Africa in the 1970s was in the midst of a great world conflict--a conflict between the black peoples and the white peoples of the earth, between the developed West and the Third World. The church was central to this conflict. People acting in the name of Christianity helped bring it about. Yet only the gospel of Jesus Christ can provide an alternative to violence, hatred, suffering, and chaos.
For the last several centuries, the gospel has been under the stewardship of the West, under the stewardship of basically white people and people with power. The problem has been that our Western way of presenting the gospel is not radical enough. We have helped produce crisis by not really being the salt or preservative of the earth.
The reports I once heard from missionaries were that Africa was becoming a Christian continent. But then Maoism and communism spread in their appeal. Why? Because they offered a more comprehensive approach, especially to social, educational, and economic problems. The gospel we've preached has not been radical enough to deal with the needs of people.
Christians in the West have given way to culture and tradition. We have fit the gospel into our culture, and to do this we have had to divide the gospel up. The same ability to divide, conquer, and dichotomize that has made the West powerful and has given us the division of labor and efficiency was applied to our preaching of the gospel.
This has meant efficiency in the short run. We could turn the gospel into a verbal jungle or a catchy phrase; we could move quickly through the world with our tapes and radio stations and promotional evangelistic strategies. The result has been that now many Americans are "born again," and that Africa has been "Christianized." But the result has also been the skipping over of deep human need.
We are moving through the world too fast with a gospel that is too easy. We have been over-efficient and ineffective.
The false dichotomies we have made in our theology have taken the power out of the gospel. We have offered people a formula, our formula, rather than new life. We have said that the gospel is the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus without adding that it is also God's visible love meeting human need in history through people filled with his spirit.
We have gone on to cut up the person into the spiritual and the physical, splitting up their needs. Then, depending on our theological persuasion--liberal or evangelical--we have prioritized those needs. What arrogance! We have acted like surgeons on unwilling victims. In the process, we make our needs theirs, and then attempt to meet our own needs in those people. By doing so, we cripple them. If we are evangelical we blame them for their own poverty as a result of their sin. If we are liberal we make them social welfare victims. Our charity dehumanizes and destroys them.
The political reality has been that most of the Western church has not seen justice as a real felt need for the poor and oppressed of the Third World. The same thing happened during the crisis of the 1960s in the South. The evangelical church was against the blacks, as I and other blacks experienced so painfully. Evangelicals were on the other side.
Because we allowed our culture and traditions to weaken the gospel, the church and its mission became an extension of the Western political and economic system. The church is central to world conflict because it has served as the advance party for Western free enterprise in cultures other than our own.
A disturbing realization for me, however, has been that the new power bloc [of Asian and African countries] is not different from the old. One sign of this was evident at an African-Arab summit in 1977 in which the emerging coalition between these powers showed the same frighteningly basic indifference to suffering and starvation that has characterized the West's use of power and its stewardship of the gospel. The message that came out of that conference was that gun factories were going to be established in Africa, and that the Arabs would provide the money. And this came in the face of the poverty and human misery so apparent in these lands.
The have-nots of this world joined themselves in the 1960s and '70s around military strategies and liberation ideals. They had the tools of the terrorist and the guerrilla in their hands. Yasir Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization said in the United Nations in 1976, "I come with an olive branch in one hand and a machine gun in the other. Your actions will determine which one I use." The powerful actions of the West have added to the desperation and the crisis faced by these nations. The greed and lust for power that is the heart of the problem for all peoples has kept this new world power bloc in the Third World from being ultimately anymore hopeful an alternative for human life than the old, Western power bloc.
As the global order changes and power shifts, there will be a world-wide conflict. The church can assume center stage if it is to be God's visible alternative to a broken world. But I wonder where the church of Jesus Christ is going to be in this struggle. Will we see that we have cheapened our witness and move to repent, committing ourselves to being the people of God in the world? Or, when we find out that Western influence and Western Christianity will be pushed to the side, will we embrace a reliance on worldly forms of power for our answer? Will we forget that the kingdom comes, "not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit" (Zechariah 4:6)?
Despite their sense of justice and religious freedom, the founders of our country found themselves enslaving their black brothers and sisters, and Christians found themselves as chaplains to that system of slavery. Of course there were the people filled with the Spirit of Christ, who taught reading, preached abolition, and freed slaves. But they were few.
Consider Hitler's holocaust. Again there were a few--the Bonhoeffers--who stood up as Christians. But where was the body of Christians? They were frightened, and caught up in the established order.
Where were the Christians been in Korea, Vietnam, South Africa, and Uganda? Continually the church is on the side of the status quo and defends the system.
The other option used by Christians during times of world crisis has been to quickly read the Bible, interpret events as the end of history, and await the immediate return of our Lord. I believe in the second coming of Christ. But the disaster of this attitude is that we get so caught up in the second coming that we fail to live out our commission as reconcilers, as ambassadors, as a people moving through the world calling others to God.
The Body of Christ
The great calling and witness of Christians in times of conflict is that when everyone else is choosing sides, we can be reconciled across national, racial, cultural, and economic barriers.
To me, the issue of reconciliation is becoming the most important issue in the body of Christ. We must be reconciled--Jews and Greek, bond and free, male and female--all must be made one in Christ Jesus.
Reconciliation is crucial to our witness in the world because it is the basis upon which Jesus gives the world a right to judge whether or not our Christian faith is real: "By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another," (John 13:35). Our reconciliation and love for each other reveals the Lord we follow.
Reconciliation is crucial to the credibility of our message about the good news of God's intervention in history: "that they may all be one: even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you sent me" (John 17:21). Our reconciliation and unity with each other establishes Jesus as the one sent by God to save us.
Yet the false division perhaps most devastating to the gospel has been the dividing of the body of Christ along racial and cultural lines. Jesus commanded us to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every nation. Paul assumed that the gospel would burn through culture and race and would make people one in Christ Jesus. The very purpose of the gospel, I believe, was to reconcile people to God, bringing them from out of the world into one body--not many bodies each with its own cultural twists, hang-ups, and blind spots--but one body with many parts, each as mixed and diversified as possible.
This was to be the glory of the church. In Jesus' high priestly prayer focusing on the unearthly unity that would set believers apart and melt them into a new order, a new race, a new people, he says plainly, "I am glorified in them" (John 17:10). God was glorified by the way Jesus walked on earth in complete unity with the Father. Now Jesus is glorified by our union with him and with each other.
When this dramatic unity broke out at Pentecost it drove people to a recognition of Christ as Lord. When it broke out at Antioch, it resulted in a new identity of believers before the world. Antioch, with all of its varied cultures became the center for carrying the gospel throughout the world.
But we have fragmented the body. We say the "black church" and the "white church," as if these were some kind of heavenly or unquestionable distinctions. More than ever we are now preaching a cultural gospel. We call for a conversion that doesn't include reconciliation.
I'm not suggesting integration. Integration is when one weaker culture knuckles under to the domination of another. That's not reconciliation. The gospel gives people dignity within their cultures but then burns through those cultures to make them one.
One of the main ways we have copped out to expediency and divided the body is by saying that the best way to win people is to let them stay within their culture, to create one-culture churches. We theorize that eliminating the pain of cross-cultural relationships makes churches. But we are more concerned with church growth than being the body of Christ, a new people in the world. This type of growth develops "ethnically pure" churches, churches with a pedigree, churches so ingrown that they can no longer be held accountable along cultural biases. When it comes to widely held cultural values like materialism or patriotism, Christians are conformed to their world; their witness is nullified.
No, the body of Christ is not a weak pedigree church, but a hybrid church, strong with the mixed strengths of a variety of cultural backgrounds and traditions, grinding up the blindness and the blocks that so often afflict our faith. This is where we get some of our "divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and make every thought captive to obey Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:4-6).
This type of reconciliation will bring a new depth and compassion to our ministry in the world. It will eliminate the cultural cop-outs that cripple our witness. It will put us in touch with the felt needs of people. There will be no more mission compounds. We will have to respond to the real needs of people because their call will come from within our own ranks, not from outside.
The purpose of the gospel is to reconcile people with God, to break the cycle of sin, injustice, and destruction that devours us individually and corporately. The evidence of our reconciliation to God is being reconciled to each other. Reconciliation cannot be regarded as a heavenly, future thing. We have been entrusted by Christ with the ministry of reconciliation, and are now ambassadors for Christ. God makes his appeal through us. We become the righteousness of God. What God calls us to spiritually, God wants us to work out locally and visibly.
If we believe in this reconciliation, we can no longer accept the basic way our society is structured, with is suburbs and ghettos, its false divisions of rich and poor, black and white. Our need to be reconciled will cause us to physically move--for the sake of a more holistic evangelism and for the sake of a more whole body--to the area of need.
If we relocate ourselves--individually and corporately--we will be a challenge to society. We will be fighting all of those hidden conflicts of racism, hatred, class struggle, envy, greed, and cultural prejudice that have fueled all world conflicts in the past and present. We will be fighting the hidden war before the outbreak of the open war. Why? Because to be reconciled, we will have to move our bodies. To relocate our bodies to the area of need means that we will be in fact redistributing the wealth and the power that creates those needs. No longer will we feel threatened by the gospel's relationship to indigenous community development. We will be free from that, free to apply our minds, skills, and resources to the reality of the problems that surround us.
There is one final and creative element of reconciliation that, when applied, puts the church of Jesus Christ at the focal point of any world conflict and into the center of history itself. The reconciled community of believers has a unique ability to call world systems to justice and accountability. It is only the community reconciled across racial and cultural barriers that provides an alternative to taking cultural sides, to being a bigot or a chauvinist or an exploiter, to being the representative of a larger system. And it is only the reconciled community that is uniquely equipped to apply the word of God in a fair way to the world, that can speak without grinding an axe.
Have we waited too long? Are we too late? Can we be God's people in society? Can we disengage ourselves from the world's systems and narrow allegiances in time? Will we be sucked into the conflict or will we remain peacemakers?
In the 18th chapter of the book of Revelation, John records God's call to God's people:
"Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great. It has become a dwelling place of demons, a haunt of every foul spirit, a haunt of every foul and hateful bird; for all nations have drunk the wine of her impure passion, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have grown rich with the wealth of her wantonness.
"Then I heard another voice from heaven saying, "Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share her plagues...."
I believe that this is a call for the people of God to disengage themselves from the status quo, from the world's economic and social systems which enslave and subjugate people. This is a call to become the example, the model of love, reconciliation, and peace. In this way, we are called to hold the world accountable, as a plumb line tests a wall or a level tries the correctness of a foundation.
My call is to Christians in the midst of an economic system such as ours that can no longer be disciplined. It is to hold accountable those people who have ignored our original ideals of justice and equality and shaped a system that has enslaved people. And the church of Jesus Christ has the same responsibility to leftist ideology, to call that system and those people to a sense of justice, responsibility and righteousness.
The responsibility is first ours. Will we have the courage to live reconciled to God and each other? To become live models on earth of what God intends to happen in heaven? We, as Christians, are the watchman of the land. If we see "the sword coming upon the land and [blow] the trumpet and warn the people, then if any who hear the sound of the trumpet do not take warning, and the sword comes and takes them away, their blood shall be upon their own heads.... But if the sentinel sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes, and takes any of them; they are taken away in their iniquity, but their blood I will require at the sentinel's hand" (Ezekiel 33:3-6).
I see what I believe is described again and again in the book of Revelation, a world conflict where people will be forced to take sides. Christians will be pushed and tested. But they are the only sentinel the world has, the only messengers of God's redemption. We will have to be like Jeremiah of old, standing in the gate, crying and pleading to our own people, pushing them to a sense of responsibility, and offering to them new life with God, made visible in the reconciled community.
John Perkins was a Sojourners contributing editor, president of the Voice of Calvary Ministries in Jackson and Mendenhall, Mississippi, and author of Let Justice Roll Down and A Quiet Revolution, when this article appeared.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!