In 1960 whilst at the
Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology my father Olasupo Aremu
Ojedokun rebuffed the counsel of his cousin Oladejo Alamu Ojedele who pleaded
with him:
“Ema loo Eko, ani ema lo ekoo.”
He joined other
students to demonstrate against the Anglo-Nigerian Defence Pact. The response they received from the police
encountered on their way to Lagos was unexpected brutality, it manifested
itself in stifling fumes from the teargas they fired.
It seems I had picked up
the mantle of my father and carried it with me through secondary school into my
university experience, living in the shadow of anti-authority struggles. This also mirrors my spiritual life, where I
have experienced the lows of the valleys and the heights of mountains. I have collapsed into the depths of
despondency so many times but God has been faithful on each and every occasion,
making a pathway of escape for me and I have come out more formidable. There was a time when no one gave me a life
chance of success and here I am today defying that expectation all because of
what the Lord has done. I am therefore
reminded of the Christian chorus:
“My lifetime. I will give God my lifetime.
And if I give God my lifetime,
He will take care of me.
He will never, never let me down,
If I give God my lifetime.”
I solemnly believe my
narrative does not differ from that of Nigeria where there is no doubt that many
men and women of integrity have vacated the scene of governance and left it to
all shades of characters. The space of
our governance has been left to those who are after their bellies to plunder at
will with no shame at all. But more fundamentally,
the voice of the Church for the most part remains eerily silent causing the
absence of a prophetic voice that speaks to the nation in times of despair. In very many cases the Church, which I am
part of has been relegated into a messy and unseemly compromise with
power. The reality is that many in the Church
are content to focus on greed, increasing materialism, personality worship and
the trappings of power.
The Church in Nigeria
is in danger of being consigned into a multinational business with branches in
the world’s major cities. And yet, there
are many rays of hope, where Nigerian Churches are prepared to fund, partner
and sacrificially give to worthwhile projects in the United Kingdom. Today I throw down a challenge to the church
that is in Nigeria and will be glad for them to prove me wrong.
I contrast this with South Africa
during the heydays of Apartheid when the Church spoke ‘Truth to Power’ as evidenced by, Desmond Tutu’s words
before the Eloff Commission set up to investigate the South African Council of
Churches on 20th November 1981, stated:
“I want to say that there is
nothing the government can do to me that will stop me from being involved in
what I believe is what God wants me to do.
I do not do it because I like doing it.
………………. I cannot help it when I
see injustice. I cannot keep quiet. I will not keep quiet, for as Jeremiah says,
when I try to keep quiet God’s word burns like a fire in my breast. But what is it that they can ultimately
do? The most awful thing that they can
do is to kill me, and death is not the worst thing that can happen to a
Christian”[1]
The current climate in Nigeria presents a ‘Kairos’ moment for the
Church; however, many Christians appear to be smeared with dubious
activities. If stories constantly
circulating in the Nigerian press are to be believed then it appears that the
hallmark of many ‘Christians’ today
does not in fact manifest itself and consist of being salt and light in/of respective
communities. Yet the scripture they are
meant to hold with reverence and believe to be inerrant states:
“If any man be in
Christ he is a new creature”.
It is also sad that some of the traits described above are not limited
to Nigeria but have assumed a global dimension.
However, it will be a wrong and a gross misrepresentation of the many
Nigerian Christians who manifest the grace and love of Christ to take the above
as the common narrative that dominates the landscape. For every Christian that betrays their
profession, there are many who by the power of God live exemplary and
sacrificial lives attempting to bring, truth and grace into many situations
they face and encounter. There are many
acting as the salt and light of their communities and therefore any brush that
sweeps away born agains or characterises them together as charlatans would be
misleading and unfortunate.
The difficulty we face is that the Church has been slow to recognise
that beyond the ‘propagation’ of the
gospel there is the need for Churches to realise their role in initiating
social action is part of the same propagation. We must look beyond the rhythm of periodic
feeding of the hungry and destitute, the seasonal visits to orphanages or the
periodic missions into parts of the hinterland.
What I have in mind is integral
mission in Nigeria one that allows the Church to assume its prophetic role and
to ‘Speak Truth to Power’. Simply put, I draw from Justin Thacker,
formerly of the Evangelical Alliance UK’s, quotation to illustrate my point:
‘Integral Mission: Jesus Style does not deny that
evangelism and social action are distinct activities – on occasions, they may
be – but it does say that the nature of the integration does not reside in the
fact that we enact the two alongside each other, or that we find appropriate
connections between them. Rather, it argues that the integration that is
relevant is that we respond as whole people to the whole person or person
before us.’
The scripture used by Justin in the illustration of the above point
states:
“So he came
to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to
his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there,
and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water,
Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?”
(His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a
Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can
you ask me or a drink?” Jesus answered
her “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you
would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” (John 4:5-10)
The question I venture to ask is when Jesus voluntarily engaged a social
outcast like the Samaritan woman in face-to-face conversation, was he
performing a ‘political action’ in
challenging the political taboos of his society?[2] It has been advanced that Jesus responded not
as simply the evangelist, nor the social reformer, but as Jesus the Christ, or the
Integral Missionary. We see in that
text, the whole of Jesus responding in love to the whole of this woman’s needs,
and we see him doing it in word and in deed.
This woman clearly had social, emotional and psychological needs, but
Jesus met them by openly talking with her.
She also had spiritual needs, to know him as a saviour, and Jesus
clearly communicates both her need and his ability to meet it. He neither neglects any aspect of who she is,
nor any aspect of his responsibility towards her. By his words and his actions he communicates
God’s love into the whole of her life and both evangelism and social reform are
communicated together.
I suggest that the Nigerian Church must fully appreciate the aspect of
integral mission that brings the vastness of its resources, both material and
spiritual to deliver wholeness to the soul and is capable of reforming and
transforming society. The continued
inability of the Church to fully grasp and understand its integral mission in Nigeria
could have the following implication, as Ramachandra argues:
“Integral mission flows
out of an integral gospel and integrated people. There is a great danger that we transform the
mission of the church into a set of special ‘project’ and ‘program’, whether we
call them ‘evangelism’ or ‘socio-political action’, and then look for ways to integrate these
methodologically. Rather, the mission of
the church is located in the adequacy of faithfulness of its witness to
Christ. Our core-business is neither the
take-over of the world’s systems nor the maximising of church membership. Moreover, we need to remember that the
primary way the church acts upon the world is through the actions of its
members in their daily work and their daily relationship with people of other
faiths. A congregation with huge social
welfare projects or many ‘church planting’ teams may be far less effective in
secular society than congregations which have none of these things but train
their members to obey Christ in the different areas of civic life which they are
called.”
The missing link in
Nigeria remains the Church for whilst the Church has a mandate to prepare
people for eternity and is driven by proclamation evangelism, church planting
and personal discipleship it must also balance it with passion for the vision to:
“….feed
the hungry, clothe the naked, provide shelter for the refugees, and loose the
chains of injustice.”
Today Nigeria presents a distorted but
legalised distribution of power brought about by a warped social system, backed
by strong-willed and corrupt political class.
Yet, we stand at a moment of great challenge and opportunity. All around Nigeria and its diaspora are
voices being reclaimed, breaking out in rhythms, chorusing in high decibels with
one sound, that of change. Nigerian
people want simple things: An economy that serves the efforts of those who work
hard, a national security policy that addresses the threat of Boko Haram and
makes our cities, towns and villages safer, a politics that is centered on
bringing people together across the various divides to work for our common
good. This is the minimum we demand, the
basic request we make for it is the change that the Nigerian people are
entitled to.
[1] Du
Boulay, Shirley (1988)., Op. Cit., pp. 174-5.
[2] Ramachandra, Vinoth, What is
Integral Mission? Available at:
http://www.micahnetwork.org/library/integral-mission/what-integral-mission-vinoth-ramachandrahttp://en.micahnetwork.org/integral_mission/resources/what_is_integral_mission_by_vinoth-ramachandra
No comments:
Post a Comment