The largely church-led abolitionist and civil rights revolutions are considered to be highly successful revolutions by most Americans. In some ways YES; but in other ways, NO. Freedom, yes; justice, economic justice, no.
The abolitionist movement, with the help of a violent civil war, was highly successful in ending slavery; the civil rights movement was highly successful in ending legal segregation. But there is a largely untold story that is missing from U.S. history. What is the REST of the story, as Paul Harvey would say? What was missing from the American church's theology that led to aborted revolutions?
The church has never fully understood nor fully practiced the justice message of the Bible---the Jubilee justice, the kingdom of God revolutionary message of justice for the oppressed poor. Therefore, the freedom for the slaves movement was soon replaced by neoslavery---legal segregation, economic sharecropping/oppression, prison gangs and lynching. Freedom without biblical justice leaves a big hole, a socioeconomic vacuum. The clever white American oppressors rushed in and filled the vacuum with a redesigned system of oppression.
Immediately after the end of the Civil War, evangelical Dwight L. Moody called a reconciliation conference, but not a justice conference. And it was a reconciliation to reconcile northern white and southern whites, not to reconcile blacks and whites. So much for the theological depth of the church.
There are two phases to a successful revolution:
1. destroying the old/evil social order
2. rebuilding a new/just social order
History reveals that most revolutions, even church-led ones, are better at destroying the old than rebuilding the new. Seminaries turn out many well trained pastors, but few prophets and rebuilders. Good rebuilders must understand the kingdom of God as both a freedom and justice message. Rebuilders must be experts at repair---repent, restitute, and repair.
According to Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, it takes both an Ezra and a Nehemiah to get the job done:
History had not treated the People of Israel well and they were in decline [because of idolatry and oppression]. A superpower military machine, Babylon, had battered them [a judgment of God] and then, leaving their city and temple a mound of rubble, hauled them into exile. Now, 128 years later, a few Jews back in Jerusalem had been trying to put the pieces back together decade after weary decade. But it was not going well at all. They were hanging on by their fingernails. And then Ezra arrived.
God didn't leave Ezra to do this single-handedly; he gave him substantial and critical help in the rescue operation in the person of Nehemiah---a building contractor, called in to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. His coworker Ezra was a scholar and a teacher, working with the Scriptures. Nehemiah worked with stones and mortar. The stories of the two men are interwoven in a seamless fabric of vocational holiness. Neither job was more or less important or holy than the other. Nehemiah needed Ezra; Ezra needed Nehemiah. God's people needed the work of both of them. We still do.
Right in the middle of the rebuilding process, Nehemiah discovered some oppression going on. Angrily, he demanded that it stop immediately, that restitution be made. See Nehemiah chapter five.
Back to the abolitionist movement. Was Lincoln a racist? Were many of the abolitionists racist? Google "10 Racist quotes Abraham Lincoln said about Black People" and "David Blight on Racism in the abolitionist movement." Northern racists never repented of their own racism; both northern and southern whites were racist. For Christians, repentance is a better option than fighting, killing. The North had made millions buying and selling slave-produced cotton. Without northern repentance, Reconstruction didn't last.
The American church needs to understand that repentance is the first and all important step in a successful revolution. Jesus said, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is here." Next, release, restitution and rebuilding.
Next, the American Revolution. Many believe that our founding fathers who led the Revolution were Christians. This raises some difficult questions. George Marsden, a Christian historian (The Wars of America: Christian Views) asserts that the British tyranny was not bad enough to justify a violent revolution. If this is so, why were Christian leaders leading a violent revolution? Marsden also says that once the war started, lay Christians became enthusiastic supporters of the revolution.
So what was really going on? Were our founding fathers frauds, con men, whose real goal as an American elite was simply to replace a corrupt and oppressive British elite? I think so, because neither the poor nor women, neither Indians nor slaves, were treated as equals as the declaration of Independence said was the purpose of the Revolution. Christian revolutions should begin with repentance, not deistic arrogance, not pious oppression.
Christian revolutions must be grounded in the kingdom of God as Jubilee justice for the poor and oppressed. If not, they quickly turn into masters of deceit. See Jeremiah 6 and 8.
Monday, March 7, 2016
Friday, March 4, 2016
High Impact African-American Churches
George Barna, an Euro American sociologist, and Bishop Harry Jackson, an Afro American pastor, have co-authored this book, High Impact African-American Churches (2004). George Barna, a skilled and experienced social researcher who is much more aware of racism/social justice issues than most Euro Americans, was amazed at how little he actually knew. The reading and research he did for this book transformed his understanding.
Some previous research he did illustrates his ethnocentrism and ignorance. Barna researched pastors' views on a biblical worldview. He found that Southern Baptists had a superior understanding versus a relatively weak understanding by Afro American pastors. But his research instrument was flawed. His definition of a biblical worldview was narrowly conceived, highly rational, and quite Eurocentric. It was based on six moral absolutes/truths: "the accuracy of biblical teaching, the sinless nature of Jesus, the omnipotence and omniscience of God, salvation by grace alone, and personal responsibility for evangelism." But this is a selective list of biblical truths. What about the Trinity, all human beings are created in the image of God, the Holy Spirit, the kingdom of God as Jubilee justice, etc.
A comprehensive biblical world view must also include orthopraxy, not just orthodoxy. Required orthopraxy might include: reconciliation across ethnic, class and gender lines, doing social justice, loving your ethnic neighbor, and ministry among the poor. In this more holistic biblical worldview, Afro American pastors and churches come through with flying colors. Barna comments:
As a Caucasian, I have to admit: analyzing the results of a large body of research focused upon the faith of the African American community blew me away. Prior to the research I was aware of the obvious differences: black church music is more energetic and soulful, their preachers are often spellbinding orators, .
However, I was not at all prepared for the nature and magnitude of the substantive difference I discovered between the black and white segments of the United States.
In the midst of massive injustice, past and present, something "truly spectacular was taking place in the lives of African Americans and it was ignited by the goings-on in their church." Here are some of the facts Barna discovered:
* Black adults are more likely to be born again Christians than are white adults.
* Did you know that when we tested 22 common goals the people pursue, the top-rated goal among black adults is to have a close relationship with God while that same goal is ranked fifth by whites?
* Black adults are nearly twice as likely as white adults to read the Bible during a typical week.
* Black adults are 50 percent more likely than white adults to strongly affirm that the Bible is totally accurate in everything it teaches.
* The typical African-American church raises more money for ministry each year than does the typical Caucasian church despite the lower levels of household income and membership in the black congregations.
Barna and Jackson state:
Black adults are more likely to struggle with finances and substance abuse. They often labor through feelings of loneliness and a sense of disconnection from other people. (This is especially true for black men.) They also fall prey to sexual temptation more often, whether that takes the form of physical intimacy with a non-spouse or enjoyment of pornographic materials. In fact, family realities become a point of confusion and stress for millions of blacks: they are twice as likely as whites to never get married and are more than twice as likely to have a child out of wedlock. Although black Americans recognize the importance of family and attribute their personal strength and success in large measure to what they absorbed from their family experience, millions of blacks admit that the typical black family is dysfunctional or a source of conflict rather than safety and security.
In the midst of past and continuing oppression and poverty, the church provides life integration of millions of Afro Americans. Oppression acts like a social pressure cooker creating enormous personal and family stresses. One-third of black youth say life is not worth living.
Some previous research he did illustrates his ethnocentrism and ignorance. Barna researched pastors' views on a biblical worldview. He found that Southern Baptists had a superior understanding versus a relatively weak understanding by Afro American pastors. But his research instrument was flawed. His definition of a biblical worldview was narrowly conceived, highly rational, and quite Eurocentric. It was based on six moral absolutes/truths: "the accuracy of biblical teaching, the sinless nature of Jesus, the omnipotence and omniscience of God, salvation by grace alone, and personal responsibility for evangelism." But this is a selective list of biblical truths. What about the Trinity, all human beings are created in the image of God, the Holy Spirit, the kingdom of God as Jubilee justice, etc.
A comprehensive biblical world view must also include orthopraxy, not just orthodoxy. Required orthopraxy might include: reconciliation across ethnic, class and gender lines, doing social justice, loving your ethnic neighbor, and ministry among the poor. In this more holistic biblical worldview, Afro American pastors and churches come through with flying colors. Barna comments:
As a Caucasian, I have to admit: analyzing the results of a large body of research focused upon the faith of the African American community blew me away. Prior to the research I was aware of the obvious differences: black church music is more energetic and soulful, their preachers are often spellbinding orators, .
However, I was not at all prepared for the nature and magnitude of the substantive difference I discovered between the black and white segments of the United States.
In the midst of massive injustice, past and present, something "truly spectacular was taking place in the lives of African Americans and it was ignited by the goings-on in their church." Here are some of the facts Barna discovered:
* Black adults are more likely to be born again Christians than are white adults.
* Did you know that when we tested 22 common goals the people pursue, the top-rated goal among black adults is to have a close relationship with God while that same goal is ranked fifth by whites?
* Black adults are nearly twice as likely as white adults to read the Bible during a typical week.
* Black adults are 50 percent more likely than white adults to strongly affirm that the Bible is totally accurate in everything it teaches.
* The typical African-American church raises more money for ministry each year than does the typical Caucasian church despite the lower levels of household income and membership in the black congregations.
Barna and Jackson state:
Black adults are more likely to struggle with finances and substance abuse. They often labor through feelings of loneliness and a sense of disconnection from other people. (This is especially true for black men.) They also fall prey to sexual temptation more often, whether that takes the form of physical intimacy with a non-spouse or enjoyment of pornographic materials. In fact, family realities become a point of confusion and stress for millions of blacks: they are twice as likely as whites to never get married and are more than twice as likely to have a child out of wedlock. Although black Americans recognize the importance of family and attribute their personal strength and success in large measure to what they absorbed from their family experience, millions of blacks admit that the typical black family is dysfunctional or a source of conflict rather than safety and security.
In the midst of past and continuing oppression and poverty, the church provides life integration of millions of Afro Americans. Oppression acts like a social pressure cooker creating enormous personal and family stresses. One-third of black youth say life is not worth living.
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Nuggets of Information/Inspiration
1. By Haitian Didi Bertrand Farmer, anthropologist and wife of medical doctor, Paul Farmer:
"I knew when I moved here in 2006 that I had a lot to learn from Rwanda, but I could not have expected just how valuable these lessons would prove to be in Haiti. In March 2011, just over a year after the [Haiti] earthquake, a Rwandan colleague of mine put it this way: 'Rwanda and Haiti, they are the same. People lost family members. They lost husbands. They lost wives. They lost children. People's homes were destroyed and everything they owned was taken away from them. And afterward, people had to keep on living.' My colleague is a warm and generous Rwandan woman with a ready smile and an indefatigable spirit. Even after her husband, a Tutsi, was killed by a neighbor during the genocide, she took in six Hutu orphans to live alongside her own five children, and has supported all of them ever since. When I asked her how she kept on living in the wake of so much loss, she responded simply: 'I worked.' And she smiled as she said it."
"As of 1994, 70 percent of Rwanda's population was female. It was largely on the backs of these women---victims of rape and physical violence, wives abandoned by husbands imprisoned or fleeing imprisonment, women who had lost family members, friends, neighbors, lovers, children---that Rwanda was rebuilt. And as Paul [Farmer] often likes to say, it was built back better. In Haiti, we often wax poetic about the role of women as the centerpost of the nation, but Rwanda has actually put this idea into practice, with an emphasis on female leadership, economic empowerment, and education."
From Haiti: after the earthquake, the chapter titled "Mothers and Daughters of Haiti."
2. By Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking:
"My parents never acted mean to black people, even though they never questioned the system of racial discrimination that permeated every aspect of life. Daddy, an attorney, represented a slew of black clients, charging them five dollars for his services. It would take me a long time to understand how systems [of oppression] inflict pain and hardship in people's lives and to learn that being kind in an unjust system is not enough."
3. By Wilbur T. Dayton, author of an article, "The New Testament Conception of Flesh,"; he writes about the Greek word 'sarx' which occurs 145 times in the NT and is often translated as flesh in English. A common misinterpretation is "that evil is inseparable from flesh, and that, therefore, the flesh is incurably evil." But "there is no uniformly evil reference in the NT use of sarx." In redemption, "it was not flesh or humanity that was destroyed. It was the sin that was in humanity that had to go. . . . Christ came in the flesh and redeemed flesh." So a person in a human body can be an instrument of evil or an instrument of good; redeemed flesh can be a temple of the Holy Spirit.
4. The American Paradox by Ted Halstead:
"The country with the most patents, Nobel laureates, and millionaires is also the country with the highest levels of poverty, homicide, and infant mortality among modern democracies."
5. The Cultural Subversion of the Christian Faith by James Smart:
"an authoritative Bible, wrongly interpreted, can have disastrous social and political consequences."
"we have not yet captured the meaning of biblical words in our sermons unless it is as dangerous in our situations as it was for the original biblical spokesmen."
6. Jeff Madrick in the July 2010 issue of The Nation:
"The financialization of the economy is a major cause of the soaring incomes at the top. Financial companies account for about twice the proportion of GDP as they did thirty years ago [they are parasites on the economy, unneeded], and up to 40 percent of corporate profits. . . . In 2006, at least fifty people at Goldman Sachs made $20 million or more. . . . Wall Street paid $150 billion in salaries in 2009, when the rest of America was mired in the worst recession since the 1930s and one out of six Americans couldn't find a full-time job."
7. Black pastor Marvin McMickle, author of Where Have All The Prophets Gone?:
"The [American black] church is becoming a place where Christianity is nothing more than capitalism in drag." Neo-charismatics have combined, praise, prosperity and patriotism, neglecting justice and the love of God.
"I knew when I moved here in 2006 that I had a lot to learn from Rwanda, but I could not have expected just how valuable these lessons would prove to be in Haiti. In March 2011, just over a year after the [Haiti] earthquake, a Rwandan colleague of mine put it this way: 'Rwanda and Haiti, they are the same. People lost family members. They lost husbands. They lost wives. They lost children. People's homes were destroyed and everything they owned was taken away from them. And afterward, people had to keep on living.' My colleague is a warm and generous Rwandan woman with a ready smile and an indefatigable spirit. Even after her husband, a Tutsi, was killed by a neighbor during the genocide, she took in six Hutu orphans to live alongside her own five children, and has supported all of them ever since. When I asked her how she kept on living in the wake of so much loss, she responded simply: 'I worked.' And she smiled as she said it."
"As of 1994, 70 percent of Rwanda's population was female. It was largely on the backs of these women---victims of rape and physical violence, wives abandoned by husbands imprisoned or fleeing imprisonment, women who had lost family members, friends, neighbors, lovers, children---that Rwanda was rebuilt. And as Paul [Farmer] often likes to say, it was built back better. In Haiti, we often wax poetic about the role of women as the centerpost of the nation, but Rwanda has actually put this idea into practice, with an emphasis on female leadership, economic empowerment, and education."
From Haiti: after the earthquake, the chapter titled "Mothers and Daughters of Haiti."
2. By Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking:
"My parents never acted mean to black people, even though they never questioned the system of racial discrimination that permeated every aspect of life. Daddy, an attorney, represented a slew of black clients, charging them five dollars for his services. It would take me a long time to understand how systems [of oppression] inflict pain and hardship in people's lives and to learn that being kind in an unjust system is not enough."
3. By Wilbur T. Dayton, author of an article, "The New Testament Conception of Flesh,"; he writes about the Greek word 'sarx' which occurs 145 times in the NT and is often translated as flesh in English. A common misinterpretation is "that evil is inseparable from flesh, and that, therefore, the flesh is incurably evil." But "there is no uniformly evil reference in the NT use of sarx." In redemption, "it was not flesh or humanity that was destroyed. It was the sin that was in humanity that had to go. . . . Christ came in the flesh and redeemed flesh." So a person in a human body can be an instrument of evil or an instrument of good; redeemed flesh can be a temple of the Holy Spirit.
4. The American Paradox by Ted Halstead:
"The country with the most patents, Nobel laureates, and millionaires is also the country with the highest levels of poverty, homicide, and infant mortality among modern democracies."
5. The Cultural Subversion of the Christian Faith by James Smart:
"an authoritative Bible, wrongly interpreted, can have disastrous social and political consequences."
"we have not yet captured the meaning of biblical words in our sermons unless it is as dangerous in our situations as it was for the original biblical spokesmen."
6. Jeff Madrick in the July 2010 issue of The Nation:
"The financialization of the economy is a major cause of the soaring incomes at the top. Financial companies account for about twice the proportion of GDP as they did thirty years ago [they are parasites on the economy, unneeded], and up to 40 percent of corporate profits. . . . In 2006, at least fifty people at Goldman Sachs made $20 million or more. . . . Wall Street paid $150 billion in salaries in 2009, when the rest of America was mired in the worst recession since the 1930s and one out of six Americans couldn't find a full-time job."
7. Black pastor Marvin McMickle, author of Where Have All The Prophets Gone?:
"The [American black] church is becoming a place where Christianity is nothing more than capitalism in drag." Neo-charismatics have combined, praise, prosperity and patriotism, neglecting justice and the love of God.
First-century economics and Haiti
According to New testament scholar, Reta Finger, this is what the socioeconomic situation looked like in Palestine at the time of Christ:
For 90 percent of ancient Mediterranean people, survival issues were foremost. Land was the most desired form of wealth in these agrarian societies. But in Palestine as elsewhere in the first century, land was gradually accumulating in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Living with just enough food for a day at a time, people had no cash reserve when drought struck. Forced to borrow at exorbitant rates from wealthy landowners, their only recourse was to hand over the plot of ground that had been in the family for generations. That meant sharecropping on other's land and keeping only a fraction for one's family.
Such was the situation in Galilee when Jesus announced the revival of Jubilee justice for the oppressed poor (Luke 4:18-19). No wonder his message was received with enthusiasm in the Nazareth synagogue.
But this same Jubilee/kingdom of God message was seen as a threat by the Jewish religio-politico-economic elite. This elite ran the temple and the rest of Palestine as "a den of robbers." Or a religiously legitimated system of oppression. Jesus' kingdom of God message was a major threat to the oppressive status quo; they did not want to see this Jubilee justice message operationalized. Ultimately this religious elite was pushed to advocate the crucifixion of Jesus to eliminate this threat.
With historical variations, of course, a similar oppressive situation took place in Haiti. The slave rebellion was successful, but soon a small Haitian elite took over. Often they cooperated with a French and American elite to maintain political and economic power that exploited the masses, that created extreme poverty.
Next some quotations from the Book, Haiti: after the earthquake; from a well-educated Haitian, Leslie Voltaire:
Haiti's slave revolution in 1804 set the country on a course like no other. Since that time, political violence and the resulting instability have plagued Haiti. . . . When we had a colonial society, there was one set of infrastructure. Then we had a rupture [rebellion, civil war], which destroyed everything; the institutional, the physical, and the economic platform of that colonial society. So it reinvented a new society of free slaves, and organized the country around a few cities [controlled by an Haitian elite] with the vast majority of people living in the countryside without infrastructure. . . . [Today] Haiti needs to be self-sufficient in food and energy. . . . For these things to happen, Haiti needs institutional and physical infrastructure.
But past and current systems of oppression prevent Haiti's poor from progress. Yes, outside aid is often unwisely given resulting in failure, but the fundamental problem is current systems of oppression often aided by a U.S. elite; this prevents progress.
So Timothy Schwartz comments: "I've spent a large chunk of the past twenty years living and working in Haiti as a part of the aid industry. Like so many people who've worked here, a sense of frustration and failure haunts me. I've watched the country sink ever deeper into a quagmire of misery and despair while I've accomplished nothing tangible to stop the process."
Another story of failure: "the majority [one estimate is 80 percent]of Haiti's physicians and nurses had left the country altogether and those who remained were concentrated in the capital city." Conditions are so bad that even well-educated people leave Haiti when the opportunity arises. Coupled with education there needs to be taught that individual progress is not enough; all education needs to be infused with community development.
One example of doing things right can be found in rural Fond-des-Blancs, Haiti. Google Haiti Christian Development Fund for the 30 year story of Christian Community Development.
For 90 percent of ancient Mediterranean people, survival issues were foremost. Land was the most desired form of wealth in these agrarian societies. But in Palestine as elsewhere in the first century, land was gradually accumulating in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Living with just enough food for a day at a time, people had no cash reserve when drought struck. Forced to borrow at exorbitant rates from wealthy landowners, their only recourse was to hand over the plot of ground that had been in the family for generations. That meant sharecropping on other's land and keeping only a fraction for one's family.
Such was the situation in Galilee when Jesus announced the revival of Jubilee justice for the oppressed poor (Luke 4:18-19). No wonder his message was received with enthusiasm in the Nazareth synagogue.
But this same Jubilee/kingdom of God message was seen as a threat by the Jewish religio-politico-economic elite. This elite ran the temple and the rest of Palestine as "a den of robbers." Or a religiously legitimated system of oppression. Jesus' kingdom of God message was a major threat to the oppressive status quo; they did not want to see this Jubilee justice message operationalized. Ultimately this religious elite was pushed to advocate the crucifixion of Jesus to eliminate this threat.
With historical variations, of course, a similar oppressive situation took place in Haiti. The slave rebellion was successful, but soon a small Haitian elite took over. Often they cooperated with a French and American elite to maintain political and economic power that exploited the masses, that created extreme poverty.
Next some quotations from the Book, Haiti: after the earthquake; from a well-educated Haitian, Leslie Voltaire:
Haiti's slave revolution in 1804 set the country on a course like no other. Since that time, political violence and the resulting instability have plagued Haiti. . . . When we had a colonial society, there was one set of infrastructure. Then we had a rupture [rebellion, civil war], which destroyed everything; the institutional, the physical, and the economic platform of that colonial society. So it reinvented a new society of free slaves, and organized the country around a few cities [controlled by an Haitian elite] with the vast majority of people living in the countryside without infrastructure. . . . [Today] Haiti needs to be self-sufficient in food and energy. . . . For these things to happen, Haiti needs institutional and physical infrastructure.
But past and current systems of oppression prevent Haiti's poor from progress. Yes, outside aid is often unwisely given resulting in failure, but the fundamental problem is current systems of oppression often aided by a U.S. elite; this prevents progress.
So Timothy Schwartz comments: "I've spent a large chunk of the past twenty years living and working in Haiti as a part of the aid industry. Like so many people who've worked here, a sense of frustration and failure haunts me. I've watched the country sink ever deeper into a quagmire of misery and despair while I've accomplished nothing tangible to stop the process."
Another story of failure: "the majority [one estimate is 80 percent]of Haiti's physicians and nurses had left the country altogether and those who remained were concentrated in the capital city." Conditions are so bad that even well-educated people leave Haiti when the opportunity arises. Coupled with education there needs to be taught that individual progress is not enough; all education needs to be infused with community development.
One example of doing things right can be found in rural Fond-des-Blancs, Haiti. Google Haiti Christian Development Fund for the 30 year story of Christian Community Development.
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