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AFRICANS HAVE IT RIGHT

* Thanks for Tim Stafford's article on the hope he found in Kenya ["Finding Hope in Africa," July 17]. I have just returned from northern Tanzania, on the other side of Mount Kiliminjaro from Nairobi, and I can confirm that the many Masai and Chaga Christians and their pastors with whom I visited as a guest of the Northern Diocese of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania, had hope. But there was more. There was laughter and singing and joy in the face of hunger, poverty, and almost nonexistent medical care.

How can this be when we in America with, as Stafford pointed out, all the blessings of the comparatively very rich seem to have such little hope, such little joy? Why is there no more laughing and singing among us? The question was answered by Johnson Lyimo, pastor of the kia Lutheran Parish not far from Moshi, when he told me, "In my country, the people have nothing, so we depend upon God for everything. He is with us every day caring for the people. In your country, the people have everything, so they think that they don't need God." Johnson has it exactly right.

- Rev. Dwayne J. Westermann

College Evangelical Lutheran Church

Salem, Va.

I am fearful of Stafford's use of the word love, Christian love, for hope.

Love is many things. There is the love that endures all things, without murmuring and complaint. It accepts both the changeable and the unchangeable as the fates of God. But there is also the love that hurts to correct, pains to solve, struggles to improve the lot of all people, Christian and non-Christian alike. This is what I am looking for from the enormous believing church in Africa.

Show me the Christians of Africa who lay down their lives to bring about family planning, so that every mouth can be fed and every child tutored and every family can find the place of contentment and rest and a measure of fulfillment. Show me the Christian who agonizes in social and political life to bring about an end to corruption, a justice system for all, an opportunity for people to find work-where the creative and enterprising are rewarded for their labors. Show me Africa's army of teachers, medical workers, pastors, writers, farmers whose faith is in God and whose life is poured out for family and neighbors. I know they are there, motivated by Christ's love and hidden by the jungle trees.

African Christians dreamed as far back as the 1960s about education for every child, economic growth that all might be clothed, fed, and housed, freedom to choose leaders, death to tribalism, and on and on. Instead, we see a patient church feeding on hopes that will not come in their lifetime. We are saddened at the overwhelming evidence that they are moving backward in history. Surely we need to get our theology right, as the hymnist wrote over a century ago: "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, / Yet that scaffold sways the future, And behind the dim unknown, / Standeth God within the shadows, keeping watch above his own."

Indeed, Stafford, in spite of Africa's bleeding wound, found the Lord, keeping watch above his own.

- Rev. Richard Shumaker

Glendale Heights, Ill.

FRESH TRUTH?

Did you really mean to publish Howard Snyder's article, "Is God's Love Unconditional?" [July 17]? Did Professor Snyder really mean to write, "But God's love has conditions"? Or did he mean to write that God's forgiveness, not his love, has conditions, which it does? If the answers to the first two questions are yes, would you and/or Professor Snyder show me where in God's Word this fresh truth comes from?

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September 1 1995, Vol. 39, No. 10