Good news from your poor neighbours: life-giving rivers from the World Church

Good news from your poor neighbours: life-giving rivers from the World Church

Alan Sharp

Sunesis Ministries Ltd

Good news from your poor neighbours: life-giving rivers from the World Church

© 2015 Alan Sharp.

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Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Douay Rheims version of the Bible, 1899 American edition, which is in the public domain. This edition was photographically reproduced by Tan Books in 1971. Edition used, 2009, Charlotte, NC: St Benedict Press/ Tan Books.

Scripture quotations marked NRSV are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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‘Loose the bands of wickedness, undo the bundles that oppress, let them that are broken go free, and break asunder every burden…. Then … thy justice shall go before thy face…. And thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a fountain of water whose waters shall not fail’ (Is. 58: 6, 8, 11).

‘(T)hese lepers … went into one tent, and ate and drank: and they took from thence silver and gold and raiment…. Then they said one to another, We do not well: for this is a day of good tidings…. (C)ome, let us go and tell it in the king’s court’ (2 Kings 7: 8-9).

‘Justice (is) … shorthand for the intention of God, expressed from Genesis to Revelation, to set the whole world right – a plan gloriously fulfilled in Jesus Christ, supremely in his resurrection (following his victory over the powers of evil and death on the cross) and now to be implemented in the world. We cannot get off the hook of present responsibility … by declaring that the world is currently in such a mess and there’s nothing that can be done about it until the Lord returns’ (Wright, 2011).

‘It is no surprise, then, that most English-speaking people think the New Testament does not say much about justice: the Bibles they read do not say much about justice. English translations are in this way different from translations into Latin, French, Spanish, German, Dutch – and for all I know most languages. The basic issue is well known among translators and commentators. Plato’s Republic, as we all know, is about justice. The Greek noun in Plato’s text that is standardly translated as justice is dikaiosune…. This same dik-stem occurs around three hundred times (233 times, ed.) in the New Testament, in a wide variety of grammatical variants. To the person who comes to the English translation of the New Testament fresh from reading and translating classical Greek, it comes as a surprise to discover that though some of those occurrences are translated with grammatical variants on our word just (e.g. justice, ed.), the great bulk of dik-stem words are translated with grammatical variants on our word right (e.g. righteousness, ed.)…. The eighth beatitude reads, Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven (NRSV) …. My own reading of human affairs is that righteous people are either admired or ignored, not persecuted: people who pursue justice are the ones who get in trouble…. Righteousness…. in present-day idiomatic English carries a negative connotation. In everyday speech one seldom any more describes someone as righteous; if one does, the suggestion is that he (sic) is self-righteous. Justice, by contrast, refers to an interpersonal situation; justice is present when persons are related to each other in a certain way’ (Wolterstorff, 2010).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction - Laying my cards on the table

Part One – Western engagement with people from the Majority World

1. The West’s economic system that is killing the Majority World

2. Rise of the World Church: challenges for the Western Church

3. The Western Christian missionary movement until independence

4. A common Black experience: post traumatic slave syndrome

5. On becoming the global rich

Part Two – The Bible as seen from the underside of history

6. The Bible doctrine of oppression

7. The Bible doctrine of justice - 1 Old Testament

8. The Bible doctrine of justice - 2 New Testament

9. Can the global rich get to heaven?

Bibliography

Glossary

Index

Table Glossary

Table 1. Proportions of church in Majority World and the West, 1970-2020

Table 2. Renewalists, 1970-2020

Table 3. Christians by continent, 1970-2020

Table 4. Evangelical and pentecostal churches in Tooting, London SW17

Table 5. Evangelicals in England, 1998-2012

Table 6. Pentecostals and Charismatics as a proportion of Protestants

Table 7. Oppression of Israel/Judah in Old Testament times

Table 8. Vocabulary for oppression in relation to poverty in the Old Testament

Preface

‘I have been thinking about the validity … of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted … as ‘knowledge’. This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence – which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture – has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of the culture’s literature…. (A) reason for this is the pattern of thinking about racialism in terms of its consequences on the victim…. That well-established study should be joined with another, equally important one: the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it’ (Morrison, 1993; c.f. VanZanten, 2014).

‘Then I go to my brother (the white man, ed.)

And I say, Brother, help me please

But he winds up knockin' me

Back down on my knees’ (Cooke, 1964).

‘When anyone … everywhere commits plunder … when he distresses the innocent, all cry out, How long? … And this feeling, is it not implanted in us by the Lord? It is then the same as though God heard himself, when he hears the cries and groanings of those who cannot bear injustice’ (Calvin, 1986, my italics).

In this book I explore what some implications might be of possibly God’s biggest work in recent generations: to move the centre of the world church from the West to the Majority World, the people who are the majority of the world. What can we learn from Black, Asian and Latin American Christians and from women generally about God, Jesus, the Bible and life? Does the Bible, for example, help us understand what to do about global injustice? Could there be things that the West has missed and been blind to for generations? Might this even be a matter of life and death?

In this preface I show why white people need to learn from Majority World people, how I developed an anti-racist identity, the realities of oppression and racism and concerns that English Bible translators have downplayed the word ‘justice’.

I am a white, modern man. When I make comments about white people, I point the finger at myself first. With respect to my country context, I live in UK, a country where the five richest families have more money than the poorest 20% of the population, or 12.6 million people. Meanwhile, in 2012 nearly three out of every ten people in UK fell below the standard of basic material needs set by UK society as a whole, twice as many people as did so in 1983. With austerity having hit the poorest hardest since 2010 (Oxfam 2014), many Black, Asian and Latin American people in Britain have joined other groups in protesting about how they have been hit hard under austerity (www.thepeoplesassembly.org.uk ).

Further, one in ten people in Britain are now millionaires, thanks to the increased market value of their house. So we live among two Britains - the haves and the have nots – which might indicate a considerable level of injustice and that the economic system might not be fit for purpose (Lansley and Mack, 2015). Further, Paul Gilroy (2004) comments that many British people still suffer melancholia or sadness about losing an empire. They try to find one way or another to restore British greatness, as far as they are concerned, by trying to return to the time when Britain had an empire, a more mono-cultural Britain before mass immigration, or by defeating the invader in battle, such as by winning a war abroad, or hoping for any success in sport. Gilroy suggests people should recognise the humanity of people of different ethnic backgrounds so as to go beyond feeling sad at what they’ve lost. For Western cultural ideology, see ch. 4 of Changing Generations (from here called CG).

While estimates of Western white people vary between 10 and at most 30% of the world’s population (few countries collect these statistics), and even though they are the most powerful people, it is important to identify what the majority of people in the world really think of white people and why. To help us to discover whether our own thinking on different issues has errors in it, Andy Hickford (1998) suggests that we need someone from outside our culture to critique our thinking. Hickford suggests white post-moderns can critique white modern, older people. But this suggestion is limited to white, male younger people, since females are not mentioned.

My research has found that we need women to critique men, and Black, Asian and Latin American people to critique white people because they experience what white people do to them every day. Because of the way that oppression works these people are more likely to convey their critique of white males in what they write than in what they say, since history shows they are more likely to suffer if they say what they think to white people (Haley, 1991). Therefore, in order to provide the best critique of white, male thinking like my own, most of this book is in the words written by women and Black, Asian and Latin American people.

Some Christians may wonder why I’m quoting from a range of people, rather than relying on my own understanding of the Bible. John Stott (1992) emphasises ‘double listening’: listening to God’s word and to non-Christians around you. Mark Noll (1994, 2014), going further, notes the presence of anti-intellectualism at the root of both American white evangelicalism and American democracy generally (c.f. Hofstadter, 1962): a situation perhaps similar to that in UK. The argument with respect to faith goes that faith is not spread by reasoning and learning. Through the action of God, it seems to be that the less educated, less learned people are those who spread the faith. This can encourage the view that ignorance is a better quality than learning.

This leads on to a conviction that the least learned person can answer from the ‘Truth’ that they have learned when any person comes to them with a view that they do not agree with, without their needing to engage with issues and views in academia and other books that challenge and often disagree with how that Christian might see the issue. One result of this anti-intellectualism is the failure of Christians to engage with the issues people raise who believe differently from how they do, many of which issues are debated in academia. So, movements such as reason, science and secularism have had national and international effects as Christians failed to engage with them, or did so in a way that resulted in more learned people laughing at Christians’ reasons for rejecting what to learned people seemed genuine concerns and alternative explanations of what is happening.

Noll calls for a return to the approach of Jonathan Edwards who 350 years ago engaged effectively with academic views that challenged established Christian approaches. We are seeing some responses to this call at last today in that, for example, some of the most famous philosophers alive today, such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, are Christians, as is Britain’s theologian Tom Wright.

I come from a conservative evangelical background, where the focus is on sharing your faith with people who have never heard of Jesus. But the less confessed assumption being made at the same time is that this faith sharing assumes that you are living according to the faith and practice of the Bible. But what if you found out that much of your lifestyle had been built on principles that contradicted the Bible and put other people off from coming to faith (e.g. white supremacy, white privilege, whiteness, white racial identity, see CG chs. 4-6)? I spent some time with Black, Asian and Latin American majority churches in London, including trying to learn what was on their agendas. This book eventually arose out of a journey that I took as a result of my work, like many other people, and as shown in the literature (Helms, 1990; Cross, 1991; Thandeka, 1999), in moving from a traditional white racial identity to a white anti-racist identity through a six stage process.

In the pre-contact stage, I saw myself as ‘just a British guy’. In the disintegration stage, I saw systematic discrimination by white people against Black, Asian and Latin American people was causing their poverty, unemployment, criminalization, etc. I tried to disassociate myself from white people and wanted Black and Asian people to adopt me. I felt guilt and shame about white oppression and white privilege. In the third stage, that of disintegration, I blamed Black and Asian people for causing their own problems, insisting that they should be able to achieve anything if they tried hard enough. In the fourth stage of being pseudo-independent, I was unsure of how to deal with my white privilege. In stage five, immersion-emersion, I tried to adopt a positive self-concept as a white person who is anti-racist. In the sixth and final stage, autonomy, I emerged from the process having developed a positive white identity based on equality, rather than on superiority, committed to act with people of colour to advocate for justice and empowerment, to dismantle white privilege and work for full inclusion (CG, ch. 5).

To understand how to improve in our learning from Majority World people, it is important to understand what encounters between Western white people and people of Majority World heritage, Black, Asian and Latin American people living in the West, are often like in UK. I was at a discussion in late 2014 about how far people have come in UK in addressing racism. A white person from an anti-racist organization, so some might consider them a ‘liberal’, thought that UK had come a long way, that there were very few examples of racism occurring today and that Black people shouldn’t use race to blame other people if they hadn’t done so well economically in UK. As far as gentrification of poor areas was concerned, they understood this as a good thing: that it was primarily the regeneration of an area that had little or no value economically. That through building new homes and developing a new shopping centre, new jobs and prosperity could be brought to an area.

In response, Black people said that to say that there were few examples of racism today in UK displayed the views of middle-class people who were insulated by their lifestyle and socio-economic experience from daily experiences of institutional and grassroots racism. Their experience was that in a recession Black people are the first to be made redundant and the last to be recruited when the economy starts to grow again. That it only took one government to try to ignore and deny the importance of racism for many of the previous gains to be lost (Jasper, 2013).

Black people said they still experience discrimination through police stop and search, through employers being less willing to employ them for jobs that value their skill levels, that their children were more likely to lose heart for self-improvement at school, that people had to fight for fair treatment in mental hospitals, that imprisonment of young Black men is even greater as a proportion of people of their background than in the US