A Pearl of Great Price

"I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—  not that there is another gospel, but there are some who are confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ." —Galatians 1:6-7

I once spoke with a white pastor who claimed that colonialism wasn't all bad.  After all, it introduced him to Africa.

He explained, "I grew up in a racist home.  I didn't know that the N-word was a bad word until I was in college.  So when I left the denomination of my youth and later joined my current denomination something amazing happened.  The church appointed an African leader to oversee my work.  So now, I, a southern white boy who learned to be racist, am accountable to an African, who I must call regularly, for guidance and discipleship.  Without colonialism that wouldn't be possible."

I looked away keeping silent for a few moments while I collected my thoughts.  I couldn't believe what I was hearing.  I wanted to take care with my words, because we were at a gathering where others were listening.  I was incensed, but I knew that he was very sincere in both his confession that he was a recovering racist and that he was grateful for the presence of African authority in his life.  He had just shared with me a precious gift of self-disclosure a truth in which he found personal redemption.  But it was not his personal narrative that bothered me as much as did the cosmic significance he was ascribing to it.

In essence, he was trying to persuade me that his journey towards personal redemption was worth the world-wide devastation that colonialism wrought.  His comments forced me to wrestle with these questions:  How much was the gospel worth?  Was it worth the European "scramble for Africa" which subjugated people from the Cape of Good Hope to the Ivory Coast?  Was it worth the violent destruction of family systems and cultures who were told that in order to be saved they must achieve some measure of European civilization?

I've been confronted with such questions before in different contexts.  In my study of  Christian missions, I have read from missionaries who espouse riding on the coat-tails of U.S. imperialism in order to gain access to people who have yet to hear their version of the "good news."  I have met missionaries who champion the idea that they have "civilized" impoverished people of color.  I have engaged mission agencies that recognize the reality that many of the people and programs they support propagate white supremacist attitudes and actions.  Yet, they maintain that they must continue for two reasons:  The Church must be in mission and the mission trips they support significantly enhance discipleship.  As I've stated elsewhere, there can be no doubt that mission is vital to the life of the Body of Christ.  Without mission, the Church cannot hope to abide in God as God's Spirit moves throughout the world creating a Church in the Spirit's wake.  But I am concerned that too many white U.S. Christians believe that to become the people that they desire to be, they must immerse themselves in foreign cultural situations that provide them with opportunities for service and knowledge, regardless of the cost.

While the racially oppressed bear the brunt of the great price of colonialist practices, participants in oppressive institutions and systems pay a price as well.  James Baldwin once wrote, "Whoever debases others debases himself."  White people who participate in racist systems unaware may gain cultural experiences, linguistic skills, and transformational memories, but they gain no capacity to resist the debasement of their own souls.   That's why it's problematic to see mission trips as a positive tool for discipleship so-long as support for white supremacy persists in any form.  In other words, the problem with racism isn't primarily one of prejudice—personal attitudes and questionable intentions.  The problem with U.S. racism is the maintenance and support of institutional and systemic white supremacist power. 

Soong Chan-Rah argues in his book, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity, "We are quick to deal with the symptoms of sin in America, but often times are unwilling to deal with the original sin of America: namely, the kidnapping of Africans to use as slave labor, and usurping of lands belonging to Native Americans and subsequent genocide of indigenous peoples. … This original sin of racism has had significant and ongoing social and corporate implications for the church in America."  Moreover, white Christian denial of the social and corporate implications of US America's original sin should  provoke Christians of every hue to ask, "What exactly are white US Christian missionaries exporting?"  Can people baptized into the waters of white supremacy and communing at the table of racial division mature as Christian disciples while participating in activities that reinforce the very racist notions that justified African slavery and American Indian holocaust, namely that "we gain from helping them?"    

This is not good news.  Killing, stealing, and destroying is not God's mission.  How can the gospel be good if it results in such a horrific history?  The only logical answer is to argue that colonialism is not the good news, because colonialism produces domination, destruction, and disconnection.  In whatever way the good news of the Beloved Community took root in colonial contexts, it did so despite of, not because of, colonialism. 

After I recollected my thoughts, I turned back to the white pastor, who I felt was seeking my reassurance that indeed he was not a racist and that the price of the Gospel was worth the loss of millions of lives and the deconstruction of essential social structures.  I replied, "I refuse to accept that the rape of a continent, the devaluation of ancient cultural creations, and the murder of millions was worth the good news that you just shared with me, that you have the opportunity for redemption through your relationship with your African leadership."

He nodded.

Since that day I've noted more occasions when white Christians excuse racism, imperialism, sexism, or colonialism because the gospel was advanced.  My question is, what is this version of the gospel that is worth the lives of millions and the loss of incredibly rich cultures?  It is not the good news that Jesus preached to the poor, the hungry, or the persecuted.  It is instead good news for the rich, the privileged, and the powerful.  Instead of a gospel that requires the rich man to sell all that he owns, this costly pearl requires great cost to the dis-empowered and the disinherited.  This is not good news, it is bad, very bad. 

Unless Christian Mission Dies *but keep reading...

"Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds." —John 12:24

Last week people all over the world, and especially in the United States, commemorated Martin Luther King Jr's "I have a Dream Speech." Children in public schools reflected on their own dreams of the future.  Many teachers challenged students to consider how racism affects people's lives today.  Others gathered to hear President Obama speak from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as a paradoxical symbol of U.S. racial progress as well as the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military force in the world.  This troubling juxtaposition reminded me of King's integrated dream that, in addition to racial harmony, insisted on an end to U.S. violence and material poverty.  In a 1967 sermon to Riverside Church in Harlem he preached:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through non-violent action; for they ask and write me, "So what about Vietnam?" They ask if our nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.

 

As an U.S. Christian missiologist, King's words haunt me, because too much of what passes for Christian mission today involves Christians participating in international travel to serve the world's desperate, rejected, and angry while neglecting to speak clearly to some of the greatest causes of economic desperation, racial rejection, and military violence in the world today—our literal next door neighbors, multi-national corporations and government.  Unless this neglect ceases, the concept of Christian mission will implicitly endorse destructive values of U.S. American empire.

Last Spring I posted a blog in which I called for a moratorium, or a stoppage, on Christian mission.  I suggested that the roots of U.S. American Christian mission were rotten.  My point was, and is, that the concept of U.S. American Christian mission conceived by European Christians and practiced by middle class white U.S. American Christians today is fundamentally flawed.  From this inherited Western perspective, U.S. American Christian mission is widely understood to constitute  international ministry to foreign people.  While recently some missiologists and mission agencies have sought to adjust strategies to emphasize that their missionaries often gain more than they give, U.S. American Christians have largely inherited a set of mission strategies that thrive on optimistic views of globalization and the assumption that United States Christianity is worth exporting globally.

Historically, imperialist missionaries to, and from, North America also believed that their version of Christianity was worth exporting.  Beginning with Columbus, the entire practice of Christian mission, and the agencies that supported it, came from empires: Spanish, French, and British. The strategies of these agencies advocated for the salvation of souls at the expense of human bodies and their bio-regions. Under the authority of these imperial regimes Christians enslaved, commodified, and culturally colonized the Americas.  It was a miracle that any of the enslaved, coerced, or captured communities converted to Christianity.  For the next five centuries, missionaries colluded with governments and agencies to triumphantly win souls and civilize foreign nations under the unofficial mandate of the white man's burden. 

The effects of globalization have transformed, what George Tinker called, Missionary Conquest from a cooperative endeavor between Christianity and commerce, sometimes missionaries and military, into an exercise in technological, economic, religious and cultural exportation.  Christianity and commerce allowed for the exploitation of Africans, Indians, and North America's soil.  Missions and military led to the physical and cultural genocide of diverse North American Indian populations.  Vine Deloria, Jr commented, "If the same energy would have been focused on correcting the ways of white Americans, teaching them to practice rather than preach Christianity, the fate of the Indians might have been far different."   Though some mission agencies—even less local churches—see their international ministries as providing discipleship opportunities rather than soul saving and economic development, one questions, "Why do middle class U.S. American Christians insist on spending so many resources on international ministry when many of the problems—economic inequality, racial oppression, and social instability—they encounter around the world have roots in the very globally exported values that emanate from their own U.S. neighborhoods?"

Most missiologists and students of world Christianity like to acknowledge that the center-of-gravity of the Christian world has shifted to the southern hemisphere.  According to Gordon-Conwell's center for the Study of Global Christianity, the United States ranks first in the number of missionaries "sent out."  The fact that Palestine sends more missionaries per one million than any other nation and Latin Americans and Africans send missionaries to the U.S. has not changed one foundational assumption that many U.S. Christians make regarding mission:  U.S. Christians believe they must 'go' to international places to heed God's missionary mandate. 

By valuing international ministry over local ministry, U.S. Christians have devalued local regions, place, space, and land.  It’s no coincidence that U.S. Christians have trouble valuing the land when Christian missionaries participated in removing the very first nations peoples who believed that  North American land was sacred.  Thus, if we are to be faithful in missionary practice, then we must begin to see that every Christian is sent from God’s commonwealth rather than the United States of America.  This understanding makes all of us missionaries and the very local spaces in which we find ourselves missionary spaces.

The concept of mission, as inherited from European Christianity must be put to death.  Tweaking and adjusting strategies to acknowledge post-modern critiques simply will not do.  U.S. American churches must recognize that mission is more than international ministry that seeks to be incarnational and sensitive to contextual issues.  Mission is the very essence of church community in its local part of the world.  In this way, mission is always local.  To engage in local ministry, then, means to clearly represent the gospel to our suburban, rural, and urban neighbors.  To be truly incarnate, this gospel must be embodied in local contexts, in time and space, in soul and soil. 

This means that the very neighborhoods from which U.S. churches send international ministers need incarnational ministers who will invite corporate executives, professional politicians, and other American dreamers into discipleship in the Beloved Community.  These mostly white middle class neighborhoods are bastions of anxiety and fear.  Such high anxiety levels have led them to worship safety and security.  In turn, these suburbanites have authorized an increase in the military-industrial complex and fueled a prison-industrial complex that is rarely challenged.  Instead, the U.S. budgeted over $682 billion for military expenses in 2012 to sponsor two wars and various other endeavors.  Domestically, the U.S. budgets $6.8 billion to the Bureau of Prisons to deal with the largest prison population in the world, a disproportionate number of whom are racial minorities.

The segregation of U.S. schools and churches also demonstrates that the U.S. has not resolved long legacies of racial oppression.  In 2012 the public school system in the U.S. was as racially divided as it was under Jim Crow segregation 50 years ago.  Preachers continue to quote King's statement that "it is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning."  Christian ministries troubled by this division are often distinguished from "missions" as urban ministries, which explains in part why I stress that traditional mission is "international ministry."  Urban ministry is mission too.  So long as international ministry alone is defined as "mission," then Christian churches will struggle to see mission as a vital part of their local ministry and churches will too infrequently address issues like racial justice and seek authentic cross-racial connections with fellow citizens. 

Those who champion globalization as connecting the world, too faintly note the quality of these new connections.  U.S. budgets and race statistics daily demonstrate the inequalities present in global connections. The world is not flat. It is indeed a spiky hierarchical world in which a small percentage of the world's population have access to a majority of the world's resources.  The oligarchical nature of U.S. society mirrors the material disparity that we witness around the world in which 20% of U.S. households own 85% of the wealth compared to 20% of the world's population owning 80% of the world's wealth.  As former industrially viable U.S. cities like Detroit declare bankruptcy I wonder how U.S. apostles of globalization can persist in their confidence about the idea that God backs globalization, no matter how nuanced their argument.  That some formerly disconnected communities can now engage in micro-entrepreneurship and are gaining access to digital banking does not mean that globalization is neutral in the world economy.  Power remains the name of the game.  With all of the aforementioned problems endemic to U.S. Christianity, it is appropriate to ask, "What about U.S. Christianity is worth exporting on a global scale?"

U.S. Christians who economically benefit from globalization, are either blind or apathetic to the problems with globalization in its various forms.  Traditional mission advocates who present globalization as benign or neutral can do so because their projects are enhanced by the prospect of globalization.  In the Christian world, international mission agencies are most readily equipped to engage a globalized marketplace, because they are the part of the Christian world with the most experience with multinational ventures.  But the border crossing made available to the world's privileged population has rich temptations that  allow the powerful to avoid just regulations and peacebuilding values.  Robert Reich explained the implications of globalization in his important text The Work of Nations:

“As borders become ever more meaningless in economic terms, those citizens best positioned to thrive in the world market are tempted to slip the bonds of national allegiance, and by so doing disengage themselves from their less favored fellows.”

Perhaps Reich's quote can help us understand why middle class U.S. American Christians insist on spending so many resources on international ministry when many of the problems they encounter around the world have roots in values that emanate from their own neighborhoods.  If he is right, then there is little incentive for missionaries who can thrive on this global scale to continue to struggle against provincial peers who question their motives and call them to account for their historical transgressions with more than a wordy apology.  It is a reality that raising funds for a short-term mission trip to Haiti is much easier and more effective than raising funds to teach suburban cosmopolitan consumers that their lifestyle is disproportionately a key cause of global climate change.  Resources are much easier to solicit for the international than the domestic scene.  It makes sense why in the heart of global capitalism, where exporting goods and values grows GDP, those who thrive on the world market favor the distant stranger over the long-term neighbor. 

This favoritism for strangers over neighbors, the preference for international over local, must die.  Unless U.S. Christian mission dies, it will remain a purveyor of white upper middle class values.  Such values are its roots.  Replanting this brand of mission in new soil is not the answer.  The notion of mission that I have described must die, so the church can be reborn in the West.  U.S. Christians must begin to see that loving their neighbors, the people nearest them, is a challenge that will have global blessings.  It's not that urban and rural poverty, or international disaster should be ignored, rather U.S. Christians must re-engage our U.S. suburbs, U.S. multinational corporations, and U.S. state and federal governments.  For one crucial way to bring good news to urban, rural, and international contexts is for missionaries to invite upper middle class U.S. Americans to repent of their militarism, materialism, and racism and participate in the Beloved Community.  As addicted consumers void of the spirit of simplicity, idolaters of security ridden with anxiety, and disciples of discrimination who know not their neighbor, they need to be transformed by the gospel, especially since they will likely export their values across the textured topography that is our global reality.