INTER FAITH ISSUES – THE WAY I SEE IT

RACISM

They say it is better to turn on the light rather than to curse the darkness. But amidst the current unrest and rhetoric about racism, it seems we have trouble finding the switch to turn on the lights. I have debated whether I should say anything at all, as whatever I post will without doubt disappear amidst the current noise. Racism, pure and simple, stems from the belief or assumption that one’s own race is superior to another. In the previous century, we have seen where that can lead as a racist government in Germany sought to extinguish another race. And in North America, the violent 1960’s and 70’s seem to be re-appearing before our very eyes. And for those of us old enough to remember, the racial violence of the 60’s and 70’s disappeared but racism did not. It is like a wound of humanity that recedes but flares up again and again. So in Germany today we have “neo-nazis”, in other regions we have “ethnic cleansing”, and in North America, “white supremacists” have never really disappeared, and even appear under the guise of religion, which is something that I find particularly evil.

To really understand racism, it helps to experience what it feels like to be on the receiving end of racial discrimination. My three visits to Africa in the last 5 years have been interesting in that regard. For the first time in my life I was part of a “visible minority”. As a white person, I stuck out anywhere I went. For the most part, it was no big deal. But a few experiences stick out as either humorous or to put it mildly, interesting. In Cameroon, I was walking down a village street alongside a missionary, who was also white. We passed a large group of young children, who upon seeing us, began to shout, “White man! White man! White man with a long nose!” I was dumbfounded and so I said nothing. My colleague, who wasn’t experiencing this for the first time, said to the children that they should go home and have their parents teach them some manners!

Another time, in the town of Eldoret in Kenya, I was out shopping with a fellow pastor and friend who was black, and whom I got to know in Canada. At one point we needed to pick up his wife, who was inside a mall. Since it was hard to find parking, my friend pulled up beside the curb and sent me inside to fetch his wife, since she did not know where he would be parked. I did so, and as we walked the considerable distance to the car, I was conscious of many stares being fixed upon us. When we were inside the car, my friend explained to me what they were thinking – a young woman with an older man of a different colour – why that could only mean trouble. We laughed. Sort of.

On the campus of the college where I was teaching for three months in 2017 and 2018, I was the only white person. Since it was a Christian college, at no time did I feel looked down or discriminated against in any way. Teachers, whatever their skin colour are held in high regard in Africa and are treated with deference and respect. If anything, my skin colour resulted in other assumptions being made – that I was rich, and people were very eager to be my “friends”. But when I worshipped with these students and the other staff, I felt as one of them – except for the times that they forget that I was there and would lapse into the Swahili or some other tribal language.

Ah, and then there was apartheid in South Africa – the political and social system during the era of White minority rule, under which the people of South Africa were divided by their race and the different races were forced to live separately from each other. Nelson Mandela was instrumental in leading to the end of that system and that did not occur without struggle. I’ve never been to South Africa, but I have heard that while apartheid is gone as a system, old prejudices still survive.

Indeed, old prejudices are hard to eradicate. What helps? My advice is to interact with and get to know someone of a different race as a person. Learn to see this person not as a member of a different race, but simply as a fellow-human being. If you do this in a true spirit of humility and openness, you will find that God created only one type of human being. The skin colour may be different, but essentially, we are all the same, created in the image of God and therefore entitled to dignity, respect, and worthy to be treated with kindness.

WHEN CHURCHES BURN DOWN

The fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris France is the news story of the week. I would think that all Christians, whether they be Catholic or Protestant, would be saddened by the destruction of an active place of worship. This one is more than 800 years old. The website of the cathedral says that the building is “above all “the House of God and the abode of men” because this building is full of human and Christian experience. It also is a place of history and culture, and an architectural monument. Personally I have not been to Notre Dame, but I have visited other European cathedrals, and I can say that all of them are places of great beauty. For those of us who are Christian, we marvel that places like that were originally built to the glory of God. Damage or destruction to such a building is without a doubt a great loss. But it is a loss that needs to be seen in perspective.

As usual, the media coverage of an event of this nature is over the top. For days we have heard words like “tragedy”, “mourning”, “sorrow” and the solidarity of Catholics all over the world with vigils and special masses. One newspaper article that I read used the headline of a “global unifier”. Say what?

Yes, I admit it is all very sad. But something that the journalists and other writers don’t mention is the fact that a fire cannot destroy what a church really is. When Jesus said, I will build MY church, and the gates of Hades (hell) will not overcome it (Matthew 16:18), He was not talking about a building of wood, stone, or stained glass”. He was talking about a spiritual entity, comprised of redeemed human beings that lasts eternally. The Bible also uses the term “church” to describe a local assembly of believers, but never in the Bible does the term refer to a building. In fact, the early Christians met for centuries without ever having a building of their own. They met in large assemblies in public places, and in smaller groups in homes, and even in burial places as the catacombs when they needed to be in hiding.

Sometimes people refer to church buildings as “the House of God”, as if to say that God lives there. But Scripture tells us“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands.” (Acts 17:24) Certainly it is right and proper to construct buildings in which people meet to worship God, but when such buildings are not available, God can still be worshipped.

In fact I am reminded of another church fire in my home town of Kitchener. One day in 1963, as I was walking home from school at lunch time, the sky over Kitchener was black with smoke. When I got home, the radio was playing and mother told us that Benton Street Baptist Church was on fire. As we later found out, a 15 year old arsonist had entered the unlocked church, and lit a curtain which set the church ablaze. He returned to the scene of the fire to watch the church burn and was apprehended there. It turned out that he originally had intended to torch St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church, but painters working inside that church chased him away, so he walked a block to the Baptist church. The building burned to the ground and was a total loss, except for an addition that had been built in the 1950’s that still exists today. The fire was so intense that the fire department had to soak nearby buildings with water to protect them from the shower of sparks as the burning steeple came crashing down.

Did that stop the Benton Street congregation? In those days, the weekly Sunday evening service was broadcast live from the church over a radio station in Kitchener. After the fire (which happened on a Tuesday if I am correct), many people tuned their radios to the station on the following Sunday evening to see if Benton “is still there”. They were not disappointed: the Sunday evening service was on as usual, but the signal was coming from the auditorium of a local High School where the congregation worshipped until the new church was built on the same site as the old. A fire can destroy a building, but not a true church.

Which brings me back to the Notre Dame fire. While the rubble is still cooling off, the President of France declared that the cathedral will be re-built. And lo and behold, all kinds of money is turning up. Led by three of France’s wealthiest families, donations have started to pour in, so far more than 700 million dollars. Well and good some would say, but the question must also be asked, why these donations, which will not impoverish any of the benefactors, come as late as they do. Fine to re-build an historic monument or even a “sacred space” but what about supporting what a church really stands for – the spread of the Gospel, the support of the poor to mention only a few things. While France is predominately Roman Catholic country, only 11% of the people actually attend mass. (Here in Canada, our record is not much better with only 29% of the population attending worship in any church, Protestant or Catholic).

We seem to be more enamoured with beautiful buildings and cultural monuments, than we are devoted to the cause of Christianity that these buildings represent. In both North America and Europe, church buildings are emptying, and when the small congregations that inhabit them can no longer afford their upkeep, the buildings are either demolished or sold and re-purposed.

An example is a Lutheran church in the city of Hamburg in Horn, a working class district of the city. In 2002 the church was “deconsecrated” because only 20 people were in attendance in a space that had room for 500. The building stood vacant for almost 10 years, before a Muslim congregation purchased it. The church is in the process of being converted to a mosque. The outside will remain much the same, but the golden cross atop the steeple has been removed and replaced with Arabic lettering that spells “Allah”.

Suddenly there was an outcry by the public living near the structure. The former pastor of the congregation expressed the grief of people who live there, whose children had been baptized, confirmed, and married in the church. The local branch of the conservative Christian Democratic Union party called for the conversion to be halted. Another local pastor suggested that it would have been better simply to demolish the building. However the man heading up the church to mosque conversion said that the legacy of decline contributed to his ambivalence about moving into the church. “We wish that churches would become more full,” he said. “We don’t want to Islamize or take over churches.”

May those who have ears, hear.

CONVERSIONS AND CONVERTING

Recently I became friends with someone who calls themselves an atheist. The person knows who I am and what my convictions are. The new friend asked me, “are you going to try and covert me”? I answered that I had never converted anybody.

I was thinking of an incident, whether actual or apocryphal, from the life of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the 19th century preacher. It is said that he was out for a walk one day when he came across a drunken man lying in the gutter. He stopped and spoke to the man, and as he bent down over him, was startled that the man addressed him by name. Asking the man from where he knew his name, he answered, “you converted me some three years ago.” To which Spurgeon is said to have replied, “And that is the tragedy, that I converted you. Had you been spiritually converted you would not be where you are now.”

Now conversions happen all the time. People convert from one faith to another. Some do it out of convenience, such as to make it easier to marry someone from a different faith. Others might do it because of some emotional influence in their life, or at worst being brow-beaten by some persistent argument.

Conversion can be a dangerous proposition. People who live in countries dominated by Islam, are often sentenced to death for “converting” from the Islamic to the Christian or some other faith. This inconvenient truth is often denied, but the fact is well documented.

Conversion to Christianity has always been a dangerous affair at some time and place or another. From the earliest days, Christians were persecuted and martyred. The first persecution came from those who professed the Jewish faith and the first victim was Stephen. Since the day of Stephen, a crimson trail of blood has flown through all time, even to the present day. No matter how hard and cruel the persecution, neither the Roman government (who first persecuted and then made Christianity the state religion), nor communism, nor Islam will eradicate the Christian faith.

Sadly, Christians are not innocent from persecuting those who disagree with them. The bloody crusades are a dark blemish in the history of the church. At various other times, Catholics have persecuted Protestants, and vice versa.
When the Pilgrim Fathers, who left British shores to flee religious persecution in their homeland settled on North American shores, what did they do? They made the same mistake by persecuting others who did not share their views.

But back to conversion. A true conversion to Christianity, or to be more accurate, a conversion to CHRIST, is a life changing event. The most famous example in the Bible is the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, who later became the Apostle Paul. Saul was a leader of the Jewish faith, a man learned in the Hebrew Scriptures, a leading person in the party of the Pharisees. As the influence of the Christian witness and faith spread, he sought permission to arrest people and bring them to Jerusalem to face justice. It was during such a mission, that God intervened on the Road to Damascus, and we read the story of Saul’s “conversion”. Saul’s life was never the same. He became a passionate defender of those whom he had persecuted. He planted churches in areas where pagan (non-Jewish) religions had dominated. Many of his writings are part of the New Testament portion of our Bible.

There have been some notable conversions in modern times, and I will mention two of the most well known. One is C.S.LEWIS, who is known for his literary works such as THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA and books like The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. Lewis was raised in a religious family that attended the Church of Ireland. He became an atheist at age 15. During his early adult life he participated in the occult. He eventually returned to Christianity, having been influenced by arguments with his Oxford colleague and Christian friend. J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis converted to Christianity in 1931, following a long discussion and late-night walk with Tolkien and and another close friends He records making a specific commitment to Christian belief while on his way to the zoo with his brother. He became a member of the Anglican Church (The Church of England) – somewhat to the disappointment of Tolkien, who had hoped that he would join the Catholic Church. Following his conversion he became a writer of numerous books, both fiction and non-fiction. Many of them are a defence of Christianity.

Another more recent convert from atheism is Lee Strobel, a former law journalist with the Chicago Tribune. He says that he began calling himself an atheist as a teenager and that he “loathed Christianity”. His wife’s conversion to Christianity was actually the catalyst that brought the couple to the brink of divorce. However after two years of intense research using his investigative skills as a former journalist for The Chicago Trubune, and consulting more than 12 leading biblical theologians, scholars and experts, Strobel learned that the Christian creed was solid and he converted to Christianity decades ago. Since then he has been a writer and teacher of the Christian faith. One of his best books is The Case For Christ, and a later sequel The Case for Miracles. Both books are best-sellers.

Mind you, conversion works both ways. One of the most well-known conversions from Christianity to atheism in the 20th century was Charles Templeton. He once was a close friend of Billy Graham, in fact the two worked together in the Youth For Christ movement, in Graham’s early days. Templeton was also a prolific author, and his works reflected his faith or lack thereof throughout his life.

How do conversions happen? Not as a result of slick marketing or human persuasion. A true conversion is a change of conviction, where someone changes their opinion about something they formerly held true and now take a different position. Atheists (who deny the existence of God) and Agnostics (who question the existence of God) generally fall into one of two categories. There are those who have intellectual reasons that they have carefully reasoned and thought through, and there are those who have what I call emotional reasons. Perhaps they are angry with some religious leader, or disappointed in how they were treated by those who belong to the particular religion. Or perhaps they had a shallow emotional experience and embraced a position that they do not fully understand. When somebody tells me that they don’t believe in God or Christianity because “there are so many contradictions in the Bible”, I generally ask them which contradiction troubles them most. Usually they cannot name a single one, but simply are repeating a mantra that they have heard from others. Or they bring up issues that the Bible does address, but they lack any kind of understanding as to how the Scriptures are to be understood.

But I have also encountered people who are true spiritual seekers. They really want to know what is true and what is not, and they genuinely search for answers. We must never brush such people aside. Like Jesus did, we ought to sit down with them, regardless of what social class they belong to and listen to their questions, engage them in their thought processes, and and give reasoned explanations instead of platitudes. But conversion? That is up them, and only them. Deep in their heart they must decide. It still happens today.

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