by Rev. Ranjit Mathews
I’d like to speak a little bit of the Church as an ordained member of it and what it has to say about charity, particularly in Africa. In liturgy and for those of you in liturgical Churches, liturgy in the Greek means “the work of the people.” After the sermon, the people rise up and say together the Nicene Creed, and it’s basically when the gathered community says, “Thank you, Ranjit, for saying what you have to say, but this is what we really believe.”
Well, in 1910, there was a conference called the Edinburgh Conference, and it gathered together missionaries and theologians with an understanding that “we need to bring God to Africa. We need to bring God to Africa.” As if God was not already there or the Divine wasn’t there. So that happened in 1910, and a century later in 2010, there was another Edinburgh conference, and this time it was much more of a muddled message. In my eyes, this was the Nicene Creed, and that to me is connected to missionaries and what we think of them.
I went to South Africa as a missionary, and my wife and I went to Tanzania as a lecturer and an architect. And so I have been a missionary twice, which has enabled me some time and space to think about aid. But to me, and some of you may know this, religiously motivated aid towards Africa is a large sum. Over the past 50 years there has been over $1 trillion spent on aid, and 90 percent of American adults are involved in charity. Robert Lupton in his book, Toxic Charity, wrote, “The compassion industry is universally constructed as a useful enterprise,” but he also goes on to say “that religious motivated charity is often the most irresponsible.”
Now I want to counter the understanding of aid as religious and secular, because that to me posits duality, that one type of aid is considered holy because it’s connected to religion and the other secular type is not. And so I think that’s problematic because we tend to deify religious aid. Now we see in the New Testament, Jesus sends out his disciples, sending them out to go and serve in the world, whereas in the Old Testament it’s about God drawing Israel to himself. In the New Testament, this is where we come up with the term missionary.
My problem with that is that it’s easy to have compassion, and when I see people in India, particularly in India with HIV/AIDS, I become compassionate. But then you see when compassion is connected to a religious understanding, it’s deified, and then how do we critique it? If religion is connected to and of the Divine, “Oh my gosh, you are critiquing God, or you are critiquing a religious person who has this intention of doing good.” Within the Episcopal Church or any other Church, we need to look beyond this understanding. We also need to go beyond an understanding that we are going to give to these good people all around the world, but we are not going to receive anything back. Over the past couple of years, around $2.5 billion to $5 billion was spent by Churches, going on these mission trips across the world. Every year. And might I add, these trips could be seven days, eight days or nine days. And there is an understanding that we are going to build and then go home and pat ourselves on the back.
There is a scholar in Tanzania, Dr. Issa Shivaji, who wrote about the NGO-ization of Africa, and if you look at it, the Church is the largest NGO in the world; it’s in every single community. If we don’t look at what the Church is doing vis-à-vis different dioceses in different parts of the world, we are not doing our job as religious folks. I don’t know how many of you are religious folk or paint yourself as a Christian, but we need to critique ourselves. I really commend the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, who I think is doing some of the hard work of critiquing the way we do things, at least in terms of mission. When they gather fellow Lutherans who are interested in mission, the conversation is not just centered on overseas mission but also involves local mission, as in the United States. It’s what, in common parlance, we call being “glocal,” where the global and the local meet. This is important because it enables a conversation that is centered on the ways in which what we do here in the United States is connected to what is happening thousands of miles away in Tanzania. I believe that once missionaries are able to see the connection between our own local context and that of the larger global stage, then our aid discussion, our mission discussion becomes that much more nuanced.
Reverend Mathews is the associate Rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Long Beach, California.