When I became president of World Vision U.S. nine years ago, the most significant issues we faced were famine, infant mortality, and poverty. These are big problems, but we are able to alleviate them–if not solve them–given the right resources, people, and time.
Since then, the world appears to have spun out of control. Now the greatest challenge for relief organizations is to work toward the reconciliation of hostile factions in places like Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, and Liberia. “Without reconciliation,” said a Bosnian cleric who had seen little but death and destruction for more than three years, “everything is nothing more than a preparation for another war.”
WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD
With the collapse of the bi-polar world of the Cold War, old animosities have surfaced; the so-called New World Order has turned out to be anything but orderly. The West may have won the war, but it failed to secure the peace.
In the first three years after the end of the Cold War, there were 85 major conflicts, 35 of them classified as wars (because more than a thousand people died in them annually). Two-thirds of these wars were conflicts within nations rather than between nations, in places where people’s otherness–their God-given uniqueness–counted against them. Ethnic cleansing entered our vocabulary and filled our television screens. More and more, it is not state-sponsored conflict we are dealing with but conflict between hostile ethnic and religious groups. Welcome to the Real World Order.
In the Real World Order, otherness is demonized and, if possible, eliminated. The fear of otherness can become so intense that even minority groups in a hostile environment are sometimes driven to make preemptive strikes–chasing neighbors from their homes, raping women, and murdering their husbands and children.
These conflicts seem intractable to those who do not believe in a sovereign God. Increasingly, the secular world is looking to the church for answers. Faith-based organizations have never before had such an open door.
There are good reasons for the church’s timidity in offering answers in the post-Cold War era. Reconciliation of hostile parties does not come easily. There are no quick fixes when great injuries have been inflicted and the pain of suffering and injustice is seared in the memory of a people, ofttimes passed from generation to generation. To engage in the ministry of reconciliation, we must be committed for the long haul. Compassion, listening, patience are all prerequisites-as is the willingness to take risks. Reconciliation does not just involve mediating the grievances of adversaries; sometimes it involves taking the side of an oppressed party, naming injustices done, calling people to accountability, and rooting out the causes of the conflict.
We have shied away from answering questions like “How do we get along despite our differences?” Perhaps that is because the Western church does not always do this very well, either. Our churches are not just segregated by race, but they are divided between rich and poor, urban and suburban, evangelicals and mainliners. In too many churches, purity issues trump those of unity as we eject those who are most contentious or do not agree with every jot and tittle of our doctrine; this approximates a form of “ethnic cleansing.”
THE CRUX OF THE MATTER
If the church is going to engage in reconciliation, its work must be grounded in the gospel of God’s reconciling love. God brings us together–regardless of our differences–at the Cross. The church exists on the basis of God’s reconciling work in Christ, and its life together is a witness to the reconciliation of God in Christ; only when our corporate life demonstrates reconciliation can we be an instrument of God’s reconciliation in the world (2 Cor. 5:18-19). Inasmuch as we do this well, we bring credibility to the church and relevance to our God, and we make sure the gospel is truly good news for the world.
Too many of us ignore the reality of God’s reconciliation in our salvation. If at conversion we do not grasp the cost to our Lord of restored relationship, it will be difficult to appropriate the power of our faith when we need it most–when a Hitler comes for our Jewish neighbors, when L.A. is torn by racial unrest, when we are dealing with troubled children in a Chicago school, when a voice on the radio incites Hutus to attack their Tutsi neighbors.
WHEN MY NEIGHBOR IS MY ENEMY
The greatest commandments are to love God and to love our neighbors. But the hardest commandment is to love our enemies. Today, it seems as hard to love our neighbors as to love our enemies, and often we cannot tell the difference. A Franciscan priest in Bosnia told me, “It’s easy to love your neighbor if he lives a long way off.” But in Bosnia, enemies became neighbors, then enemies again, and now some at the grassroots are learning how to be neighbors again. On this small planet, we can no longer keep our neighbors at a distance.
There are 28 women in the town of Fojnica, Bosnia, who are living fruits of the ministry of reconciliation. Every day the women–displaced Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats–work side by side, depending on each other to earn a living. They have built a business producing linens. World Vision provided them training and money to buy equipment and supplies. In less than a year, their business has become self-sustaining. If these women demonstrate that the principles of reconciliation work, perhaps these principles will be appropriated by the other 3,500 displaced people in Fojnica, and then, it is to be hoped, by other Serbs, Croats, and Muslims throughout Bosnia.
Christians need to be proactive in writing the rules for these disorderly times-the New World Order; promoting preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution should be high on our organizational agendas. But mostly, we must personally demonstrate reconciliation. Without the ability to accept and even embrace one another in our diversity, we will see more ethnic cleansing, more genocide, more deterioration of our cities and families.
The church has much more to contribute to these times. But if reconciliation were the only message the world heard, it would be light years ahead of where it is today, and the gospel would be manifest even to the most jaded audience.
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