26 September 2007

A Better View

This is where I went swimming last week. It is an abandoned iron quarry known as Bong Mine. A group of five or six people from the hospital ship I work on took a train ride from Monrovia to Bong County, where this quarry is located. It was really fun, with the exception of one of my mates getting her camera stolen...
For me, one of the most difficult things about being in Liberia is the mix of response to our presence. Some people are all smiles and waves and so happy that someone is trying to help them out. Others see us as an easy target to extract money and goods from. Still others despise us for how fortunate we are. Within each of the responses, there is a spectrum of differences in the attitude still. Some fall into two or even all three of these responses at different times, but that's just another example of how you can't group people together nicely and make generalizations.
I know of several pastors in Liberia that are really glad we are here, and glad that we are helping out, but they still take every chance they get to take advantage of the white man from the big ship. It's not their fault, for the most part. So many NGOs and missionaries have come through and given out so much that they've come to expect handouts.
What I'm about to say next is in no way saying that the people of Liberia are less human or valuable than any other people group on the face of the planet, it's only a metaphor to exemplify the NGOs and missionaries have a tendency to be like a child that finds a wounded baby animal near the treeline in a park. The child wants to help the animal recover so that it can survive, but lacks an understanding of the animals needs for survival. Since the child does not realize that the animal needs to maintain its survival instincts, the child may bring the animal home and give it warm milk and splint its leg and feed it plenty of food and love the animal and play with it, but when the animal is taken back to the park, it will have a much more difficult time surviving in the wild if it has become dependent on the care of the child.
Many NGOs and missionaries that have worked in Liberia have done this to the Liberian people. If we come to the aid of a country and hold it up, how will it learn to stand on its own? If we come and show them how to stand, and coach them. We need to maintain a very tricky dynamic tension to help Africa and I by no means think that I know better than anyone else how to do it, but I know if we keep doing things the way we are, we will change some of the problems into different ones, not help eradicate them.
I've been stressing sustainability for a lot of this post, but that is not the whole story. The reason we have to maintain a dynamic tension is that there are people that will die if we don't help them and they won't die because they have some disease that is just too awful to treat, they will die because there is no one to treat it. That's the thing that I like the most about working with Mercy Ships, the organization has an understanding of the need for sustainability and for the immediate need of people in life threatening situations, and they address both. There is room for improvement, though. We still have a lot to learn about how to work in each of the nations of West Africa.

20 September 2007

Resolve and Dr. T F Chen

I feel like I think this every time I remember that I have a blog:

"I need to post more often so that this blog isn't a total waste."

I'm taking a stand. Viva a la revolution!! I'm shooting for a post a day regarding what I'm thinking about, which will prove to be quite an eclectic collection of science, religion, culture, and procrastination in the form of over-organizing everything.

The first of many to come:

Gawker Artist, Dr. T F Chen.
Category: Culture

After reading Francis Schaeffer's The God Who is There, I have found modern art and culture far more interesting. I used to enjoy nice looking art, but rarely took a liking to the edgier stuff. With Schaeffer's perspective of what artist's like Van Gogh and Picasso were thinking and what this logical implications of the views they were expressing were, I have found a new desire to understand their perspective so that I can help people find what they are looking for.

Back to Doc Chen, the guy makes some really neat art. I like it. I like it for two reasons: A. It is aesthetically pleasing. B. It is designed to communicate something meaningful. While I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions that Dr. Chen makes, or the solutions he is suggesting, I feel the need that he is addressing. He has established a philosophy that is very interesting, though I haven't found it to be complete. I think he makes a good step towards truth in his "Five Dimensional Cultural Philosophy."

However, from a few minutes of googling to find out about his religious stance, I uncovered a discrete association of Dr. Chen and the Unification Church, which has some rather erroneous doctrine about Zachariah (John the Baptist's father) being the biological father of Jesus (making Jesus an illegitimate child). While this religious organization is concerned with the idea of love, I'm afraid that they're leadership is not in touch with reality, or truth for that matter.

While I hold love to be supremely valuable, I also value the truth. Both can (actually, they must) coexist within the same worldview. I do understand why Chen would be drawn to such a group, as they have an overarching desire to accept and tolerate people from various cultures.

ahh, I better stop here or I won't be able to sleep! I'll save it for another post.

12 September 2007

Relevant vs. Relative

I've been thinking about the difference between relevant and relative lately, particularly with regards to the Church. There's a lot of buzz (from what I can tell via the Internet) in the Church today regarding the way that some churches are "doing church." (Surprise, surprise. We've been doing that for Christianity's whole existence.) I'm noticing a few things: 1) parachurch organizations, 2) Emergent churches, 3)the mainstream response to both.

So the whole parachurch thing, I don't know how I feel about it. I can see the need, and the benefit they have, but I also understand the feeling that some of these organizations take away from the role of the local church. On the whole, I think they are a good thing that should work in conjunction to local churches in a way that allows the church to take ownership of the program that the parachurch is promoting/doing. This would make parachurches something that sharpened as iron sharpens iron the local church, which, at times, seems rather dull these days.

The Emergent church movement. I've read some particularly malicious things about this. Which leads me to believe that there is probably something God wants us to learn from this movement. I've read a few books by authors that get grouped within this group (some by association to the movement, some by similarity of thought). While I'm not so keen on throwing out some of the aspects of the modern church in favor of a church adept to ministering in the postmodern world, I do think that the movement has some ideas that are on target.

One such idea is a redefinition (maybe re-terming is more appropriate) of the "saved" or "born again" label. I would identify myself as both saved and born again to the "Christian-ese" speaker, but to postmodern "outsiders" I would be careful to make sure that the terms mean the same thing to both of us.

This is an example of a bigger problem with modern Christianity. We have isolated ourselves in a sub-culture. There are wonderful aspects to this sub-culture, but the bottom line is that it cripples our effectiveness because we don't know how to operate outside of it. One of the ways that we are particularly unable to operate outside of our Christian sub-culture is communication. Particularly in a spiritual context. Going back to the example: [conversation to you, a fellow Christian] I say "saved" you think "follows the teachings of Jesus, therefore going to heaven." [conversation with a postmodern non-Christian] I say, "saved" he thinks "judgemental, exclusive, and self righteous."

So what if we re-term our speech? Will that make us un-biblical? To abandon terms coined by people that lived in the past 200-300 years? Sounds to me like that's the same sort of thinking that people had after reading Martin Luther's 95 theses, or some people have in regards to using something other than the King James Version.

Really, what I'm starting to think is that the reactionary modern church might be the ones doing the real damage. Sure, they talk about sin being evil and bad, bad, bad for you. But does all of this talk make them less of sinners? I'm seeing a lot of reflections of the Pharisees in this sort of thinking. Will telling people that sin is bad really help them not sin, or will it make them sin more by hiding or not admitting their sin. You can't hide a wound and expect it to heal itself, it will only get infected. Why would we think that communicating to people that having a spiritual wound is unacceptable would cause them to bring it out in the open where they can get it treated? I think it will convince them of this:

"Even though this spiritual wound hurts, and might be killing me, I can't afford to let others see it and risk the rejection. I'll hide it and try to suture it myself. Instead of going where I can get antibiotics (since it might cost me the shallow and ineffective fellowship that I get), I'll pour my own household cleaners and chemicals on it to try to kill the infection. Maybe that will work."

I'm actually impressed with how well we do suture ourselves, or at least keep the old scars covered, but wouldn't it be better if we could make each other feel like we were a safe group to get help from? This is what I propose we do: start being like Jesus. Not the Jesus that would never swear or have a negative thought (although we should strive for that), but the Jesus that loves people that need it. Remember this line, "It's not the healthy that need a physician..."? We are the doctors. Do we know how to triage patients, because I think we live in an emergency room full of deathly ill people that need doctors, and they need them now. Should we be treating headaches, bellyaches, and sore throats or internal bleeding, broken bones, cancer, removing cataracts, and building prosthetics. How is our bedside manner with the patients that might want to walk out of our clinic, carrying their own severed limb, compared to the ones that come back every Sunday? Maybe we should love a little differently than we do.

But I said I was going to write about the difference between relevant and relative. The difference is this, if the Gospel (which is "the kingdom of God is at hand") isn't relevant, then it isn't going to make sense. You have to make the words fit the context. Relevant is when what you say out loud produces a picture in the other-half-of-the-conversation's mind that is at least similar to the one in your own. Relative is when you marginalize the truth for the sake of making that picture acceptable in someone else's mind. HUGE DIFFERENCE! The gospel isn't "be a good person and go to heaven", but it's also not "just say Jesus, I'm a sinner, and You're the way to heaven, and I believe in You." It's "Jesus is real. He is showing you how to live today, right now, right here, a hora. He's not teaching you the best way to get what you want. Follow His example, which is in accordance with the way He made you to work, and guess what? You will work! and at the end of it, you get to enjoy life with Him just like He intended!!!"

The thing is, you can't really say that and it make sense to a person if you live like most Christians live. Why? Because they don't see how Christians are like Jesus. They see Christians like televangelists or as an exclusive club that doesn't even have any benefits until after you die. It's less appealing than saving for retirement is to the average college senior!!!

I think it's time that we started taking righteousness seriously and pursuing it rather than the imitation of it. I think it's time that we started taking evangelism seriously and meeting people where they are instead of letting them be in our club if they ask nicely. I think it's time that we started taking love seriously and not just reciprocating it when we feel obligated. I think it's time that we started taking Jesus seriously. The kingdom of God is at hand, remember?

01 September 2007

Cheshire Home for the Handicapped

Today I went with Lorah and a few others from the ship to Cheshire Home for the Handicapped. It was a great experience. I enjoyed it tremendously and my time there felt eerily natural.

The people living at the Cheshire Home are severely handicapped. Half of them don't have the capacity to use the toilet, only two of them can walk, several of them cannot communicate in any evident manner at all, this includes hitting things.

It may seem strange that I would say that I enjoyed visiting people that have such a difficult time interacting with other people. It wasn't, it was one of the most natural experiences I've had working with the Liberian people. I think it's because they don't talk about the war all of the time. They might remember the war, and how bad things were then, but I think that they have such a hard time with life as it is, that the war isn't their excuse for how hard life is. They just know that life is hard.

Really, it almost makes me feel dirty for how little I appreciate what I've got. How about you?