Peacemaking in the Church and Beyond - Lesson 2

I guess the question is, where have we gone wrong? Where has the church going wrong? And I want to propose to you that we begin our search a little further from home. The church today is growing at historic rates. You probably know this: In Africa, the church is growing like wildfire. Tim spent many years in Africa. He could talk about that in detail for us as he was in three countries there for 20 years, almost. This growth in Africa is part of a larger shift in the global epicenter of global Christianity. In other words, it's shifting from the north to the south, from the western world to the majority world, as we call it in society today. But the question is, how do we explain this phenomenal growth of the church when in those same areas of the world there are tribal wars, there are ethnic clashes, there is gender oppression, and even genocide among Christians and between Christians in these regions of the world? When God has called his new creation to be reconcilers, to be agents of reconciliation, how is it that followers of Jesus where the church is growing the fastest today are also acting out with such hatred and anger toward one another? 

One of the well-known stories from Africa is the tragic story of Rwanda. I probably don't have to repeat that story for any of you, but just as a background, a population census in 1991 showed that Rwanda was 89 Christian, 89%. Three years later, in 1994, more than 1 million people were brutally massacred in that nation, often inside church buildings, and in many cases with the willing participation of pastors. Now, what is less well known is the back story, so I want to share that with you, more specifically, the history of Christian mission that contributed to the horrible unfolding of events in Rwanda. 

The first white missionaries in Rwanda arrived in 1901. They came with a specific mission of creating “a Christian kingdom in the heart of Africa.” In the next 40 years, the missionaries made enormous progress. By 1941, 40 years, the King of Rwanda, the king, was baptized. Shortly thereafter, all the chiefs and influential leaders followed suit, making Rwanda the image of a fulfilled dream. In 1930s, revival broke out, setting other surrounding African countries on fire with the gospel; Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Burundi still celebrate the fruit of that mighty revival that began in Rwanda in the 1930s. But trouble was brewing. 

When the missionaries first arrived in Rwanda, they found a nation with three groups of people, the Hutus, the Tutsis and the Twas. Power at that point was in the hands of the Tutsi monarchy. Even from these early beginnings of the church in Rwanda, there were already seeds of unrest in relationships among the three groups, abuse of power, negative stereotypes, neglect of the poor, but rather than confronting these injustices, the missionaries largely ignored them and even built upon the existing power structures when it was to their advantage. They favored the ruling Tutsis over the other two groups. The gospel they presented did not address the abuses and the injustice, and with few exceptions, their mission focus was exclusively on the need for personal salvation from individual sin. Following this? 

Now, over the next decade, bitterness festered among the Hutus and the Twas against the ruling Tutsis. Eventually, anger heated to a boil. Between 1959 and 1963, the region was rocked by a bloody ethnic cleansing that forced many of the Tutsis into exile. And those very same roads that had been trekked by the first missionaries 60 years before that were now trodden with Tutsis fleeing for their lives. In the years that followed, the church kept growing, but now she was working hand in hand with the government. Discriminatory policies were put in place and even supported by the churches. Ethnic tensions continued to grow, eventually culminating in the 1994 genocide in which a million Rwandans lost their lives. After the ‘94 genocide, the church in Rwanda was covered in shame. Many ask how could such a thing in this country happen that was almost 90% Christian? One amazing fact is that despite the horrible realities, Christianity is still growing in Rwanda. Just a few years after the genocide, a new census has shown that the Christian population now stands at 94%. So, the question is, has anything changed? 

One Rwandan church leader, Antoine Rutayisire in the Lausanne movement, recently said the answer is both yes and no; yes, he said, because we now know the message that we should preach to heal the wounds of our nation, and no, because not many people are preaching it. Similar expressions of the church in crisis can be seen today in the mistreatment of Dalit believers in India, sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the post-apartheid turmoil in South Africa's Western Cape, followers of Christ -- followers of Christ! -- who harbor contempt for each other. 

So, the compelling question is, is something fundamental missing in our communication of discipleship and Christ-centered leadership? What can we do to recover our calling as ambassadors of reconciliation? Well, I believe that a critical, critical starting point in this discussion is to understand the problem, is to revisit the question, what is the gospel? What is it? Engineers at NASA tell us that a one-degree error in setting the trajectory of a spacecraft, for example, when aiming for the moon, a one-degree error will cause the space vehicle to veer hundreds of miles off target. Small differences in degrees at the beginning of flight make for significantly different landing points in the end. Trajectory is all important. 

Now, I grew up in a church tradition that thought of and taught the message of reconciliation primarily as a way for human beings to get right with God. It was a vertical relationship. Now, clearly the emphasis of reconciliation was on my relationship with God, between God and people. And my church, I think, is pretty typical. If you were to poll the members of a Bible-believing church to describe the essential message of the gospel, what would they say? Most would describe the love of God. They would talk about the sinfulness of humankind. They would talk about the death and resurrection of Christ and the offer of redemption. Does that sound familiar? Sounds pretty good. And that would be a correct answer. Almost. Only the trajectory is slightly off, but with potentially massive implications. 

Some years ago, a common evangelical understanding of the gospel was explained by Dallas Willard, and he said it has two main ideas: the fall of humankind and the redemption of humankind. And Dallas Willard has coined this “the Gospel of sin management.” The fall and redemption are essential aspects of the gospel, to be sure, we agree about that, but is this the whole gospel? Well, for certain, the Puritans, the reformers, and Augustine himself said absolutely not. Unfortunately, though, this was essentially the message propagated and modeled by the Western missionaries in Rwanda that eventually led to Christians slaughtering each other. 

How then does our rocket’s trajectory, our message and our mission, need to be adjusted to have a better chance of landing where God intends? If the Gospel of sin management gets us close but is critically, critically off target, what needs to be adjusted? Let me propose to you that Paul writes to believers in Colossae what is perhaps the most incredible statement about Christ in all of Scripture. He points back to creation -- and this is Colossians chapter 1 -- he points back to creation by declaring that Jesus was there from the beginning. Before all things, he says, Christ was. Then he points to the future by declaring that Christ was the first of many to be resurrected in the era to come, in other words, the firstborn from among the dead, and because he was firstborn, he has supremacy over everything. That's what the text says. Then Paul wrote these incredible words: “Through Christ, God has reconciled to himself all things in heaven and on earth.” What things? All things. 

The Hebrew idea of redemption from the beginning included all creation, more than simply the individual salvation of men and women. In the Book of Genesis, we read that God created everything good, all creation. When Adam and Eve partook of the forbidden fruit, sin entered into the world, and creation suffered its deadly effects; all creation suffered. In the New Testament when the Lamb of God comes to give life, Paul's view of redemption, explained in Colossians, led him back to Christ's lordship over all creation there in Colossians chapter 1, and moreover, someday all things will be reconciled to God through Christ the coming King. 

Now, that's an exciting message, so what difference does it make? See, this explanation highlights the fact that the story of redemption has not just two chapters, the fall of man, and the individual salvation of man, but the good news actually has four chapters, and this is important in the discussion of reconciliation. The four chapters are the creation, the fall, redemption, and eventually the reconciliation of everything that belongs to God. This four-chapter view corrects a trajectory that is focused solely on sin management. It adjusts that correct trajectory to recognize that the gospel is inclusive in scope. It corrects the notion that evangelism is primary and everything else is secondary. 

It may help to know that in the Greek culture of New Testament times, reconciliation was not even a religious term at all. It didn't refer to appeasing God, nor did it have anything to do with receiving divine pardon for sins. Rather, it was a word that was drawn from the world of politics. It referred to dispute resolution. One would normally speak of the reconciliation of warring nations or in the sphere of personal relationships, the reconciliation of an estranged husband and wife, as Paul did in 1 Corinthians 7. So when Paul used that word, reconcile, with God as the subject, that God was reconciling the world to himself, he is declaring that God has launched a dramatic new initiative to overcome human alienation and to establish new and peaceful relationships. God has unexpectedly taken the initiative to overcome our alienation to Him and to restore people to peaceful relationships, not only with himself, but with one another. This is the corrected trajectory that really matters. 

This means then, that the church is now the community of reconciled people who are entrusted with the work of embodying and representing God's reconciling work in the world. This is the gospel of Christ, and the need for this hard work is painfully evident in our time. 

In the public sphere, the political process has become very ugly, as you know, especially in an election year. The media of our day feed on resentment and anger and the polarization of opinions. We are losing the art of civil discourse in our society, as opposing factions draw to their corners and hurl angry slogans at one another, especially this year. Unfortunately, this same tendency affects our church culture. For example, Christian believers in America in recent weeks have unfriended each other on Facebook due to the rising political tension in our nation. In this current atmosphere, it is crucial for the church to recover our role as reconcilers. This reconciliation, mind you, is not silly tolerance --that's not what I'm talking about. It is not unprincipled compromise. It is not grounded in slick skills or in sociology, but rather, the roots of reconciliation are in our story. 

The short version goes like this: From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view. So, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away. See, everything has become new. All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given you and me the ministry of reconciliation. That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So, we are ambassadors of Christ. Be reconciled to God. Second Corinthians, Chapter 5, verses 16 to 20. 

True and abiding reconciliation comes from what we believe and who we worship, our common identity as God's people who participate in God's new creation. So, when Paul described the Corinthians as ambassadors of reconciliation, he was referring not to an augment of the gospel, not as a supplement to the gospel, but he was referring to the essence of the gospel, that redemption includes a return to the mandate that God gave at the very beginning, a right relationship with God and with each other. 

This view of the gospel reframes our role as followers of Christ, and so I have belabored this point in the beginning because it's so critical to catch, because otherwise, reconciliation is nice, but this is the core of our identity and our belonging to Jesus. We're not just simply getting people into heaven and pursuing personal holiness, but our calling is for the redemption of conscience, for the redemption of family, for the redemption of marriage, for health, for work, the redemption of leisure, of imagination, of ecology, of fashion, of worship, of language, of relationships, for God has created all of it, and he desires that all creation, again, more fully reflect who he is, and the practical implications of this are absolutely astounding. It implies that sexuality should not be avoided by Christians, but sanctified. Emotions should not be repressed but purified. Politics should not be declared off limits, but reformed. Peacemaking cannot be forfeited only to those in power but redeemed by Christ-reconciling agents. 

We can see the negative implications of living and proclaiming merely the gospel of sin management in the Chinese problem in Indonesia, if you follow that, the Australian dilemma with Aborigines in their country, hostilities toward Gypsies in Serbia, the race problems that plague the church in America, which we’ll touch on toward the end of this course. The church has got a problem, and the most powerful solution to our problem is the gospel. Jesus shed his blood to bring peace, and you and I are his appointed agents of reconciliation.