Christ Born Across the Sea
This Blog brings my Christmas greetings to those of you – numberless or few, I know not – who visit my site. This is supposed to be the season of both good will towards as well as good news for the poor and dispossessed of our world.
Undoubtedly the biggest disaster of the past twelve months – apart from the continuing disaster of the Iraq War of course - was the tsunami which devastated so much of coastal Asia. These sad occasions afford the opportunity for the rest of us to dig deep into our pockets and our resources of humanitarian care, to try to alleviate suffering and loss on such an immense scale. In addition to the hard-working staff members of international aid and relief agencies, catastrophes of this kind also attract a host of do-gooder individuals who, operating from a mixed bag of motives, some honourable and others less than honourable, travel under their own resources to the stricken region to help out however they are able.
James Garwood appears to have been just such a person. An American, and one time heroin addict, who encountered Jesus while in prison, James set off for Thailand’s Khao Lak coast, armed with good intentions and a big bag of balloons with which he aimed to entertain the thousands of refugees in that area. Now twelve months later James is leader of a Christian Church which he has named ‘Life in Action in Thailand’. He holds regular services for recent converts to Christianity from Buddhism, insisting that he did not come to start a church but “felt God tugging at my heart” and claiming that “hundreds and hundreds” of local people converted to Christianity following the tsunami. James is not the only evangelical preacher to have descended upon this area which prior to the tsunami was Buddhist in faith with not a single local Christian church. As could have been predicted, the majority of these new churches have been set up by US-based evangelicals supported by apparently inexhaustible funding from US evangelical congregations.
Given the history of Christian missions I was not surprised to learn that some of these converts converted for material rather than spiritual reasons. Said one former Buddhist “Christians are very good to me. That’s why I converted”. There are echoes here of the ‘rice Christians’ of India, or of those conversions in Africa which appeared to have more to do with job opportunities in the colonial administration than religious impulses. As both a student and teacher of missiology, as well as having myself been a missionary in the Middle-East, I have longed for the day when Christian mission would forever divorce itself from economic, political, cultural and ideological accoutrements of its sponsoring churches. While on the whole the older churches have learnt lessons and adopted approaches much more sensitive to cultural realities, it remains a feature of many of the ‘younger’ expressions of Christianity that they remain blissfully unaware of the contents of the baggage they carry with them.
This seems to be particularly the case in respect to American evangelical groups. One of the PhD dissertations I recently had to examine was submitted by an American Evangelical who had spent twenty years as a ‘missionary’ in Europe, half of that time in a Catholic European country, and half in a former Eastern European nation that has Orthodox and Catholic communities. His primary mission seemed to be to replicate the kind of Church order and governance which his US sponsoring Church claimed to have been directly handed down to it by God. He was oblivious to the fact that this governance mirrored the USA’s political and ideological aspirations including the US's particular and peculiar understandings of democracy. The American theologian Walter Brueggemann has written extensively about this phenomenon which he describes as enculturation. He uses this term to describe the way that the ethos and activities of many American churches cannot be separated from the values, behaviours and aspirations of that country’s dominant ideology. This not only affects the way that such churches operate in a missionary context, it more importantly in his view renders them incapable of offering any critique of the culture of which they are a product.
One of the problematic areas of missionary concern then becomes that the Jesus who is being proclaimed to the unbeliever is not at all the Jesus of first century Palestine but the Jesus who ‘in the beauty of the lilies was born across the sea’, who is a product of American history, experience and imagination. In many contexts there has been a rejection of Jesus as a cultural product in favour of an indigenised Jesus. Some years ago I heard the current Anglican Archbishop and Primate of New Zealand, Whakahuihui Vercoe, claim that we ought not to assume that Jesus was incarnated into only Palestinian culture, but rather at the moment of birth was incarnated in many if not all cultures. Thus the Maori people had encountered Jesus within their own cultural and religious traditions long before, in the Archbishop’s words, “the British missionaries introduced us to a white Jesus whom we did not know”.
So what we see happening in Thailand today mirrors that Maori experience. Buddhists are introduced to an American Jesus, powerful and equally importantly, wealthy, who apparently has at his command infinite resources for rebuilding shattered and dispirited communities. Phra Viroth Titaphoonyo, abbot of the Wat Laem Pom Buddhist temple laments the influx of American money and values the missionaries bring with them, and the nature of the material help on offer. He sees Buddhism and Christianity responding to the situation in quite different ways, one spiritual and the other material. “If you are a Buddhist”, he says, “when the people jump in the water and ask for help, a Buddhist teaches you how to swim. A Christian just gives them a hand a pulls them up”.
So if this Christmas you were tempted to complain about the gross commercialisation of the festive season, please include in your complaint the equally gross materialism of some manifestations of Christian mission.
Undoubtedly the biggest disaster of the past twelve months – apart from the continuing disaster of the Iraq War of course - was the tsunami which devastated so much of coastal Asia. These sad occasions afford the opportunity for the rest of us to dig deep into our pockets and our resources of humanitarian care, to try to alleviate suffering and loss on such an immense scale. In addition to the hard-working staff members of international aid and relief agencies, catastrophes of this kind also attract a host of do-gooder individuals who, operating from a mixed bag of motives, some honourable and others less than honourable, travel under their own resources to the stricken region to help out however they are able.
James Garwood appears to have been just such a person. An American, and one time heroin addict, who encountered Jesus while in prison, James set off for Thailand’s Khao Lak coast, armed with good intentions and a big bag of balloons with which he aimed to entertain the thousands of refugees in that area. Now twelve months later James is leader of a Christian Church which he has named ‘Life in Action in Thailand’. He holds regular services for recent converts to Christianity from Buddhism, insisting that he did not come to start a church but “felt God tugging at my heart” and claiming that “hundreds and hundreds” of local people converted to Christianity following the tsunami. James is not the only evangelical preacher to have descended upon this area which prior to the tsunami was Buddhist in faith with not a single local Christian church. As could have been predicted, the majority of these new churches have been set up by US-based evangelicals supported by apparently inexhaustible funding from US evangelical congregations.
Given the history of Christian missions I was not surprised to learn that some of these converts converted for material rather than spiritual reasons. Said one former Buddhist “Christians are very good to me. That’s why I converted”. There are echoes here of the ‘rice Christians’ of India, or of those conversions in Africa which appeared to have more to do with job opportunities in the colonial administration than religious impulses. As both a student and teacher of missiology, as well as having myself been a missionary in the Middle-East, I have longed for the day when Christian mission would forever divorce itself from economic, political, cultural and ideological accoutrements of its sponsoring churches. While on the whole the older churches have learnt lessons and adopted approaches much more sensitive to cultural realities, it remains a feature of many of the ‘younger’ expressions of Christianity that they remain blissfully unaware of the contents of the baggage they carry with them.
This seems to be particularly the case in respect to American evangelical groups. One of the PhD dissertations I recently had to examine was submitted by an American Evangelical who had spent twenty years as a ‘missionary’ in Europe, half of that time in a Catholic European country, and half in a former Eastern European nation that has Orthodox and Catholic communities. His primary mission seemed to be to replicate the kind of Church order and governance which his US sponsoring Church claimed to have been directly handed down to it by God. He was oblivious to the fact that this governance mirrored the USA’s political and ideological aspirations including the US's particular and peculiar understandings of democracy. The American theologian Walter Brueggemann has written extensively about this phenomenon which he describes as enculturation. He uses this term to describe the way that the ethos and activities of many American churches cannot be separated from the values, behaviours and aspirations of that country’s dominant ideology. This not only affects the way that such churches operate in a missionary context, it more importantly in his view renders them incapable of offering any critique of the culture of which they are a product.
One of the problematic areas of missionary concern then becomes that the Jesus who is being proclaimed to the unbeliever is not at all the Jesus of first century Palestine but the Jesus who ‘in the beauty of the lilies was born across the sea’, who is a product of American history, experience and imagination. In many contexts there has been a rejection of Jesus as a cultural product in favour of an indigenised Jesus. Some years ago I heard the current Anglican Archbishop and Primate of New Zealand, Whakahuihui Vercoe, claim that we ought not to assume that Jesus was incarnated into only Palestinian culture, but rather at the moment of birth was incarnated in many if not all cultures. Thus the Maori people had encountered Jesus within their own cultural and religious traditions long before, in the Archbishop’s words, “the British missionaries introduced us to a white Jesus whom we did not know”.
So what we see happening in Thailand today mirrors that Maori experience. Buddhists are introduced to an American Jesus, powerful and equally importantly, wealthy, who apparently has at his command infinite resources for rebuilding shattered and dispirited communities. Phra Viroth Titaphoonyo, abbot of the Wat Laem Pom Buddhist temple laments the influx of American money and values the missionaries bring with them, and the nature of the material help on offer. He sees Buddhism and Christianity responding to the situation in quite different ways, one spiritual and the other material. “If you are a Buddhist”, he says, “when the people jump in the water and ask for help, a Buddhist teaches you how to swim. A Christian just gives them a hand a pulls them up”.
So if this Christmas you were tempted to complain about the gross commercialisation of the festive season, please include in your complaint the equally gross materialism of some manifestations of Christian mission.
posted by MichaelElliott @ 1:58 PM
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