16463: Anonymous Re: 16425: Cunningham: Christians vs Voodoo (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

***PLEASE POST ANONYMOUSLY.***



RE: Christians vs. Voodoo

As a Christian, and as someone who did one year of training with Youth
With A Mission (YWAM), then spent numerous years as YWAM staff on the
Latin American mainland, and overall had good experiences within the
organization, I find Patti Cunningham's recent posting of YWAM-Haiti
leader Terry Snow's missionary letter in the post "Christians vs. Voodoo,"
to be a prime example of things undertaken by Christians in the name of
Christ and evangelism that, in truth, do damage to both, and crucially, to
the Haitians who are intended to be helped thereby. I also personally
found the letter to be painful to the depths of my Christ-controlled
being.

Few would argue with the fact that an inherent requirement of the
Christian faith is for adherents to convey the gospel, i.e., to seek by
deed and word to bring people into the Christian fold. While many in the
name of tolerance both in Haiti and elsewhere dislike this aspect of most
manifestations of Christianity, and would blanketly direct energies toward
preventing missionaries from evangelizing, taking such actions, especially
while appreciating any philosophy of "the marketplace of ideas," are
themselves only an exhibited intolerance, as Corbetter Lori Zachary has
pointed toward. The hard fact is that Christians WILL evangelize, plain
and simple, because that is among the core-most requirements of the
Christian faith. Therefore, the most room for true debate lies in HOW
missionaries evangelize, the spirit which they do it in, and most
crucially, their views of the cultures, peoples and their histories, to
whom they "go"--in this context, Haiti and Haitians.

Few would also debate whether Christians throughout history have
undertaken actions in the name of Christ and evangelism that have called
forth resistance to their activities, including within Haiti. While
Christians tend to uniformly cry "persecution" to such resistance, I
suggest that, many times, it is instead divine chastisement behind the
persecutions, directed by God at some because of their underlying views of
the peoples and cultures with whom they work, and their tactics undertaken
toward them in the name of Christ and evangelism that warrant association
with neither.

Terry Snow had reportedly been recipient of "persecutions" in Haiti.  One
web page at YWAM-Haiti, and quite widely reported in broader YWAM circles,
details this by explaining some relatively mild events, and then stating,
"Terry didn't suspect that a certain [Haitian] political group was
dismantling his ministry and his reputation. He didn't know he was being
persecuted."  The same report then naively asserts, "He had no reason to
be [persecuted]."  Yet the same article later categorizes the mentioned
political group as "fascist."  Elsewhere at the same website, the naivety
continues.  Snow quotes Zechariah 8:13, and applies it to Haiti to assert
that the country is a "curse among the nations."  Snow then brazenly
asserts that Haiti was "the point of entry for the Gospel into the western
hemisphere through Christopher Colombus in 1492." Since Haiti was
privileged in this way according to Snow, he goes on to wonder in apparent
dismay and sincerity why Haiti "is known today for voodoo, poverty and
government turmoil" (sic; http://www.ywam-haiti.org/).

With this view of Haiti and Haitians as his backdrop, and confident that
he has had "no reason to be [persecuted]," the focus of Snow's recent
missionary letter from Haiti is what he says is a campaign where "the
Churches of St. Marc came to together in one voice to declare Jesus as
Lord and renounced voodoo, with its destructive influence as it has
affected Haiti's past (sic)." In what he asserts as "the climax" to the
campaign, Snow preached to an assembled group of mostly Christians that
"voodoo had never helped them," and cited what he reported to the group as
a "resent adduction of a baby from the hospital, presumed to be dead,
killed at the hands of a witch doctor for a special sacrifice for the
August 14 celebration of the Boukman pact" (sic). Finding basis for his
symbolic actions in the anti-Vodou campaign within the symbolism of the
Judges 7 campaign of Gideon, Snow then led groups of YWAMers and Haitians
to go to six "particular location[s]."  In unison, they were to each
"launch a large firework bomb into the air" while Snow waited elsewhere
"ready to launch the final explosive end."  Snow says that the "BOOOOOOM!"
that followed caused demons associated with Vodou to flee.

Most who know any fair number of Haitians and who have a good
understanding of Haitian and world history (and His-story, to use YWAMese)
would consider Snow's take on Haiti, Haitians, and Vodou, and his recent
anti-Vodou campaign, to be ridiculous at best, and virulent at worst.  It
is these undergirding beliefs about Haiti and Haitians, exhibited in Snow,
that are prime examples of the sort of shallow thinking held among certain
missionary groups in Haiti that have led them to conduct most of the
country's various "Christians vs. Voodoo" campaigns throughout history,
including this recent one that Snow celebrated.  I am again suggesting
that the attitudes and underlying beliefs that are foundational to these
campaigns are a prime reason for certain missionaries' experiences with
"persecution" in Haiti, but that the supposed persecution should instead
be viewed by the pertinent missionaries as a sort of gift that has come
their way to help them re-evaluate their ways of thinking and doing in
Haiti.

The sort of worldview that would cause missionaries in Haiti to think and
behave in such a way certainly requires picking apart--even picking apart
from the perspective of Christian missiology.  Don Richardson is a
prominent Christian missiologist and a teacher in many if not most YWAM
missionary training schools. *Ironically, YWAM-Haiti leader Terry Snow
very probably sat under Richardson in one way or another during his own
YWAM training school or schools.* In Richardson's book, Eternity in Their
Hearts (which was assigned reading at the YWAM School of Evangelism I
attended in the late 80s) he argues that the God of the Bible has from the
most ancient of times made Himself known in measure to all peoples of all
cultures of all times. The God of the Bible has done this, Richardson
argues, by planting certain and strong truths and knowledge of Himself
within the religions, rituals, and histories of all peoples. While
Richardson cites some very interesting ethnographic data to back up some
of the practical sides of his assertions, he centers the core of his
argument in Christian theology, most particularly Hebrews 6:29-7:21.
Speaking of Christ and quoting Psalm 110:4, the author of Hebrews wrote,
"The Lord swore and will not change his mind, You are a priest forever,
according to the order of Melchizedek." Though the details of this are
beyond my scope here, for Richardson, the implications of it are profound
and even revolutionary; in short, Christ has in measure been a priest of
all peoples, including Haitians, long before the missionary ever thought
to arrive or was even born.

For Richardson, the job of the missionary is therefore to first build very
close relationships with people, which includes learning, appreciating,
and even emulating their cultures very deeply and in every appropriate
way. Within this spirit, Richardson says that the missionary can then
discover the antecedent God-placed truths that Richardson says exists
among a people, and then bridge from the truths to, in essence, fill in
puzzle pieces of the faith of those who perceive missing pieces in what
they already have.  Many other prominent Christian missiologists have
added to Richardson and argue for what they call an "incarnational" model
of missionary activity. Their theological basis for this is the kenosis
passage of Philippians. "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain
conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of
you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests
of others. Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who,
being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to
be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant"
(2:4-8).  I would like to suggest to all readers what most are already
well aware of, namely, that when missionaries in Haiti fail to undertake
their activities incarnationally, and within what Richardson has pointed
out above, they are probably, in the vast bulk, hurting not only the
Haitians they say they love, but the Christ they say they love.

And they are failing on many other points besides. As another Corbetter in
this debate named Kowolin has accurately observed, "The individualist
westerners can learn from vodou practitioners, what it really means to
live with your neighbors as sisters and brothers: sharing of the little
that you have; making your neighbors's needs and concerns yours."  As one
who has been part of and moved about within various Christian circles in
the West, I can back up Kowolin.  Extreme individualism permeates most
Western Christian movements, and that missionaries from the movements very
often export this individualism to Haiti and elsewhere, both deliberately
and unawares. Perhaps this is one explanation for the fact that the number
of lakou settlements from the first some decades of the Haitian peasantry
has declined, having given way to kinship patterning surrounding nuclear
families. Adding further to Kowolin's observation, I can attest that many
Haitian social organizational forms, such as Sosoyete-s, Artibsyon-s,
Gwoupman Peyizan-s, and others, put most Western Christian churches and
movements to utter shame in exhibiting true community. Missionaries in
Haiti: if you have not first stopped to deeply live-learn with *and from*
those you say you are trying to reach, you may very well be doing more
damage than good, despite any external hard "projects" you may be able to
point to.

Apparently, none of this is a perspective that Snow has adopted during his
missionary activities in Haiti, particularly as regards Vodou and
Vodousaints. This recent anti-Vodou campaign that was the focus of his
missionary letter is only yet another mis-characterization and
misrepresentation of not only Haiti and Haitians, but the Christ the
missionaries say they serve. Thankfully, there are at least some Christian
missionary groups in the Haiti who do otherwise, and who may therefore
more truly help Haitians, as well as be accurate representatives of
Christ.  As a prominent Indian evangelical has said to activities
correlative to this anti-Vodou campaign, "God has called us to be
peacemakers, not troublemakers." YWAM-Haiti and all observers of their
recent campaign would do well to give careful heed.