Divine Recruits
The center of global Christianity is moving south to places like Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. That’s not news to anyone who’s read Philip Jenkins or heard him speak on the topic.
And Christians in North America have been reminded so often now that instead of sending missionaries to Africa (you know, that culturally homogenous land of heathens), they’re now sending missionaries to North America.
But that’s not as simple as it sounds. From yesterday’s NY Times:
Father Oneko, 46, had never counseled parishioners like those he found here at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church. Many are active-duty or retired military families coping with debt, racial prejudice, multiple deployments to war zones and post-traumatic stress disorder. Nor did he have any idea how to lead the multimillion-dollar fund-raising campaign the parishioners had embarked on, hoping to build an octagonal church with a steeple to replace their red brick parish hall.
Cutting his sermons short was, in some ways, the least of Father Oneko’s worries when he arrived here in 2004. He did not understand the African-American experience. He had never dealt with lay people so involved in running their church. And yet, in the end, the families of his church would come to feel an affinity with their gentle new pastor, reaching out to him in his hour of need, just as he had tended to them in theirs.
