ATLANTA — They’re good-hearted Presbyterians — serious about their faith, people who want to show God’s love to a suffering world. But it’s not as easy as just getting on a plane with a suitcase and a pocket stuffed with dollars.
In a religiously diverse world, in which Americans often enjoy prosperity and peace which others do not share, working in partnership with others can be a complicated thing. And those at the Presbyterian Global Fellowship https://www.presbyterianglobalfellowship.org meeting August 17-19 — a mostly white, evangelical crowd — were challenged to temper their energy for mission with some hard thinking about realities that are not always comfortable to face.
Lucas de Paiva Pina, a Brazilian who is working with immigrant fellowships in Georgia, looked out across the room and said: “We need to put more color here — yellow, black, red, all of them.”
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has pledged to become 20 percent people of color by 2010, but still is more than 92 percent white.
Americans who want to work with the global church need “to change the attitude of we-and-they,” Pina said. “We need to understand that in Christ, we are brothers and sisters. We are a family with different languages, different colors, different cultures, but we are from the same family, saved by the same Savior.”
Maqsood Kamil, executive secretary of the Presbyterian Church of Pakistan and a professor of systematic theology at Gujranwala Theological Seminary, said: “You have to be compassionate if you want to be a partner” — and that doesn’t just mean having zeal for mission.
“The Western church does not know the meaning of suffering, which is so essential for Christian life,” Kamil said. Jesus says in the Bible, “deny yourself, lift up your cross, follow me,” but many Americans know prosperity, not suffering, and don’t understand that “if one suffers, the whole body suffers.”
Americans offer money, “but are you going to stand on the ground where we were hit?” Kamil asked. When a church in Pakistan burned, what mattered most, he said, was that Raafat Zaki, then a regional coordinator with the PC(USA)’s Worldwide Ministries Division, came and stood on the ashes.
“That was so important to us, far more than the money,” Kamil said, calling that “a partnership of suffering.”
American missionaries in Pakistan and India eventually finish out their service and go home, Kamil said. But Muslim missionaries never leave, never go back — they are buried where they served, while some Christian missionaries “love mission but do not love the people to whom they have been sent. I’m telling you real truth.”
The Pakistanis call these people “project-lovers,” Kamil said, because they dislike the Pakistani people and “behave the way the American government behaves.” Pakistani Christians need partners who think like servants, not colonialists, he said — people who say, “I am here to serve. Not to rule, not to lead, but to serve.”
HOPE AND REALITY
Roberta Hestenes, a well-known evangelical who has taught at Fuller Seminary and worked for World Vision International, offered a message of both hope and of hard realities. She challenged the gathering to find hope in Christian faith in places where faith has been hard-won — in places like Cambodia and China and the AIDS-ravaged villages of Africa.
Hestenes has worked among the poor in more than 80 countries for more than 30 years. And she laid out, in plain language, some realities that American Presbyterians who care about world mission need to face (and which, she said, “singing a praise song loudly does not cover.”)
Hestenes described herself as a witness to God’s saving power in the world. There is a need to take the eternal gospel and offer it in the context of particular places and cultures, she said. But she disagrees with those who would say “the message itself is flawed,” and that by changing it “we might be more successful, more palatable, more winsome.”
While the context for presenting it may change, “the Word of God is given and we don’t tamper with it,” Hestenes said. “And we’re not clever with it. But rather straightforward, clear.”
She said it is that eternal message — “the light of Jesus Christ, shining in the darkness” — that led the number of Christians in China to jump from about 100,000 during the Cultural Revolution to from 30 million to 100 million today, depending on the estimate.
On a trip to visit a minority people in one province, Hestenes noticed a cross along the side of the road and asked to stop. She, along with a Chinese pastor who had not been back since 1949, when the Western church was expelled from China, walked through the rice paddies and up a hill. They met the pastor of the church, a woman who showed them the sanctuary believers had built with their own hands. In a village of 1,200 people, the sanctuary could seat 700; the sign above the church proclaimed in Mandarin: “Jesus is Lord.”
The pastor said the people of that congregation had prayed for 18 years that Christians from elsewhere would come to see them, and she told Hestenes: “God has sent you.”
Encounters such as these exhilarate Hestenes. But she also sees challenges for Christianity in this complicated time — among them, globalization and changing demographics. In a connected world, Christians can take the gospel message everywhere, she said.
But people also are experiencing tremendous migration and displacement across boundaries and borders all over the planet, she said. That can create opportunities — as people in transition often yearn for a foundation, a sense of security “which really can only be found in Jesus Christ,” she said.
After all the suffering in Cambodia, “in the refugee camps God planted a new church,” and a generation of believers and pastors emerged from those camps, Hestenes said — producing at least 300,000 Christians in Cambodia now.
In Africa, she has seen firsthand the devastation of AIDS and HIV infection, which has affected 65 million people, many of them Christians, “all of whom are loved by God,” Hestenes said. She described standing in a village where every adult between 25 and 40 had died from AIDS.
“And I am heartbroken that the American church is just now beginning to notice,” Hestenes said. There can be no authentic discipleship or spirituality which does not demonstrate caring for “the poor and the broken and the lost,” she said. “I believe we will stand before God and be asked” why the church was so slow to care about AIDS.
Another reality is the multiplicity of world religions and spiritualities — the many ways of interacting with God — which “cannot be boxed off, cannot be ignored, cannot be disregarded,” Hestenes said. “In our rationalism and our thoughtful, Reformed faith, one of the realities is our God still works in power, in signs, with wonders, in many ways” around the world.
Presbyterians are just one part of “the richness and the diversity” of the global church, Hestenes said — a global church that also includes Orthodox, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestants, evangelicals, “and I’m going to name it out loud, Pentecostals.”
Being part of a global church “isn’t Presbyterian-to-Presbyterian” only, she said — American Presbyterians relating to Presbyterians in other countries — but means interacting with and learning from the whole body of Christ.
Hestenes told of traveling to Latin America, to a country she did not name. In the morning she met with Pentecostals, who in the previous year had baptized 50,000 adult converts.
In the afternoon, she met with the president of a theological seminary from a mainline denomination, who told her: “We are the best Greek and Hebrew teaching institution in all of Latin America.”
When Hestenes asked the seminary president what the mainline Protestants could learn from the Pentecostals, the president’s answer was: “Absolutely nothing. They have everything to learn from us.”
But “God is at work,” Hestenes told the Global Fellowship. And “his church is bigger than we are.”
WHERE NEXT?
Where the Global Fellowship goes from here is still being worked out. About 800 people from 42 states came to this meeting at Peachtree Presbyterian church.
During the last plenary session Aug. 19, Scott Weimer, the senior pastor of North Avenue Presbyterian church in Atlanta and one of the fellowship organizers, described a covenant passed out at this meeting as still “a provisional document,” but said, “we’re committed to it.”
Tuck it in your Bible, put it on your nightstand, keep it in your desk, Weimer encouraged the participants.
The Global Fellowship plans to use the Internet and other technology to keep its supporters connected. More meetings may be scheduled later and ideas shared for what works in ministry (and what does not).
“Let us know where God showed up for you at this conference,” Weimer told the crowd. But he said he had no doubt: “We really believe that God is here.”
