Christians You’ve Never Heard Of, But You Should: William Wadé Harris

(It’s been a while since I’ve made a blog entry.  Is this something I should apologize for?  Explain?  Try to justify?  OK, here it is:  I’m sorry about that.  I’ve been flooded with papers to grade, institutional responsibilities, and scholarly projects that last few weeks……….

Hmm.  They say you should never begin a speech with an apology.  Maybe it’s the same for blog posts).

There are a number of reasons why Americans are fascinated with Abraham Lincoln.   He was a key figure in one of the more critical events in American history.  He

OK, we all know who this guy is……..

wore that funny stove pipe hat.  He wrestled with significant political, constitutional, racial and social issues.  He worked his way up from a log cabin to the White House. He was tall.

Most of this interest is deeply tied to our interest in the American nation.  That interest is fine, but I’d like us to consider something else.  While American Christians ought to be interested in the American nation, we ought to have a deeper interest in the Kingdom of God.  But here is the problem:  the Kingdom of God does not get a lot of play from Steven Spielberg, the History Channel, the Ford Motor Company, or our pennies.  So we have to do some work to bring stories about the Kingdom of God into our consciousness.

So let me make one small attempt to contribute to our interest in the Kingdom of God:  you should know something about William Wadé Harris.

William Wadé (pronounced “waddy”) Harris may not be as historically important as Abraham Lincoln.  But I would argue he’s more historically important than any number of American Presidents you have heard of, including Calvin Coolidge, James Monroe, and William McKinley.  (Some folks here in Canton would grumble at me for that last one).

Why would I argue for Harris’s significance over a good Canton man and Methodist Sunday School superintendent like William McKinley?  Besides the fact, that is, that the eight presidents from Ohio don’t exactly give us goosebumps?

Consider this:  there are more Christians in Africa today than there are people in the United States.  That development represents a significant change in world history.  And that change is worth some consideration.

There are many aspects to this story, which covers several centuries, eight hundred people groups and more than fifty nations.  William Wadé Harris, though, is as good a place to start as any.

Born in Liberia, Harris converted to Christianity as a young man and taught for an American Episcopalian mission for a number of years.  Then he set off on his own.

…..but do you know who this guy is?

Between 1910 and 1930 Harris traveled through what is today Ghana, the Ivory Coast and Liberia as an evangelist.  Around two hundred thousand Africans became Christians under this ministry.  His ministry also influenced and inspired numerous Pentecostal movements in West Africa, movements that have spread across the continent.  That kind of influence in itself should make us sit up and take notice.

But I also think we should know about Harris and understand him better because his ministry raises a number of important issues related to the Christian faith, culture and power.   For instance, many people today associate evangelistic missionary work with imperialism.  Some anthropologists like Lionel Tiger do more than associate the two.  He bluntly calls missionaries “frank imperialists.”    Tiger’s camp assumes that any action that addresses the spiritual or theological issues of someone from another culture disrupts the “fundamental ideals and values” of those people.  And there are many American Christians who, feeling uncomfortable with the idea of evangelism, take a similar stance.  For many, evangelism seems somehow be an inherently intrusive, imposing and self-righteous activity.  Interestingly, though, other forms of missionary work are seen as less intrusive and even helpful.  Lionel Tiger, like most of the people in the “Frank Imperialist” school of thought, does not object to outsiders providing water projects, modern medicine or education to people from other cultures.  He assumes that these actions do not disrupt fundamental ideals and values.  (Don’t they?  That assumption would be an interesting one to discuss some other time).

Tiger, and others, could use a better grounding in the history of world Christianity and the work of Harris, who operated without the guidance, support or direction of any missionaries.  Many of his travels took place in regions where no missionary or white person had yet visited.  In fact, ten years after Harris had itinerated through many inland villages in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, Methodist and Catholic missionaries were great surprised to arrive in villages to find thousands of Africans already claiming the Christian faith.  (This dynamic occurred in many places in Africa).  Would a ministry of a single African preaching to thousands of other Africans, far from the presence of Europeans, be considered imperialism, especially when these Africans voluntarily adopted Christianity?  It is hard to square this historical reality with simplistic claims of frank imperialism.

And there is more to Harris.  (What, for instance, is your stand on angelic visions?)  I’ll bring up a few more cultural issues in my next post.

 

 

The Pope, The New York Times, and the Painful Reality of Being Outnumbered

Back in 2005, just after Pope Benedict XVI took over leadership of the Catholic Church, my local newspaper came out with the following headline:

“Centuries of Catholicism and Still No American Pope”

From a historical perspective, this is a rather curious headline.  What, the Catholic Church has slighted Americans for more than two millennia now?   I guess that back in the 7th  or 11th or 15th centuries, if the Catholic Church had just tried hard enough, it could have figured out how to make a Navajo or a Cherokee or a Shawnee a pope.  Instead, those cardinals just kept picking some Italian guy.

The non-American Pope Benedict XVI

OK, that curious headline could just be the result of a local editor who was in a hurry and wasn’t thinking clearly.  But it reflects a very real way of thinking:  many Americans, whether they are Catholic or not, assume that the Catholic Church really ought to put a priority on listening to American Catholics.

Really?  Why should Americans be top dog in this fight?  Why should we think that the Catholic Church ought to choose an American as pope in the first place?  Consider this:  American Catholics make up 6% of the Catholics in the world.  Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines have more Catholics in their nation than the United States does.  If anyone deserves to make an argument based on national identity it would be one of these other nations.  (Actually, it is problematic to try to define Catholicism, or any branch of Christianity for that matter, by national identity, but that’s a discussion for another time).

I don’t know who will be the next pope.  (I am intrigued that a Nigerian, Francis Arinze, has been discussed as a candidate.  That would be an interesting selection.)  And I don’t know what the conclave thinks about these issues of national identity.  As a Protestant, I will leave that for the Catholics to work out among themselves.  (I’m sure the Vatican is relieved).  However, it is worth pointing out how our identity as Americans can sometimes lead us to take a rather self-centered view of things.

For instance, one might think that The New York Times, a cosmopolitan paper of some sophistication, with very good international news coverage, would take a global view of the Catholic Church.  But one would be wrong.  With the upcoming selection of a new pope on

All the News that Is Fit for Americans to Print

its mind, The New York Times released the results of a poll on Wednesday morning of this week.  The Times polled American Catholics, asking what they thought of the Church and the pope.  The tenor of the story was that many American Catholics want a younger pope who is more open to what the Times calls “modern” ideas – and that the church hierarchy today is out of touch with the people.  Being good journalists, the Times story included quotes from ordinary Catholics in ordinary places like Des Moines, Iowa.  They quoted a Catholic woman from Fort Wayne, Indiana who said the cardinals are not in touch with their lives.  “I don’t think they are in the trenches with the people,” she said.

Now, this is a helpful article and poll, in some ways.  We learn what American Catholics think.  We have a problem, though:  the article never mentioned Catholics outside of the U.S.  The Times never mentioned that American Catholics only make up 6% of the global Catholic population.  The underlying assumption of the article?   The Catholic Church ought to listen to Americans.

If we really wanted to know what ordinary Catholics believe, we don’t go to Fort Wayne and Des Moines.  We go to Sao Paulo and Manila and Nairobi.  And what do the Catholics in Brazil and the Philippines and Kenya want?  Do they agree with American Catholics, or do they want something else?  Do these people agree that they want a younger, more modern pope?  Do they think that cardinals are out of touch with the people in the trenches?  Maybe, maybe not.  What do they want in a new pope?   We don’t know.   I wish we did.

The New York Times doesn’t get it. (It gets some things, but religion is usually not one of them).  Assuming that American Catholics ought to have top priority in shaping the Catholic Church is like assuming that the state of Georgia ought to have top priority in shaping the policies of the federal government in Washington D.C.

We need to recognize that world Christianity challenges Americans and Europeans just by its very existence.  We misread the world if we continue to assume that Christianity is primarily a western religion.  Africa now has more Christians (380 million) than the United States has people (300 million).  Asia has 320 million Christians and Latin America has 480 million.  The center of gravity of Christianity, ladies and gentlemen, has shifted from North America and Europe to Africa, Latin America and Asia.

You know what that means for American Christians?  We are outnumbered. We are a minority in our own faith.

Quite frankly, this is a painful reality for us to digest.  We Americans, especially if we are white, are not used to thinking about being outnumbered.  We tend to view the world through the political, economic and cultural power of the United States.  Sometimes we think that the whole world revolves around us.  Yes, the Christian virtue of humility is a really, really difficult thing to attain.  I have a very difficult time with humility, personally.  (Hmm.  Perhaps my snarkiness in this very blog is evidence of this.)  America, as a culture, has a very difficult time with humility, as well.  It will take quite a bit to get us to shed these forms of self-centeredness.

My litmus test:  we will have made a huge step forward when my local newspaper comes out with a headline that says, “Centuries of Catholicism and Still No Filipino pope.”

 

Is the World Secularizing?

Maybe.   Probably not.  It depends on what you mean by secularizing.  And we need more data.

I said something similar in an earlier post.  So if that sounds familiar to you, you actually read that post about secularization in the United States AND you remembered what I said there.  Wow.  I am impressed with you.

Background:  there has been some discussion in the media lately about whether or not the U.S. is secularizing because the number of people who identify themselves as not adhering to any particular religious group is on the rise.  (This definition of “secularization” refers to the percentage of people who display overt religious activity in their life.  There are other forms of secularization which I won’t discuss here).

So what is happening around the world?  For many decades, social scientists assumed that whatever happened in Europe and the United States/Canada would eventually happen in the rest of the world.  If this sounds arrogant, it is because it is arrogant.  Social scientists, it should be pointed out, are actually human beings and not thinking machines, which means that they are susceptible to self-centeredness and ethnocentrism.  Like the rest of us.

In the last decade or so, this “secularization thesis” has been crumbling.  Now we have more information to chew on.  Our friends at Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life recently published a study of worldwide religious affiliation.  Overall, they found that 16% of the world’s population declare themselves to be religiously unaffiliated, which is slightly less than the religiously unaffiliated in North America (17%) or Europe (18?).

So, are Europe and the US/Canada leading the way in a secularization trend?

Well, guess what:  the world doesn’t always follow Europe and the US/Canada.  In this case that is a good thing.

Where are most of the “nones?”  More than 75% of all the “nones” in the world are not found in Europe or North America, but in Asia.  So maybe Asia is secularizing more quickly?  Well, not so fast.  We have to remember that Asia has far more people than the rest of the world, so they tend to outnumber everybody in a lot of areas.   99% of all Buddhists and 99% of all Hindus are found in Asia, for example.

So let us break this down a bit more.  The six nations that have the highest percentage of “nones” are as follows:

Czech Republic:  76%

North Korea:       71%

Estonia:               60%

Japan:                  57%

Hong Kong:        56%

China:                  52%

Notice a pattern?  Japan and Hong Kong have their own peculiar dynamics, so take them out.  The other four nations indicate that communism has been a powerful factor, globally, in producing people who do not affiliate with any religion.

What does this mean for the future?  It’s the commies who secularize the most people!  So we need to stand hard against godless communism and the pinko threat to our God, our flag, our precious bodily fluids and, and, and….oh, wait a minute.  It’s not 1956 anymore, is it?  It’s 2013.

Communism is obviously passé as a political ideology, except to North Koreans who didn’t get the memo.  Communism is not the future, though it has certainly left a secular legacy in many of the nations where it took root.

This is what I find interesting, though:  while the “nones” are possibly on the rise among the younger generation in the United States, the opposite may be true in Asia.  We need more data on this, but the Pew study finds that the median age of the “nones” in Asia, 35, is significantly higher than the median age, which is 29.   The younger people are more religious than the older generations.

By its sheer size, China accounts for a lot of this.  The report did not break down the median age data by nation, but the sheer size of China suggests that this nation accounts for large amount of this percentage of older “nones.”

This fits with what we know about the growth of Christianity in China.  If atheists, agnostics and secular types appear to be on the rise in the West, Asia may be heading in the opposite direction.

Now, these are tremendously huge generalizations, so we need a lot more studies to speak with any precision.  But the study suggests that we can’t say, with any confidence, that the world is secularizing.  The opposite may be more likely.

One other little tidbit from the study.   Which religion is more evenly dispersed around the world than any other?  Christianity.

That suggests that Christianity is far more culturally adaptable (and, I would argue, sensitive to local issues and needs) than Islam, Hinduism, folk religion, Buddhism, or (gasp!) atheism/agnosticism.

Oh, yeah.  The cultural adaptability of Christianity was a theme in my book, wasn’t it?  (Sorry.  I can’t resist a shameless plug).

 

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: Missionaries and World Christianity

James Bond, missionaries, and world Christianity?

You may be thinking that I have a topic that really does not fit in my contest about which individual we should be more interested in.  You may be thinking that because I have written a book about missionaries and world Christianity, I am looking for a cheap way to turn the topic back to my interests. You may be thinking that I am playing a literary bait and switch here, using James Bond to hook your interest in something totally different.

You may be right.

But then, again, you may not be.

Granted, the nature of James Bond films compels me to shift the point a bit.  I can’t have a sensible contest based on the question of how world Christianity plays out in these thoroughly secular films.  There is, however, a closely related topic to world Christianity.  What happens when the Bond films cross cultural boundaries?  What does cross-cultural engagement look like?

Let’s just say, not great.  Bond films exude an aura of British superiority.  This ethnocentrism, apparently, was even stronger in the Ian Fleming books.  In fact, the whiff of British exceptionalism was so strong that some storylines had to be revised when the books were made into movies for American audiences.  I guess American audiences don’t like to be depicted as inferior.  Who knew?

It gets worse, however, when dealing with non-Anglos, particularly in the books and early films.  The villains are often nonwhites and they are often deformed.  Furthermore, nonwhites just don’t have the brains, the sensibility, the skills, or the enlightened rationality of the Brits (or the Americans, for the film versions).  In “Dr. No,” Bond enlists the help of a Jamaican assistant to investigate Dr. No’s hideout, but this black guy, like the other

The dragon: ha, ha, it’s just clever technology, folks.

Jamaicans, is deathly afraid of the rumors he has heard about a dragon that inhabits the island.  The “dragon” turns out to be a flame-throwing tractor with big teeth painted on the front.  The foolish, superstitious and cowardly Jamaican assistant gets killed in the ensuing battle, but the film viewers are not supposed to care because, like the villains, his life doesn’t seem to matter much.  (It should be noted that even though they are evil, none of Dr. No’s scientific assistants are black.  His hideout displays a level of intelligence that blacks do not seem capable of achieving.)

The Jamaican assistant’s fear of the “dragon” emerges from a common depiction of race and religion that comes straight from the 18thcentury Enlightenment thinker (and Brit) David Hume.  According to Hume, less rational people, particularly those who have not been blessed with civilization, believe in irrational religious beliefs that express themselves in superstitious behaviors.  Enlightened and rational people, on the other hand, build sophisticated, morally superior civilizations that progress beyond the ignorance of previous

Build your own “Dr. No” Lego dragon! Pretend you are intimidating inferior people!

ages.  “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men, to be naturally inferior to the whites,” Hume wrote in Essays, Moral and Political.  “No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences.”  Most people easily spot the racism in Hume’s thinking.  However, his claims about religious faith, which masquerade as rational truth, still infect much of the western world today

Samuel Sharpe, who lived half a century after Hume’s death and more than a century before the first James Bond film, would seem to qualify as a superstitious and naturally inferior “species of men.”

But here is where world Christianity helps expose fallacies in Hume’s and Fleming’s brand of Enlightenment thinking.  Sharpe’s relationship with the missionaries brings out point.  The leaders of this 1831 Jamaican rebellion (as well as a similar rebellion eight years earlier in Demerara, on the north coast of South America) were deacons and evangelists.  Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian missionaries from Britain had been ministering among the slaves for the previous decades.  Slaveowners, in fact, complained bitterly that the missionaries were spreading radical and subversive ideas about equality and abolition among the slaves.  (Hume, who believed that evangelical religion led to social disorder, political radicalism, emotional derangement and psychological delusion, would have agreed).

The missionaries, however, did not promote, plan or lead the rebellion.  In fact, they warned the slaves not to plan any resistance, they downplayed the possibility of emancipation getting passed in Parliament, and they did not even know of Sharpe’s rebellion until right before it occurred.

In other words, this movement took off without missionary leadership, in ways they did not expect and could not control.  That is usually what has happened when a movement of Christianity emerged and grew after it had crossed cultural boundaries.

There is also a theological point here about cultural blind spots.  Although they were generally favorable to antislavery ideas, British missionaries preached a simple evangelistic message and stayed away from topics of abolition.  The slaves who had converted to Christianity, however, saw implications in the gospel that white Christians were slow to recognize:  the Exodus story indicates that slavery is not God’s plan for the world.  The same held true for Christian slaves in the American South.  On Sunday mornings they might hear a white minister preach on the text, “slaves obey your masters,” but on Sunday nights, in the privacy of their separate worship, they heard slave preachers draw conclusions about freedom from the Gospel.  And they wrote and sang scores of spirituals with themes of being released from bondage in Egypt and entering in the Promised Land.

These slave spirituals could get emotional, a point that Hume would have looked on with distaste.  The slaves could not boast of “ingenious manufactures” or cool Bondian technology.  They did not display the marks of a “civilized” people.  But they understood truths unknown by rational philosophers like Hume and clever writers like Fleming.

That’s interesting.

 

Score:

James Bond      2

Samuel Sharpe  3

Strangers on Your Doorstep, Part 4a: The Long Beach Friends Church

In 1979, the Long Beach Friends Church looked to be on its last legs.  This church, which had been formed ninety years earlier, had once thrived with a membership in the hundreds.  By the late 1970s, though, worship attendance was closer to a couple dozen and it had no children’s Sunday school program to speak of.

Mother’s Day at Long Beach Friends in the 1940s

This happens to churches sometimes, for a variety of reasons.  For the Long Beach Friends, the biggest factor seemed to be that many long-time members had moved away.  We Americans are a restless lot, and this has been no less true of southern California.  As residents came and left Long Beach, the demographics of the city shifted, with Asian and Hispanic immigrants making up a larger percentage of the population by the 1970s.

Members of the church wondered whether or not they would have to “lay down the meeting.”  (Translation for the non-Quakers among you:  closing down the church).  The church held a prayer meeting.  Through that meeting they decided that God was telling them that He still had a purpose for that church, which might mean some sort of ministry in their community.  They decided they would not lay it down.

Very shortly afterward – it may have been the next Sunday morning–four Khmer men (immigrants from Cambodia) stopped in front of the building.  They were looking at the cross and wondering if the building were a church.  One of the women from the church invited them in to their Sunday Bible study.  The one man of the four who could speak a little English told the class they had been in the United States for just a few months.  They wanted a church where they could raise their children as Christians.  Somewhere, in a winding odyssey that had taken them from their villages in Cambodia, to refugee camps in Thailand, to southern California, they had adopted the Christian faith.

The Long Beach Friends Church now found itself on a different sort of odyssey.  The children’s program, of course, suddenly took on new life.  But the existing members also discovered that they had been pushed into unfamiliar territory.  They decided they needed to round up clothes, toys and transportation for the new immigrants.  They had to learn Cambodian customs.  They had to figure out how to hold worship and conduct ministries in a couple of different languages. And they had to learn the ropes of the medical, welfare, housing, interpreter and the refugee systems.

Today, Long Beach Friends is a thriving multiethnic church.  You should check out their website.   The church has worship services, Bible studies, and ministries in English, Khmer, Spanish and Korean. They have an inner city ministry, community dinners, programs for children, and a sports ministry.  Nobody talks about “laying down the meeting.”

Of course, the church must have had its conflicts, tensions, challenges and difficulties along the way.  I don’t know any of those details, but I know these things happen in every church, family, school, business and, needless to say, long-term cross-cultural ministry.  The key is not sinlessness but faithfulness.  That prayer meeting in 1979 demonstrated a desire by the small congregation to discern what God had called them to and then to be faithful to that call. And so did the search by the Khmer men to find a church in this strange new land.

More on this in my next post.

Twitter and World Christianity

OK, you might think, after reading my “Strangers on the Doorstep” posts, I shouldn’t really just wait around for people from around the world to arrive on my doorstep, if I’m interested in world Christianity.

That’s right, I might think, in response to your thinking.  Obviously there are many ways for you to be connected and involved.  For instance, think of the good you could do for world Christianity by Tweeting!

Youcef Nadarkhani

If that sounds superficial and absurd (and even if it does not sound superficial and absurd) you should check out the recent Anxious Bench blog by Thomas Kidd.  He writes how an Iranian convert to Christianity and pastor named Youcef Nadarkhani has recently been released from prison after being jailed for apostasy from Islam.  The interesting part, especially for all you social-media-savvy folk out there (you are social-media-savvy, aren’t you — you’re reading my blog after all) is that Christians launched a Facebook and Twitter campaign to help support efforts by the American Center for Law and Justice and the State Department to put pressure on the Iranian government.

Spoiler Alert:  If you haven’t switched over to Kidd’s blog yet and you don’t mind me telling you a interesting little nugget from his story, read on.  A great deal of this social media support came from…Brazilian evangelicals.  Of course!  That’s just what you were thinking, isn’t it?

It’s an interesting (and important) little event in worldwide evangelical cooperation.  I’m telling you, we need to think about getting more knowledgeable about this world Christianity stuff…..

Strangers on Your Doorstep, Part 3a: Upstate New York

Most of you who are regular attenders at evangelical churches probably have a Sunday morning routine that is similar to many others.  You go to Sunday school, you drink coffee, and you catch up on the week with fellow congregants.  You go to worship and sing praise choruses or hymns. You scan the bulletin for other activities you may be involved in:  small groups, outreach projects, the choir practice.  You listen to a decent sermon and hope the pastor is done by noon so you can beat the Presbyterians to the Olive Garden.

It is a pattern that carries its own joys and frustrations.  Over the years, a few people leave and enter the picture.  The worship and church projects may change somewhat.  But you see God at work and there may be a certain comfort in the familiarity of the overall pattern.

So let us suppose that one Sunday morning, 75-100 Asians walk into your church, unannounced.  Most of them cannot speak English.  They are of all ages and they do not look to have much income.  Their leader tells you that they are from Myanmar.  They are refugees who have just been moved to the United States.  And they want to start attending your church (attendance of about 150-200) because your church is Baptist and they, too, are Baptists.

What do you do?  Well, you know, you’d have to try to accommodate them, wouldn’t you?  I mean, it’s a church and you have all those Bible admonitions to deal with.  You can’t really ignore 75 new people standing around in your foyer, can you?

Karen youth in upstate New York at a baptismal ceremony

But how would you accommodate them?  Just let them sit in church?  Do you stick their children into your Sunday Schools?  And what happens in the weeks ahead?  Do you teach them all English?  Do they need assistance with clothes, transportation, or finding jobs?  How much do they need to know about Christianity?  Will you have to set up separate classes for the adults?  Separate worship?  The deeper you go, the more questions that arise.

I love this story.

I love this story for a couple of reasons.  First, it is not hypothetical.  It happened a few years ago to a Baptist church in upstate New York.  (I got the story second-hand, so some of the details may not be exactly accurate, but I believe the fundamental points are sound).

I also love this story because it shows an unanticipated way that God is at work.  Sometimes, He pushes people out of their comfort zone.   I’m OK with that.  Especially if I’m not the one who is made uncomfortable.

I also love this story because it repeats the George Boardman story in a different form.  These refugees were from the Karen people of Myanmar, which is sometimes also known as Burma.  Their ancestors became Christians about 170 years ago after a small delegation of Karen arrived on Boardman’s doorstep.

This New York church, collectively, faced similar sort of challenges that George Boardman did.  They suddenly had a ministry on their hands that they did not seek or anticipate.  They weren’t asked to go out and preach in a jungle, but they were asked to adjust their patterns of ministry.  Sunday mornings would not be the same.  Their plans for the future had to change.  Those adjustments aren’t usually easy to make.

Most evangelical Christians have not been hit with anything quite like this in their church.  And you may feel pretty comfortable in thinking that it is pretty rare.

Don’t be so sure.

Broadly speaking, this story results from a powerful trend that has swept the world in the last several decades.  This trend is the remarkable growth of world Christianity, which is the embodiment of Christianity among diverse culture groups around the world.

World Christianity is not only growing.  It is coming to the United States.  Thousands of churches have already found themselves reacting to the arrival of Christian immigrants who have, in some way, forged connections to their ministries. Your church might be confronted with something very similar someday.   How will evangelical churches respond?   It is, I think, an important question.

Strangers on Your Doorstep, Part 1: South Bend, Indiana, 1995

A number of years ago when I was in graduate school at Notre Dame, I answered the doorbell and discovered four Asian young adults on my doorstep.  They told me they were from Indonesia.  Three of them were about to start college at Purdue.  The fourth, a young woman, was about to start at Notre Dame.  The problem was that the dorms would not open for another week and she had no place to stay.  Her companions were going to head back to Purdue within the hour.  She had our name and address because my wife, Elisa, coordinated a program in our church for international students.  Could she possibly stay with us?

Well, now.

Many readers of this blog are probably kind, warm-hearted, compassionate people who would not hesitate to open their home to someone in need.  I, however, am not such a good person.  In unexpected and uncertain social situations, I freeze up and worry about what might go wrong.  I once took the MMPI psychological test and reviewed the bar-graph results with a psychologist who would help me interpret them.  One bar towered above the rest of the bars in the row, like the Eiffel Tower looming over old apartment buildings of Paris.  This particular bar measured Harm-Avoidance.  Interpretation:  I am a Big Chicken.  (The psychologist, who was a kind soul, did not use these exact words, but I could see what was what).

Anyway, that day in South Bend I found myself turning over a question I could not remember considering before:  What am I supposed to do with the Indonesians?  I invited the four students in and stalled in my response while I mentally whipped through my options.  Unfortunately, the situation seemed like some sort of New Testament parable.  As a Christian, I realized, I was probably supposed to warmly tell the young stranger she was welcome to stay with us and then carry her bags up to our guestroom.  But the Big Chicken in me provoked all sorts of worrisome possibilities.  Maybe she would teach my daughters to smoke pot.  Maybe she would rip our bedsheets, leave dirty dishes stacked in the sink and monopolize the TV.  Maybe she was going to invite her friends in at night for loud, exotic Indonesian college-student parties.  Maybe this whole thing was an elaborate plot to steal all the valuable electronics in our house (a computer and a VCR).  Maybe…. maybe…. well, the scenario I couldn’t imagine seemed the worst of all.

What to do?  It was important to discuss major decisions with Elisa, but she was not at home and the three Purdue students were about to leave.  I briefly considered eliciting advice from my daughters.  The oldest, Karin, was pretty sensible.  She was, however, entering the second grade.  No, I probably should not go that route.  I was on my own.  And so I decided:  yes, she could stay with us.

End of story:  The young woman stayed, the Purdue students left, Elisa came home a couple of hours later and because she is a better person than me, she immediately welcomed the young woman with warmth and compassion.  That stranger on our doorstep, Sari, stayed with us for about ten days and turned out to be an amazingly fun and delightful young woman.  Over the next couple of years, we invited her over to our house many times.  Sari became a good friend and proved to be a true blessing to everyone in the family.  In hindsight, I can only imagine the anxieties she had that day on the doorstep in South Bend, anxieties which rightfully would have been far, far greater than mine.

We would never have been blessed that way, however, if we had not been missionaries in Kenya for six years. First of all, Sari would never have had our name in her pocket if Elisa had not started the international student ministry at our church.  Elisa did this because we ourselves were once strangers in a different culture.  Grateful for how a veteran missionary couple, Jim and Joan Harding, welcomed us and eased our transition to a very different place, we thought it would be good to do something similar when we moved back to Indiana.  Second, missionaries are not necessarily instinctively more compassionate than others.  They are made up of the same stuff as ordinary Christians are.  But my missionary experience put me in places where I had to adjust to unexpected scenarios, where I had to consider the possibility that the Holy Spirit arranged surprising situations, and where I had to face my own flaws and limitations if I were going to do this missionary thing.  I began to see that sometimes I am called to find out whether or not the grace of God is bigger than the Big Chicken within.

But here is the take-away:  with the growth of world Christianity, many American Christians will find themselves in similarly unexpected situations in the decades to come.  In fact, many already have.