Know No Suffering

I have recently completed the first half of Peter Storey’s book, With God in the Crucible. Peter Storey is the former president of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and of the South African Council of Churches (SACC); he provided a powerful voice against the apartheid regime in South Africa for over three decades. The subtitle for Storey’s book is Preaching Costly Discipleship. His work hearkens to the previous works of individuals such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Reading about his immense suffering, I have come to question what it means for the Church to exist in such a tranquil state here in North America. I have no idea what it is like to suffer for the sake of Christ, at least to the degree Storey graphically intimates for his readers.

On a similar note, in my Christian Ministry class last Thursday two people stood up and discussed the state of the Christian Church in Rwanda and Zimbabwe. They humbly rebuked the Western notion that wealth equals God’s special blessing on a people. In the US so many churches concern themselves with foreign missions in an effort to take God to these foreign lands. My two friends reminded me that God was there before the missionaries came. Oftentimes, God even seems to be more present in these lands. There is a disparity between how we view God’s goodness here in the States and how God’s goodness is viewed in war-torn Rwanda. Even though I personally reject the ever more popular ‘Health & Wealth’ gospels, I often catch myself speaking of God’s blessing when it especially pertains to my own benefit. The global community of the Church must work in dialog and not in monologue. The Church in American may bring the money, but it seems the Church in Africa could show us a faith ‘forged in the furnace of suffering.’ We go to church with smiling faces because we’ve been convinced that God is in the business of making us happy, and if we are not happy then we must not be pleasing to God. Rwandans go to Church praying and weeping for the strength to forgive the murderers of their friends and neighbors. There is a reality of faith in suffering which simply does not exist in a life of plenty and comfort. In North America, how in the world do we understand these words of our Lord?
“But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for that is how their fathers treated the false prophets” (Luke 6:24-26).

Peter Storey pens the story of his people, of a mixed people. The story is in his sermons, given for the love of his people. With a culture that is every more global we can no longer ignore the pains of this world. Starvation, slavery, illness, poverty, racism, murder, war, toils, and strife are rampant on the Earth. In our effort to respond to this pain, however, we must be careful not to ‘go to the nations’ and forget our own. Having been on several mission trips I found it easier to minister there than at home. My excursions into the world will not save me from refusing to minister at home. The sick are here, the poor are here, the discriminated and hated are here, the lost are here, the fullness of Christ in the least of these is here in the United States.

Triune God, let not our comfort mold our faith, but let our faith disband our comfort.