We're back from Liberia, and everyone is home with their family. I am deeply grateful to the men, their wives and kids for allowing their husbands to braved the west African heat, culture and people in order to give them a place to grow spiritually and physically.
Since my arrival I've been going over the writings of Francis Schaeffer, especially his book, "The God who is There," to glean some of the cultural issues he faced in Europe after the war. In the God Who is There Schaeffer tackled how to communicate the gospel to a culture/people who no longer believe in the concept of Truth as an absolute or what Schaeffer called, "as an antithesis, "they took it for granted that if anything was true, the opposite was false." In morality, if one thing was right, its opposite was wrong. This little formula, "A is A" and if you have A, it is not non-A," is the first move in classical logic. If you understand the extent to which this no longer holds sway, you will understand our present situation. Absolutes imply antithesis; Schaeffer.
As a people and culture, that CenterPoint has disappeared from our concsciences, and we now live in a culture without a reference point. We can walk in the market place of ideas and purchase our truth as we know or express it (Isa. 59:14-15).
The idea/vision of CenterPoint is to anchor the church in the Word of God and its truth, thereby practicing the ministry of the presence among believers in Post War Liberia. "If the church is a communion of saints, that communion can exist nowhere else but in the congregation of sinners who experience God's graciousness in word, sacrament, and the special gift of being enableed to live for each other. God becomes more tangible because Christ exists in this community in word, in truth, in love, in forgiveness, in reconciliation, and in mutual love of all the members. The Christian community in turn, becomes real, when the human, graced by God, is enhanced in promise, demand love, and service (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in A Testament of Freedom).
That love was expressed when brothers and sisters from the west gave us funds, to travelled to Liberia in order to make CenterPoint in reality in the lives and culture of the People. These men were not just driving nails in woods, but were also confronting the Liberians with their faith and truth of the gospel of Christ daily as we learned with them.
Truth has become a moving target in this bleeding culture after 15 plus years of war and carnage. Hearts, and minds are difficult to penetrate with the truth of the gospels, where people don't trust one another or outsiders. The shift has been tremendous for post war Liberia as young men and women have been forced by circumstance to grow up faster than the natural process demands. They've seen more evil, carnage, brutality, sexual violence againstt them, than any generation before them. We have to speak the truth to them, in love.
It is my generation of Christians more than any other who need to heed these words of Martin Luther, the Reformer:
"If I confess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the Truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point."
Tony
Ref:
Truth and Love, the Apologetics of Francis Schaeffer
A Testament to Freedom, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The God Who is There, Francis Schaeffer
Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, H. R. Rookaamer
West African Christianty: The Religious Impact, Lamin Sanneh
The Cost of Discipleship, dietrich Bonhoeffer,
