The Galli Report: 11.26.21
Haitian discipleship: something we all need. Crazy-good evangelicals obeying Jesus. Minichurch revival. Dorothy Day: How to change the world.
Image courtesy of Haiti Lifeline
Teaching the Bible for All It’s Worth
Alex Kirk’s “Read your Bible Every Day: How Haitian Christians helped me rethink a mantra” says much about what illiterate cultures can teach us about Bible “reading”:
[The pastor] clutched a mighty Bible and his boxy jacket, two sizes too big for him, reduced his frame to scarecrow status. He began: “Jean, chapitre un, verset vingt-neuf. ‘Le lendemain, il vit Jésus venant à lui, et il dit: Voici l'Agneau de Dieu, qui ôte le péché du monde.’”
He said it again. After a few repetitions I was able to put together “John, chapter one, verse twenty-nine.” Then came, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” He continued to repeat the verse. I thought it was a rhetorical ploy and he was laying the emphasis on a bit thick. He stopped and discoursed for about sixty seconds, then began to repeat the verse again, phrase by phrase, and all the men in the group repeated it after him. They went on like this for about ten minutes.
It dawned on me slowly. These men cannot read. There were only one or two Bibles among them. According to data from The World Bank, the literacy rate for adults in Haiti doesn’t quite reach 62 percent. In a rural village like this, the rates would be much lower. This was their Sunday school class. They were memorizing John 1:29 together in real time. After some time, the teacher discoursed again for four or five minutes – perhaps he was offering a short exposition. Then they began to repeat again and continued for the rest of the class. At the end of class, for accountability, the men stood up one by one and repeated the verse alone.
As I leaned forward in that rigid pew, the humble simplicity and power of this method of discipleship landed on me.
Those (Good) Crazy Evangelicals
Here’s the thing about evangelicals: They are amazing disciples of Jesus sometimes. A lot of times they do hard stuff just because they believe Jesus tells them to. Like Texan Aubrey Schlackman:
The vision had come as she was driving home from the Kroger, and it was so sudden and fully formed that Aubrey Schlackman began to tell people that “it was like God placed it in my head.”
This was last year, a time when abortion was still widely available in Texas and Aubrey was one more young mother joining the midmorning traffic along Farm to Market 407 in the growing suburbs north of Dallas. She passed the Starbucks. She passed the AT&T store. She was thinking about getting her two young boys down for a nap when she reached a pleasant stretch of land bordered by a long split-rail fence, and this is when the idea came.
“A maternity ranch,” she thought, and she could practically see it through her windshield.
Read the full story here, in The Washington Post. (Not sure if you’ll hit a paywall, however.)
I am becoming familiar with a local project that is similar in mission, a Catholic Worker home called The Nativity House, in Lockport, Illinois. I’m not personally motivated to march or protest or demand change in legislatures (but I am glad many people are) as much as I am moved to support efforts like these, ones that put arms and legs on Christian love for the vulnerable.
Speaking of Community
Why the minichurch is the latest trend in American religion: While megachurches often make headlines, most of the congregations in the United States are relatively small.
How to Change the World
This quote from one of my new heroes, Dorothy Day (from The Catholic Worker Movement, June 1946) articulates beautifully what all these people above are doing, creating little cells of joy and peace in a harried world. (The mention of giving away an onion refers to a scene in The Brother’s Karamozov, and is a symbol of redemption.)
What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute—the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words—we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We can give away an onion. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.
Grace and peace,
Mark Galli
Perhaps we could take a note from the Haitian practice in remembering that the Bible as given to us is a means to an end, and not an end in itself. Every chapter and verse memorized; every Greek and Hebrew translation and parsing; every bit of Biblical knowledge gained that does not lead to a deeper and more intimate relationship with the Author is, in my opinion, a complete waste of time. The point is the book must be used as a way to draw closer to God and not a means to self aggrandizing knowledge. Maybe if we paid more attention to WHY we read we'd find ourselves more in community with our Haitian brethren.
This is the perfect example of why people go running from Christianity and why god is absolutely dead in the modern times