Saturday, February 25, 2006
I just posted the following in a journal that one of my school classes requires of me. I thought I'd share here as well . . .
The ongoing nature of colonialism has struck me in new ways by reading Philip Jenkins' "The Next Christianity." As the months have turned into years, the war in Iraq has demonstrated with increasing clarity how arrogant we in the United States are. It's not so much a matter of whether or not we should have gone to war in the first place (which, of course, there's a raging debate over), but that we went into this endeavor with a tragically poor understanding of the real world situations we would face, as well as those we would stir up by doing what we've done. That same arrogance/lack of understanding is true of the church. We have taken far too much pride in our financial wealth, our publishing empires, our academic institutions - and the result is a pervasive mentality that we are the be-all, end-all of the church. It doesn't even occur to us in America that we are a minority of Christians in the world, or that our wealth and power mean nothing in true Kingdom terms.
We arrogantly claim to have exegeted scripture so well that our doctrine is the "right" doctrine. And yet our doctrine has been shaped by our money and our history. Meanwhile, the doctrine we feel a need to correct in the Southern hemisphere has equally been shaped by money (or the lack thereof) and history. Why is that we've done any better than they have? Jesus' pictures of who the Kingdom of heaven belongs to ring ever more true - those without power, those without money, those without social standing.
Power relationships corrupt. They're dirty. The fact that I make decisions on a daily basis without realizing the degree to which they play into dirty power frightens me.
