---Gatorade commercial
A man stood up in an international missions meeting and said to everyone solemnly:
“My tribe says that the journey is as important as the destiny.”
We were at an international executive meeting of the largest missions organization of the world. I had an invitation to join the international leadership for a few meetings and I would come to it from my dirty road on the Amazon to attend the meeting wherever they were held: Lausanne, London, Dallas. It was not a comfortable environment for me, a 3rd world woman. I made my presence less awkward in my own mind, convincing myself that I was some kind of indigenous heroine representing the poor in the middle of all the well-dressed male mission executives.
On this occasion, the man who was talking was a Pacific Islander. I felt uncomfortable with his dramatic presentation. Neither his self-important presentation, or the metaphorical proverb recitation were necessary. In my opinion, in order to contribute he had be less of a Sioux smoking his peace pipe, and more western. “Making a theatrical gesture was not going to help the western candidates present understand anything of “our”world,” I thought.
Evil me did not like the display of nativeness. It was enough that we had different skin color. We didn’t need to dress in ethnic costume. To me, a woman in her early thirties, breast-feeding a baby during the meeting (awkward), having to carry the gender difference was heavy enough. I refused to be branded like a stereotypical “native.” We, the “natives,” had thick accents, nappy hair, smells other than French perfume, we show our naked breasts. We commit sexual immorality, we get caught in financial scandals. Our theology sometimes is questionable and always too emotional. We are here as pets, not as partners.
My approach in those white male-dominated meetings, was to try to be smarter than John Stott himself. I would try to speak very cleverly. Never showing my latin-ness, my so called “nativeness”. “C’mon guys, let’s be productive contributing as equals, and not make our ethnic differences stand in the way.”
What I did not realize then was that the founder of our organization had a different idea. I was slow to understand that I was there not to be clever like a wanna-be Ivy League parrot. He called me there because I was myself, with my dirty feet and messy hair. The islander who spoke was there because he was Maori. As a Maori he had all the right to say Maori things and they were going to be taken as such.
The founder was purposefully breaking the white hegemony of the mission by inviting all of us, different people, to the first layer of leadership. He did not want a parochial mission but a global one. The big Maori guy exposed to the rest of the organization our well-disguised diversity. He was a full native, with all the gala, the protocol, the ceremonies that it included. To be a militant for a cause is not the same as being the cause itself. I was as close to the natives as Donald Trump is to the poor. I am a militant for the indigenous cause but I am not an indigenous myself, neither is my thinking.
The Maori was focused on the journey. He displayed the protocol and solemnity of his nativeness without fear or embarrassment of any kind . He understood the value of all. In the ceremonial language of Polynesia, concepts are communicated through dance and rituals. The glory, the honor, and the endurance of all generations before them are present in the chants and dances. They are not performances but a way of life, a way to make the intangible spiritual world close to our touch.
When the “awkward”Maori became the international president of the global organization, I had an epiphany. I understood the value of plurality through his chant. I knew then, that we were on the way to become a true international organization. We had broken the white protocol of rational discourse and entered the mysterious land of rituals and ceremonies. We had replaced the cold talks and strategic plans with dancing. Soon we would be under way to replace the exclusion with embrace.
Unfortunately many evangelical groups do not see cultural contextualization as a good thing. We get stuck in the format of our own western rites and protocols. We think we are not compromising the Gospel because somehow our version of it is purer than everyone else’s. Yet, we are equally influenced by destructive ungodly culture.
The present western gospel goes to bed with greed to mistakenly achieve “good” goals. As western evangelicals we prefer having beautiful red velvet chairs in our churches than to have real relationships. Our theological discourse still addresses the mind of the society of the 17th century, but our morals are very post-modern. The personality driven religious leaders trade personal charisma for real guidance, and the nauseating self-involvement of “normal” evangelical Christianity follows the rules of the day. Our theology might excel in systematic logic, but our morality is contaminated. That is the sad picture of western Christianity.
As the Maoris leader said: “The journey is as important as the destiny.” It is required of us not just to arrive at results, but to have an honorable journey there. There is no honor in walking alone.
My son Samuel singing Adriana Calcanhoto.
LaVera Betts was an American missionary from Wycliffe Bible Translators. She was short in stature, short in hair but large at heart. She was almost 80 years old and had lived in the jungles of Brazil for more than 45 years when she had had a stroke in her small wooden house in Amazonian city of Porto Velho. She was transported for treatment to São Paulo, 4,000 miles away. For a few weeks, accompanied by her fellow worker in Bible Translation and best friend Helen, she fought for survival.
Meanwhile in Porto Velho a party was taking place. It was a crazy conference/party that our local mission had decided to host. Indigenous Indians from more than 50 tribes came to enjoy a week of fellowship and good food in my back yard. A big tent was set up for 2,500 people. Several cows were killed and donated to us by friends of the mission. A lot of indigenous preachers, singers, dancers came from all over to enjoy the fellowship. It was during the days of the party that Helen called with news from Sao Paulo. LaVera had die the night before.
Alan Lea came to me and asked: “Could you say something about her during the meeting today?” Mr. Lea was the director of Wycliffe Bible Translators, our next door neighbors in Porto Velho, and co-hosts of the party.
LaVera was not married and did not leave any close relatives. She had outlived everyone close to her. In a few months, she would have to go to compulsory retirement in a home for missionaries somewhere in the US. She would have to live there among complete strangers until her death. LaVera and Helen, her dear Canadian work partner for many years, were dreading the eminent separation from each other and from the missionary field they called home.
“She is gone, dead, and now what?” A single missionary lady whispered to me in great pain; “Braulia it is so sad, what do we do with her body?” This was more than just a question, it was an outcry. LaVera had dedicated almost her entire life to the Tenharim Indians of the south Amazon basin. She lived in a simple wooden house without any extra comfort other than a hot shower and a fan when she came to town. Now she would be buried in an unknown cemetery in Sao Paulo, far away. And after Helen returned to her home in Canada, no one in Sao Paulo would know who LaVera was. No one would ever honor her grave with flowers, or recite poems or Bible verses to the wind in memory of her.
I thought to myself that it would not be difficult to gather some money to get her remains back here to the Amazon, so the people who loved her would have a chance to remember her. Before I had a chance to suggest that somebody remembered that LaVera had left clear instructions. She had said that if she died in Sao Paulo, she wanted to be buried there. She did not want to disturb anyone and be a burden after her death. I was a little put off by this cold pragmatism, but it came from somebody who always knew who she was and what she wanted. LaVera was a citizen of the kingdom. She had no earthly ties, nor belonged to any people group. When she embraced the missionary call, she understood that God had called her to give up everything for Him. And that’s what she did.
It was not because she loved the Brazilians, that she lived in Brazil. What moved her was her love for Jesus. It was not because she loved the Tenharim people that she had spent an immeasurable amount of tiresome hours translating the New Testament into their language. She did it because she loved Jesus. Her love for Jesus was reflected in her love for others.
As Christians we believe in eternal life. But loneliness scares us. LaVera’s grave was going to be lonely like she was in life.
I walked slowly to the tent, and just before the end of the meeting somebody asked me to talk about LaVera. Even though I was not very close to her, I was asked to speak because most of her American friends felt too emotional to say anything. So I stood up on the wooden platform, staring out at the tent filled with indigenous faces to pay a last tribute to LaVera.
The short and dark Tenharim Indians gathered around me singing in their language. They sang a song that LaVera would have understood had she been here. They finished in tears, reminding everyone they had the Bible now only because of the effort of that short lady.
I started my piece, mumbling some nonsense between tears, thinking to myself, that to be a Christian after all is to be able to say: “We enter this world with nothing, and can take nothing with us. We are not from here. This is not our home, it never was nor ever will be. He is our one and only gain.”
LaVera Betts
Without a Land
Without a people
Without a family
Her legacy: Jesus
We walked down the red dirt road that led to the bank of the Negro River. We left Manaus, traveling to the city of Manacapuru, located in the junction of the Solimões and the Negro, the huge rivers that create the Amazon. A rusty barge anchored on the bank was being loaded. Dozens of cars, trucks, were driving in slowly. In the middle of the moving vehicles a great number of people walked on board, carrying pieces of dusty luggage, coolers to sell popsicles and sodas, bikes, and big bags of manioc flour.
The Amazonian peasant is tenacious in his conquest of daily life. The women were dressed in minimal shorts and lycra tops that revealed excess fat, saggy bellies hanging over their waists, (so much for the miracle of acai berries). Sweat percolated indecorously in unthinkable parts. The men also wore synthetic fabric, bright-colored soccer jerseys in contrast to their skin. Marked with mosquitoes bites, they looked more like bright leathery reptiles than human beings.
Dizzy from the intense movement of people and things, I looked for a place to sit down. The only pleasure that I foresaw in my day was the river, flowing below us in its majestic blackness. To leave the metropolis of Manaus brought me a kind of relief from the urban chaos, the excessive heat, the illogical-city of the impossible agglomeration of uneducated people. I had like d Manaus at some point. Now what once was a beautiful town had became a giant ugly, adult city. Manaus struck me as a crooked, dirty, city-erotica looking for its reason to exist, unleashing exacerbated sensuality.
The Christian population only grown to be a relatively large percentage of the city in the past 10 years. Now most of them adhered to the general sexual promiscuity building gigantic phallic temples and prostituting themselves to obtain scandalous financial orgasms.
I was accompanying a couple from America who came to share in Brazil about marriage. I was the translator. I knew the couple only through their story. The wife had an affair, got pregnant and was forgiven by the husband. The redemption became their main story and ministry. The blonde American woman wearing khaki shorts sat by me. I was overwhelmed by an inevitable weariness, late night flight and intense heat, I could not get into the conversation. Finally after one hour the barge reached the other bank of the river, we proceeded in a van to conquer 100 miles of total jungle to reach the city of Manacapuru.
The group checked into a cheap motel. There was only enough time to shower and dress in church-like costumes. I was wearing sandals smaller than my feet, but in spite of the pain, that I knew was going to last for the whole evening, I had to pretend that I was gracefully loving the people that extended their sweaty hands to us. I looked around and all I could see was the kitsch drawings on the church walls, the colors that didn’t match, the gigantic sound equipment that was going to hurt my ears.
The worship time started after a long introduction by the local pastor. Then, an awkward-looking guy with effeminate gestures took the pulpit and started singing and encouraging the people to follow. The chorus started, everyone singing in unison, songs of the latest evangelical fashion, praises of how God satisfied emotions, and God appears to be erotically taken by humanity.
When they started on the second song the unexpected happened. I began to feel God close to me. I felt the ballerina God calling me to dance with him in the beauty of that jungle church. I saw in the worship leader a captivating redeemed smile, full of grace and love. I saw the Christians not minding his past, but allowing him to lead them in the most unlikely social construct.The mayor of the small town, the pastor born in a river village who was back from studying in the big city; the university girl visiting her parents, the ex-prostitutes, the poor river-bank women, housewives of the rubber gatherers and wood cutter men, everybody together singing about God’s love.
The American couple took the pulpit. I was the Brazilian voice of the lady screaming to the church: - “I have committed the sin of adultery. “ The husband shout teachings about grace, forgiveness and the love of God that is able to restore people and rebuild destroyed families. The cultural differences faded away in the light of the family drama repeated since the world became world. His story was about the pain of the betrayed husband, who tried to react in the way he thought a man should. However He found a love in God that made all the difference and he yielded to God’s idea of what a man really is. He humbled himself, accepted his wife back, covered her sin under a blanket of grace. Everything was old and new at the same time. Grace became man and made his way into someone’s story.
After the service we left the church to eat fish together with our new friends - everybody - Americans and Brazilians laughing with the stories of the pastor and his group. The next morning we traveled back to a Manaus that did not seem to me so illogical anymore. Even the granite covered Christian temples did not look so vain. They became in my eyes rescuing places, buildings that reflected the greatness of grace and forgiveness. All that the city-erotica needs is love. Through my new eyes everyone had a unique beauty. Every wrinkle told me a story. The sun was not so intense anymore, the sweat stains on people’s clothes were not so offensive. The rain that fell abundantly to the asphalt that afternoon came straight from the eyes of the Father.
Celebrate the marriage between media and missions
I open my Facebook page and there it is, unavoidable, the Youtube video of the Kony 2012 campaign. It is an impressive media campaign calling for the public opinion in America, trying to turn the attention of the politicians to Uganda. The non-profit organization Invisible Children says that Joseph Kony is a leader of the Ugandan rebel force Lord’s Resistance Army, and has recruited more than 30 thousand child soldiers for his private militia. The video became a case study for social media, achieving more than 40 million views in a matter of days. Look at the article of the WSJ:
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/03/08/kony-2012-how-a-clip-caught-fire/
Kony 2012 is not a video that informs you, it was made to touch you. It stirs up the heroic desire to exterminate injustice that exists in each one of us. There is not a better vehicle than the web today to make social and political causes known, to capture the imagination and passion of the multitudes. Tremendous is the power of campaigns like that today in drawing attention to the invisible, the poor, the slaves the one who are suffering.
Grassroots News International was born out of a genuine desire of a group of YWAMers to empower young people around the world to generate and broadcast news relevant to their lives and communities, without having to depend for that on the big vehicles of media. In its brief existence GNI started capturing the attention of the affluent American and european youth. Many young Christian kids who can afford an IPod could give to it a legitimate use. They can report from their perspective what is happening on the Tsunami in Japan, on a festival of airplanes in Florida, on a tornado disaster in Alabama. Missionary kids, involved with the countries they live in, can be the first ones to report a cholera epidemic or guerrilla struggle about to happen.
However the recently born Grassroots News can do more than that. The 21st century requires new tools for missions. The Christianity that did not see economic needs, political oppression, suppression of citizenship is dead. The religion that grows oblivious to the social circumstances does not have a place anymore in today’s world.
All the changes that the world has been through in the past 20 years, is confronting missions with a need to face the challenge of social transformation as a priority. Proclamation alone will not do the task, if it is not followed by empowerment to see reality transformed. Minority groups, indigenous tribes, impoverished communities, oppressed populations they are all exposed by to the possibility of change. If we do not marry our mission to social relevancy, the Christianity we are taking is going to be innocuous, meaningless.
The Arab Spring has answered the question: what is real citizenship in the 21st century? The conflicts in Egypt were fed in the beginning essentially by social media, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Youtube. It was not the revolution of a heroic minority or a activist group. It became a popular revolt inspired and guided by the internet. I don’t want to discuss the merits or the results of the revolution, but by the way in which it happened. The young people managing the web were the first martyrs.
As Wael Gnomim describes well the internet created a new sort of awareness, a new social conscience that could not tolerate political abuse and dictatorship anymore.
http://www.ted.com/talks/wael_ghonim_inside_the_egyptian_revolution.html
Mass media, free and democratic, made all the difference in this unexpected and amazing political revolution.
How can somebody living under an authoritarian regime sbe a free citizen in the 21st century? Having access to the web. Being able to tell his/her own story. That is the real freedom.
For centuries we stare at systemic injustices with an impotent look. How can I, a simple person, deal with injustices so great, so old, so ingrained in people’s society? I am not a politician. I cannot send my troops in. I cannot raise that much money.
The power of the internet tells me the opposite now. A 24 year student that sees the horror of sexual slavery in America, with the help of her class, makes a documentary, packs a bus, and go to 50 states, making the voice of the prostituted children heard. (Sex and Money: http://sexandmoneyfilm.com/tour/ )
A film director sees the pain of the indigenous tribes that have no alternative but killing their children due to culture or health reasons. He gathers a group of missionaries to tell the story of a child in a docudrama and starts an international campaign that echoes in the UN corridors. (Hakani Campaign: http://www.hakani.org/en/default.asp )
I see the power of media, the power of images and the power of true voices. And then I spread the gift, empowering young people to tell their stories, to share their cry and make their pain heard. That is what our GNI teams are going to be doing next quarter in places like Togo, Gana, India. They will give the local people media-tools that is a type of global citizenship. They are going to go beyond the Kony 2012 campaign, Sex and Money or Hakani. They are going to empower the young people they are training to produce thousands of different campaigns or news, that can generate for them a new and real freedom.
Let’s pray and celebrate our grass-roots news teams, coming out of the Voice for the Voiceless DTS ready to spread freedom, social power, and redemption…
Watch to cry and laugh with him, and go save a life of a child.
To vilify religion is a popular sport these days. The ironic thing is that even religious leaders, pastors and missionaries are acolytes of this sad habit. They are right to a certain degree. Allow me to indulge in badmouthing a little. Some of the public image portrayed by religious people is horrible. It’s shameful for serious Christians to be called the same name as some awfully hypocritical people that carry that name. That is the reason why the fervor against religious sounds so virtuous and the young man in front of a church reciting slam poetry against Christianity and in favor of Jesus poses like a hero to many. I think there is no virtue in this debate.
Maybe the discussion would be at least relevant if there was a possibility for we humans to build any kind of answer to Jesus and his love, without making it a social response. Is there a gospel without “the other”. If the “the other” is present, social culture is there. The debate becomes innocuous when we face this impracticality. The anti-religion discussion does not lead us to anything transformational, but to an excluding arrogance of any given expression, except ours.
What we need today is to take religion seriously. Some protestants who are professional iconoclasts want to make the Christian faith a mere internal experience. They proclaim real spirituality as a perfect abstraction of love. They abstract life in community. The form of the church has being stained and is no longer the ideal structure. They abstract servanthood, worship, the message of salvation and the Word of God. They are not capable though of abstracting me or you, who, by the way, are still very human and full of non-abstract needs.
What we post-modern anti-institutional Christians have to understand is that the pseudo non-form is a form of format. To preach the Gospel without any cultural manifestation, without any institutional proposal is to empty it out, to make it irrelevant, incapable of a dialectic relation with society.
If we go every Saturday night to drink wine and smoke cigars at Mr. Browns’s home, and we discuss God, the Bible, and each other, this is our church. The drinking of wine, and the smoking of cigars becomes our religious practice. The home of Mr. Brown becomes our temple. This is how human beings make culture. We are very arrogant to think that any pseudo-non-form of the religion is better than any other alternatives, contemporaneous or historic.
When we understand this detail about human culture, Christian religion is no more our greatest enemy, but the lack of it. Jesus did not preach a total rejection of any cultural form of religion in the world. He filled the empty forms with grace and meaning. When he did it, he turned the religious establishment upside down, not because he hated them but because he loved. When we understand this love we start to collect grace in the most diverse formats we find around the Christian religious world. We start to feel compassion of the common men who roughly tries to reproduce the sublime in their little strip-mall-store-front churches.
Grace becomes collective history, on a mud and lava rock building that became the first Christian church in the island of Hawaii. A cathedral viewed from far away in a big city, lost in the middle of financial buildings, says to the people that walk by, there is another life, you know? Grace becomes memory in the ancient hymns, becomes bigger when it is beyond me, becomes plural in the Christian service. To deny the importance of the symbols, the sounds, the smells, it is to deny the human condition.
However, it is better to have a religion without being religious. The religious person is the one that makes a god out of the form. I ask if it is not what the ones that protest against religion are doing. The god that they are trying to advocate is so small that it cannot mingle with human history and society and get out clean.
The Word became flesh. In order for him to continue to incarnate today he calls us to him, as we are, cultural beings. Beings that signalize his divine message through ideas, rituals, habits, architectural projects, socialization efforts, talks, preachings, music, songs, paintings and sculptures. Everything that is part of human life can be transformed into the divine message. This process of collective divinization is called religion.
I believe Jesus is bigger than this. He sits down humbly in the lava rock church, or he stands up and sings with a big voice in the cathedral. He is always occupied in touching lives.
real deal AÇAÍ at an Amazon fair.
fresh fish
spices
II
