Churches and the Quebec Mosque Killings: "Silence Has Consequences"

Three days should be long enough, I thought, to see how many church groups had posted statements or prayers about the terrible murders in the Quebec City mosque.

So I went online, checking out the home pages of national church bodies. I visited 20 websites; eight groups had posted calls to prayer or expressions of solidarity and concern; 12 had not.

I posted my findings on Facebook. “Canadian churches say they want to be relevant to society, that they want Canadians to know they care about a hurting world,” I wrote. “So, three days after the terrible murders of Muslims in Quebec City, how are they doing?”

I then went on to list my findings, naming the groups that had mentioned it—and those that hadn’t.

(I also checked other faith groups;  a couple of  national Jewish websites condemned the attack, but I found nothing on Hindu, Buddhist or Sikh websites—groups that, admittedly, have less of a national presence.)

Immediately, some people protested. “A website isn’t the only way to be relevant and show concern for hurting people,” said one.

“You don’t know if an e-mail or phone call was made,” said another. “Maybe they wanted to keep it private and personal.”

Others noted that some church groups aren’t really very tech-savvy, don’t update their websites very often, or might have complicated layers of approvals before they can post anything like this.

All valid points—to an extent. Some groups do take longer than others to make decisions. And just because nothing is mentioned on a national website doesn’t mean members weren’t individually expressing their concern. And statements on websites are not the only way churches can show they are relevant.

But at a time like this, with so many dead and a nation in shock, that seems to be the minimum any faith group could do, and as quickly as possible.

Why? One reason is because that’s where most people today look for information—online. This is especially true for younger people, who don’t tend to read printed denominational magazines.

Posting something on a website is also a way to tell those who are grieving that they aren’t alone. Not saying anything says the opposite: “We don’t care.”

Finally, a posted statement clearly tells anyone who sees it that hate of any kind isn’t welcome here.

And that, in the end, might be the most important reason posting a statement. One thing that was emphasized again and again following the murders is that people of goodwill and good hearts need to speak up for those who live in fear because of their race or religion. 

That was the message delivered by Liberal Member of Parliament Joel Lightbound, who represents the riding where the killings occurred.

In a moving speech in the House of Commons, he apologized to Muslims in Quebec City “for having observed stigmatization, ostracization over the past years.”

He had “seen the mistrust, the fear, the hatred among my peers,” he said, but had not “done enough” to counter it.

Silence, he concluded, “also has consequences.”

One person who knows that only too well is Winnipegger Shahina Siddiqui. In an article on the CBC Manitoba website after the killings, she noted that the seeds of the murders “were sown and nurtured by deliberate campaigns to foster Islamophobia.”

For a long time, she said, “language that dehumanized Muslims and demonized Islam was creeping into our discourse . . . and being accepted uncritically as truth by society at large.”

This point was reinforced by Andrew Coyne, a columnist for the National Post. While we shouldn’t try to censor speech, he wrote, that doesn’t mean “we should not govern our own.”

“We are all of us engaged every day in the construction of a moral order: By our accumulated individual examples, the words we use, the acts we condone, we can make it one that encourages decency and compassion towards others, or the reverse. This is particularly true of those in positions of leadership, political or other.”

“Other,” in my mind, includes faith groups. If, God forbid, anything like this should happen again in Canada, I hope more of them are quicker off the mark in speaking up for the kind of Canada we all want to live in.

Short Term Missions Trips, or What's in it for the Leper?

If it’s winter, it must be time for short term mission and service trips.

A quick search online shows that groups of Winnipeggers are heading out from churches and schools to places like Mexico, Uganda, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Bolivia and Guatemala.

(Funny how God seems to call Canadian Christians to southern climes in winter, isn’t it?)

Each trip can cost participants thousands of dollars, much of it fundraised. In the evangelical church world, many are undertaken by youth groups.

Service trips by doctors, nurses, dentists or other trained professionals can make a good contribution. But what about other kinds of trips?

Says Robert Lupton says in his book, Toxic Charity:  “Contrary to popular belief, most missions trips and service projects do not: empower those being served, engender healthy cross-cultural relationships, improve quality of live, relieve poverty.”

Adds Daren Carlson, President of Training Leaders International: “I have seen with my own eyes or know of houses in Latin America that have been painted 20 times by 20 different short-term teams; fake orphanages in Uganda erected to get Westerners to give money . . . teams who build houses that never get used.”

Short-term missions, he says are “fraught with problems, and many wish such trips did not exist, at least in the common form today.”

Many of the short term mission and service trip leaders I talk to agree that the money might be better spent providing jobs for local people. But what about the effect on the participants—the lives changed by the trip?

No doubt, that can happen. But for most, the effect doesn’t appear to be as long-lasting as hoped.

Research a few years ago by Kurt Ver Beek of Calvin College in the U.S. found there were, in fact, few long-term life changes in the lives of Christian teens following their mission trips—no increases in giving, prayer or spirituality.

But even if some lives are changed, it prompts another question: Is it morally right for people in Canada to use poor people as a means of personal and spiritual transformation?

That was the issue raised last year by American pastor Hugh Hollowell, who operates a ministry for homeless people in Raleigh, North Carolina.

In a blog post, Hollowell wrote about receiving a fundraising letter from a young person wanting money for a short term mission trip to South America.

The key “selling point” in the letter was how the trip would “change the lives of the teenagers that go on this trip.”

When he read it, Hollowell thought back to another encounter between a wealthy missionary and a poor person, many centuries ago: The meeting between St. Francis of Assisi and the leper.

In the story, Francis—a product of wealth and privilege—was riding his horse near Assisi when he came across the leper.

Francis got off his horse and gave the leper a kiss of peace and all of his money. Then he got back on his horse and rode away.

For Francis, the experience was life-changing, setting him on a course of helping the poor. But what about the leper? He got money and a kiss—neither of which he asked for, Hollowell noted. What he mostly got, said Hollowell, was a chance to play a nameless bit part in the inspirational story of St. Francis.

No doubt, some trips do very good things. But unless participants and leaders are very careful, they can also cause problems and challenges for the very people they want to help.

Plus, the trips can put them on morally shaky ground. Will the people they meet just be nameless faces in Facebook selfies and church basement Power Point presentations? Or will they be seen as real people who deserve respect and dignity as human beings?

Those are tough questions that require an answer—before boarding the plane.

“Let me tell you the truest thing I know,” said Hollowell. “The economically poor do not exist to be agents of your transformation. They are not props in the story of you. And if you don’t have a really good answer to the question, ‘What’s in it for the leper?’ I wish you would stay home.”

Image above: St. Francis and the leper.

Evangelical Scientist Katherine Hayhoe: Climate Change Evangelist or Old Testament Prophet?

Can you be an evangelical Christian and believe in climate change? Katharine Hayhoe says yes—she is one, and she believes it is happening.

Hayhoe, who is originally from Toronto, is the director of the Climate Science Centre at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

  

There are, of course, lots of scientists who believe in climate change. But there aren’t as many who are openly and proudly evangelical—a group in the U.S. not known for being accepting of that issue.

Surveys in that country show that only 28 percent of white evangelicals say humans are responsible for climate change. That’s the lowest of all Christian groups in that country.

Why is that the case? After all, the Bible has a lot to say about how God loves and cares about creation, and evangelicals say they take the Bible seriously.

For Hayhoe, the reason is due to the way politics and religion is mixed in America.

“I see a difference between theological evangelicals and political evangelicals,” she says.

Theological evangelicals, she explains, “take the Bible seriously. They love God, and love others. But many evangelicals in the U.S. today are political evangelicals. Their main source of authority is not the Bible, but what some political parties or leaders say, or a particular political ideology. And these are the people telling them climate change isn’t real.”

A theological evangelical, on the other hand, sees that “humans are made in image of God, and that we are responsible for every living thing on the planet, we are stewards or caretakers of creation.”

For her, “objections to the science of climate change have nothing to do with being religiously evangelical. They have everything to do with being politically evangelical. They oppose it not on a religious basis but a political basis.”

Because she spends much of her time speaking to churches about climate change, Hayhoe has been given the moniker of “climate change evangelist”—something she doesn’t think really fits.

“An evangelist is someone who spreads the good news,” she says. “But I feel like an Old Testament prophet saying that you need to heed my warning . . . the clock is ticking. Every year that passes by without action means we are losing time to try to fix this problem.”

And yet, she is hopeful. “There is good news about how people are doing things to help the planet,” she says.

She is also optimistic that more evangelicals will come around and see climate change as an important issue.

“I believe that as Christians we are given a new heart by God, and with it comes a desire to love and help people and care for God’s creation,” she says.

This includes caring for others, including those affected by climate change.

“If we look on the effect of climate change on the poor and vulnerable in the developing world, all the climate change refugees, people suffering from drought, those near coastlines whose homes are being flooded as the seas rise, these are the people who our hearts should desire to help because of who we are as Christians, and as humans,” she says.

“As Christians who want to share God’s love in the world, when we see suffering how can we turn away and not help?”

And one way to do that, she states, is by caring “about a changing climate.”

More Response to Pure: Stereotyping Mennonites by the Most Obvious Visual Distinctions

Dan Dyck directs communications for Mennonite Church Canada, one of two of the largest Mennonite denominations in Canada. I asked him a few questions about his response to Pure, out of his experience as a communicator and from his position with that church body.

What is your experience with what the public and the media know about Mennonites?

Both tend to conflate the culture and the faith. Both tend to stereotype Mennonites by the most obvious visual distinctions of a small minority of Mennonites in Canada (e,g. black dress and bonnets, horses and buggies, etc.). What most people don’t know is that there are more Mennonites in Ethiopia than in Canada, and that Mennonite culture in Africa (or other countries) is something entirely different than in North America.

The show gets many things about Mennonites wrong. But Mennonites are not an easy group to understand, what with there being so many different kinds in Canada. Could Mennonites do a better job of explaining themselves to the media and public at large? 

Yes, undoubtedly, but it’s a challenging task to break through the noise of media and culture until an attention grabbing opportunity arrives, like Pure. Mennonites tend to let their lives and actions toward others speak for themselves, rather than expending energy on explaining ourselves to an audience that probably doesn’t care a whole lot until a controversy or drama like “Pure” comes along.

Additionally, there is no shortage of information about Mennonites online. Anyone with access to the Internet can at any time learn more than they probably want to know about Mennonite faith and culture in Canada and beyond.

What kind of problems do you find with Pure?

Like many other Mennonites, I am surprised at what appears to be a poorly researched setting for this story.

The show depicts Low German speaking Mennonites from Mexican (Old Colony) with the visual life style distinctions of Old Order Mennonites who have been in Southern Ontario since the early 1800s. This is problematic for many, and perhaps especially for the media-shy Old Order folks themselves as they are now associated with criminal activity that to my knowledge does not exist in their community.

The Low German speaking Mennonites from Mexico depicted in the drama would not really be considered “Old Order” in the context of Southern Ontario, where the show is set; for example, Old Order Mennonites in southern Ontario do not speak Low German, and would not have surnames like “Funk” or “Epp”.

Do you think this show will be harmful for Mennonites in Canada?

I believe the accumulated positive weight of Mennonite faith and reputation of our churches and organizations helping out locally and internationally with aid, relief, disaster assistance, poverty alleviation, feeding the hungry, etc. will in the long run overcome any negative impressions the viewing audience of Pure will generate.

Can you see anything positive coming out of Pure for Mennonites?

A hopefully positive outcome for Mennonites is that this show has the potential to make us more empathetic and sensitive to other groups that have been stereotyped by the media and popular culture, such as First Nations or Muslims. Mennonites are by no means immune to stereotyping other groups. I hope Pure will help us reflect on what are feeling, and I hope it makes us more aware of our own assumptions of others.

The other faith group to have recently experienced this kind of exposure are the Mormons (the play The Book of Mormon). Mormon's decided not to fight it. Instead, they used it as a way to talk about their faith. Do you think Mennonites could do the same? 

The Mormon response of using the play as an open door, not being defensive, was the right response for them, and even courageous in their context. I would say Pure also gives Mennonites in Canada a responsibility to engage their faith, and walk through the open door this presents with integrity, sensitivity and grace. Angry, defensive responses to inquirers, whether in private or in public, will not serve anyone well. But your question raises another question: Who has the right to tell whose story?

Click here to read my Free Press column on this topic.