The Unbelieving Believers - R

Man, it's been awhile, hasn't it? Since the last time I wrote a blog post, I moved into a new house, graduated college, went to a different country, saw two friends get married, and started my summer internship.

In the immortal words of Ferris Bueller: life moves pretty fast.

I do want to focus more on one item on that list, though, and that's going to a different country. I had the amazing privilege to travel with a group from ACU to a small village in Ghana called Ateiku. This was my first time ever leaving the country, and I was a little nervous I will admit. When I first heard about the trip, it just fit so perfectly with my schedule (between graduation and my internship) and sounded so compelling that I felt like it was very important for me to find a way to get there. And I think it was important for me to be there, but more on that later.

First, I want to try to give you a small taste of the colossal amount of work God has been able to do in that country in the last twenty years. Our main contact was a man named Lawrence Oduro. It is very difficult to overstate the impact that this one man has had on the community around him. He walked by faith to that small village of Ateiku to spread the good news, but when he saw how deep the needs of that community were, he did more than start a church. To skip a few steps in the story, because of Lawrence's work in Ateiku and the surrounding villages, over 100 wells have been dug, which bring clean water to hundreds of thousands of people; dozens of churches have been planted all over the country; because Lawrence cannot preach at all these churches, he started a school to train preachers, which this year graduated twelve new preachers; he also started numerous primary, intermediate, and high schools to raise the quality of education in the area; and most recently, he built a hospital in Ateiku to make healthcare more affordable and more available, since the next closest hospital is a two hour drive from their village.

Like I say, God has done an incredible amount through this one man. The area has been completely transformed. If you'd like, this amazing video gives a little more information on the ministry there, and I'll even promise not to continue with the blog post until you finish watching it.

The entire time I was there, I was keeping an eye out for why exactly God had me there. What was I meant to learn? What was I meant to see? Who was I meant to meet? What was I meant to do? I'm now fairly convinced that one of the most significant things to come out of that trip was a one-hour conversation that our group got to have with Lawrence one night. We asked him about the culture, about the ongoing work he was conducting, about the state of Christianity in Ghana - everything we could think of really. He very graciously answered all of our questions, happy to share with us ignorant Westerners.

Towards the end of that conversation, I asked him (since he'd been to America numerous times and often hosted groups of Americans in Ateiku) what the main differences were between American Christians and Ghanaian Christians. What followed was a conversation that might rattle around in my brain for the rest of my life.

The first thing he said: "Huge, not small." Seems like a belief in Jesus may be the only thing we actually have in common. He thought for a half-second and smiled. He said, "I would say that about 70% of American Christians are not believers."

We stared. Not really sure I'm following Lawrence.

It turns out that Americans really don't know what faith is. He talked about American churches trying to plan, trying to accomplish something. The first place they turn is not to God with a prayer but to the budget with a pen. We have to make this make sense, we have to plan and be organized, we have to work out of the carefully constructed line items that keep the church running.

Lawrence said that Ghanaian Christians don't have that luxury. They have to operate out of faith. When they see a need, they trust that God will find a way, big or small, to fill it, and they ask God to do just that until he does.

My first thought was to be defensive, to think that well yes, we pay attention to the budget so that we don't run the church into the ground, we want to be responsible, don't we? Then I remembered a discussion that I once had in class on the disciples and the feeding miracles.

During those days another large crowd gathered. Since they had nothing to eat, Jesus called his disciples to him and said, “I have compassion for these people; they have already been with me three days and have nothing to eat. If I send them home hungry, they will collapse on the way, because some of them have come a long distance.”
His disciples answered, “But where in this remote place can anyone get enough bread to feed them?” “How many loaves do you have?” Jesus asked. “Seven,” they replied. He told the crowd to sit down on the ground. When he had taken the seven loaves and given thanks, he broke them and gave them to his disciples to distribute to the people, and they did so. They had a few small fish as well; he gave thanks for them also and told the disciples to distribute them. The people ate and were satisfied. Afterward the disciples picked up seven basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.About four thousand were present. After he had sent them away, he got into the boat with his disciples and went to the region of Dalmanutha. - Mark 8:1-10

Let's go ahead and agree that the disciples here represent American Christians. They're asking a pretty good question. Or at least they would be, if they hadn't already seen him feed more people with less bread. Just two chapters prior to this in Mark, Jesus fed the 5,000! And then he walked on water! And the disciples are somehow still concerned with the question of how. It seems almost laughable at this point to think that Jesus couldn't find a way to do this, but it seems like they're doing exactly what Lawrence observed that we do. They're trying to make it make sense. They're trying to operate out of the numbers that work in their minds.

In the immortal words of Randy Harris, "God doesn't do math like that."

The sad reality is that Americans don't have faith because most Americans don't need faith. We are some of the wealthiest people in the world, we live in relative safety, we have an amazing infrastructure, and we have some of the lowest rates of hunger on the planet. For the most part, our needs are met regularly. We don't need faith, because we have the expectation that we'll be taken care of.

As someone who currently works in not one but two churches, I feel it's necessary to say that I'm not advocating for fiscal irresponsibility. I think budgeting is smart and important. The lesson I'm learning is that the budget cannot decide what we are capable of. What are mere dollars and cents to the creator of heaven and earth?

This is challenging me more than I can remember being challenged in a long time. I realized that even though I'm a proud Christian, I don't think that I'm a true believer. But there's no time like the present to practice. What's the wildest change you're hoping to see happen in your life or in the world? What's that impossible thing that hasn't happened yet? What's that thing that you could never do because the budget or the schedule wouldn't allow? Be crazy enough to believe that God can do that any way he wants. Start praying and start looking for opportunities. It may not make sense to us, but it doesn't have to.

Since when does God have to make sense?

~RJS~