Paul Wilczynski's Observations

The Poisonwood Problem

David Blackstone writes for Sojourners...

A front-page story in The New York Times this week raised a red flag about evangelical relief groups in Asia who are mixing tsunami relief work and proselytizing. While many mainstream, faith-based agencies abide by Red Cross guidelines that humanitarian aid not be used to further political or religious ends, some mission groups happily pass along gospel tracts with food and medicine. Honestly, I don't know where to begin as I lay out a response to this controversy. I did run an economic and social development agency in Central America for more than a decade, and we were explicitly faith-based. A majority of our local partners were Catholic and evangelical churches that offered programs such as community micro-credit, innovative agricultural skills development, literacy (often linked to study of the Bible), and children's nutrition. But then and now, talking about humanitarian aid and spiritual motivation trips land mines for different segments of the general public. A healthy slice of New York Times readers are appalled, I am sure, that religious groups were leading the charge to provide aid to the victims of the quake/tsunami in South Asia. For some secularists, all religious people who establish a mission for humanitarian aid overseas are typecast into the 1950s characters of Barbara Kingsolver's novel, The Poisonwood Bible. At best, the characters are ignorant of the local culture, and at worst downright manipulative, with the missionary considering charity a foil to convert the needy "natives." It's time for secularists with these stereotypes in mind to catch up with reality. There's a broad range of spiritually motivated relief agencies - Catholic Charities, Church World Service, Mennonite Central Committee, Jesuit Refugee Services, Lutheran World Relief, just to name a few of the Christian ones - that understand their mission as helping humans in their time of suffering. Period. Their approach is that such acts alone are the expression of love, compassion, and justice to which they feel called. To be sure, there are some mission organizations - particularly in evangelical churches - that bear out Kingsolver's typecast. I was raised throughout childhood in an evangelical church, so I know well the mentality of her missionary characters. When I was carrying out my work in Latin America, more than a few old family friends asked me why I "was wasting my time" on projects that aimed to effect real social change or stimulate long-term economic development. In their eyes, that was "social welfare" work more properly relegated to secularists. The work of a faith-based agency should be, in their eyes, propagation of the Christian message and winning converts. After all, as one friend reasoned with me, if the Latin Americans you work with are not saved and have to spend an eternity in hell, your projects accomplish nothing. It is the explicit intent of some evangelical aid groups to view aid as stage one of a longer conversion strategy. Once the recipient experiences the mercy of the organization, they perhaps will be more open to receiving the gospel of Jesus Christ and be baptized into the church. But, by and large, most evangelical missions organizations have become a bit more cautious in the way they mix evangelization and material assistance. In other words, it is rare to find a group that requires an individual to sit through a sermon in order to get a meal. Two very different theologies - how God exists in the world, if you will - undergird these distinct approaches to humanitarian assistance. The Kingsolver-esque "food in exchange for your soul" agencies understand redemption to be a purely spiritual transaction. In their theology, this world has fallen into evil and is beyond redemption. The work of Christians is to preach a personal message that salvation from this fallen world is available to any individual who will make a decision to follow Christ. If people remain Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, or of a more local faith, they are destined for hell. In this worldview, it is easy to judge the sinner and point their way toward salvation. If you saw the world this way, wouldn't your compassionate choice be to do everything possible to save the people of the world? Providing humanitarian assistance in a time of crisis would be an effective way to gain people's trust so that they would hear your message. This, in essence, is the ethos of the proselytizing aid agency. That is not how I experience God in the world, or understand God's calling me to a vocation of service. Along with most Christians who are operating in humanitarian assistance internationally, I experience God calling people to act with love and justice wherever we find suffering. When we stand in those places, we intensely experience God, working with us and through us - and at times in spite of us - to bring moments of redemption where there is brokenness. Spiritual practice so conceived throws us into acts of re-uniting what has been torn apart, confronting evil with goodness, and showing love where there is hatred. We do not judge, lest we be judged. We aim to embrace. We are simply invited to join in God's presence, and where it takes us - or those whom we serve - we rarely know. Our faith is hope in things not yet fully seen, yet we are confident in the path before us.

Source: Sojourners 2005 (c) http://www.sojo.net

posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 7:34 PM