An atheist praises Christian missions in Africa

(Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/72/7268/7268-40896.mp3)

If you think evangelical Christianity is unfairly caricatured by American opinion makers, you might want to avoid Europe.

There, cultural commissars in some circles compare evangelicals with the Taliban — unfavorably. By their lights, we’re medieval, superstitious enemies of enlightenment and progress who should be silenced for good.

So it was noteworthy when an article praising Christian missions in Africa appeared in The Times of London a few months ago. Even more remarkable: It was written by Matthew Parris, a self-professed atheist (read it at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article5400568.ece).

Parris, a Times columnist and former Member of Parliament, spent his boyhood in what is now Malawi. He returned there last year with a secular charity that assists villages lacking clean water.

“It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities,” Parris writes of the journey. “But traveling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I’ve been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I’ve been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my worldview, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

“Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa, Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.”

Parris has applauded such efforts before, but he used to qualify the praise with a caveat:

“It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write,” he acknowledges. “[O]nly the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

“But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.”

African followers of Christ, Parris says, have a different look in their eyes. And they look you in the eye, not down or away. The “most impressive” African members of the secular aid agency he worked with in Malawi “were, privately, strong Christians.”

They worked diligently and optimistically, he believes, because they have a different view of the universe and their place in it. They and other African Christians he has encountered over the years don’t fear ancestors, evil spirits or spells. They are curious, engaged with the world. They take action, because they don’t believe they are victims of irresistible fate. They don’t buy into the traditional tribal pressure that keeps villages under the thumbs of chiefs and nations under the thumbs of “big man” gangsters.

Parris rejects the notion, fashionable among many academics, that tribal culture is off-limits to criticism just because it is indigenous to Africa. Tribal values have many strengths, but they tend to “grind down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won’t take the initiative, won’t take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.”

In stark contrast, “Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective … smashes straight through the philosophical/spiritual framework I’ve just described. It offers something to hold onto to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.”

Contrarians will say Parris is a prisoner of his own culture, an intellectual imperialist trying to re-colonize Africa with a Western individualism that doesn’t work all that well in the West. If Christianity is so great, they may ask, why hasn’t Parris himself become a believer?

True, Parris is much more interested in the cultural benefits of Christian faith than the faith itself. But as a nonbeliever, he recognizes an undeniable fact: The Gospel changes hearts and minds, transforms societies and liberates people from the cultural chains that bind them. In African and Asian cultures that stifle the individual will, Christ shines the light of spiritual freedom. In Western cultures dying from individualism and materialism, He points toward a community — the church — where people love one another as He loves us. His Spirit works within every human culture, but He confronts and transcends cultures when they contradict His truth.

Africa — like the rest of the globe — hungers for such truth.

“Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation,” Parris says, would “leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.”

(Gordon Fort, IMB vice president for global strategy, also grew up in Africa and served there for many years as a missionary. Read his reaction to Parris’ article in this Baptist Press story: “ATHEISM: Both agree, Africa needs God”)

Hope for the hopeless

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/68/6881/6881-38908.mp3

Several years ago I wrote about my friend George. Nice guy. Sincere. Loved to joke around and play basketball. Deeply depressed.

Eventually, he hanged himself.

On the last day of his life, the only words George managed to utter to his father, who later found his body, were these: “No hope. No hope. No hope.”

By the year 2000, suicide had become one of the major causes of death worldwide among men and women ages 15-44, according to a World Health Organization report. Many suicides, the report stated, occur “during periods of socioeconomic, family and individual crisis.”

It’s hard to live, in bad times or good, without hope. You certainly won’t find it on the shiny shelves of postmodern culture. Phony substitutes and countless distractions, yes. Real hope, no. Most hopeless people keep struggling without taking their own lives, but they see little light in their darkness.

Medication and treatment can help the clinically depressed. At the end of the day, however, no therapy or drug, no self-improvement program, no political or social movement, no philosophy, no economic plan or number of possessions can bring hope to someone who has none.

Only the resurrection of Jesus Christ offers real hope — not just to His followers but to all the hopeless people of the world.

The pop atheists of our day want to bury the idea of Christ’s physical, historical resurrection once and for all, along with its impact through the ages. The world would be much better off, they say, if the “legend” of Jesus rising from the dead had never gotten started. That would mean no churches, of course, but also no schools or universities for the masses, no books or literacy, no hospitals or charities, no freedom for slaves, no great classics of Western music and art and literature.

More than all these put together, it would mean no hope for humanity.

Handel’s Messiah, originally an Easter event, celebrates Christ’s birth, death and resurrection. After conducting it for the last time in 1759, the ailing and nearly blind composer acknowledged the ovation by saying, “Not from me — but from heaven — comes all.” He expressed the desire to die on Good Friday “in the hope of rejoining the good God, my sweet Lord and Savior, on the day of His resurrection.” He died on Holy Saturday.

Some years ago, a woman who had never been out of China attended a performance of Messiah on her first trip abroad. As the last triumphant notes faded away, she turned to her hosts, trembling with exaltation and urgent curiosity.

“I must know,” she pleaded. “Who were they singing about?”

Messiah is a monument of Western music, to be sure. But if Christ is a part of only the Western cultural tradition, why are many of His most ardent followers in the East? Why are the fastest-growing church movements found in Asia? Why have Koreans become the world’s most determined missionary senders? Why are Muslims in many places around the globe seeking out the Gospel after having dreams about a man they identify as Jesus?

At Easter, local believers in a part of the Arab world celebrate the risen Savior and seek to share Him with their families and friends. They ask Him to soften hearts and minds to the truth that God not only gave His Son as a sacrifice, but raised Him from the dead and conquered death. They pray that gifts of Scripture, Easter parties, even dreams will open the door to sharing hope with unbelieving Arabs.

And they do this in places where persecution — particularly of Muslim-background followers of Christ — is increasing daily. They know something many of us in the traditional centers of Christianity have forgotten or rejected: The risen Christ is the hope of ages, the only hope for the world.

Lift up your eyes to the hills from whence cometh your help — and your hope.

“Truth is an arrow and the gate is narrow that it passes through,” sang Bob Dylan after his resurrection encounter with Christ. “Surrender your crown on this blood-stained ground. Take off your mask. He sees your deeds. He knows your needs — even before you ask.

“How long can you falsify — and deny — what is real?”