Shaken Foundations or Sure Foundation?
Dick Robinson
In times or dramatic, rapid cultural shifts we need foundations that sink deep and sure. To change the metaphor, we need to set our anchor on solid rock, to re-explore our roots.
I was born in the heart of Africa, in a country that was then the Belgian Congo. Yet I have lived all my adult life in the American midwest. For a long time I had little interest in going back to Africa. I had my family, the ministry God gave me, and a wonderful community at this church called Elmbrook where I am privileged to pastor these thirty years. But when in 1995 I went to Rwanda to listen to survivors of genocide, then to eastern DRC to speak to perpetrators of genocide, something awakened in me. Much was the reaction to the deep deep suffering then in Rwanda, now in Congo: conflict and war and dying and poverty and corruption. And most of all the people, the people I met in the churches: wonderful, worshiping, suffering, but extraordinarily joyful people; people who pinned all their hopes on God and the cross.
And I found a church that had outgrown my missionary parents' expectations but was the fulfillment of their prayers and dreams. Something completely unexpected had happened as a result of a movement of the Spirit of God. A church had been born that had naturally and culturally outgrown the missionaries' fundamentalist and yes, colonialist theologies. A church that needed us, but that in return we would find that we needed them perhaps even more. We have technology and planning and management and books and bibles and theological training, but in the process have lost perhaps the vibrancy and joy and dependency of the African church. So we - African church and American church - are on much more even ground; we need each other. That's how it ought to be in the Body of Christ. I found in Africa a suffering church. I've been drawn to it, and in some cases, into it.
So I began to go back, and back again on behalf of this American church, to take teams and to meet people, and to worship with joyful abandon in independent African congregations. I have been all over eastern Congo, during times of war and now in communities that are wrestling their way to peace. From remote villages in the far north on the Sudan border; in significant cities like Bunia and Beni and Butembo and Bukavu. I've been to Tanzania, and NW Uganda amidst the Muslims, where four years ago Elmbrook’s missionaries – Warren and Donna who went to work at a Ugandan-led community development project – were killed, most likely by religious extremists.
I went to Rwanda right after the genocide, speaking to and hearing the stories of men and women who survived the genocide, some of them showing the scars of machetes and spears, no family left without loss. So many stories. So much horror. And I was in the refugee camps of the Hutu outside of Goma in Congo, a million displaced people, who begged us to tell the world that they were not all genocidaires. Many were pastors and church people who simply fled, others had sheltered Tutsis in their homes, only to turn them in when their own children had a machete or the muzzle of an AK-47 at their head. They felt a deep deep guilt.
I have been in Burundi a number of times, working with the church. Most of us never knew that while 800,000 Tutsis were being killed in Rwanda, civil war raged in Burundi. In six short years half a million Hutus died in the hills and villages. I led a team from Kigali down to Bujumbura in 1998; we got caught in the middle of an ambush by rebels on the main road; the matatu minivan 30 feet in front of us decimated by a team of rebels, who themselves had killed a government patrol, stolen their uniforms and set up a checkpoint where they randomly killed anyone coming down the road. We saw the every-day terror exploding in front of our eyes, bullets flying around us as we tried to speed away. Eight people on the matatu were killed; we picked up the sole survivor, bloodied from his wounds, taking him to the hospital in the capital.
I have flown over and walked across the wastelands of southern Sudan, on trails and in villages, in places where children had no clothes, and a few adults with only a few rags, teaching and praying and worshiping in mud churches adorned with rough wooden crosses, people without Bibles writing their own indigenous music, full of praise to the triune God: Father, Son and Spirit. Where did they learn that?
I've slept in the villages of Aba, where I grew up. Back then a place with a strong church. Now a community cut off from the world, overcome by an oppressive spiritual pallor. In recent weeks LRA rebels from Uganda have been in around the villages of my childhood, stealing children as young as six and seven - boys to be child soldiers who will kill their own parents; girls to be sexual slaves – murdering anyone who tries to intervene; adults with arms and legs cut off while still alive, left in the dust to die. And yet…and yet, the church is still there. I stood on top of a huge rock on a hill in extreme NE Congo, 7 kilometers south of Sudan, and west of Uganda, watching the sun rise as the brass band with battered instruments from the Nineteen-Fifties, self-taught musicians, trumpeted the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah, north to Sudan, east to Uganda, south to the tribal war zones, west to Kinshasa. How to explain all this? How to understand it? What to do with it?
I live in Wisconsin, alone in a four bedroom house on six acres of hardwoods and pines with springs and creeks and lawns. I pastor at a megachurch with budget numbers too large for me to understand. I am trying to be a bridge-builder - crossing cultures and building koinonia, fellowship and community, between simple, poor churches in Africa and our complex, corporate American churches. I am trying to stand in the gap of cultural understanding and divine service, to teach wealthy but well-meaning Americans what we need to learn from poor and weak refugees in Africa. I come home at the end of a day, or get off the plane from three weeks in a wholly different world, and there is no one to tell the stories and the suffering to, no one to ask the hard questions of. Please do not misunderstand me; that is no complaint. Nor do I expect you or anyone to understand, unless you, or they, wish to go with me, to see, to listen and to learn.
I simply go on Elmbrook's behalf, at its request, to represent this American church walking alongside the southern, majority-world church. I have a wealth of good friends, I am blessed beyond my deserving. I have opportunities to see the world that very few others do. I am filled with joy. I am extraordinarily content. I was thinking recently how much pain my bad knee had brought me these past several years. I can see it, now that I am on the other side of a replacement. I didn't realize it while suffering from it, how pain dulls the senses and robs us of joy. We, the American church, need a divine healing. My life is built on the sure foundation that is Christ; I am a living-stone in this holy temple that is called the church, rising to become a dwelling where God himself lives by his Spirit.
