What are the Christchurch Earthquakes teaching us about Global mission?

God is not absent from Christchurch’s earthquakes. To ask if God caused these events is a theological question for another time, but I am convinced that God is here and God is not silent. This conviction permits the expectation, (an expectation unsupported by explaining the earthquakes merely as ‘works of nature’ outside the sphere of divine activity) that God has lessons for His Church and for Christchurch from and through these events. Even if we accept that God has lessons for His Church, it may seem strange to seek lessons about global mission in what is after all, a very local event affecting only the second-largest city of a country at the bottom of the world, having a total population comparable to that of a suburb in some of the world’s megacities. Beyond being strange, it may even seem threatening or irresponsible to ask what this local event teaches about global mission. Surely at this time when the dust is still settling and nerves are still unsettled from the last aftershocks, our resources and compassion should be turned to our immediate communities: our households, streets, suburbs and parishes. This is good as far as it goes. We do need to start from where we are: from Jerusalem. But, and this is perhaps the first lesson that the earthquakes teach us – the Church is universal and the world is interconnected.

The first messages of concern that I received in the minutes that followed recent aftershocks, came not from within ‘Jerusalem’ but from the ‘ends of the earth’, not from within Christchurch but from my native Kenya. Kenya is a land acquainted with suffering and the experience of suffering can become a platform for mission. For those far beyond our city limits, their own experiences of suffering foster a sense of connection with the broken, their own suffering becomes a lens that helps them perceive what God is doing globally. That is the crux of mission, being caught up in what God is doing in the world by way of reconciliation and redemption. As it is for those who contacted me from Kenya so it can be for the Church in Christchurch. The question of where and how God is active in this broken and unstable city, particularly in its marginalized poorer suburbs, is a microcosm for the larger missiological question. Where and how is God active in the broken and unstable parts of this world? The questions that came from Kenya, questions after my safety and the safety of my family, are the same questions that Christchurch residents use in greeting after every major aftershock. And so we see that these questions, born as they are out of local experience, can quickly take on thoroughly global significance if we are prepared to ask them across borders other than the garden fences of our local suburbs.

We are daily confronted through the mediation of our television screens (when we are using them as windows and not as mirrors) with evidence of the world’s brokenness. This may well evoke an emotional response, particularlly if we know individuals in the regions concerned, but this response is not missiologically durable. People can move on from vicarious connections as quickly as they are invited to by a media industry that parades the brokenness of the world on a catwalk of suffering where the fashion changes every week. However, through our own experience of being uprooted and unsettled, we are allowed to participate in realities much bigger than ourselves and our local context – realities that are much more representative of how the majority of this world’s inhabitants live. Having to walk for fresh water, we walk with the women of an impoverished African village. Having to carry human waste to a communal collection point, we experience the workings of un-serviced South Asian slums. We negotiate the potholes in our roads along with those who live amidst infrastructure that has been torn apart by war or allowed to crumble in a climate of corruption. In the midst of our experiences ‘here‘ God invites us to be connected to the inhabitants of similar contexts ‘over there’ not because we know them but because we know Him. God invites us to participate with Him in a world that He cares for and loves because He has an emotional connection with everyone who is going through pain or suffering or injustice. The earthquakes teach us a concern for the marginalized wherever they are. Yesterday New Zealanders were concerned for Haitians. Today Kenyans ask after their neighbours in Christchurch. Tomorrow? This is not a negation of local mission, for which the earthquakes are providing many opportunities, but its logical conclusion. Yes we must reach out to our neighbours. But all who suffer whether near or far, become our neighbours. I hope the lessons learnt locally concerning how to reach out to neighbours, how to speak of Christ, hope and the future with people to whom we would not normally mention such things, are lessons that get applied beyond our city. Indeed the most successful missionaries are those who have gone through pain, emerged out the other side of pain and then shared their stories of God’s goodness with others in the midst of pain. There are however limits to what participation in Christchurch’s pain teaches us about the pain of others. What we have learnt is truly learnt and legitimately repeated but our grasp of the vocabulary of suffering is not exhaustive. There are those in the world who speak with more fluency. Although there is no pain that is insignificant , in mission we are wise to cultivate a humility and outward focus that avoids trivializing comparisons.

We can also, if we are willing, learn courage from the earthquakes which have razed to the ground the illusions of security that have historically excused disengagement from the dangerous world outside the Eden that is/was our Garden City. We have been reminded with earth-shattering forcefulness that wherever we are, even in Christchurch, our lives belong to God and we may die at any time. Disorientation and risk cannot be avoided by staying ‘at home’ in stable, democratic, developed New Zealand with its emergency services, social safety nets and insurance companies. Even our assumptions about ‘home‘ have been shaken to the core. As the author of Hebrews reminds us with words that take on a new significance in Christchurch “…here we don not have an enduring city,” (Heb 13:14). This is especially true in the once desirable sea-view and hill-side suburbs. We have become refugees, made homeless from the lives to which we had become accustomed. We are internally displaced persons. Our ‘place‘, from its most particular manifestation in destroyed or condemned family homes to, in its broadest sense our city, has been taken away from us. We no longer recognize its once familiar landmarks, or if we do the recognition is attended not by a sense of security in knowing ‘where we are’ but by a sense of shock that the familiar can be so thoroughly destroyed and disfigured. We have learned to view with suspicion and doubt the integrity of our red-stickered aspirations and have been invited to learn instead that our home and our insurance is God. God is walking in the world on a missionary journey with a pilgrim people who like Abraham, have been called out of the land of their fathers where they were secure and comfortable. Like the Israelites they have been brought out of Egypt to wander, trusting God everyday for food and clean water, in a wilderness of grey silt. Like the heroes of faith recommended to us in Hebrews 11, this people hopes for, walks and works towards promises that they may not see fulfilled in their lifetimes on this earth. Courage cannot help but characterize the people that makes peace with insecurity and learns to journey with God, making its home with the homeless at the raw edges of God’s redemptive work.

The earthquakes taught us in an instant what is really important. When the earthquakes struck, people in Christchurch ran from their homes, like the east and central African refugees I have met in Kenya, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They left behind the things that they worked so hard for. They abandoned their handbags and left their shopping at the till. They turned their backs on houses and possessions, for “is not life more important…?”(Matt 5:25) I hope that we do not forget that. At the moment it may seem unbelievable that we will ever forget. After all we still remember Galipoli, the Wahine disaster and the Napier earthquake. Certainly we shall not forget that the earthquakes happened. But God would have us do more than learn to remember the mere fact of the event as we sink back into the routines of insularity that characterized our lives before the the quakes threw us all together in a shared brokenness. The challenge of memory is learning to create spaces for continuing community connection and conversation in the smoothness of a reconstructed city where the systems and infrastructure that allowed us to live our lives apart have been resurrected. Even as we participate in the processes that will return to us rebuilt homes in a rebuilt city, will we continue to participate in the life and sufferings of Christ who, in the earliest days of His incarnation was made a homeless refugee in Egypt? Such connections, to the Messiah’s mode of life and the lives of others, are appropriate memorials for the Church, memorials in living stones not bricks and mortar. Similarly in the reconstruction of this city we can learn how to strike the fine balance between memorializing the hurts of the past and moving on from them – a balance between tearing down every heritage building and leaving the Cathedral as an unusable pile of rubble for the sake of memorial. Learning to negotiate this tension will stand us in good stead as we respond missiologically to the scars that history leaves all around the world. There is no way of truthfully remembering the Rwandan genocide that can avoid reminding us that 800,000 people were murdered with machetes. The question is how to remember this in a way that does not enshrine the hurt so that that past pain perpetuates present evil, as has been the case in the Balkans and the Middle East.

Perhaps another lesson for global mission is the importance of learning to be teachable. In the present disorientation we can hear the new things that God is saying but there is a real possibility of listening instead to familiar, received wisdom. Insurance companies for instance would tell us that we suffered because we were underinsured. Therefore we need to to do what we have always done, pay more and consume more of the services they offer, in order to be safe. God would have us trust Him in new ways as our provider and teacher. There is a fine line between insurance as an aspect of stewardship and insurance as a substitute for orthodox hope. But there is undeniably some sense in which choices made about insurance do have some correlation to how much we are prepared to trust God and accept that we should hold things more lightly than we have, including our assumptions about the direction of mission. After September’s earthquake, similar in magnitude to Haiti’s, there was much talk of New Zealand’s laudable building codes and perhaps a temptation to imagine that the export and duplication around the world of the New Zealand way of doing things would avert such disasters. After February’s quake, when systems and codes did not comprehensively save us from loss of life and large scale destruction, the limitations of this belief were disclosed. The lessons that the Haitian Church had learned about endurance, gratitude, joy, contentment, simplicity and celebration in the midst of a ruined city are now of more benefit to the people of Christchurch than the knowledge we already possessed concerning the regulation of the construction industry, is to either us or them. All our technologies did not prevent us from ending up where we are, but now that we are here we can learn to worship, to sing with the congregations of Port au Prince a song that was first sung by the congregation of ancient Israel. “He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.” (Pss 40:2) If we are teachable we may also learn to recycle, not simply to insure things against damage but to salvage them when they are damaged. This city has a recycling system that operates largely out of sight and out of mind on our behalf but the fact that this system permits the dumping of tonnes of salvageable material indicates that it is far removed from the ingenious recycling that characterizes the majority world and reflects the cosmic scope of God’s redemption.

The lessons of Christchurch’s earthquakes are urgent. Unlike the media coverage of the same events they will not be replayed and replayed, they will not be looped at public gatherings. There will be no ad breaks wherein we can suspend our attentiveness. These lessons are live. Only time will tell if we are learning our lessons and learning to implement them. Are we learning to courageously and radically change our lifestyles individually and corporately in the light of the earthquakes? Are we asking if church programs are fit for purpose, if ministry priorities have been correctly ordered? Can we question the justification, if any exists, for the repair and maintenance of buildings which will be missed for no longer than one hour on a Sunday morning by no more than the handful of congregants? Would this city and world be better served by the amalgamation of congregations with the attendant reduction of duplication in local mission and the freeing of resources for global mission? Then in years to come the local church in Christchurch will display unprecedented and unparalleled outward focus and unity in carrying forward the mission of God globally.