Colonialism

I was researching how Christianity came to the New World, and some of the stories are pretty gruesome. Some of the conquistador priests didn’t mind using force, and some of the first conquistadors were bloodthirsty. The Franciscan Friars tended to gather hundreds of Indians in one place, throw water over all of them and consider them baptized into the faith. As a result, many Indian groups in North America think that the Catholic faith is about following certain rituals instead of about becoming disciples of a resurrected Man-God. When they add the Catholic rituals to their beliefs in the spirits, they create a hybrid (called syncretism) that looks like Catholicism on the outside but hasn’t committed them to God on the inside. We saw a lot of this when we were living in Guerrero. The men in our village would make their annual trek up the mountain to the altar of St Mark, but this Mark was the rain god, not the writer of the gospel. We knew because you had to be drunk to communicate with him, and honoring him included things like making animal sacrifices, speaking with the dead, and telling the future from mirrors and stones. The people called themselves Catholic, but they weren’t aware that Jesus solves our issue with sin and death. Because of the way Spanish colonialism introduced Christianity on this continent, there are many people who are not aware of the good news about Jesus, even though their religious practices have a thin veneer of Christian ritual overlaying their pre-Colombian beliefs.

But there are good stories. Some of the Spanish priests traveled in small bands from village to village with an interpreter and preached the gospel. When someone responded, they baptized him  and gave him a few more days of instruction before moving on, expecting him to baptize and disciple the rest. I would love to hear how things went after the priests left because this is not much different from what Peter or Paul did in the book of Acts. Of course Paul kept discipling his converts through letters and visits, but perhaps the friars did this, too. I would love to know more about this. Did discipleship happen in colonial times? Although Christianity looked very different back then, so different we would not now recognize it, still we have to realize that many of those missionary priests were motivated by the same love for Jesus that moves us today to go to Indian villages with the gospel. One Indian group was asked why thy accepted the friars and their response was, “Because these go about poorly dressed and barefoot just like us; they eat what we eat; they settle among us; and their intercourse with us is gentle.” We have to honor them for that. They made huge mistakes. Yes. But so do we, and we love Jesus no more fervently than they.

You’d think the colonial days are over. Sadly, they are not. When Robert came back from his trip, he brought back this story, which has a sad ending. Not all our stories are happy. A Hispanic church planter we know was sent out from his church to work with an Indian group. He moved to the village and lived humbly among them. He worked hard. Things went slowly. Although at first he had been committed to learning the language, he found it difficult, so he continued to evangelize in Spanish. His home church, a megachurch in a big city, had a change in leadership, and the new pastor could not understand why work among the indigenous should grow so slowly, so he persuaded the church to drop this missionary’s support. The missionary became a tent-maker, barely eking a living from various trades. After ten years, the missionary decided he was called to move on. There was a small congregation that would remain faithful. This brings gladness. But here was also the problem: it had no leaders. The missionary had pastored the church from the beginning, and no one in the group could match his gifts or his knowledge. So the missionary invited someone from another church a few hours away to take over. This new pastor brought these practices with him: the Lord’s Supper was only served once a year with wine that had to be brought in from the founding church in Chile; baptism could only be performed by someone approved by the founding church; and the members of the congregation would be forbidden from meeting for fellowship with believers from any other churches. Even though there are so few Indian believers in the area, they would not be able to come together for encouragement. The church would be sealed off and controlled from afar. This is a sad story that repeats itself over and over among Indian churches in Mexico. So just as it was 500 years ago, the story of bringing Jesus to people of other languages in this hemisphere is a mixture of gladness and sadness. Even as more and more people come to Jesus,  colonialism is still alive and well here.