Where is the Church when it hurts?

Some years ago Philip Yancey wrote a fine book titled Where is God when it Hurts?  But while a legitimate question in one sense, it is the wrong question, even a misleading question.  The better question is Where is the Church when it hurts?  Supposedly, the church is the body of Christ here on earth.

John Perkins once wrote that Mississippi, or more precisely, the blacks of Mississippi, would have better off had the white church not existed.  The church of Mississippi neglected justice and the love of God; this neglect allowed ethnocentrism and oppression to run wild, unchecked.  Even worse, the white church often participated in the ethnocentrism and oppression.

I am afraid that the same could be said for the church in the other 49 states as well.  Much the same could be said about the church in Rwanda as is presented in the book Bishop of Rwanda, 2007.  Bishop Rucyahana asks the following question: "Why did God allow the massacre of more than a million people in Rwanda?"

Again, I think this is the wrong question.  For me, there are several questions that should be asked.  "What was missing from the gospel that Western missionaries brought to Rwanda?  Why did the Rwanda church neglect justice and the love of God so that ethnocentrism and oppression flourished, not shalom?

A paragraph description from the pen of the Bishop:

"The amount of pain from sorrow or guilt in Rwanda is inconceivable to those who have not been here.  And the fact that so much of this pain came through the churches and other religious institutions has only made matters worse.  To whom do the people turn for hope when they have been betrayed by the very ones who claim to represent God's love?  During the genocide, there were pastors who killed people in their congregations; priests who bulldozed their churches on top of the people who were hiding in them, pleading for mercy; nuns who set fire to church buildings holding people begging for their lives; and ministers who lured their congregations to their deaths with the promise of protection.  Can you imagine the pain and hopelessness that generates in people?"

Think Exodus 6:9.  More than forgiveness and reconciliation are needed; we need a justice that both releases the oppressed and then rebuilds, repairs the damage ethnocentrism and oppression have done.

Some more quotations from the Bishop:

"In 1926, the Hutu made up about 80 percent of the population, the Tutsi just under 20 percent. . . . no trace of systematic violence between the Tutsi and Hutu. . . .  there was no such thing as a universal Hutu-versus-Tutsi animosity.  They were considered equals, they intermarried."

"What happened between 1926 and 1994 that changed a somewhat primitive but peaceful society into the monsters of genocide?  The sad truth is that this hatred was created and manipulated by the Belgian colonial masters in order to make the people easier to control."

"This was used to completely draw the Tutsis in so they would feel that they were closer to white people. . . . It wasn't just the Belgians who taught these myths; they also were taught in the church schools and in the churches."

" . . . the myth of Tutsi superiority. . . . The Hutu began to believe that they were indeed inferior.  The result was that they began to hate all Tutsis, even those who were poor."

"Throughout the 1950s, when I was a young boy, the racial tension began to grow.  Church printing presses produced propaganda about how the Tutsis had been favored."

" really started to hate religion during this time, because I knew that religious leaders were cooperating with the persecution. . . . I was very bitter."

Next to Rituals of Blood by Orlando Patterson; expert of slavery:

"fundamentalist preachers . . . . were at the vanguard of such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan. . . . 40,000 fundamentalist ministers joined the Klan. . . .  Without these ministers and the fundamentalist revival of the twenties . . . the KKK could never have enrolled the fantastic numbers nor have gained the remarkable power it wielded between 1922 and 1925."  The southern church blended culture and religion thereby sanctifying social evil.