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Hope for the future
By Mark Tooley

All over America, thousands of United Methodists are actively supporting church renewal. But much of our hopes for denominational renewal now depend upon millions of United Methodists who live far from America, in places with which most of us are unfamiliar, speaking often exotic languages, but worshiping the same Lord, and following the Wesleyan path, often more earnestly than we.

Three million United Methodists now live outside the U.S.—most of them in Africa. There are 1.2 million United Methodists in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By some counts, there are two million people attending United Methodist churches in the Congo on a typical Sunday. That number equals and may surpass the total number of United Methodist worshipers on average in the United States. Even as United Methodism loses a thousand members or more every week of every year in the U.S., the African churches are now increasing by that number, or faster. Perhaps it is providentially ironic that the number of United Methodists outside the U.S. is now equal to the total 43-year membership loss of the church in the U.S.

My own United Methodist story is similar to so many in the U.S. I grew up in the church thanks to family that had been Methodist for generations. But compare our story to the Rev. Jerry Kulah, a district superintendent in Liberia. By his own account, his experiences included “raging storms, deep waters, and blazing fire.”

Jerry (pictured above) was born to a polygamous family, in a Liberian village. He was among more than 25 children of one father and about seven wives, which meant a life of “competition, jealousy, hatred, and struggle for survival.” An older half brother brought him to the capital of Monrovia but had little money and often was away on military assignments. On many days, Jerry went without food or stole to survive. At age 8, Jerry became a servant to another family with hopes of being provided for. Instead, he was introduced to child abuse and slave labor, to which he was subjected for 12 years.

But Jerry attended school where he was introduced to the Bible. At age 15, during a Bible study, he became affected by “the reality of my sin, hell, and eternity.” When he got home he knelt on the floor and asked Jesus into his life. He became active in Christian youth activities but resisted the call to ministry, preferring a dream of material comforts. He earned a university degree in mathematics and got a well-paying job. In 1989, Jerry was planning a wedding with a young woman he had met in school when Monrovia was besieged by rebels, starting a 14-year civil war, during which Jerry lost nearly everything.

The government declared Jerry’s tribe to be enemies and both Jerry and his older half-brother, United Methodist Bishop Arthur Kulah, became hunted fugitives. While on the run, Jerry wore double layers of clothing, so as always to have extra clothes. When government troops finally captured Jerry, they accused him of being a rebel, thanks to his odd dress. The commander ordered a soldier to shoot Jerry, who pleaded his innocence while also praying. Amazingly, the soldier ordered Jerry to run for his life.

Several days later, Jerry again evaded arrest and likely death when compelled to give his identity card to a soldier. The soldier confusedly stared at the card while Jerry prayed the 23rd Psalm until the soldier returned the card and let Jerry pass. In 1990, Jerry recalls God telling him to escape to Nigeria. Jerry led evangelism in a refugee camp there while also attending seminary. His fiancée, Ruth, also escaped Liberia to meet Jerry in Nigeria, where they finally married in 1992. In 1994 they had their first child, whom they named Joshua. Finally, Jerry and his family returned to Liberia in 1997. He began pastoring a church in 1998, became evangelism director for the Liberian United Methodist Church in 2001, and became a district superintendent in 2007, supervising 34 churches and seven preaching points.

Today Jerry and his wife care for their four children, his mother, and the five children of Jerry’s brother, who died during the war. “God specializes in going into the interior of life and taking that which is inferior to make superior,” Jerry has concluded. He also quotes from Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Like many African United Methodists, Jerry is a first-generation Christian, ministering among many first- and second-generation Christians. He works among fast-growing churches, where the gospel is proclaimed powerfully, and where there is no dispute about the authority of the Scriptures. His dynamic spiritual environment is not dissimilar to the upheaval and excitement of primitive Methodism in 18th-century and early 19th-century America. What is a distant memory for most United Methodists in the U.S. is a daily reality for many United Methodists in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere.

The increased representation of the Africans at the United Methodist General Conference over the years has been dramatic. In 1996, the Africans had 70 delegates, compared to the 62 delegates of the very liberal and fast-declining Western Jurisdiction of the U. S. In 2008, the Africans had 192 delegates, compared to 40 delegates from the Western Jurisdiction. In 1996, there were 146 delegates from outside the U.S. In 2008, there were 278. In twelve years, the non-U.S. United Methodists have doubled their numbers. It is not unrealistic to assume that after another 12 years, by General Conference 2020, this rate of growth will have continued, and the international delegates will be more than a majority.

There are today more than 3.2 million United Methodists in Africa, more than one million alone in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In our church’s most liberal area, the Western Jurisdiction, there are fewer than 400,000, despite their region’s including some of America’s most populous and fastest-growing states, including California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. Meanwhile, in relatively conservative Georgia alone, there are more than 480,000 United Methodists.

The delegate strength is even shifting within the U.S., where the somewhat conservative Southeast Jurisdiction is holding even in membership, while the more liberal Northeast and North Central regions are declining almost as quickly as the West. In 1996, the North Central Jurisdiction, including most of the Midwest, had 190 delegates. In 2008, it had 138. In 1996, the Northeast had 152 delegates. In 2008, it had 126. In contrast, the Southeast has remained relatively stable, going from 264 delegates in 1996 to 252 in 2008. The South Central jurisdiction went from 166 delegates in 1996 to 148 in 2008.

What are the bedrock beliefs of the church in Africa? Jerry Kulah explained this in October 2007 at a conference called “A Hope and a Future Through Our Wesleyan Heritage,” sponsored by United Methodist renewal groups. In his “Africa Declaration,” Jerry called United Methodists to scriptural faithfulness and effective ministry. The declaration was endorsed by the bishop and every district superintendent in Liberia, as well as United Methodist leaders from other parts of Africa.

“We of the Central Conferences of Africa are deeply concerned that the global United Methodist Church is beginning to speak with different languages, and not with the common speech that presents Jesus Christ as the Good News of salvation, our only Lord, and only Savior,” the declaration said. “As a result, the global witness of United Methodism is being threatened with the proclamation of different kinds of ‘gospels.’”

Kulah noted that Africans are concerned that “some Euro-Western churches seem to be deserting the biblical path of church planting, disciple-making, prayer, and evangelistic and missional endeavors to an inward focus,” changing the “Great Commission” to the “Great Omission.”

“We are saddened that some United Methodist Churches of the Euro-Western world have questioned over and over again the United Methodist Book of Discipline’s biblical positions on such issues as homosexuality, abortion, and the authenticity of the Scriptures as the Word of God,” Kulah said. “By such actions and attitudes toward the Gospel we are throwing both our adults and our children into confusion and, without words, telling them that Christianity does not have all the answers to their spiritual longing. We are afraid that the current unrestricted embrace of liberalism within the United Methodist Church is endangering the chances of our children to ever consider Christianity a possibility. It further creates a breeding ground for the rapid spread of other faiths amongst our future posterity.”

The declaration cited as essentials that God is the creator, that humanity has sinned against God, that Jesus is the “sacrificial offering” for sinful humanity, that Jesus was “wondrously born of a Virgin,” performed “countless miracles,” and “arose literally and physically from the dead,” that Jesus will “literally” return to reign with his church, that all who confess Jesus will be saved and resurrected like him to live forever, that the “children of Israel” are a “holy tree into which now we as believers in the Jewish Messiah, have been grafted as branches,” and that the Word of God calls us “to chastity, temperance, charity, and forbearance.”

The Africa Declaration called for United Methodism, which collects more than five billion dollars a year in the U.S., to shift away from spending tens of millions on church agencies to confronting the “devastating poverty, disease, and mortal suffering of our United Methodist brothers and sisters around the world.” The church should affirm “on behalf of our impoverished brothers and sisters worldwide, life-giving freedom, rule of law, economic development, trade and property rights, electrification, industrialization, irrigation, transportation, basic health care, and improved agricultural development.” It called for support of seminaries in Africa and ensuring that the seminaries everywhere adhere to God’s Word.

The declaration also called for “just and proportionate representation” on church agency boards. Currently, non-U.S. United Methodists comprise only 10 percent of church agency boards, even though they represent more than 30 percent of the global church.

Jerry’s declaration called for commitment to the Great Commission, the affirmation of marriage as “lifelong marriage between man and woman,” for church leaders to model Christian behavior, for clergy, especially the bishops, to uphold the church’s standards, and for the church’s schools and publishing agencies to teach Scripture-based beliefs. “The church’s missional priority should be fighting deadly diseases, ensuring clean water, protecting the environment while improving the standards of living for the world’s poor, declaring solidarity with persecuted Christians everywhere, affirming the “providential role of the family in God’s order of creation, defending the sanctity of all vulnerable human life, including the poor, the elderly, the terminally ill, the disabled, and the unborn, guarding the God-given dignity of all persons and advocating voluntary charity, individually and corporately, around the world.”

“When the baby Jesus was threatened by a vengeful King Herod, the Holy family fled to Africa for sanctuary,” Jerry’s declaration concluded. “Today, the Church in Africa offers itself as a sanctuary for God’s Word for the renewing of his Church around the world. Will the United Methodist General Conference of 2008 and 2012 respond to this call for faithfulness from the church in Africa?”

“Wake up, and strengthen the things that remain, which were about to die; for I have not found your deeds completed in the sight of My God,” are God’s words to the Church at Sardis, from Revelation 3:2. The United Methodist Church has slumbered, but the Holy Spirit never left it, and God’s work continued within it, despite obstacles. Now, we must awake and enlarge what God has given us, that he might use us powerfully once again. The United Methodists in Africa, among others, are God’s instruments in this process of reviving his church around the world.

Working with our friends across the seas, especially United Methodists in Africa, we must strive to complete what God has commissioned us to do. We must celebrate the honor that he has bestowed upon us to serve him in so momentous a project as restoring the United Methodist Church.

 

Mark Tooley is the director of UMAction. This article is adapted from his book Taking Back The United Methodist Church (Bristol House, Ltd.). Used by permission. Out of Africa            By Thomas C. Oden

My thesis can be stated simply: Africa played a decisive role in the formation of Christian culture. Decisive intellectual achievements of Christianity were explored and understood first in Africa before they were recognized in Europe, and a millennium before they found their way to North America.

Christianity has a much longer history than its Western or European expressions. The profound ways African teachers have shaped world Christianity have never been adequately studied or acknowledged, either in the Global North or South.

My question: How did the African mind shape the Christian mind in the earliest centuries of Christianity?

The challenge that lies ahead for young Africans is to rediscover the textual riches of ancient African Christianity. This will call for a generation of African scholars to reevaluate prejudicial assumptions that ignore or demean African intellectual history.

The global Christian mind has been formed out of a specific history, not out of bare-bones theoretical ideas. Much of that history occurred in Africa. Cut Africa out of the Bible and Christian memory, and you have misplaced many pivotal scenes of salvation history. It is the story of the children of Abraham in Africa; Joseph in Africa; Moses in Africa; Mary, Joseph and Jesus in Africa; and shortly thereafter Mark and Perpetua and Athanasius and Augustine in Africa.

Modern Christianity has been thought to have brought only oppression to Africa. Hence to be truly African is to resent Christianity and the West. But what if the West is more deeply indebted to Africa than has been imagined?

The resulting problem is one that Kwame Bediako calls “a crisis of African identity.” It is the subtle but profound self-perception, especially in sub-Saharan African traditional religion, that Africa lacks intellectual subtlety and substance. Having seemingly no firm textual history, it unconsciously treats itself as if standing intrinsically in hopeless disadvantage.

But the Christians to the south of the Mediterranean were teaching the Christians to the north. Inattention to this south-to-north movement has been unhelpful (even hurtful) to the African sense of intellectual self-worth. It has seemed to leave Africa as if without a sense of distinguished literary and intellectual history. But this is a history that Africa already owns but which has remained buried and ignored.

 

Taken from How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind by Thomas C. Oden. Copyright (c) 2007 by Thomas C. Oden. Used with permission of InterVarsity Press, PO Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515. ivpress.com  “Hope Lives”                By Elizabeth Turner

 

Amber Van Schooneveld’s new workbook, Hope Lives: A Journey of Restoration is richly devotional, helpfully educational, and stunningly beautiful.

The Compassion International advocate has crafted a unique resource for believers who feel overwhelmed at the needs of the world. Drawing heavily on Scripture, quoting scholars like Peter Kreeft and the tiny revolutionary Mother Teresa, Schooneveld integrates stories of children in Africa, the suffering of southeast Asia, and the challenges of 21st century living in North America. Banishing guilt as a motivation for serving others, she rather encourages believers to see ministry as a balm for restoring their own souls.

With captivating, glossy photos, spaces to journal and reflect, and action suggestions, this book is both extremely practical and yet motivating for the big picture. President of Compassion International Wess Stafford encourages, “this book demands that you interrupt your busy life and embark on a spiritual journey to know the poor through God’s eyes, through his words.”

An ideal resource for individuals, couples, small groups, or Sunday school classes, Hope Lives gently but clearly calls Christians to join their own spiritual growth with active love for individuals around the world. “It’s not a journey of guilt or obligation. It’s a journey of God’s grace restoring us to the people he created us to be, and a journey of serving God to bring his grace and love to those in need.”

Hope Lives is available through GroupPublishing.com.

 

Elizabeth Turner is editorial assistant at Good News. Being a global church in word and deed

Much has been said about United Methodism being a global church. We are that, and all of our lives are enriched by this reality. But it is time we consider how truly to be a global church, in both word and in deed. Simply, there are immediate concerns—serious justice issues—that we United Methodists must address concerning our Central Conference delegates between now and the 2012 General Conference that will be held in Tampa Bay, Florida.

• The French-speaking African delegates never received the Advanced Daily Christian Advocate (ADCA)—the pre-General Conference publication with all the petitions and resolutions to be discussed—in their language until they arrived in Fort Worth. American delegates who were fortunate enough to have received it two months earlier felt overwhelmed by it.

• Some foreign delegates report they had to change the language they were listening to because of poor translation.

• There were snide inferences made to some African delegates by Americans about not forgetting who pays the bill. This use of intimidation is contemptible.

• We saw and heard much about the pain many activists experienced because of votes at General Conference on controversial issues. United Methodist bishops were there to provide pastoral comfort to the grieved protesters. Unfortunately, our bishops seemed oblivious to the deep pain and distress felt by many of our Central Conference brothers and sisters.

• There were intimidating notes and pictures left on the desks of African delegates by General Conference delegates or from spectators off the floor.

• By General Conference 2012 in Tampa, Central Conference delegates should be given access to a cell phone and, perhaps, a laptop computer. Money saved by doing the ADCA digitally could provide these technological tools.

This list could no doubt be expanded. But if we are to be a truly global church, let’s determine we will be in both word and deed. It’s just a matter of plain justice, fairness, and equality.

—Good News Editorial Team



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