In a Strange Land
by Emmanuel Ndikumana
A Response to Joel Van Dyke and Kris Rocke’s ‘The Beautiful Question of
the Incarnational Gospel’
In the mid 1960’s and early 70’s the church was thriving in Burundi. One denomination
in particular, the Burundi Pentecostal Church, experienced a tremendous move of the
Holy Spirit in the southern part of the country. Many times, it is said, the Holy Spirit
urged them to take the gospel across the border to Tanzania but they paid no attention.
They lived in very fertile territory, where they enjoyed prosperity and had very little
interest in taking the gospel to foreign lands.
In 1972 an ethnic war broke out in the whole of Burundi and the southern region was the
most affected. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed while other hundreds of
thousands, including many Christians, fled to Tanzania. Three decades later, the exiled
Christians had learned the local language (Swahili), spread the gospel in many parts of
Tanzania, built magnificent churches and produced wonderful gospel songs that are still
influencing the whole region today.
Why is it that we Christians are so inclined to disobey our master’s command to go and
make disciples of all the nations (Matthew 28:19)? Why is it that once we accept the
gospel and begin to enjoy its fruit we tend to believe that it was meant for us alone? We
ought to keep in mind that our land was a strange land too before it was transformed by
the Lord’s song (sung by some foreigners). For that very reason, we owe the Lord’s song
to those in today’s 'strange land,' which need not be necessarily geographical.
For God so loved the world …
Someone has rightly observed that love is a personal reality only possible in reciprocal
relations. In creating the universe out of nothing, the Creator, whose self-giving is an
expression of his own being, was inviting his creation to share in the fullness of his
divine communion. In endowing human beings with godlike capacities and in stamping
them with his own image, he was particularly inviting them to have a personal
relationship with the eternal Trinitarian personal God who conferred on them the
dominion over the rest of creation. God’s creation act thus established a relationship of
interdependency between himself, human beings and the rest of creation. Besides, since
human beings reflect God’s glorious image regardless of race, religion, color, culture,
class, sex, age, etc., they all have an intrinsic dignity, an inalienable and inherent worth
that calls for respect, service and love to every person (Leviticus 19:18; Luke 6:27,35).
The stewardship of God’s creation therefore, far from being an absolute dominion, rested
on human dependency on God the Creator. Inspired by the devil, Adam and Eve doubted
the trustworthiness of God’s character. Their desire for independence resulted in
disobedience, which was a deliberate attack on the divine order established at creation.
The consequences were disastrous as human beings lost dominion over nature through
the loss of their relationship with the Creator. Pain and frustration characterized their
relation to the rest of creation as sin became universal. Any re-ordering of the chaos
caused by the fall now depended on the Creator’s unconditional love, the one he had
demonstrated in the very act of creation in the beginning. Such renewed mercy to
humankind was demonstrated in God’s personal and direct intervention to save Noah, his
family, a representative group of animals and the covenant he made with them after the
flood. The call and the blessing of Abraham in particular signaled a new phase in history,
God’s response to the calamities that had befallen humankind.
God summoned Abraham’s descendants, in the desert of Sinai, to enter the covenant he
had made with him. This, he explained, was because the whole world is his (Exodus 19:56)! The redemption and election of Israel thus fitted into God’s universal and inclusive
redemptive purpose. In calling them to be a kingdom of priests, God expected Israel’s
social, economic, political and cultic structures to reflect his loving character and to serve
his salvific plans for the whole world. To mediate God’s redemptive purposes to the
whole universe, Israel had to be the light to the nations not only in her message but also
in the social message she embodied. According to Israel’s prophets, it was the violation
of the Sinai covenant, particularly in its requirements related to social justice, that
explained the exile.
2. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange world?
Israelites thus found themselves in the Babylonian exile not because they desired to be
there but because they failed to understand the reason why they had been redeemed and
elected. Not only had they failed to understand their raison d’être, but they had failed to
understand how they should respond to it. That is why, it seems, even after they were
forced to live among the nations as a result of God’s judgement, they still found the
world too strange to hear the Lord’s song. And yet, their captors and their tormentors
were asking them to sing them the joyful songs of Zion (Psalm 137:3-4).
God’s initial purpose in creation has not changed: to bring about a world that can share in
the fullness of the divine communion according to his loving and self-giving nature. After
the fall, however, his purpose, always flowing from his loving nature, is inextricably
linked to humanity’s sinfulness and need for redemption. As the history of salvation
unfolds, God’s act of salvation incorporates his people within a network of politics,
economics and social structures. It is within these networks that God’s song of
redemption must be sung, in order that the gospel flow from them to every strange land.
Jesus' earthly ministry was consistent with the flow of that history of redemption. He
engineered a company of believers of whom Abraham is the father (Romans 4:16-17), a
prophetic nation with the very mission Israel received in the Sinai desert (1 Peter 2:9).
During his earthly ministry, Jesus made sure that lepers, tax collectors, sinners, the poor,
women and children were no longer victims of society or prisoners of an omnipotent fate.
He empowered them to resist manipulation and exploitation. The church is challenged to
walk in Jesus’ steps as God’s agent in the world and co-workers with Christ through
whom 'God was pleased … to reconcile to himself all things' (Colossians 1:20).
Unfortunately, like the Israelites in Babylon, many Christians today live in lands of their
exile, places afflicted by war, poverty, HIV-AIDS, and social, political, and economic
exploitation. While in the 'Promised Land' they thought they had nothing to do with the
inhabitants of this land. When the latter ask them to sing them the joyful songs of Zion,
they feel tormented. For them the hope for salvation does not apply to such a land and
such people. They fail to realize that if the Lord gave in the past a song to the inhabitants
of Zion his intention was that inhabitants of Babylon hear the song as well. They too are
objects of the Lord’s salvation. Joel Van Dyke and Kris Rocke have done the wonderful
job of showing us that when the inhabitants of Babylon hear the song of Zion, not only
are they capable of dancing to its tune but even of revealing its meaning in ways we have
not understood so far.
3. A call to repentance
For Israel unfaithfulness and disobedience to the Sinai covenant led to the loss of the
Promised Land and the subsequent end of Israel as a nation. Similarly, the church that is
unfaithful to the call to follow in her master’s self-emptying involvement in the muddy
water and polluted atmosphere of human life loses her raison d’être and may end up not
being the church at all. In the same way that repentance and return to the Sinai covenant
were the only hope for Israel’s restoration, so only repentance and return to the religion
of the cross will bring the church to its full stature. That religion allows today’s lepers,
tax collectors, sinners, poor, women, children – all those our society has excluded – to
hear the Lord’s song in their own land.
In 1993 Burundi experienced another outbreak of ethnic violence. This also claimed the
lives of hundreds of thousands, sending many more into exile. Unlike the 1972 events,
however, this outbreak brought about hundred of thousands of internally displaced
people. In each displaced camp Christians shared the same fate with non Christians. If
ever people needed hope, these people did. Who else could have offered such hope
except those who had learned to trust the Lord whatever the circumstances of life? While
some found it almost impossible to live out their Christian faith in camps of the
displaced, others courageously and creatively decided to openly live out their Christian
values. They chose to forgive and reconcile with those who caused them to suffer,
sharing the little they had with those who were more destitute than them regardless of
their ethnic differences. Some paid for their determination with death, killed by those
who felt betrayed by them. Interestingly, however, many more joined in their song after
finding meaning for life in the quality of the life these faithful Christians lived.
Today Burundi is emerging from 15 years of civil war. People are learning to live
together once again, not in refugee and displaced camps but in villages. The church is
once again thriving. My hope is that we have learned the lesson and will no longer wait
until we are sent into exile (be it political, economic, or social) before we are willing to
sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land.
Emmanuel Ndikumana is the Founder and Executive Director of Partners Trust
International, which seeks to empower local churches in Burundi through theological
and leadership training. A member of the Lausanne Theological Working Group, he has
served as the Burundi General Secretary and later as Francophone Africa Training
Secretary with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES).