c. 2000 Religion News Service
(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.)
“Take up the White Man’s burden. Send forth the best ye breed. Go, bind your sons to exile to serve your captive’s need …” _ Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden”
(UNDATED) A number of years ago, I was serving without ministerial title in a fledgling urban mission in my neighborhood. The pastor of our church, a young black man with tremendous zeal, often joined forces with colleagues from white, suburban churches to conduct evangelism programs in the area around our church.
On one such occasion, the pastor of the visiting church, having no knowledge of either the neighborhood we were canvassing or my ministry experience (prior to joining the mission, I had served for nearly five years on the ministerial staff of another church), presumed to give me my marching orders about evangelizing the community in which I lived.
Suffice it to say, I was insulted because this pastor’s actions were condescending, presuming both a knowledge and authority he didn’t have.
That clergy can sometimes be arrogant and patronizing _ even in their encounters with each other _ is not news. Nor is it particularly noteworthy that prejudice _ often masked as concern _ is often the subtext for such behavior.
What strikes me, however, is that in a period characterized by political correctness, and punctuated by declarations of repentance and forgiveness between white and black, Occidental and Oriental, the biblical concept of reconciliation must still be lived out on a day-by-day, encounter-by-encounter basis.
In no arena is there a greater need for reconciliation than in the Christian church. It is a curious irony of human nature that the same people through whom reconciliation is supposed to come _ having been given the “ministry of reconciliation,” according to St. Paul _ actually need reconciliation themselves.
But it remains true. Recent conversations with Christian friends, both white and black, in disparate locations around the country, bear witness to this truth.
Desirous of doing good in their respective areas of the Lord’s vineyard, they have been stung by the paternalism of colleagues and superiors who, like the pastor who approached me, inexplicably assumed a knowledge of and authority over ministries that could not be justified. In each case, the disputes reached the breaking point and the parties went their separate ways, leaving the ravages of their ministries in their wake.
To the unchurched, for whom revelations of such behavior provide sufficient reason to remain unchurched, this is a bad witness. Many rightly wonder how the church _ that is, not the institution but the people _ can be an agent of God’s love to unbelievers when that love is so often missing among the believers. Did not Jesus say to his followers, “This is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you” (John 15:12)?
How was this love expressed? In Jesus’ willingness to die for us, not because we were righteous _ we weren’t _ but because our salvation required it.
Oh, that Christians would show such love toward one another. Then we might have something to share with the rest of the world.
DEA END RNS
