An Athiest Says Africa Needs God! Huh?

I have been studying quite abit about aid to Africa lately, in relationship to the work Go and Do Likewise is doing via GADKenya in Rionchogu, Kenya. On the flight to Nairobi last month I read "Dead Aid" a book by Dambisa Moyo that has garnered lot's of press and controversy worldwide. She argues that 5 decades and a trillion dollars of government to government aid to Africa has made the poverty related problems there worse rather than better and created nations who are now dependent on aid instead of becoming self sustaining. I agree in principle, and I have been wondering how does that relate to aid in smaller models such as the work we are attempting in the village of Rionchogu, population 7,000. A worthy discussion I hope to participate in. But, as I was doing my research I came across an article the title of which both surprised me and stopped me cold.

As a Christian, I am driven by Jesus Christ's clear commands to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul and to love your neighbor as yourself. But, I also freely admit the obvious, that there are many secular and other faith organizations who are doing wonderful work helping others in the world for reasons of their own. Still, I was caught off guard by this article by Matthew Parris (an atheist) I have copied below regarding aid to Africa.

A recipient of local aid in Rionchogu

From the London Times December 2008

"As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God

Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset

by Matthew Parris

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn't fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.

At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. From Algiers to Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, then right through the Congo to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya, four student friends and I drove our old Land Rover to Nairobi.

We slept under the stars, so it was important as we reached the more populated and lawless parts of the sub-Sahara that every day we find somewhere safe by nightfall. Often near a mission.

Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers - in some ways less so - but more open.

This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. You do not encounter missionaries in the lobbies of expensive hotels discussing development strategy documents, as you do with the big NGOs. But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. “Privately” because the charity is entirely secular and I never heard any of its team so much as mention religion while working in the villages. But I picked up the Christian references in our conversations. One, I saw, was studying a devotional textbook in the car. One, on Sunday, went off to church at dawn for a two-hour service.

It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man's place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

How can I, as someone with a foot in both camps, explain? When the philosophical tourist moves from one world view to another he finds - at the very moment of passing into the new - that he loses the language to describe the landscape to the old. But let me try an example: the answer given by Sir Edmund Hillary to the question: Why climb the mountain? “Because it's there,” he said.

To the rural African mind, this is an explanation of why one would not climb the mountain. It's... well, there. Just there. Why interfere? Nothing to be done about it, or with it. Hillary's further explanation - that nobody else had climbed it - would stand as a second reason for passivity.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Those who want Africa to walk tall amid 21st-century global competition must not kid themselves that providing the material means or even the knowhow that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system must first be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete."

So Dambisa, or anyone else, wanna weigh in on this?

Eaar

P.S. If you are interested from my last post, Susan Boyle has got some competition, talent wise at least, from a 12 year old!

Susan Boyle: Did You Pre-Judge Her Too? I Did.

Ok, you've probably already seen the video on TV or the internet and heard commentary on Susan Boyle, who blew away the audience and judges on the TV show "Britain's Got Talent" which is similar to American Idol and also has Simon Cowell as one of the judges.

If you haven't yet read about the 47 year old unemployed church choir volunteer, who's never been kissed and who took a chance on being embarrassed in front of millions in an effort to live her dream. Well, live it she did.

I could spend hours trying to write my own post on this, but this article in the Britain's "The Herald" newspaper by Colette Douglas Home says it better than I ever could.

"The moment the reality show’s audience and judging panel saw the small, shy, middle-aged woman, they started to smirk. When she said she wanted a professional singing career to equal that of Elaine Paige, the camera showed audience members rolling their eyes in disbelief. They scoffed when she told Simon Cowell, one of the judges, how she’d reached her forties without managing to develop a singing career because she hadn’t had the opportunity. Another judge, Piers Morgan, later wrote on his blog that, just before she launched into I Dreamed a Dream, the 3000-strong audience in Glasgow was laughing and the three judges were suppressing chuckles.

It was rude and cruel and arrogant. Susan Boyle from Blackburn, West Lothian, was presumed to be a buffoon. But why? ..... (Click here to read the rest of the article).

Oh, you're one of the few that still haven't seen the video, or now that you've read the background, you want to watch it again? Here you go, soften your heart, grab your kleenex and be ready to cheer!



Susan reminds me in some ways of my 17 year old daughter Caitlin. Also, a special needs child as Susan was, Catie works hard at all that she does, she must, she has no other choice. Things that are easy for the rest of us, such as reading and comprehension, are for her, so very hard. She loves Broadway plays like Susan, such as Wicked (she has seen it 5 times), Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables, which Susan sings her song "I Dreamed a Dream" from. And she often dreams dreams, that I, in my practical sense deem unrealistic for her life.

Susan Boyle has shown me that I am the one who has who has been limited in my thinking. I am the one who has judged incorrectly. I am the one who judged prematurely, as I did when I started watching Susan's appearance. I thought this was another poor soul about to be laughed at by millions, unaware how foolish she looked. But it was I who was the foolish one.

A lesson pointed out thousands of years ago in the Bible:

1 Samuel 16:7:

⁷ But the Lord said to Samuel, “Don’t judge by his appearance or height, for I have rejected him. The Lord doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

And what springs from the heart are hopes and dreams. So how about you, do you have a dream? Are you perhaps now willing to Take A Chance? If so, let me hear about it, if you dare. Susan dared!

Eaar

TAKE A CHANCE

There have been many times in my life I have used people to get what I wanted out of life. Many of those times I didn’t always have enough self-awareness to know, that that was what I was doing. I never forced anyone to do anything, but certainly took advantage of relationships, friendships and manipulated circumstances to my advantage.

I speak of this not as some confessional, as I have done that and will gladly do again when called for. It’s just that I have come to realize how much I still do it and how much we all do it. That is, use others rather than love others. Even when I do good things for other people I know, sometimes, if not all the time I do it for my own selfish reasons. Wanting to feel good about myself for example or satisfying some obligation I feel or doing a favor to gain a favor or gain influence.

The trip I am now on my way back from, to Kenya once more, for me has been exhausting, even grueling, both physically and emotionally. A nine day trip, close to 20,000 miles round trip, 40 hours on 4 different flights, 3 days of all day driving in a Land Rover over the terrible dirt roads in Kenya, being thrown about like a pinball machine.

Now please, I am not trying to impress anyone or seek sympathy. Been there, done that. It is just that there were times during this trip when I was missing my wife and family, when I was exhausted, dirty, worn out emotionally, knowing tomorrow would involve more of the same, that I couldn’t help but feel discouraged, couldn’t help but wonder why in the blazes I was doing this, because now there wasn’t anything in it for me. The excitement of going to Africa had worn off with last years trip, the “cool factor” of doing missionary work was gone and any obligation I may have had was paid.

Then finally in my loneliness, though surrounded by scores of grateful villagers, I realized that for perhaps the 1st time in my life I was doing something that cost me, without the need for anything in return. It’s not that I didn’t get thanks and love from the villagers. It’s just that I didn’t need it or require it to go on doing what I was doing.

That hasn’t brought me great joy, like I have somehow achieved something or had some spectacular epiphany. Instead, as I write this on the plane back home, tears are falling. I am not sure why, perhaps something inside of me that was broken has healed or perhaps the reverse, something inside of me that needed to be broken has, finally, so that the healing can begin.

So, if this is not a confessional, what is in this post for you?

Please, take a chance. Take a chance to love someone in spite of the love returned. I don’t mean romantic love but agape love: unconditional, self-sacrificing, active, voluntary, volitional.

Examine your motives. I assure you if you are truly honest with yourself, you will find even in your most altruistic moments you are meeting your own selfish needs. Somehow validating your own perceptions of yourself, of right and wrong, good and bad, love and hate.

So take a chance, love without conditions, give without thanks. It will cost you. I repeat. It will cost you. But here’s the rub. You will be changed. I guarantee it.

So, take a chance! Give up your comfort, your wealth, your own happiness for a moment. For the cause of lessening someone else's discomfort, their loneliness, their poverty, their shame. I can’t tell you what to do. You’ll know the moment if you look for it. Not as some assignment or stunt. Not just to prove me right or wrong. Do it for real, roll the dice, take a risk, take a chance.

Eaar