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>> It’s a great pleasure for me to speak in French to you today. So it’s a huge challenge
the church, this problem of racism and ethnic conflicts. What I’m going to talk about
we’re going to concentrate on the big African continent but the concepts can be transposed
to anywhere else.
Africa, like all the other Third World countries in the world is going through a demographic
explosion. The cities are filling up rapidly. And the churches were not prepared for this
influx of people. And on top of that the sociological research of recent years has shown us that several missionary agencies
and have been evangelizing targeted ethnic groups. We see missionary enterprises in several
countries, several tribes and several ethnic groups are connected to several different
denominations.
And today all of these groups are in the big cities. There are also the consequences of
the genocide and wars that push people more and more into the big cities. And the church
is not prepared to face their needs. I’m going to use a Power Point presentation to
help us to understand this.
And I’m just going to talk about three different genocides that happened in recent times. There
was the genocide in Rwanda, in Burundi, and also the massive problem in the Darfur region.
And a lot of people from these regions are migrating to big cities. Except for what happened
in the villages, they cannot have possibly the same denominations in the big cities they
had in the villages. They’re spread out and scattered in the cities. However, in the
village they were members of a church of such and such denomination. But in the big cities
sometimes they find themselves in the same neighborhoods, but in the recent past they
were enemies. They were in churches that oppose one another. And they are not well received
in these same denominations in the city.
So I would like to show you this graph here. It outlines several reasons that are keeping
these people from integrating the church. Several churches have these reactions. First
of all, there was silence when confronted with the genocide problem. There was silence
towards the ethnic problems. They found a way to ignore the problem. And sometimes they’ve
tried to get around the problem. And people in that situation do not feel welcome in the
church. Sometimes the church leadership has already taken sides. Sometimes the church
rejects a certain ethnic group.
I just would like to give an example from my church in Montreal. I’m taking a big
jump here from Africa to Montreal. There is a church in Montreal the City of Montreal
has about120,000 inhabitants and there are 100 churches. But all these churches have
this one characteristic, if the pastor comes from a certain country, even if his church
has the smallest representation in the church, that – the leadership team in the church
will be coming from that minority. And that looks like either tribalism or racism. But
in Africa we’re living the same thing in even a more flagrant way because there is
war and ethnic diversity.
As another way to react to the problem is spiritualize everything. God knows. God knows
everything. And other churches have taken another position, it’s not our problem.
It’s the problem of the politicians and the government. They say it’s not our problem.
I would like to give a few suggestions, not necessarily to find ready-made solutions,
that would be too easy. But I would like to give you some reflections that can lead to
some profound thinking on the missiological level. Because we’re one in Jesus. There
is no difference of race or color or ethne or tribe. And sometimes we lack that clarity
in our missiology or in our ecclesiology. So I would like to say that as leaders in
the urban church, we should not take sides. We need to proclaim equality in Jesus Christ.
We need to help people think about what it means to be equal in Jesus Christ. I’m going
to read a quote here. I’m not going to mention the name of the person or the country by respect
– out of respect.
I was in a country recently that has gone through a terrible crisis along these lines.
And someone said to a group of Christians, someone said go to the church. In the church
you’ll be protected. No one will kill you in the church. But someone said that – there
have been bombs in the church that have killed people that took refuge in the churches.
So the leadership got together and asked themselves why did that happen? One of the persons that
had thrown the bomb was a leader in one of those churches. And the answer was, they were
not from my tribe. Because what type of message are we preaching in our urban churches because
we have people like that now in our churches? We could not carry on with making our churches
in the big cities into ghettos. We need to proclaim equality in Jesus Christ. We need
to help leaders in the church integrate into the leadership of the church people from other
backgrounds. And to help these leaders understand that on top of being one in Jesus Christ,
we need to help these leaders understand that we need to transform the city for the glory
of Jesus Christ.
So one of the lines of reflection that I want to suggest is integrating people from multiple
backgrounds into leadership of the church. Another suggestion I would like to make, in
my experience, in the developing countries I visited, it works quite well. It’s to
do an exegetical analysis of biblical passages to have an understanding of their ethnic implications.
And where ethnic groups in the church are implicated in transforming the church and
the city. And these studies will help the members of the church understand because the
missiological history in the church is composed also of the implication of strangers and outsiders.
And so we can see in the biblical missiology there is a lot of foreign presence in the Old Testament
as well as the New Testament.
And so to conclude, I would like to encourage you – I would like to encourage you to analyze
the problem of tribalism and ethnicity not just in terms of black or white, but in terms
of the integration of people from various ethnic origins into the leadership of the
church. We have been challenged in the plenary sessions of these past days seeing how enormous
the diaspora is a challenge to us. And so whether our churches are in the developing
world or in the western world, we have a very important presence of foreigners from the
diaspora. So we have a huge job ahead of us to integrate these people into the church.
And that is possible because we are
one in Christ. And
because
we love the cities where God has placed us. So may the Lord help us to contextualize our ministries so we can
touch the totality of the people that he’s put in our neighborhoods, in our cities. Thank you
very much.