the 45-year trauma of white-on-white oppression which Soviet-dominated communism was in this Central/Eastern European region.  “You smell of Communism,” said our Romanian host.  “It’s not something you rub off from your coat.  It’s on the radio, at your job, in your school.  It’s the air you breathe.  To say you’re immune is silly.”  There was a difference between grittier Romania and more prosperous Poland.  “Romanians are survivors,” said our Romanian host.  “Poles resisted, with dignity.”  It is hard for Americans to imagine Poland’s resilience amidst three deep traumas on its soil:  Nazism, Communism, and much of the Holocaust killing (during a sober and chilling visit to Auschwitz the guide kept saying “the killing was very organized”).  Anywhere I go I find that reconciliation is very popular until you find the raw nerve.  The first raw nerve in Romania and Poland was redemption around “collaborationism” and the church.  Many church leaders cooperated with communist authorities and informed on their colleagues; in Romania, some former communist leaders are now elected officials.  One Romanian evangelical said “I still feel very communist” and talked of a journey of “de-communization.”  “Post-conflict” is a deceptive term.  Post-segregation America is still racialized.  Post-apartheid South Africa is still divided between haves and have-nots.  The unfinished business in “post-conflict” societies poses a significant challenge to faithfulness.  The church’s integrity is at stake in leading this process, through its own repentance.

Memorial to Soviet massacre, Wroclaw. In the sword hilt of the "angel of death" is a Soviet star

Lesson 2:  Redemption must touch Russia

My biggest surprise was Russia emerging as the second raw nerve.  When Russia entered any conversation, the temperature rose – whether concerning past, present, or future. “The further east you go the worse things get,” claimed one Romanian speaking about the residues of communism.  She said the heart of darkness is Moscow.  The moving “Angel of Death” sculpturewe saw in a Wroclaw park memorializes the Stalin-ordered Soviet massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia in 1941.  It is not a vision of redemption but a kind of Psalm 137 eye-for-an-eye lament.  All roads to reconciliation in the region must ultimately touch the heart of Russia.

Lesson 3:  Intergenerational conflict and secularization

While Orthodoxy is dominant in Romania and Catholicism in Poland, their influence is rapidly decreasing among internet-age youth who did not grow up under Communism and are very open to an intensifying secularization and materialism.  Some leaders see this is as a much-needed pruning of Christian authenticity, beyond formalism, ritualism, and civil religion.  One remarkable encounter in Romania was lunch with an Orthodox priest who is pioneering a major initiative to adapt the Alpha program for an Orthodox audience (bearded Orthodox priests do the teaching videos versus clean-cut Nicky Gumbel).

Lesson 4:  Screwtape is alive and well

Another compelling encounter was dinner in Bucharest with a Pentecostal pastor who spent three years researching a searing 400-page account of the communist persecution of Pentecostals.  He said his digging into once-secret archives was like reading the Screwtape Letters of C.S. Lewis, where a senior devil instructs a junior devil on how to make Christians irrelevant and harmless.  The approach was systematic, gradual, and covert, the objective to cause Christians to turn minor things into major things, and to think they were holier by doing so (such as whether women should wear pants to church, and gradually dissecting songs of triumph from their hymn book, leaving only songs of  lament).   “It’s a devilish thing to divide people when they don’t even realize what they’re doing to you,” commented our host.

Lesson 5:  Mirror to American Christianity

Despairing "Matron of the Homeland" at the memorial, facing the angel of death

Eventually I began to wonder how Screwtape was subtly messing with America, including my own life.  A saintly 85-year old Wroclaw woman who went through both Nazism and communism welcomed us into her home.  An evangelical, no leftist, and fond of U.S.-based ministries like Campus Crusade and the Navigators, I was shocked when she said, “After communism we looked to the west with such hope.  But this capitalist does not have such a nice face.  As with medicine, you should read the label more carefully.”  She spoke of America’s “unjust society” where financial combinations make some multi-millionaires while others are deprived of their homes no matter how hard they work.  A pattern of critique became America’s unbridled consumption and corporate greed, eroding trust that our system is best.  This growing distrust extended somewhat to American mission groups which swept in after communism with quick-fix approaches and comfortable lifestyles.  Earlier in Romania I felt a chill when our Romanian host Danut Manastireanu said “Every church has its challenge.  Our challenge was persecution.  Your challenge [in the U.S.] is materialism.  You need to teach us how to handle materialism.  But capitalism is a more civilized god than communism.”  To say we are immune from materialism is to deny it has become the air that we breathe.  That is exactly the Screwtapian tactic.  Yet others smell what we have become accustomed to.  Developing a theology and life of “enough” is a critical test of American Christianity’s witness in the world now.

From another angle of the mirror, my colleague Gann Herman from Duke (who shared the journey with me) was struck by the extent to which the persecuted church in Eastern Europe hoped for and was disappointed by the non-response of left-leaning Western Christians to their situation.  Soft on communism, they were unwilling to look directly enough to see its dirty undercoat—and those leftists were in the church.  “I looked only at communism as a theory, read Marx, and did not look at the reality of communist rule,” reflects Gann.  “I thought of the Bible smugglers and virulent anti-communist rhetoric of the fundamentalists as skewed.  But now I wonder, and feel guilty, and also grateful that Christians like Danut are willing to still reach out to us, to forgive us.”

Bonhoeffer statue in Wroclaw square, town of his birthplace

Lesson 6:  The witness of the church is alive

I didn’t know the depth of Christian resistance in the region’s trauma.  A prominent sculpture is dedicated to the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Wroclaw, his birthplace.  At Auschwitz we saw the cell of Franciscan priest Maximilian Kolbe, who exchanged his life for a Jewish inmate.  Poland’s non-violent Solidarity movement courageously opposed Communism.  There is the quality of leaders like Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Pope John Paul II, and a Pentecostal pastor who organized underground Romanian churches in spite of torture.  A Muslim imam in Wroclaw showed us their place of prayer and discussed reconciliation over Turkish coffee.  A Lutheran bishop introduced us to the “Mutual Respect District” where Lutheran, Catholic, and Orthodox churches and a Jewish synagogue work together.  A Romanian senator hosted us in the opulent Parliament building dictator Nicolae Coucescou built during communism, and told of his parents living and serving among the marginalized Gypsy or “Roma” people.  Two Youth With a Mission women are documenting oral histories of communism as steps toward redeeming memories.  Not to mention our hosts Danut of World Vision and Wojciech Szczerba and his colleagues at the Evangelical School of Theology in Wroclaw.  This dynamic mix of Pentecostal, Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, and evangelical are signs of the hope and new possibilities that the Holy Spirit is always planting in places of deep pain.

Lesson 7:  Fertile ground for renewal of the church

Christians we met in Romania and Poland testified that the intense challenges of de-communization, collaborationism, secularization, growing materialism, and the broken relationship with Russia pose an opportunity.  As I have said of race in America, it is not so much that the church is called to solve the problem, but that this is difficult ground which God is using to heal and even renew the church, to learn the repentance which opens up a new way of life.

About the Author: Chris Rice is co-director of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School. He is author of Reconciling All Things, Grace Matters, and More Than Equals. He writes at the blog Reconcilers.

Related Reconcilers Posts:

• Listening to the Persecuted Church
• Glimpses from Our Romania/Poland Journey

Latest Reconcilers Posts:

• Book Review: Rethinking Changing the World
• It Matters That Jesus Was Galilean
• Celebrating “Grace Day”

Chapter 1:  Romania and the post-communist challenge

Chapter 2:  Poland and the Peace Church

Chapter 3:  Auschwitz and Birkenau

Chapter 4:  Krakow, hope of John Paul II

Chapter 5:  Memorial to a Soviet Massacre

Related Reconcilers posts:   Listening to the Persecuted Church

I expected a “why Christians need to get into the halls of power” book.  But this book is far more interesting, a critique of that very vision.

Hunter, a sociologist and professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia, takes on both the Christian left and the Christian right (both Jim Wallis of Sojourners and James Dobson of Focus on the Family are fingered).  Hunter argues that a pursuit of and desire for power and social control dominates American Christianity’s approach to cultural change.  This pursuit is, he believes, morally bankrupt and theologically suspect (my extended review explores Hunter’s argument about Christian captivity to “politicization”).

Hunter’s antidote to this captivity is what he calls faithful presence within.  This alternative counters the defensive against paradigm of the Christian right, the relevance to paradigm of the Christian left, and the purity from paradigm of those Hunter terms “Neo-Anabaptists.”  The challenge of Christian faithfulness is two-fold:  to detach the church from politics and the public from the political.  The hope that Hunter sees is in a public church, with a faithful presence not apart from society, but within (contrary to “purity from”), and with an Christian/church identity which is detached from an American identity (contrary to “defensive against” and “relevance to”).  The problem is that Christianity has assimilated too much into the state and the market and lost the critical differences required to be a prophetic presence.

Hunter adopts a startling theological category for faithful presence within:  exile.  Jeremiah’s call to the Jewish people is not to flee Babylon but to “build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce” (Jeremiah 29:4-7).  Faithful presence is to become a “community of Christians [who] are now, more than ever – spiritually speaking – exiles in a land of exile.  Christians, as with the Israelites in Jeremiah’s account, must come to terms with this exile” (280).

Choosing Jews in Babylon as the analogy for creating a new kind of Christianity in America says a great deal about how un-Christian Hunter thinks the church has become.  Namely, a weak culture, precisely by selling its soul to politics and mixing its identity with the nation.

A quote from the end of the book:

“[Changing the world is] based on the dubious assumption that the world, and thus history, can be controlled and managed … By this logic our actions are justified only by the outcomes they promise to bring about … Christianity is not, first and foremost, about establishing righteousness or creating good values or securing justice or making peace in the world.  Don’t get me wrong:  these are goods we should care about and pursue with great passion.  But for Christians, these are all secondary to the primary good of God himself and the primary task of worshiping him and honoring him in all they do” (285-6)

I’m interested if others have read this book, and what you think.

See my extended review of Hunter’s book including comments on strengths and weaknesses …