Kenyan Witnesses

 One of the great joys and surprises of Norway has been our ability to interact and spend time with persons and families from Africa. The connection point for many of these conversations has been IMCO, the English speaking international congregation in Grünerløkka that we have had a strong connection with during our first 5 weeks of sabbatical. 

Again, it is Rev. Terje Nilson who is the pastor there. He also is a mentor to many international students from local theological schools and seminaries. Rev. Terje has been nothing but welcoming since our first conversation and he has been a substantial blessing to us. He and his wife Dagrun and church member Haakon (on far left in photo) even took our family out for a Norwegian favorite: pizza! 

(Don’t worry the kids were with us but out of the shot 😀).

The IMCO congregation is a small but very welcoming gathering of Christians with United Methodist heritage gathered from the Phillipines, SE Asia, and a collection of countries in Africa (but especially Kenya).

Our kids made friends with some of the children here. We felt welcomed here. It was, again, a small and humble gathering, but entirely comfortable. It felt like being at Ford Street Church in many ways.

One thing I was glad for was that most Sundays we heard African preaching. It is fascinating to hear the differences in how the gospel is presented!

One exception to that diet of international preaching was March 27 when I preached. Everyone survived even my sermon!

The connection with this congregation helped to bring us into conversation with the perspectives of many nationalities in regard to the secular shifts in Western society and were helpful in somewhat clarifying a question I had wrestled with.

One thing I had noticed before Norway is that the most noted scholars and theologians discussing the secular shift in the United States were older white men (Diana Butler Bass being a notable exception). Truly, perspectives on these shifts from other women and people of color are harder to find. In a way this makes sense. As our culture slowly erodes its attachment to faith or organized religion it has also simultaneously been doing important work to deconstruct systems of racism and sexism. It makes sense to me that persons with different positionality might focus on different aspects of what are probably related phenomena.

Nonetheless, this observation had made me wonder if my awareness of and focus on the secular shifts of my own context weren’t on some level rooted in a fear of loss of my own power. Said a different way, am I so concerned about growing secularity because my income, job security, and social status are on the line? Those are okay reasons to wrestle with these things, I guess, but I would like to hope that I want to explore these things because I want to share Jesus with other people in a way they can understand, and not just to protect my turf.

At any rate, these kind of deep self-interrogations were going on while we prepared and after we arrived in Norway. What helped resolve them to some degree was the witness of African siblings.

I have written about conversations with the international students (pictured above with Oslo UMC clergy) and I’ll return to that again just to draw out a couple learnings they gave, in particular.

The students, from various traditions and regions, but all from Kenya helped give me a picture of Kenyan society and culture that can be described and contrasted with more Western cultures (USA and Norway) in three key ways.

1) People attend religious services in large numbers in the Kenyan context. There are many options to choose from. While atheism is not unheard of, an atheist person might be considered a bit weird (the words of a student, not mine). The default cultural expectation is religious participation as Christian, Muslim, whatever, but SOMETHING. “None of the above” is not considered an available option. 

2) Faith and religion have a powerful voice in the Kenyan public space. Politicians clearly state their religious affiliation publicly. Most public meetings even on local levels begin with prayer. The opinion of faith groups and people of faith are given heavy weight in public policy conversations.

3) Kenyans sculpture holds an expectation of the miraculous or transcendent in their every day existence. One of the students pointed out that this anticipation of the supernatural is deeply embedded culturally and certainly predates the arrival of colonial powers. 

These points clearly established, what I have observed is that most of the African voices I’ve been listening to are totally flummoxed by the situation in Norway. They fail to identify any positive aspects of a secular society (like the freedom to worship as you choose or not at all, freedom to opt out of institutions that are too patriarchal, racist, or otherwise don’t align with values, etc). Simply put, they can’t figure out how things went so wrong with Norway. 

Maybe that’s overstating things a bit. Keep in mind I’ve been in conversation with a host of voices on this and that each person has slightly differing opinions. Some suggestions about how the Christian society of Norway became thoroughly un-Christian have to do with Norway’s great wealth (the standard of living here is on the whole better than the USA). The thinking goes that people don’t feel dependence on God or each other because all material needs are met. You can almost see the occasional person thinking, “A little hunger, suffering, and deprivation will bring these Norwegians back to God.” 

Or maybe it’s something else? One of the Kenyan students observed that in Kenya the schools provide a more thorough introduction to basic Christian concepts and biblical narratives. This is certainly not the case in Norway, though Norway does offer courses to 3rd graders and high school that are basic Christian doctrine and Christian ethics courses respectively. The very different situation means that while the average Norwegian may not have a biblical frame of reference that helps them to be aware of their need for God, sin and broken relationships, or their status as a created being bearing the image of God, that the average Kenyan has this awareness much more convincingly wired in. This dynamic makes all the difference when it comes to sharing the gospel, this student observed. I think they’re probably right. But what to do?

It’s really this situations that leaves Kenyans, Norwegians, and this American rightly puzzled.

 

This is where the conversation gets really interesting and a set of new conversation partners enter. There are several couples we got together with who are doing ministry in Norway, trying to figure these questions out in a cross cultural way.

For instance, we got together with Rev. Susan Matti and her husband Rev. Benjamin Matti. Both of them were ordained and served churches (including a 15 point charge) in the Methodist Church of Kenya. They came to Norway (first Susan, then Benjamin a couple years later) to pursue graduate degrees. They became connected with IMCO and Susan is now serving a UMC church somewhat near Oslo, while Benjamin continues to work on his proficiency in Norsk and assist Rev. Terje as needed.

We got together with them at the busy Oslo Central Station and spent a long time in conversation about their experiences and ministry in Norway as well (again, kids were at the next table, aren’t they champs for being so patient!).

What struck me in conversation was how earnestly they hoped to share the gospel of Jesus Christ in spite of all the obstacles already named and in the midst of the culture they find puzzling to say the least.

In conversation with seasoned and experienced colleagues like Susan and Benjamin something came in to focus for me. They were wrestling with the same questions I was in the midst of secularity. It was almost as if they had gone to sleep one night in Kenya and had awakened in this context of deep secularity and were asking, “okay- now what?”.

This helped me come to a realization that my own journey has not been so very terribly different in at least one way: I come from a world that in some ways was similar ( the rural Indiana of my youth was less secular and more closely aligned with Kenya on points listed above). My own sense of things was that one day I woke up and the context of ministry had changed- perhaps in some way I had changed. They experienced the transition by moving from one country and culture to another, my country has been in the midst of rapid cultural transition most of my life. Susan, Benjamin, and I are all trying to figure out how to adapt and offer Jesus.  To be sure, I don’t want to flatten their experience into my own. I’ve had advantages as an American clergy person  both culturally and materially that make my own journey most definitely privileged in comparison on many levels. Yet, it is just this reality that helped me to see that the questions I’m wrestling with are not simply questions of angst related to my own diminishing power but are also about a sense of cultural dislocation that has occurred as the world has changed faster than I had the capacity to comprehend or adapt.

So, can we make a home here in this unfamiliar secular land and share Jesus in a different tongue (In their case Norway, in my case a rapidly secularizing USA)? I think the hope they and others give me is that the answer can be “yes!”

Another couple wrestling with this question we were able to get together with was Rev. Dr. Andrew Ratanya Ph.D. and his wife Felicity (currently a Ph.D candidate in her own field of restoration and care for victims of sexual trauma). They were gracious enough to have us to their home and share a delicious meal from their Kenyan tradition. I brought deviled eggs, they had never heard of them! 

Conversation stretched out over well more than 3 hours and their children, similar in age to ours, had a great time showing the kids around their neighborhood. We only remembered to grab a photo as they walked us back to the metro station near their apartment.

Andrew has served as a pastor and was ordained in Kenya but came initially to Norway to complete his masters and the Ph.D. Eventually Felicity began work on hers. As the years passed and they began to think about returning to Kenya they came to realize that their children had spent almost all of their lives in Norway. They spoke Norwegian as fluently as anything and culturally it was home.

I get a sense that this realization came with some pain as love for Kenya is still strong in their hearts, but the decision to remain in Norway was one very much for their children.

Andrew is a terrific theologian and has spent much time thinking about the collaboration of colonialism, capitalism, and Christianity which has in too many cases (and in his native Kenya) led to ecological devastation and environmental catastrophe. How can it be that people who claim to be followers of Jesus have left the world in this way? With this prophetic sight and passion in his heart he is wrestling with how the church can engage in real and hope filled ways to remedy these past wrongs and help the hope of God to bring about healing in the world. 

I think he suspects- and I’d have to say I agree- that there is an opening for a church whose missional focus is ecological justice.

Oslo is an environmentally conscious city. The great majority of vehicles are electric, public transportation is excellent, recycling opportunities ubiquitous, and by 2024 will be a carless city in its downtown. People are deeply aware of changing climate- Norway’s arctic geography makes even small changes hard to ignore. At the same time Norway is a significant oil producer and much of its prosperity and its comprehensive welfare state is dependent on that reality. The contradictions are obvious and glaring. This odd combination of awareness of and dependence on the problem positions people in a kind of state of hopelessness. You can imagine Norwegians thinking “We have a crisis, but nothing we do will be enough, we can think of no other way to live, and the rest of the world is not changing fast enough either.”

What if a/the church was able to make ecological healing a central touchstone of its missional effort? It would have a couple benefits. 1) it is a topic people in this culture are aware of and care about. In other words, it’s an opening. 2) The Church is a mission. We too often get sloppy or self-serving and end up focusing on our own feelings or needs, when what Jesus embodies and leaves in the form of the Church is a mission of God in the world. 3) What could happen is that people who have given up hope might hear a word and join into action with the hope of God for the world. As God’s Spirit inspires people to come together to seek change, the dawning horizon of the Kingdom of God appears. Hope is awakened.

If the third and final point could be achieved it would be a powerful thing. Even though persons in a secular society have lost the sense that God is present in their lives or that the world is a transcendent place, this by no means implies they have lost their hunger for God or transcendence. Maybe this is what it might look like to offer Christ and be the church in a secular age?!

Meeting people in the midst of their concern, focusing the mission of a congregation around that need, introduce hope through long labor together in the mission of God for the healing of the world. It’s not exactly “rinse and repeat” put it’s a dreamy, hope-filled picture of a church that might act in a way that is faithful to its deepest values of what God is doing in  the world in Jesus Christ. 

It may not be an idea that catches on in the USA anytime soon, I will admit. We are far more polarized on major matters of policy like these than the Norwegian population. But are there other issues around which this same kind of resonance with the gospel can be found? I think so! Anywhere you have people you have unmet needs that are so big that people have abandoned hope. If the church will not be blind to these, but instead organize and inspire people around these issues, it might reintroduce hope in Jesus name- those in darkness might see a great light.

To get there, however, we’ll have to get out of our own way. We have to come to peace with the church not existing any more to simply comfort us in our living in our own land, but come to understand church as God’s vital mission, in which we join in a strange land. Who will point the way? I think I’ve met a few witnesses who can.