"Give We Sense": Seeking to be Wise in a Shrinking World

Plenary address, Day of Common Learning
Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA

October 17, 2006

Thank you very much for that very generous introduction. If you don't mind, I'd like to have a copy sent to my mother. My friends, it is an honor and a delight to be asked to address you on this Day of Common Learning. We live in uncommon times, and we need to spend the days we have in a learning community seeking wisdom for what God is calling us to do. We live in a world that is full of surprises. Who would have thought, for example, that Oakland and Detroit would be playing for the American League crown? But more seriously, if there is one phrase to capture the spirit of our times, I would vote for this one: "Who would have thought?" Perhaps life holds surprises only for us older people, who have been around long enough to see strange twists in history, but we have seen enormous surprises in the last 20 years. Who would have thought that the formidable communist regimes of the Soviet Union and its satellites would suddenly collapse? Who would have thought that the Chinese, who were devastated body and soul during their violent Cultural Revolution, would today be leading the world in economic growth rates and eagerly consuming western ideas as well as products? Who would have thought that Islam would experience a major resurgence? Who would have thought that violent radicals, acting in the name of Islam, (and illegitimately so, most Muslims would agree) would threaten the peace and security of millions worldwide?

Five years out from the 9/11 tragedy, our talking heads, blog sites and thought magazines are awash with chatter about the surprises of our day: the impact of economic and cultural globalization, of Islamic radicalism, and of the rise of China, the new economic superpower. I acknowledge the importance of these themes, but as a historian of the modern era, I am dismayed to see that most of this talk ignores one of the greatest and most surprising changes in the world of recent times, one that reaches across regions and civilizations. Resurgent Islam--we hear lots about that. But until very recently, an even greater religious change has been ignored. Christianity has become pervasive. Today it is a worldwide faith. This new fact amounts to a seismic shift going on in the world's religious commitments. The vast majority of Christians live not in Europe and North America, as is commonly supposed, but in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific region. Today, Christianity is predominantly a non-western religion. Who would have thought?

For the past thousand years, Christianity and Christian consciousness have been tied to Europe, and our understanding here in the global North of what it means to be Christian bears the deep stamp of European culture. But today Christianity is in deep decline in Europe, and it is rising elsewhere. What does this great fact mean to us assembled here today? I submit to you that this change is huge; it rocks our world, but it does so in God's surprising ways, not the ways we might expect. Before I offer some suggestions about what this big surprise might mean for us here, let me briefly outline the contours of this great change.

From Christendom to World Christianity

Perhaps the best way to start is to look at some worldwide religious developments over time. In 1900, 80 percent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and North America. A century later, nearly 70 percent of the world’s Christians now live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Christian adherence and vitally are waning in the North, and they are rising in the South and East. In Great Britain, for example, only about 1 million of the 26 million members of the Church of England attend on Sundays. In Nigeria, there are now 18 million Anglicans, and their churches are packed on Sunday. Half of the world’s Anglicans now live in Africa.

The rise of nonwestern Christianity has come as a huge surprise. Christianity outside of the West was thought to be a product of European imperialism, and it was expected to wither and die in the post-colonial era. Just the opposite happened. Christianity has grown much more rapidly since the end of the colonial empires than during them. Consider the huge change in Africa. In 1900, there were only about 9 million Christians in all of Africa. By 1950, with Africa still mostly under colonial rule, this number had tripled, to about 30 million. By 1970, however, in post-independence Africa, this number nearly quadrupled, to over 117 million. Today, the number has more than tripled again, to an estimated 397 million Christians in Africa. Says historian Philip Jenkins, the Christianization of sub-Saharan Africa is probably "the largest religious change in human history."

Even so, the notion that Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America is a Western import remains strong. When Americans think of Christianity in those lands, we think of it as a missionary product. Western missionaries, religious ideas and media products are indeed flowing freely around the globe, more so than ever before. But so is the new Christianity. It too is a missionary sending faith. The United States still leads the world in mission sending, but the U.S. also receives the largest number of foreign missionaries. A missionary lives down the block from me in Grand Rapids. Antonio Rosario, an Adventist minister from the Dominican Republic, oversees three new Latino congregations in our city.

We Americans think that Christianity elsewhere is a derivative of our own brand of it. But as it takes root in the global south and east, Christianity is being transformed. Never before has the world seen the faith of the Cross expressed in so many languages and cultural forms. Increasingly these facts contradict the assumption that Christianity is a European faith. African Christian scholars, for example, see Christianity as an African religion, not an import. That is the main point of the Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako's stirring and provocative book, Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (University of Edinburgh/Orbis, 1995). Yale historian Lamin Sanneh, a Christian from the Gambia, has an eloquent little book, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Eerdmans, 2003), which portrays a stunning contrast between today's post-Christian West and non-Western Christianity.

Christianity is in fact becoming predominantly non-Western. What ought that fact imply to us? It ought to say, among other things, that what happens in Africa, Asia and Latin America will have a growing influence on what Christianity will be like worldwide. Conversely, what happens in Europe and in North America will matter less. Tite Tienou, the West African theologian who now heads Trinity Evangelical Divinity School near Chicago, insists that “the future of Christianity no longer depends on developments in the North.” Missions historian Andrew Walls concludes that “it is Africans and Asians and Latin Americans who will be the representative Christians, those who represent the Christian norm, the Christian mainstream, of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries.”

Only a few years ago, such assertions would have seemed vastly overblown, but the tragic events of September 11 and the subsequent wars have begun to awaken us to the “globality” of contemporary life. What happens halfway around the globe matters here almost immediately. And one of the surprises is how religious this radically interactive world truly is. The eminent sociologist Peter Berger, formerly a high priest of secularization theory, puts it starkly, “the assumption that we live in a secularized world is false.” He goes on to say that the assumption that “modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion” has proven to be mistaken. Globally interactive modernity has proven to be a powerful vehicle for religious interaction and competitive expansion, as traditional religious and communal boundaries have broken down. The rising Christianity of the south and east is no longer distant or exotic. It is in fact starting to change the whole church, even up here in the North.

Time does not permit me to point out all the ways in which the Christian churches in the global North and worldwide are being changed by the new Christianity, but let me suggest a few of them, briefly. First, one worldwide Christian fellowship after another now has a leader from the global South. The head of the World Council of Churches is Samuel Kobia, a Kenyan Methodist. The executive director of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches is Setri Nyomi, a Ghanaian Presbyterian. The general secretary of the Lutheran World Federation is Ishmael Noko, from Zimbabwe.

Second, the most compelling public leaders and thinkers for the Christian church are beginning to come from the global south and east. If you asked who is the leading Christian public theologian or intellectual 50 years ago, people might say Karl Barth, a Swiss theologian. Today, it is Desmond Tutu, a South African.

Third, Christians from Africa, Asia and Latin America are enlivening Christian witness and fellowship in the global North. The largest congregation in London is headed by a Nigerian Pentecostal. The same is true in Kiev. In the United States, the Catholic Church is being transformed, once again, by immigrants. Three thousand U.S. Catholic parishes now have Spanish-language masses each week. There are three thousand African Christian congregations in Great Britain. Twelve hundred Chinese evangelical congregations now grace the U.S. and Canada. In Grand Rapids, in addition to the burgeoning Latino presence in Catholic and evangelical churches, we have Korean, Cambodian, Kenyan, Sudanese and Ethiopian congregations. Religious demographers tell us that the main reason why Christianity continues to grow in the U.S. is because of immigration.

Fourth, even in our predominantly Anglo churches, we are singing hymns and praise songs from Zimbabwe and Nicaragua and from South Korea. Our youth groups and oldsters too travel on service and witnessing trips to El Salvador, Kenya and the Philippines. We used to hear about the gospel's progress in Africa or Asia from our own missionaries. Today we are as likely to hear the news from African or Asian church leaders themselves. The same globalization that has made our world more radically interactive in business and popular culture is bringing Christianity from the global south and east into increasing interaction with its North Atlantic counterparts.

Re-Orienting Ourselves

It is not difficult to predict, then, that in our North Atlantic world, Christians will more and more take their cues from the parts of the world where Christianity is on the rise, where the churches are becoming movers and shapers in society rather than declining, and where critical and compelling, life-and-death struggles abound. My friends, this is where the main stage for Christianity is today, where the average Christians live and give witness. We stand here on the far northern reaches of a global religious network whose heartlands are to the South and East. There are more Christians in Africa than in North America. Brazil is now the second-largest Protestant nation. China may soon overtake it.

So we need to ask ourselves, what are the most widely practiced forms of Christianity in the world today? Who are the world's average Christians, and what is their life like today? The average Christian in the world today, historian Dana Robert reminds us, is a lady from Africa or Latin America. Her family doesn't have money. Her husband farms, and he scrounges up short-term cash jobs when he can. She tries to sell a few things at the market. The kids don't have their shots and they get sick. She struggles to keep them in school, where there are no textbooks. The political situation is fragile, and the national government doesn't get much done, while local officials demand bribes. Our sister reads her Bible, and its accounts of famine, plagues, poverty, displacement and exile, tyranny, and endemic cronyism and corruption, which seem distant to most of us in the North, are immediately relevant to her. Biblical stories of robbers on the roads, streets full of the crippled and sick, the struggle to pay gouging tax and debt collectors and demanding landlords are foreign to most of us here, but they are familiar to people in the global South. The Bible is their book.

So who is Jesus to our average Christian lady and her family? Certainly he is their personal savior, as North American evangelicals put it. But the defining text for southern Christians in understanding Jesus' ministry is not so much the quiet conversation with Nicodemus in John 3 about being born again. It is Jesus' public inauguration of his ministry in Luke 4, where in his home synagogue he boldly claims in the words of Isaiah that he has come "to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoner and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4:18-19). As the center of Christian adherence and vitality continues to shift southward, it will be only natural for this outlook from the South to gain weight. Voices and perspectives from Europe, Christianity's declining northern margin, will seem less authoritative. This new world Christianity is with us to stay, and it will shape who we are as Christians.

How important is this phenomenon? How much should it matter? We are finding out, in our post-September 11 world, that many things we once thought were distant, exotic, and of peripheral importance matter a great deal. We are discovering, as the American business journalist Tom Friedman put it in a recent book, that "The World Is Flat." We North Americans can have no distance from the rest of the world. Its passions, troubles, and dynamic prospects are immediately our business too.

Not only that, but the time has come for North Americans to listen and to learn from our Christian brothers and sisters who give witness to the faith from the lands to our south and east. That is not easy for us to do. We tend to think of Christianity to the south and east of us being quite fragile, and still dependent on us for help. So we send our missionaries, relief and development workers, and our short-term service teams. We send our money. We send our parachurch superstars, to preach the purpose-driven life. My friends, I don't want to romanticize African, Asian and Latin American Christianity, which certainly has problems and issues of its own. But our brothers and sisters have much to teach us. As the Ugandan Anglican Bishop David Zac Nirinigiye recalled recently, it was so refreshing when a prominent American evangelical pastor came over to Uganda just to be with him, to understand his ministry, to see how he gave witness to the gospel, to learn. So I propose that we do a little learning today from some African Christians.

Give We Sense

Last summer, my wife and I and some friends of ours visited fellow Christians in Sierra Leone, West Africa. We made a few visits in the capital, Freetown, then headed to Kabala, an up-country town far to the north, to visit people in our sister churches there. It was an unforgettable visit, sweet with fellowship and new friendship, and poignant with recognition of all these folk had endured in recent years. We heard a sermon while we were there, by Mr. M.B. Jalloh, on the text of I Kings 3. Its title in Krio, the Leonean's English-derived Creole tongue, was "Give We Sense." Mr. Jalloh told his people that just as God wanted to know the desires of Solomon's heart and to grant him his deepest request, God wants to know our hearts and wants to give us what we need. Like Solomon, we should be asking God for "sense," for wise and discerning hearts. It was a message I will never forget, made all the more profound by the context.

With bright sandy beaches and lush green peaks and plains, Sierra Leone can look like paradise. But in recent years, Sierra Leone has been a living hell. From 1991 to 2000, it was wracked by a brutal and meaningless civil war, fed by illegal drug and diamond trading. Gangs of rebels, often young boys who had been kidnapped, brutalized and kept high on drugs, sucked the life out of villages and terrorized the inhabitants, raping and maiming them, then torching their homes and moving on. After years of violence and insincere peace talks, a British invasion in 2000 quickly ended the rebellion, and for the next five years, a U.N. peacekeeping force occupied the country. Poorly supplied, underpaid and undisciplined, many of the peacekeepers made their way by extortion. Villagers were not sorry to see them go.

Now, six years past the end of the fighting, the country still struggles to recover. Freetown, the capital city on the coast, is swollen to three times its prewar population. The city has no electrical power, and the water system is dangerously close to failure. The strain of staying alive is evident on people's faces. Up country, resilient farming people are trying to rebuild their lives. They are putting food on their plates, but the schools are overcrowded and poorly supplied, burned-out modern homes and businesses often get replaced only with mud-brick traditional dwellings, and a generation of teens and young adults face life without the ability to read or write. Kids have no shots, and many suffer with measles and malaria. The average life expectancy is about 40.

So if you were in their situation, what would you ask God to give you? Surely, people of faith in Kabala ask God for help all the time. They pray, fervently, for their daily rice, and for the rain and seed and health and strength to raise it. Children fall sick and there is no medicine; parents plead with the Lord to heal them. Yet here in this biblical story, God comes and asks what Solomon wants, and Mr. Jalloh assures his audience that God approaches them, too, saying, "Ask for whatever you want me to give you." Jalloh tells them that he struggles with Solomon's answer. There is so much that we need, he says, that we do not have. A long life, some material blessings, some protection from those who would do us harm. But Solomon asks for a discerning heart, for the wisdom to distinguish what is right from what is wrong, for the sake of justice and good order in the land. Mr. Jalloh pleads with his hearers to ask God for the same thing: "Give we sense!" If we ask and receive that from God, he says, then God promises that the rest will follow.

So what we saw and heard among this movement of new Christians in up-country Sierra Leone was really amazing. In a land where the task of rebuilding is so immense, and the daily struggle to make it is so challenging, here were Christian brothers and sisters, some of whom could not read and write, asking for wisdom and discernment. This was big-picture thinking of an amazing quality. Indeed, it was wisdom born, I believe, out of the experience of extreme distress and the meltdown of government and the breakdown of social norms. People had learned, through it all, to have radical trust in God. Here were up-country, village people, trusting God's word, and coming up with wisdom that on a secular level it has taken decades for the Africa studies experts to discover. What does Africa need? After fifty years of opinions regarding the emerging nations of Africa, the experts are finally saying something quite basic. Africa needs wise rule--good governance, transparency, accountability, and discernment--for administering justice and promoting the common good.

Our Christian brothers and sisters in up-country Sierra Leone seem to know those things intimately. And they were bold to take it upon themselves, as New Testament people of God, as agents of God's kingdom, to ask collectively for what the Old Testament portrays as the privilege of a king. Not "give me sense," but "give we sense." In an amazing coincidence, our pastor back home in Grand Rapids preached on the same text a month later. It was a good sermon, but the focus was entirely different. It was on our individual needs and experience, all about "my God and me." Our Leonean brothers and sisters were thinking in much more collective and communal terms. "Give we sense." They know what we need to rediscover, my colleagues. We are in this struggle for God's reign together. We need to think and pray and act in together terms.

I am too much the novice and the foreigner to know with any certainty what wise and discerning people should decide to do in up-country Sierra Leone to make things better. But what I saw these Christian people doing was deeply impressive. We met a lady named Kumba Sesay, who has taken in 29 widows and orphans, provided them with food and shelter, and helped the children go to school. Kumba has been taking reading classes herself, humbly providing a good example to others. Her husband, Joseph Sesay, is a leader in a Christian community development agency that the missionaries from Grand Rapids had been forced to leave during the war. It is performing well under Leonean leadership and is now taking on projects of national scope, including one to put deep wells and sanitary latrines in 100 towns and villages; and another to provide school fees and adult literacy classes to thousands of girls and young women. These initiatives seemed to be taking place according to a high level of wisdom--conferring with and deferring to local authorities, and involving local people in the planning, execution and long-term management of projects. God was granting our Leonean friends their request. He gave them sense, and as a result, we can hope, the material blessings of longer life, a bountiful supply of goods, and domestic tranquility might multiply for them and for their troubled land.

So God allowed us to see our brothers and sisters at work and in thought in Sierra Leone, and it blessed us in ways beyond our imagining. Africa is now one of the great heartlands of world Christianity, and the people we met there are now the world's average Christians. Their way of reading the Bible and discerning its message is now among the 'normal' ways in which God's word comes to believers today. That can be a tough thing for northern Christians to acknowledge. Much more rapidly than many of us well-meaning but patronizing northern Christians can accept, we are hearing powerful and authoritative words from the southern church. There is a cliché making the rounds, even repeated by some African spokesmen, that the church in Africa is "a mile wide and a foot deep." African Christianity has its problems, but usually when I hear this phrase, I think it applies more closely to Christianity here in the North. If only we could make half the difference in our societies today that we saw God's faithful doing in up-country Sierra Leone this summer. Lord, give we sense.

And what would some God-given sense show us? I am still praying for it myself, so I can't presume to tell you in detail. But in brief and broad-brush terms, a discerning heart and mind, one that is attuned to God's worldwide activity and purposes, would surely show us these three things:

Three Things to Learn

1. The world we inhabit is not "normal." The way things are is not the way things are supposed to be. That is starkly evident to a visitor in Sierra Leone. It may be more difficult for us to keep in mind here, where normalization campaigns abound, but the Bible lays out clearly for us that we live in abnormal times. It shows that we inhabit a world that was created good by God, but which has become distorted and subverted by sin and rebellion. Jesus came to defeat the forces of sin and death that plague our world, and to cleanse, empower and deputize all who put their trust in him to be his advance agents, working for the world's redemption and renewal. There is a struggle on, and we are enlisted in it. But we northerners live in an era when people believe that the contemporary state of affairs is normal. Many of our neighbors believe the secular myth of progress, that society's evolving standards will lead us to a more benevolent, more enlightened world. Others, with a more sober view of the world's violence and wreckage, have become moral cynics, and decide mainly to look out for themselves in a normally nasty and cruel state of affairs. In North America especially, faith in progress probably still dominates, and it continues to push Christians to accommodate their faith to society's changing values. In places like Sierra Leone, this "secular narrative of progress" is not plausible. Christian believers' instinctive stance toward prevailing social norms is to oppose them. To conform to prevailing social norms would be to give in to chaos and revert to paganism. Perhaps we should be more oppositional in our approach to cultural engagement here in the North. Give we sense.
2. God is moving in this world. Remarkable things are happening for the Kingdom of God, but we may have to adjust our angle of vision and categorical lenses to see them. In secular terms, America is the cultural capital of the world, the economic capital of the world, the political and military superpower. Seattle is one of the great seats of empire, the home of such world-shaping, iconic firms as Microsoft, Boeing, and even Starbucks. Seattle's Pacific Rim location projects American power out to the world, both in commercial and in military ways, via the Bremerton naval station and the army post at Fort Lewis. We tend to think that the world of policy making, statecraft and armed conflict, or perhaps the world of capital investment, corporate affairs and business competition are the worlds that truly matter. But God seems to do the main kingdom work in ways that are radically different. Grassroots Christian movements are a force for transformation in China. African and Asian Christian women reading their Bibles are leading what Philip Jenkins calls a "biblically fueled social revolution." And in the supreme case of God's subversive action, our Lord Jesus defeated sin and death by allowing himself to be executed by torture. So God is full of surprises, using, says the Apostle Paul, "the weak things of the world to shame the strong" (I Cor. 1:29). God is using the "average Christians" of Sierra Leone, South India and El Salvador to change the world, and with their immigrant cousins arriving on our shores, we exclaim, in the words of Acts 17:6, "these people who have been turning the world upside down have come here also" (Acts 17:6). Lord, give we sense--to see how and where you are moving in this world, and to invest ourselves there too.
3. God has things for us to do. To whom much is given, Jesus said, much will be required. It is easy in a small university with a Christian stance, working in an international knowledge industry that values size and secularity, to think you are marginal. It is tempting to believe that you can't make a difference. Yet in comparative, world Christian terms, you have enormous privilege. This is what an African friend of mine said last spring in his commencement address at a small Midwestern college. Anyone who has the great gift of a place in a university is being groomed for leadership. As a future leader, God's word has plenty to say to you about what you should be doing, and preparing to do. Read again the stories of Daniel, who was being groomed for a cabinet post; of Joseph, who rose through the ranks to become prime minister, and of Queen Esther, who found a timely seat in the king's court. Esther's Uncle Mordecai counseled her with words that may be God's words to you as well: "who knows whether it was not for such a time as this" that you were put here? (Esther 4:14) God is preparing you for some important tasks. Like Daniel and his fellow scholars in Nebuchadnezzar's court, you should pursue your studies at full tilt. What did Daniel and his friends do? They were at the palace, the Bible says, to learn the language and the literature of the Babylonians. They didn't just focus on their own culture, they eagerly learned about the broader, stranger world into which they had been carried. They were faithful to God in their studies, and he gave them, the Bible says, "knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning," (Daniel 1:17) learning that surpassed that of the other students. Knowledge is not the same thing as wisdom, but it is a powerful aid, and in the process of acquiring it, with a God-given discerning heart, it can become wisdom. So for Daniel and his colleagues, "in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king questioned them, he found them ten times better…." (Daniel 1:20). Dare to be a Daniel, to be an Esther. Seek knowledge, push on out beyond what is comfortable and easy, find out what an astonishing world we live in, and ask that God make you wise, for the sake of the kingdom. Give we sense.