Katongole / Rice Reconciling All Things

1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8308-7830-7
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 167 Seiten

Reihe: Resources for Reconciliation

Christianity Today Book Award winner Our world is broken and cries out for reconciliation. But mere conflict resolution and peacemaking are not enough. What makes real reconciliation possible? How is it that some people are able to forgive the most horrendous of evils? And what role does God play in these stories? Does reconciliation make any sense apart from the biblical story of redemption? Secular models of peacemaking are insufficient. And the church has not always fulfilled its call to be agents of reconciliation in the world. In Reconciling All Things Emmanuel Katongole and Chris Rice, codirectors of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School, cast a comprehensive vision for reconciliation that is biblical, transformative, holistic and global. They draw on the resources of the Christian story, including their own individual experiences in Uganda and Mississippi, to bring solid, theological reflection to bear on the work of reconciling individuals, groups and societies. They recover distinctively Christian practices that will help the church be both a sign and an agent of God's reconciling love in the fragmented world of the twenty-first century. This powerful, concise book lays the philosophical foundations for reconciliation and explores what it means to pursue hope in areas of brokenness in theory and practice.

Emmanuel Katongole (Ph.D., Catholic University of Louvain) is associate research professor of theology and world Christianity at Duke Divinity School. He is the author and editor of several books, including A Future for Africa and African Theology Today.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Katongole, Emmanuel

Rice, Chris

Leseproben

Introduction

Reconciling All Things. It’s a pretty preposterous title for a book. Especially one as short as this. If the title is ambitious, it is because this book arises out of our deep restlessness about what it means to live faithfully in a broken and divided world.

One of us is American. One of us is African. One is Protestant, one Catholic. One is a practitioner, one a theologian. Yet our journeys cross and defy easy categories, borders and loyalties. We find ourselves bound together as restless pilgrims in search of something better in a divided world.

The restlessness and convictions of this book grow out of three pilgrim journeys.

A Pilgrim’s Life

For me (Chris), even after seven years in Durham, North Carolina, I still feel like a stranger in unfamiliar territory. I am as white and American as most of my dear friends at Blacknall Presbyterian Church. My children play in soccer leagues and ride horses. We live in a quiet and stable urban neighborhood. Trained at Duke Divinity School, where I now serve, I can talk the talk of the academic world.

But the most important education I ever received came during my twelve years growing up in South Korea as a son of missionary parents and my seventeen years living in an inner-city black neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi. There I was, born in the U.S.A. but growing up in bustling Seoul during the tumultuous post-Korean war years, when we also saw an explosive growth of Christianity. And there I was after that, studying Chinese at Middlebury College and aspiring to a government career. I took a summer break to volunteer in Mississippi, of all places.

I arrived in Mississippi in 1981 as a starry-eyed twenty-one-year-old. There at Voice of Calvary Ministries—founded by Mississippi pastor and activist John Perkins in an inner-city neighborhood that had been abandoned by churches of every color—Christians of different races worshiped, worked and lived side-by-side on the same streets, seven days a week. You name it, Voice of Calvary did it: housing, economic development, youth ministry. It was an exciting place to be.

I went to Jackson for three months and stayed for seventeen years. My wife, Donna, and I met and married at Voice of Calvary, and our three children were all born or adopted there. I saw our church almost split over a racial crisis. I experienced revelations of how God can bring joy, friendship and new life out of pain, failure and weakness. Along the way, I became an unlikely friend and colaborer with Spencer Perkins, the founder’s son, who grew up amid intense racial animosity. We helped start a Christian community called Antioch, where our families lived for twelve years. We also founded a national reconciliation ministry and wrote a book to tell our story.

Then Spencer and I nearly split apart in 1997—a bitter relational crisis. Yet somehow, with the help of friends, we learned to give each other enough grace to go on and to trust God for the lack. Just trying to live peacefully in one neighborhood, in one church and with one person named Spencer taught me that reconciliation is a long and fragile journey.

But the most important lesson of those seventeen Mississippi years was this: even in a deeply divided world, even in the most deeply divided relationship, the way things are is not the way things have to be.

After Spencer’s sudden death in 1998 and a period of discernment, our family opened a new chapter. Here in a different place—on the other side of the tracks at Duke University—I found myself immediately restless: can places like Duke and West Jackson say hello, become friends and transform each other?

Through this pilgrimage from America to Korea to Mississippi to Duke, I find myself constantly longing and searching for communion across worlds and divides I have lived on both sides of—Asia and America, black and white, haves and have-nots, action and reflection, Blacknall’s Presbyterian deliberateness and Voice of Calvary’s gospel choir spontaneity, Korean kimchi and Mississippi ribs, the reality of West Jackson gunshots and the beauty of Duke gardens.

African in America

This book’s second source of restlessness is found in Emmanuel’s journey.

For me (Emmanuel) as well, this has been an unexpected pilgrim journey, for I never imagined myself at a place like Duke.

Here I am, a Ugandan who grew up in the small village of Malube. A Catholic priest in a Methodist seminary. An African living in the United States. I am a village-born-and-bred son of Uganda who can remember waking up to 5:00 a.m. chores in the garden before running the two miles to school. But I have also been able to study in Uganda, Rome and Belgium. I am now teaching in a wealthy research university, going home and back again and again in the name of a fresh conversation about Africa.

My father came from a poor family in Rwanda to Uganda, raising seven children with my mother. He never went to school himself yet became a parent leader at our school and mobilized children in the village to get an education. My father died when I was twelve. My brother died of AIDS in 1993. When civil war broke out in 1980, my mother fled the house as the military demolished every living thing. She walked fifty miles to Kampala and did not return until six years later. Here I am, with both my experience of growing up in Africa under the brutal regime of Idi Amin and my involvement in the dynamic and rich traditions of the African church.

In all my teaching I find myself in search of something better than the tribalization that divides so much of Africa, or categories such as North and South, black and white. Here I am, pressing the question as I teach, “But what does this theology mean for my mother?” What does it mean back in Malube, where trees are being cut down by powerful businesses, where roads are in disrepair, where clean water is not available, where the priest lives in a faraway town? What does it mean for our conversations about God and peace never to be disconnected from the challenges of real, local places, from digging wells, organizing education and planting trees?

Whether it is building community between African and American congregations through the ministry of Share the Blessings or leading pilgrimages of Duke students and faculty to Uganda or supporting Ugandans who serve as priests in American parishes, my life is about being at Duke and at the same time never leaving Africa.

A Shared Journey

The third source of restlessness for this book comes out of the journey we have shared.

We discovered each other in a classroom at Duke, Emmanuel as teacher and Chris as student. Soon we were friends, discovering we were even born the same year. Eventually a remarkable international journey merged with our two journeys through the Reconciliation Track of the 2004 Lausanne Forum for World Evangelization.

Chris was invited to convene the Reconciliation Track and invited Emmanuel to join the leadership team. The journey took the team to Duke, to Rwanda ten years after the genocide and to the October 2004 Thailand forum of 1,500 participants. Over that week in Thailand we joined fifty Christian leaders in our track from twenty-one of the world’s most divided places historically—from Korea to Northern Ireland, from India to South Africa. As we worshiped across denominations and nations, ate together, debated and reflected on our ministries of reconciliation, something beautiful happened: strangers became companions, and a global community of the restless was born.

Rooming together in Thailand, the two of us bonded and talked into the night each evening. Returning to Duke, conversations intensified with Greg Jones, our dean, about a major new initiative focused on reconciliation. By December 2004, the two of us were walking down a North Carolina beach as the new codirectors of the Duke Center for Reconciliation, sharing our dreams for what a center would look like if it were to take seriously both social realities and Scripture, action and reflection, America and Africa. Yet even in this growing friendship, we weren’t sure what we were getting into. As Protestant and Catholic in churches that do not share the Communion cup, we knew the church’s brokenness was at the heart of our restlessness.

Since that walk in December 2004, we have walked together in one another’s formative villages in Uganda and Mississippi. Chris saw the church where Emmanuel was baptized into the faith. Emmanuel saw the Antioch dinner table that bound Chris into a beloved community.

Now, three years into the journey of the center, a major new initiative is forming around reconciliation—a seedbed for future leaders (we send students to both Mississippi and Uganda), a resource center and a fueling station to nourish Christian leaders in America and across the world. Every semester is full of encounters—at Duke, across America and around the world—with people working in places of deep pain with great hope. We end every semester on that same North Carolina coast, walking the beach and naming the gifts. This journey is not worth it without joy and celebration along the way, without remembering the bigger story we are in.

The Convictions in This Book

The convictions we explore in this book became clear to us only as we worked together to establish the center. We discovered we had developed strong, common convictions about reconciliation as a Christian vision and practice.

Indeed, in our zest for constantly bridging diverse worlds, we see a bigger journey—a quest for God’s new creation and a fresh vision for the...