Sudan, and a New Day
It’s strange having ACU Lectureship in September.
Of course, we still have torrential rains and unruly weather (at least the first day), which is of course only part and parcel of the whole Lectureship experience.
One thing I think is just great is that my lovely wife Katrina, who married a nerdy little bible major and hung out with lots of my bible major buddies, is the first to be a speaker at Lectureship; with an art degree! How ironic.
Over the summer, she’s been working on a series of pieces regarding the suffering in Sudan and Northern Uganda. It has been facinating to journey with her in the emotions she has felt for this part of the world. A rage…(How could this be happening for so long and no one here knows about it?)…a confusion (much of her earlier artwork shows a lot, but some is not accurately reflective of the actual events going on in that region)…and hope.
Hope is what brought her to speak today before the curious crowd today. Hope told her that within each child soldier is a seed of promise – that things will actually turn out right – that there is a new King coming to set the record straight. A kind of king that binds up the broken, busts the slaves and prisoners out of captivity, and shouts at the top of his lungs that the Lord has come to bring comfort for those who mourn. Katrina’s paintings were a glimmer of that new Kingdom – a shadow of what we can already see breaking in to our hopeless world.
Yeah, Lectureship is strange in September- I am beginning to think that almost anything can happen…
Of all the things that we have gained and appreciate from standard issue, legacy-style churches, we have learned that to a great degree they are carbon copies of one another. The basic premise of their worship order is exactly the same each week, and basically looks like (given a few flavors) the order that the church down the street is doing. High church, penecostal – it doesn’t matter; the institutionalized church has lost her sense of creativity.
And not just in what they do when they come together. If America really is the melting pot for the nations, then we should clearly be able to see such diversity within church systems throughout this great nation (and especially the cities). I don’t need to tell you that this just ain’t happening. The typical Christian in America may be the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and male, but research shows that the typical 21st century Christian is either a sub-Saharan african woman in sordid conditions and absolute poverty, or a Brazilian mother who has more mouths to feed than she can afford. How would a typical American church welcome these two women? Would they feel not only welcomed but able empowered to lead the forming of a new, unique faith community that met them where they were at?
Agent B 2:05 pm on September 20, 2006 Permalink
Wish I was there. I might actually break a self-imposed exile from lectureship…