News of the extended network of faculty, alumni, students, visiting researchers, and mission partners is regularly updated, and some of the big ideas or major events in Global Christianity are covered in the CGCM News.

A Message from Ted Karpf

CGCM Colleagues
For two years I have been working to bring a new course based on missions work in the HIV/AIDS to STH. This spring it has happened. The advert is below. More importantly, this is the first course with a critical international public health component and one which is field tested in missions round the world. Values and practices is based on my foundational work with the Ford Foundation and WHO on Decent Care. It will look at health and health systems and give a sense of how to understand what is happening in systems and what can change for the patient and family in that system. By enacting agency every one of us can be the manager of our own health care. For those of us in missions it is crucial to understand how each of us can have a say in what happens to people in health care encounters. The course will be driven the class itself with reasonable reading assignments and paper by midterm. The final will be the writing of an Op Ed piece, max 750 words. That should lighten the end of year issues, all to be done before finals week. Cannot figure out how to do this any better. It is a first-run course and we will learn from each other how best to make this work. So I hope you will consider signing up.
Best Always
Ted+

Decent Care CourseCourse Description
Important theoretical and practical issues related to cross-cultural, governmental and nongovernmental and faith-based service work related to the practice of *Decent Care and its application in developing healthy communities will be surveyed.
Structured according a developmental approach to health and health systems, students will be encouraged to think critically about and experience the application of values and assumptions undergirding health systems and structures of such service work as currently envisioned and practiced.
Case studies, guest speakers, and multimedia offerings will enrich the context of informed disciplinary and cross disciplinary approaches.

*Decent Care is a concept developed in the World Health Organization by the instructor. Decent Care bases the planning, delivery and evaluation of care on values that place individuals, in their social and cultural contexts, at the center of the caring process. The aims of decent care are to develop health systems around the primacy of persons in their own health care, and to build a bridge between the principles of human rights and the practice of medicine. By listening to and honoring the voices of the people care processes and models can be developed that respond to the needs of a community enabling human flourishing.

Music and Mission

Tracy Howe WispelweyTracy Howe Wispelwey, a long-time singer and songwriter, visited the BUSTH on May 2, shared her journey, her vision for art and music being a restorative force in the world, and some of her songs. Psalm 126 has been particularly important to her. "It is how transformation happens," she said. "You do this and I will be there (not it will happen)." She likes to collaborate. In recent years she has worked closely with groups of people in many local contexts, particularly in Latin America. You can listen, download, or share some of Tracey's music here.

Rev. Don Woolley on the Missional Church

Dr. Dana Robert & Rev. Don Woolley
Dr. Dana Robert & Rev. Don Woolley

Rev. Don Woolley, an Alabama pastor and leading activist in the movement to make the church a movement again, visited BUSTH on April 24 and 25 to talk with faculty, administrators, students, and Conference leaders of the local UMC about forming missional churches. A response to the end of Christendom, the purpose is to reorient the church from a bunker, deficit mentality to an external focus taking the Gospel out into the world."There is a difference between reaching out to the community because you need them to survive and reaching out because the community needs Jesus," said Woolley in his Thursday lecture.

Rev. Woolley is working closely with the Australian Alan Hirsch, founder of Forge International and Forge America, its spin-off in the U.S. Forge does domestic missionary training that is fully grounded in Scripture, something they believe churches forgot because of their status during the seventeen hundred years of Christendom. Their inspiration, rather, is the pre-Constantinian Early Christian Church where Christians took Jesus very seriously in spite of the radical implications of the gospel. They denied themselves. They loved others. Women had authority. And they grew hugely, even though they were illegal and the price of becoming a Christian might be death.

A lively discussion ensued about the differences between the church growth model, which Rev. Woolley feels is basically consumer driven and seems to be running out of steam, and the missional model he, Hirsch, and Forge are advancing.

Korean Diaspora Progress Reported

The team of researchers who have been working to construct the ground floor of a project to understand the establishment and growth of the Korean Diaspora community in Boston in the 1950s and 1960s presented the results of their work to date at CURA, the Institute for Culture, Religion and World Affairs on April 8.

Prof. Robert Presents
Prof. Robert Presents

Dr. Dana Robert introduced the project and briefly described a meeting with Dr. Hesung Koh who helped inspire it and advanced a working relationship between the Center for Global Christianity and Mission and the East Rock Institute which is located in New Haven, CT and is one of the oldest and most important Korean culture institute.

Daewon Moon and Hye Jin LeeDaewon Moon talked about the Korean Society of Boston and the first Korean church of Boston, both founded in 1953 and how they contributed to promoting Korean Studies at the universities in the Boston area.

Hye Jin Lee talked about Sungha Kim, a Korean BU alum, who made huge contributions to the development of the Korean Collection at the Harvard-Yenching Library.

Dr. Doug Tzan talked about the methodological issues involved in the project. Doug Tzan Prepares to Present

A diverse group of scholars from different parts of the BU community assembled to hear the presentation, ask questions, offer advice, and commit to helping advance the project to the next level.

Prof. Robert Presents Augsberger Lectures

Professor Dana Robert delivered the Augsberger Lecture series at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonville, VA on March 19 and 20, 2013. Each of the three lectures addresses an aspect of friendship as mission. The audio files are included here so you, too, can listen! Many thanks to Eastern Mennonite for these and for the photos by Jonathan Bush.

Augsburger lecture chapel with Dr. Dana Robert

Lecture #1 - Friendship as an Incarnational Mission Practice

"Through the incarnation, God became human in the person of Jesus. And Jesus’s ministry was one based on friendship. And the purpose of friendship was to build a fellowship that witnessed to the kingdom of God."

Lecture #2 - Friendship as a Missional Practice: Lessons in History


"Cross-cultural friendship is grounded in a common relationship with Jesus Christ. It shapes shared visions of shalom. It creates community broader than our nuclear family and tribe. We become links in a chain that began with Jesus himself, and moved down through history."

Lecture #3 - Friendship in the Way of Jesus

"How should friendship and mission relate to each other? When you engage in mission projects, especially those that take you to another part of the world, or when you relate to persons unlike yourself, what do you mean by friendship?"

Augsburger lecture chapel with Dr. Dana Robert

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Culture Warrior?

I was horrified upon finishing the audio recording of Eric Metaxas’s biography of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy -- to learn that Metaxas had an agenda in writing the biography that a) never occurred to me, and b) seems entirely at odds with Bonhoeffer’s own words and deeds. Metaxas used Bonhoeffer’s life story to draw a parallel between the Third Reich’s takeover of the Lutheran church and the U.S. government’s attempts, among others, to mandate access to birth control and uphold Roe v. Wade. Metaxas believed these to be evidence of a dangerous federalism encroaching on church freedom of belief. In addition, he wanted readers to understand Bonhoeffer’s absolute rejection of Hitler as a model for American reactions to Islamic fundamentalists and the Taliban. While I appreciate the urge to enlarge the circle of those who appreciate Bonhoeffer, I find Metaxas’s move to parachute Bonhoeffer into the middle of contemporary American culture wars ahistorical and problematic. In retrospect, I can identify parts of the biography where Metaxas tipped his hand – and I wish I’d picked up on these cues earlier. Metaxas focused on Bonhoeffer’s defiance of family opinion to pursue a career as a pastor rather than as an academic. To Metaxas, this served as an early sign of Bonhoeffer’s unwillingness to join his family’s place in Germany’s liberal, cultural elite. When Bonhoeffer studied in Manhattan at Union Theological Seminary in 1930-31, he was most inspired by the vibrancy and passion of African American worship and gospel singing. To Metaxas, this was evidence of Bonhoeffer’s rejection of the liberal intellectual strains of American Christianity he encountered at Union. Metaxas further underscored this rejection when he chronicled Bonhoeffer’s return to New York and Union in 1939. Bonhoeffer chose not to worship on Sundays at The Riverside Church with the city’s liberal elite. Instead, he frequented a church where sermons were firmly rooted in scriptural analysis. To Metaxas, this was a sign of Bonhoeffer’s rejection of liberal, intellectual theology focused on issues of social justice. Reviewers far more qualified than I have explained why Metaxas should be taken to task for making these kinds of associations. In articles here, here, and here, they complained that Metaxas engaged in “terrible oversimplification” to create a political and theological “polemic.” Clifford Green, executive editor of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, advised readers to use metaphorical “bifocals” to keep an eye on the interviews Metaxas gave as well as the text he wrote. “Polarization,” Green wrote, “is the structural motif of the whole narrative.” All reviewers cited Metaxas for factual errors, which, they argued, allowed him to ignore what he either didn’t like or didn’t understand in Bonhoeffer’s theology. The biography, Victoria J. Barnett wrote, is “consciously evangelical” in a U.S. context. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, explained Barnett, who is general editor of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works and director of church relations at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. At the same time, she cautioned mixing “faith” and “ideology,” which Bonhoeffer, himself, identified as leading to trouble. Because of Metaxas’s perspective, Clifford Green wrote in his review, he hasn’t actually written a historical biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Instead, Green concluded, Metaxas’s “real target is liberals.” Further fishing on the Internet led me to a study guide publishers included in the book. Though Metaxas may not have written the questions himself, he surely gave the go ahead. The questions are leading. They force readers to start their analysis of Bonhoeffer from a fundamentalist position. They range from historically presentist to outright offensiveness. “Are there efforts today to silence those who would preach the full gospel? Where? What attempts are being made to stifle Bible truth?” (603). “Where should a servant of Christ draw the line in adapting to his/her surrounding culture?” (597). My biggest objection to this line of questioning is that it encourages readers to ignore Bonhoeffer’s honest interest in the ways people of many faiths chose to uphold the ethical principles Jesus articulated in the Sermon on the Mount, whether they believed Jesus was the son of God or held the promise of eternal salvation. To Metaxas, such a position – which he denied Bonhoeffer -- leads to watered down, inauthentic Christianity. To Christians such as Barry Alter and her circle – and, indeed, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, himself – this is the position from which lived Christianity begins. Metaxas included a passage from a letter that gets at the heart of the interpretive dilemma. In this letter from London that he sent his paternal grandmother Julie in 1934, Bonhoeffer expressed interest in traveling to India to live and study with Gandhi. It sometimes seems to me that there’s more Christianity in [India’s] ‘heathenism’ than in the whole of our Reich Church. Christianity did in fact come from the East originally, but it has become so westernised and so permeated by civilised thought that, as we can now see, it is almost lost to us.   Though he had a letter of introduction to Gandhi, and though Gandhi extended an invitation to him, Bonhoeffer never made the trip. I suspect that Metaxas focused on the word “thought,” questioning the role of ideas and intellectual inquiry in faith. Bonhoeffer’s words indicate something entirely different. He was setting east and west in opposition, perhaps romanticizing India in the ways that cultural and political critic Edward Said would have called “orientalism.” But Bonhoeffer wasn’t putting down India. He wasn’t calling Hindus heathens – that’s why he put the word in quotes. Bonhoeffer was genuinely interested in exploring the ways people of faith around the world managed to live principled lives. To Metaxas, that kind of approach smacks of wishy-washy cultural relativism. To me, this shows that Bonhoeffer wasn’t coming at Christian evangelicalism in the trope of “the west to the rest.” Indeed, it’s these qualities of curiosity and openness that have drawn me to my project, In the Midst. My conversations with Barry Alter and those of her cohort who survive have helped me gain a clearer understanding of the many ways people of great moral and ethical character have strengthened their commitments to their own faiths and also celebrated different ways of experiencing the Divine. Barry, for instance, studied with the French Catholic mystic Abishiktananda. She meditates and contemplates during her daily devotions. Her mantra is “dwell,” which she tells me helps bring her closer to the Holy Spirit. When Barry finishes her meditations, she sings hymns from a book her father, a Congregationalist minister, gave her when she was a child in 1930. Most of those hymns date back to the nineteenth century and are rooted in Quakerism. My goal in producing In the Midst is to explore ways that deeply ethical, principled people have used the Bible and Christian teachings to “save the world” now, on earth, not just to concern themselves with salvation after death. Their “mission” converges with the Jewish commandment to engage in tikkun olam, the vital, practical work of repairing a fractured world. As you’ll hear when I post audio of Barry’s thoughts on the Thief on the Cross and the Rending of the Veil, Barry believes that actions as much as words lead to salvation. If there is life after death, it is open, Barry argues, to all who live as Jesus did, challenging authority, questioning accepted hierarchies, and finding community with those of any faith who work for justice. I don’t know that Barry’s understanding of Christianity precisely mirrors Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s – but I do know that they both grounded their faith in action. In both approaches to Christianity, there is no room for exclusion or fear. Filed by Catherine Corman, March 22, 2013

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