Keeping Up with the Joneses (Part I)

A typical small, thatched enclosure for worship.

Several pastors from our church partner have been telling me I really need to communicate well how much difficulty they have surviving and ministering in such a harsh social and physical climate. 

I recently had an intense conversation with one of these, a man whom I have written about before as someone who has a good sense of the importance of CHE and development from within. But I find the major premise of his encouragement to be difficult to deal with. The big thing he laments is there is so much aid flowing in to the country from Middle Eastern groups, who are building tall mosques in every village and at every minor road intersection. He finds it a huge barrier for pastors to invite people to come to hear more about Jesus when that means they are asking people to come to a small, grass thatched hut after they’ve become accustomed to going to pray in a large, tall, freshly painted and neatly tiled mosque built with money from outside.

It does seem very contrary to human nature to leave a nice comfortable situation and choose a shoddier, less than pleasant place to focus their important interactions with God. But it is very hard for me to take the next step with the pastor when he says that Christians from the West must step up their efforts to support local Christians in building churches and providing means for pastors and churches to be respected in the community. Or else he says there is little chance that people will listen to Christians who are looked down on and left behind infrastructurally and economically.

It seems to me that the power of the Gospel is in the fact that God chose to use things that weren’t fancy and expensive and comfortable in order to draw people back to the most important things about relationship with God. So then it is a bit counter-gospel to set buildings and earthly comforts as the important part of drawing people to experience the transformative power of Jesus, isn’t it? That’s easy to say, but the most challenging response that these pastors have given to my hesitation is two-fold: 1) I don’t experience how difficult it is to get people’s attention and respect from such a needy position, because I’ve never been a village pastor in a dominant Muslim society and I’ve never lived in a hut struggling to have food and clothing for my children. 2) Jesus used physical things and physical healing to draw people’s attention to his real power for their lives, which gives precedence to getting people’s attention through their physical needs. 

A third rebuttal that I will personally add is to try telling a church in the US that they shouldn’t worry about how attractive their building and worship service, sign, or website are, because those things don’t draw people to Jesus. Instead they should just return to the simplest worship of God in the simplest structure. Most congregations would not buy into that idea, maybe because of human nature. But also because we believe the worship of God and living in relationship with God should be able to be as attractive and pleasant as we can faithfully make it.

Stay tuned for other dimensions of this difficult conversation!

-- El Padre