1. Listening
As Christians, steeped in traditions in which Scripture holds a primacy of place in our worship and theology, we are a deeply narrative people. The Scriptures are narrative: a broad tale of God’s pursuit of humanity. Telling the story of one’s encounter with God is known as “witnessing”: saying what you saw, bearing witness to the action of God in one’s life. Jesus often taught not with maxims or rules, but with parables—stories. So we are conditioned to believe in the importance of story, and this is a rich resource when it comes to processes of restitution and reconciliation. We must create spaces in which people can tell their stories.
Very often black South Africans feel that white South Africans do not know what they suffered under apartheid, and do not care to know. While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created some space for victims and perpetrators of egregious human rights abuses to come face to face and tell their stories, the average person who had suffered under apartheid had no such venue. Their stories still bubble just below the surface, desperate to be told and affirmed.
The primacy in Christian tradition of the personal narrative, and the creation of a space in which to tell it, becomes a significant resource from which to draw when we speak of telling stories. We already know that our individual narratives form us, and that those truths transcend the empirical truth that a court or police officer seeks. Creating space in which we can hear other people’s stories helps us to empathize with the storyteller, and to have our own ideas of what is true challenged and held up to the light. In the context of race relations, it can also serve to strip well-meaning whites of their Messiah complexes as they realize how much they don’t know.
Make no mistake: listening can be hard. We do not like to be made uncomfortable or confronted with our complicity in another’s oppression; thus, conversations tend to be shut down very quickly, if they even start. Yet they are critical to the restitution and reconciliation process. Those attempting restitution will find this to be a major challenge: the need to listen before doing is paramount, but the pain and anger we will hear if we listen to others’ stories is uncomfortable enough that we will be tempted to discard the endeavor. Keeping everyone at the table will be a major challenge.
Listening also reminds us that the people know their own needs better than any outsider does, and in Pastor Xola Skosana’s words, we must stop seeking white solutions to black problems. A small but telling anecdote: Wayne Gordon is pastor of the evangelical Lawndale Community Church on the economically depressed, primarily African-American South Side of Chicago in the US. Gordon often tells a story about the early days of his ministry. He had dozens of ideas for how to improve the community, but he started by first asking people what they thought they needed. Their answer took him aback: they wanted a safe place to do laundry. Several women suggested the church get a washer and dryer and put it in the storefront where the church was meeting. Gordon admits to being skeptical; he had hoped to tackle drug addiction or education. But the Laundromat became a gathering place for the community, a safe place to bring kids and do the laundry. People donated what they could in order to use the facilities; those who had no money contributed to the upkeep of the space. Gordon calls it a “pivotal moment” in the history of Lawndale: “it established a pattern for everything we would do in ministry. The first step was to listen to the people.”
2. Be Specific to Your Context
One of the cornerstones of Christian faith and theology is understanding that ours is an embodied, incarnational faith. It is highly specific. Jesus always responded to people’s individual needs, meeting them where they were. If we are looking to create a universally applicable system, this can be confusing. Consider, for example, the aforementioned example of Zaccheus in Luke 19, who restores what he has taken fourfold and is told that “salvation has come to this house.” Yet just one chapter earlier, another tax collector repents and asks for forgiveness, and his genuine grief over his sins seems to be enough for the writer to call him “justified” without any compensation that the reader knows of. And in the same chapter, the rich young ruler who asks Jesus how to enter the kingdom of God is told to sell everything and give it to the poor. All, nothing, fourfold—taken together, the stories suggest that there is no formulaic way to go about restitution; it is highly contextual. The needs of a rural community in Gauteng are different than an urban community in Langa. The histories of the engaging communities, the resources available, the needs, the growth of the relationship—these will all be different in each situation. Don’t worry about creating a model of restitution that can be replicated around the world; rather, focus on the healing of your own specific community. We must be Christ in the world—in the precise time and circumstances in which we are situated, addressing the specific needs of our own brokenness and our own healing; that is part of living an incarnational faith.
3. Take Sin Seriously
Perhaps one of the great strengths of Christian theology is that it takes sin seriously. While Christian theologies of sin are often critiqued for being repressive and judgmental, taking sin seriously is a way of facing the injustices of the world head-on and accepting responsibility for them; it is, in a sense, taking the human condition seriously. Bonhoeffer, in his doctoral thesis, wrote, “God does not overlook sin; that would mean not taking human beings seriously as personal beings in their very culpability; and that would mean no re-creation of the person, and therefore no re-creation of community. But God does take human beings seriously in their culpability.”i
Taking sin seriously means understanding that reconciliation does not come cheaply. We should expect that the work of reconciliation will be a difficult and ongoing process, one that demands much of us and is costly if we are to follow in the path of Christ. This sense of realism—that the task ahead is difficult and costly—is one that stands us in good stead when we encounter opposition, resistance and our own frailty. Too many Christians have come to embrace a Christianity that promises ease and comfort; being reminded that our faith is actually rooted in struggle and sacrifice can be a source of spiritual stamina when we undertake difficult work.
4. Lament
Lament is not merely grieving; it is also a clarion call for justice, an insistence that God set things to rights alongside a simultaneous affirmation that He will, in fact, do so. Consider the Book of Joel: Joel makes no bones about naming the evils around him and recognizing them for what they are (“Is not the food cut off before our eyes, joy and gladness from the house of our God?”—Joel 1:16), insisting that the crisis be made known (“Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain!”—Joel 2:1) and an assurance that God answers His people even when He seems silent (“God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love”—Joel 2:13). Lament allows us to recognize that things are not as they should be, that there is deep brokenness in ourselves and our communities. It lets us name the evil and call it into the light. And the expression of grief and brokenness opens for us new opportunities for healing and redemption.
It is easy to think of lament as purely the province of the oppressed people, a tool of survival offered particularly to them. But joining in lament for the brokenness of the world, particularly in situations where we have had a hand in it, directly or indirectly, or when we are the ones who benefit from prevailing powers and principalities, can be a step toward the kind of radical solidarity reconciliation demands. UWC theologian Denise Ackerman poses the question of whether those who are not victims can also lament:
“Can penitent people lament what they have done because they see that their wrongdoing is the cause of grief and suffering? Can I, the beneficiary of apartheid, lament its existence? Can I, in fact, afford not to lament? There are conditions attached to lamenting from ‘the other side.’ They include the notions of confession, repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. I understand genuine confession to say: ‘I no longer stand by my wrongdoing; I repent of it and side with you in condemning it.’ Literally, repentance means turning around–going in the opposite direction.”ii
Perhaps as we delve into the work of restitution, we must truly repent of the structures and actions that make it necessary. The penitents “must lament our misuse of power and privilege and our failure to stand up more courageously against evil and injustice. We must lament the wasted years, the self-destructiveness of sin that destroyed the possibility of true community. Lamenting from ‘the other side,’ however, is not unending. As it is primarily part of confession and repentance, it has no need to continue forever,”iii writes Ackerman. While coming from different places and with different vulnerabilities and places of brokenness in our lament, it may be precisely the element that lets oppressed and oppressor come together and begin to imagine a new way of being.
5. Trade Power for Fellowship
One of the overarching trajectories in the narrative of the early church is its struggle to understand and incarnate what a community of reconciliation looked like. As the previously Jewish church began to incorporate believers from the Gentile world, they struggled with questions about keeping kosher, circumcision, and observance of traditional Jewish feasts. In every instance, the answer is a resounding “no”: Peter’s dream in Actsiv strikes down the food laws; Paul tells the church at Galatia that adding the cultural and ritual observances of Judaism into their communal life is tantamount to embracing a false gospelv; and the feasts are not demanded. The Jewish Christians were challenged: the things that made them “them”, that made them “chosen”, come under attack when they must live in community with those they have long considered unclean. In essence, the gospel was a full frontal assault on the essentializing of identity. There could be no “us” and them”; there could only be a broader understanding of “us,” and doing that meant not enforcing a cultural whitewashing in which new converts needed to become Jewish.
This understanding that relationship does not mean remaking the other in one’s own image is central to a fully realized vision of reconciliation and restitution. It is of particular significance in contexts where people may fear that reconciliation will mean cultural annihilation.
Rather, as relationships develop between congregations and communities, those perceived as powerful must be particularly careful not to dictate the terms of engagement. This will often entail hearing difficult things said by the very people the powerful may think they are helping—but that very paradigm of helping, in which one partner is perceived as having all the resources and is giving out of their goodness to the other, is problematic. An equitable relationship will entail both the advantaged community being willing to give up power and privilege, including the traditional power of dictating the terms of engagement, and the disadvantaged community making its voice heard without fear that the partnership will be dissolved and in confidence that their perspective will be heard and valued.
6. Stay at the Table
Dolphus Weary, the leader of Mission Mississippi in the U.S., has said, “Do the right thing. It will be harder than you thought and cost you more than you expected. Do it anyway.” In the restitution process, we will hear hard things, be asked to go beyond our comfort zone, and engage in power dynamics that may be different than relationships we’ve had before. The temptation to disengage and walk away will be strong. Both parties should regard the relationship as a covenantal relationship, one they would only undertake leaving with the same gravity they would undertake leaving a marriage. Breaking off a relationship in the midst of the restitution process may be more detrimental than not having begun the process at all, as it confirms for the disadvantaged community what they have likely feared all along: that advantaged communities will only stick around as long as it’s convenient and serves their own purposes. A commitment to stay at the table through the inevitable tensions is critically important.
We have, within Christianity, the language of the Kingdom of God: a realm in which the current powers and principalities will be overturned, in which the last are first and the first are last, in which there is enough for everyone and no one goes without. There is a now/not-yet tension to the Kingdom: while we know it is not fully realized, and will not be in our lifetime, we strive for it anyway. One of the things this Kingdom imagery offers is hope. The emergence of communities in which people attempt to live according to different rules and create fresh relationships offers us creative alternatives to the structures of empire in which we find ourselves.