Children at Risk

Fuller Seminary’s School of Intercultural Studies in 2006 chose “Children and the Mission of God” as its theme for its annual missiological lectures. The lectures were launched by Bryant Myers, newly appointed professor of International Development, and a well known Christian development ideologue. He began the lectures with an overview presentation, “Children in our Midst: Our Mandate”. Among the thoughts brought out by Bryant Myers, was the insight that “The well-being of children is an indicator of the well-being of society,” According to him “If the children are doing all right, the rest of us probably are, too.”

One thrust of Myer’s speech was that even though many of the world’s children today are doing well, there are many who are not. An alarming 210 million children globally are involved in labor outside the home, half of them in full-time work—taking them out of school and placing many in hazardous conditions. Of these, 1.8 million are involved in the worst forms of child labor: prostitution and pornography. Myers noted the distressing fact that those who exploit children in this way often take advantage of disastrous situations; after the tsunami, he said, “the child exploiters arrived in Banda Aceh (Indonesia) as soon as relief workers did.”

Many more disturbing statistics were offered in the speech: 5.7 million children are engaged in forced or bonded labor; 300,000 are child soldiers; 10 million are refugees, many without their families; tens of millions live on the streets; and vast numbers are unregistered, with no recognition by their governments. Myers also noted the very different kind of problem of “deceived children” in the U.S., where $12 billion is spent every year on advertising directed to children 12 and under. In the affluent world as well as the developing world, children are at risk – albeit in different forms.

“Children are in trouble everywhere in the world—some in awful ways, but also in more sophisticated, psychological ways,” Myers said. We must “act like Christ and be the Church” by caring for and protecting children through tangible provisions of care, by actively advocating for them, and by empowering them. “These children need to hear the gospel,” Myers urged. “They need to learn the liberating news that Jesus weeps for them…and that he provides forgiveness.” We must all think more intentionally about children and how our daily decisions will affect them. The speech concluded with a moving note citing a quote from John Whitehead: “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”

It is very apparent that in our world and for that matter in most of history, children have by tradition been cherished, if at all, as citizens of tomorrow, the so called “future generation”. With this positioning as “assets of the future”, children deal with marginalization on account of their gender, caste, race, ethnicity and class, just as grown-ups do; they suffer being inconsequential merely for the reason that they are “children”. That childhood itself is valued and requires to be treasured, sheltered and provided for, is a relatively modern insight.

Similarly, until very recently, issues related to children have tended to be marginal in almost every area of Christian living. From the many rules of the New Testament calling for compliance of children ‘in all things’ (Col.3:20) to all the culture and behavioral norms of the present day, a top down approach which often prevents listening to children and characterizes the child-parent association as one of blind obedience: it is more about power and control than nurture.

However as we know Jesus identifies himself with children in a series of verses in the gospels. (Mk.9:33-7; Mt.18:1-2; Lk.9:46-8) “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” (Mk.9:37) Jesus’ teaching about receiving children as the mark of true greatness places children at the center of the community’s attention as prime objects of its love and service, and requires of all who would be great in the community to serve children. Those simple words of Jesus say it all that there is to be said on the subject of children. If you want to know who God is, look in the face of this particular child. If you want to know who has the highest rank in the Kingdom of God, it is the one who cares for children

Christian workers involved in ministries to children at risk of course cannot fail to see the reality of the plight of the children in such a world. Jesus Christ came to not only redeem the nations but also to place people in a redemptive culture where they could have hope. Children are made in the representation of God and as such have an inherent spirituality. This recognition that children are spiritual beings and are spiritually aware guides Christian people working with children at risk in all that they do and plan in their ministry. But how does this appreciation of a child’s spirituality shape their work? How does one work with those children whom life has ‘incensed and who have a disturbed spirituality because of their experiences in their respective “at risk” situations?

In some ways, Jesus left us clueless. The Lord Jesus at no point told his followers how to be successful with children or what policies to put in place or what to speak to a child at risk; as an alternative he told them to just let the children get nearer to them and then be taught by them, look to them and discover the way they are, grow to be like them. Jesus’ main concerns are not about what one can do for children but what one can learn from them to shape our own life and spiritual growth.

Coming to some hard realities on the ground, one of the certainties of our world at the start of the twenty-first century is the rapid pace of change. Even though the world is going through a moment of unparalleled growth, capital and the enlargement of the resources of the "have" nations, there are still many pieces of our world where scarcity, sickness, bloodshed and conflict are taking their effect on the social order. The depressing truth is that this unmatched lucrative development in the world order has left the developing world far away in the past to the point that the disparity between the "haves" and "have-nots" has intensified considerably in the last several decades

In India 87 of every 100 children born have the probability of dying between birth and exactly five years of age. The state of India's newborns and the health challenge faced by them is bigger than that experienced by any other country. Although India's neo-natal mortality rate (NMR) witnessed a significant decline in the 1980s (from 69 per 1,000 live births in 1980 to 53 per 1,000 live births in 1990), it has remained static since then (only dropping four points from 48 to 44 per 1,000 live births between 1995 and 2000),

Also, one in every three malnourished children in the world lives in India. Child malnutrition is generally caused by a combination of inadequate or inappropriate food intake, gastrointestinal parasites and other childhood diseases, and improper care during illness, the report says, while pointing out the incongruity that in a nation with soaring Gross Domestic Product rates and Sensex indices, children continued to die of malnutrition and starvation. The major cause for such a tragedy is the lack of public health services in remote regions, poor access to subsidized health care facilities, the declining state expenditure on public health and the lack of awareness on preventive child health care.

Similarly globally, each day some thirty thousand children under the age of five will die around the world. In the time that we will take to read this paper, some 1,200 children will have died. The causes are many: war, poverty, hunger, preventable diseases. And yet, even though we lose as many children in a week as were killed in the 2004 Asian Tsunami, rarely does a cry go out or the plight of these children get reported in the news. Children remain the hidden casualties of war and poverty in the world, unseen in the reporting on bombs and political responses. In Somalia alone, the site of the most recent fighting for power, some 1.5 million children are at risk in the middle of the battle. Worldwide, mostly on the African continent, there are over two million children under the age of 14 living with HIV/AIDS. And yet, we rarely hear about them. They remain invisible to us, and if we are honest, we often prefer it that way.

Besides as Keith White puts it, in the name of liberal democracy and freedom, children and young people have televisions, mobile phones and videos in their private space, ideal conditions for the global predators who would consume them as market statistics. Millions of child prostitutes have their identities, their virtue, their futures taken from them as an insatiable industry thrives on arousing the sexual desires of adults, an inevitable and unspoken effect of which is eventually to recreate children as sexual creatures. Child soldiers indoctrinated and motivated by adult communal and religious agendas kill and maim other children.

In view of such a hard to believe inventory of trouble for our children and the diverse manners in which we adults have put them at risk, what should be our response? What Should Christians do in a world that seems to be difficult and more dangerous for our children? Without a doubt we should do what Jesus did. Obviously, we should not do less. Jesus preached and healed, He taught and He acted. He modeled what He taught. However, the core of Jesus’ ethical impetus, however, is his specific summons to begin living now in this fallen world according to the values and demands of the coming kingdom. Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom does indeed lead to the formation of a disturbing community asking and trying to answer searching and difficult questions. But it is a group of people who lovingly challenge the evils of the here and now precisely because it shares the Creator’s love for his good creation and dares to strive now toward that fullness in personal, socioeconomic and political life that Christ will bring in its fullness at his second coming.

With all this background, we must all be familiar with the many issues to be taken up by the Church and those of the church who are engaged in this mission, not the least of which is to continually renew our grasp of the mission of God as it gets reinterpreted at different times without changing at its core. Part of the difficulty here is the range of impulses for mission among the many part of the global missionary movement. Among younger Christians in many places in the world, ideas such as the glory of God as revealed in the worship songs of their time, identification of the desires of the whole self in community, and a new found commitment to justice have aroused a new mission’s consciousness. An illustration of this is the increasing response to the overwhelming plight of over one billion children at risk. This concern has found expression at various levels including at the level of development practitioners as well as academicians.

Such an encouraging support and an over powering urge among Christians agencies, churches and individuals to network, to collaborate and to share leanings and experiences led to the formation of the Viva Network( Now Viva) around a decade ago. Viva today works with over 80 network initiatives helping as many as 1.2 million children, apart from being a catalyst for the furtherance and popularization of child theology in seminaries and Bible Colleges. Other Viva initiatives for the church include (Understanding God’s Heart for Children), for Child Care Workers (Celebrating Children) and for Christian institution and church run programs (Quality Improvement System).

There are newer and possibly greater challenges that wait for us on the horizon and the fight to take on and overcome these challenges is only beginning to be fought. Global trends like the growing influence of cyber evil, is only one more in a register that includes economic excess, aggressive flare-ups, and limitless immoderation. These engross people deeply excited for a sense of individual meaning and distinct value in today’s world. Our Christian answer to these things must come out from three strong commitments:

We must be acquainted with the influence of historical and currently emerging societal and global trends as the setting in which Christ’s redemptive love is discovered. We must pull out all paradigms, programs, and individuals whose significance no longer correlate to the world’s changing life contexts. And, finally, we must return to the Lord in complete humility, equipped with knowledge of the signs of the times but in patience awaiting the wisdom from above that will give us light and insight for the work ahead.

In addition to all that they do in terms of physical interventions Christian workers involved with children at risk have an opportunity as well as a responsibility to help children explore their own spirituality and provide to them the necessary ingredients of spiritual formation and also be enriched by what the children have to offer. Along the way then, they can help over turn existing paradigms that see children as passive recipients of assistance and who have nothing to offer to the church and to society. That is most certainly not true. A Christian response to children at risk needs to grasp the opportunities to allow children to explore, ask questions and find the answers that helps them acknowledge the sin in a fallen world that has put them at risk and find healing in their lives, lest when they grow up to be adults, they in turn perpetuate a vicious cycle where they in turn pose a risk to future generations of children.

Finally then, as we have seen, children are not the people of tomorrow, but are people of today. They have a right to be taken seriously and to be treated with consideration and respect. They should be provided opportunities to grow up into whoever they were intended to be, for the unidentified human being inside each one of them is our hope for the future.’ Jesus as we know was entirely unyielding in taxing adults and adult systems that damaged or wounded little ones: the adults needed to alter their norms radically, even to the extent of tugging out their own eyes and cutting off limbs if this would put a stop to them from harming children (Matthew 18).

Christian Choices : How Different Are They ?

Forty-eight students from an elite Christian school in Delhi who recently failed in one or more exams in the Class XI finals were recently asked to leave the school and seek admission else where in the middle of the academic year. The decision created enough fear and panic among the parents for the news to make it to the pages of at least one prominent news paper. Such a piece of news and comments in the press provides an opportunity to introspect on the long journey that Christian institutions have made in India to arrive at this juncture.

The early history of the Christian institutions in India is tied up with the so called civilizing mission of both the East India Company and subsequently, the church. Eventually as the colonial regime stabilized and thinking evolved, this mission got subsumed into the church turning into the quasi official social sector arm of the state developing services – primarily education and health care to areas where the State did not or would not go. To aid this process, church related institutions were often given land on perpetual leases at nominal rates – a privilege which makes church a large owner of property even today cutting across denominations.

Although a large emphasis of Christian institutions today purports to be the poor, this was not always the case. The typical Church run institution catered to the elite of the day, an image that has persisted to this day. “Civilizing” the ruling classes was always a primary agenda of the state and the church apparatus was not the only the instrument available to pursue this goal.

The Mayo Colleges and the Lawrence Schools were set up with a similar purpose. Contrary to popular perception although exposure to Christian values and truths was a part of the church curriculum, proselytizing was not a major piece on the agenda. This was partly the result of experience – a short period in the early nineteenth century when missionaries were indeed active produced a kind of native Christian that were so alienated from their own community that most were too worthless to be even used as pawns- some from the aristocracy turned to drink and debauchery and others had to be accommodated in artificial townships called “mission compounds”

But Church run institutions were and are known for promoting excellence. Part of the “civilizing mission” was about taking “barbarians” and turning them into “gentlemen” and “ladies”. Although the italicized terms have now become archaic and now evoke nothing but revulsion and images of arrogant imperialists, there was a certain beauty in picking up some thing raw and then molding them into products of merit. It also blended well with the teaching of the church and Jesus Christ who chose people to be his disciples such people “not many of whom were wise according to worldly standards”, “God chose what is weak in the world” and “God chose what is low and despised in the world”

Look at Jesus’ 12 disciples—mostly poor and despised people: fishermen and tax-collectors. An interesting thing is that God usually calls the poor, lowly, and despised to do His great work. Look at Jesus’ 12 disciples—mostly poor and despised people: fishermen and tax-collectors. The only one who had a very high education and prestigious occupation was the Apostle Paul. But Paul himself noted that it is not the high and mighty that are called.

The world thinks that we need to go after the gifted people, the talented people, the wealthy people, and the important people. If we plan to really accomplish great things, then we need the powerful people, the educated people, and the respected and influential people. This is the way we think, and it is very logical in terms of how things work in this world.

Hidden behind the curtains, we Christians think that way too. Most often we think that God could do great things with people who have something special to offer him. We think that God could do greater things through them than he can do through "ordinary" people, who do not have the fame or money or recognition. ".While this may be the thinking of the world and even the thinking of many Christians, it is not the thinking of God. In fact, the wisdom of God is entirely the opposite of the wisdom of the world. The wisdom of the world is centered on what people can do. It is humanistic at its core. In other words, it only considers what can be done through our human resources. And it even looks at spiritual enterprises, like the church, in human terms. The church is seen much like a business, and decisions are made according to the acceptable business practices of the culture without necessarily factoring in any of the spiritual resources that God indicates we have in Christ. We even live our lives based on the wisdom of the world.

But does God really need those who are impressive in terms of the respect and adoration of the world? Are they necessary for God to accomplish great and mighty things? Does God pick the best, the most talented, the most influential, the most wealthy, the beautiful people, because he desperately needs their gifts, talents, connections, prestige and power ? There is a simple answer to this. It is NO!!!

So let us not measure a person by his profession or occupation or academic achievements alone though these things certainly have their value and importance and by no means do we demean them in any way. . I guess that the bright students whom the bright and elitist schools would like to retain are capable of doing pretty well on their own and the school’s assistance might only make them do better. But the ones who are failing, falling behind and unable to cope are the ones who might have crossed over the line had the school chosen not just to keep them on their rolls but pay extra attention to them to help them cross the threshold , they might have had another, better life. The wonderful truth is that God uses ordinary people just like you and me. In fact, he delights to use ordinary people like you and me. God is able to take us and do great and mighty things through us because it does not depend upon us; it depends upon him. That is the great Christian witness to the world and once that has been discarded, there is not much to choose between a so called Christian school and any other

Christian Institutions : Slowly Losing their Way

Forty-eight students from Delhi’s St Columba’s School at Ashok Place — who recently failed in one or more exams in the Class XI finals — have been asked to seek admission elsewhere. Such a piece of provides an opportunity to introspect on the long journey that Christian institutions have made in India to arrive at this juncture.

The early history of the Christian institutions in India is tied up with the so called civilizing mission of both the East India Company and subsequently, the church. Eventually as the colonial regime stabilized and thinking evolved, this mission got subsumed into the church turning into the quasi official social sector arm of the state developing services – primarily education and health care to areas where the State did not or would not go. To aid this process, church related institutions were often given land on perpetual leases at nominal rates – a privilege which makes church a large owner of property even today cutting across denominations.

Although a large emphasis of Christian institutions today purports to be the poor, this was not always the case. The typical Church run institution catered to the elite of the day, an image that has persisted to this day. “Civilizing” the ruling classes was always a primary agenda of the state and the church apparatus was not the only the instrument available to pursue this goal.

The Mayo Colleges and the Lawrence Schools were set up with a similar purpose. Contrary to popular perception although exposure to Christian values and truths was a part of the church curriculum, proselytizing was not a major piece on the agenda. This was partly the result of experience – a short period in the early nineteenth century when missionaries were indeed active produced a kind of native Christian that were so alienated from their own community that most were too worthless to be even used as pawns- some from the aristocracy turned to drink and debauchery and others had to be accommodated in artificial townships called “mission compounds”

But Church run institutions were and are known for promoting excellence. Part of the “civilizing mission” was about taking “barbarians” and turning them into “gentlemen” and “ladies”. Although the italicized terms have now become archaic and now evoke nothing but revulsion and images of arrogant imperialists, there was a certain beauty in picking up some thing raw and then molding them into products of merit. It also blended well with the teaching of the church and Jesus Christ who chose people to be his disciples such people “not many of whom were wise according to worldly standards”, “God chose what is weak in the world” and “God chose what is low and despised in the world”

By doing what it has done, by turning out on to the streets, those who have failed , the very same people whom the world calls low and despised , St. Columbus School has turned the teaching of Jesus on it head. By choosing students who are already bright and intelligent to remain on the school roles and turning out the rest to the mercy of those mediocre schools which might accept them, it has gone the way of any other commercially run school which does not purport to run on the basis of any noble values. After all, again to quote Jesus Christ and the Bible , “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. I guess that the bright students whom St. Columbus are capable of doing pretty well on their own and the school’s assistance might make them do better. But the ones who are failing, falling behind and unable to cope are the ones who might have crossed over the line had the school chosen not just to keep them on their roles, they might have had another, better life

This piece cannot really close without referring to Anna Hazare and his school in Ralegaon Siddhi who has a school that takes only the sort of students that St. Columbus chooses to discard and who has built up the reputation of his school by enrolling almost entirely rural village youth, delinquents with police records and those who have failed repeatedly in their previous schools. By picking up those whom even the world and even the church run schools has discarded, Anna Hazare is doing what Jesus would have approved of. In today’s world, we need to applaud people like him all the more for we need them more than a church that has lost its way.

The Church in India and Health Care: Staying Relevant

The church and the Christian community in India have always been justly conscious and proud of its involvement in two sectors historically- education and health care. This involvement has been an interesting one and from a time where the church run health care meant charity and charitable institutions, today many church run institutions are involved in a variety of initiatives –including an adoption of the rights based approach which really represents a paradigm shift. In India, and other developing nations, the presence in the field of health care of the Church and NGOs needs to be evaluated and new strategies for better effectiveness need to be adapted especially as we live in times where even the legitimate concern of the church are looked up by many in our nation with unease and suspicion.

If the Christian institutions and churches have earned recognition for their contributions to society in past days, it was because they were relevant to their times and the health care needs of those days. If we want to retain that appreciation or regain that stature, we need to rediscover and reclaim that position by doing three things and all at the same time: Be Advocates for the poor and the marginalized as the scriptures instruct us to do, be the best and most effective in all that we do and be the Champions of innovation and change constantly in all our institutions. It is no longer possible or right to breathe and live on the basis of past glory, no matter how noble the foundations might have been.

The Church which historically provided health care through its institutions is today saying that health care is a basic right that the state should provide and to which the citizens have a right. While institutions have not been abandoned or closed down and still provide a significant service, this approach of demanding from Caesar what he should rightfully provide because of the taxes he collects is a bold initiative for a minority community and its institutions to taken and should be applauded. Such initiatives should in fact expand in their scope. Now what does all this mean?

The flagship program in health of the government since 2005 has been the National Rural Health Mission. The purpose of this mission among other things is to strengthen the primary health centers (PHCs) and sub-centers and create a network of rural hospitals. The direction that NRHM has taken has led to the increased privatization of health care services in the country. Now while it is a separate discussion as to whether privatization of health care is good or bad, can the church with its numerous institutions, clinics and committed manpower step in to provide low cost and ethical health care. If that could be done, it would not only mean that the church’s own resources are freed up for other things, but also a huge contribution to society in general where the general complaint across states is that the government run facilities are sloth or corrupt, if not both.

However despite the growing reality of public private partnerships, participation of Christian institutions is in this is still a largely untapped opportunity. Apart from this, can the church with other like minded and committed organizations act as a watchdog to ensure that the resources allocated for the running for the program are actually being used effectively and usefully. The church with its numerous dioceses parishes and mission stations has a country wide presence which is an unparalled advantage.

Indian systems of medicine is again one of those areas where attention would be helpful. The Indian Systems of Medicine & Homoeopathy continue to be widely used due to their accessibility, efficacy and affordability. The Indian medicine system is also embedded in the beliefs of a wide section of the public and continues to be an integral and important part of their lives and for some, it is also a way of life. Complementary and Alternative Medicine or Traditional Medicine is rapidly growing worldwide. In India also, there is resurgence of interest in Indian Systems of Medicine. People are becoming concerned about the adverse effects of chemical based drugs and the escalating costs of conventional health care. Longer life expectancy and life style related problems have brought with them an increased risk of developing chronic, debilitating diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and mental disorders.

Although new treatments and technologies for dealing with them are plentiful, nonetheless more and more patients are now looking for simpler, gentler therapies for improving the quality of life and avoiding problems of toxicity. Ayurveda, Homoeopathy, Siddha, Unani, Yoga and Naturopathy offer a wide range of preventive, promotive and curative treatments that are both cost effective and efficacious. There is a need for ending the long neglect of these systems because it is the various indigenous systems of medicine are the ones that are typically patronized by the poor being affordable and rooted in the country’s folk traditions. Even the WHO Charter on traditional medicine encourages health systems to immediately address this neglect of this vast body of knowledge.

In the neglect of indigenous medicine, Christian institutions are on the same side as any one else in the country. Since the majority of Christian doctors and nurses are trained in Western medicine, the hospitals and clinics they run are also based on the Western tradition. The unfortunate result was the marginalizing the Indian system of medicine, that has been practiced in India for thousands of years and has benefited millions of people over the centuries. In fact a lasting contribution to the promotion of Indian Systems of Medicine by the church would be to set up an institution of the stature of CMC Vellore or St. John’s, Bangalore, where training is provided on alternate systems of medicine.

At the turn of the last century, the church run hospitals and clinics had a virtual monopoly on providing health services outside the big cities. Government institutions and hospitals tended to be in the cities, the whole chain of primary health care institutions were non existent and so what little was there was provided by the church. Today, that is no longer the case. Options have emerged and even if many of the options that exist today are hardly inspired by philanthropy, they nevertheless exist and people use them – even the poor use them even if they can’t afford it.

But in a situation that is no longer monopolistic from a business point of view, and operating in a climate that is no favorable from a social and political point of view, our institutions not only have to survive and thrive but be the best. But what is best? Many corporate hospitals have emerged today; that technologically speaking has every thing to offer provided if you have the money. And increasingly the choice is becoming between costly corporate hospitals (not necessarily ethically managed though!) and ill equipped badly run government clinics and hospitals.

The genuinely non profit sector is gradually disappearing and this space is getting vacated. The social costs are damning. P.Sainath in November 2007 cites a study done for the WHO in six Indian States found that 16 per cent of households it looked at were pushed below the poverty line by heavy medical costs. Nearly 10,000 families from lower income groups were covered by the survey for the years 2002-05. Some 12 per cent had to sell their assets to meet health expenses. Over 43 per cent had to resort to loans for the same reasons. I hope that a day will not come when patients have to sell of home and hearth to settle bills in a Christian hospital to avail of the “best” health care available.

The late Pope John Paul II, in his Apostolic Letter, Ecclesia in Asia, wrote: "Following in the steps of Jesus Christ who had compassion for all and cured "all kinds of disease and illness" (Mt 9:35), the Church in Asia is committed to becoming still more involved in the care of the sick, since this is a vital part of her mission of offering the saving grace of Christ to the whole person. Like the Good Samaritan of the parable (cf. Lk 10:29-37), the Church wants to care for the sick and disabled in concrete ways, especially where people are deprived of elementary medical care as a result of poverty and marginalization".

What people expect from the church and the church run institutions is not necessarily the technological cutting edge but acceptable and appropriate standards of care that are ethical, affordable and administered with compassion, grace and prayer and that in fact can become a protocol for others to emulate. May be for this a business model needs to be evolved that combines business acumen, human sensitivity and ethical protocols. In that sense, while the church’s ministry, much as the Lord Jesus’ example and reminder through the story of the Good Samaritan remains always the same, the ministry of the Good Samaritan himself trying to be a neighbor to his people has evolved over the centuries and must continue to do so.

Profiling John Dayal : Every Community Needs an Activist

In the aftermath of the recent violence against Christians in Orissa, I realized once again that while human rights are universal and important, every community needs a John Dayal, for while human rights as a whole needs champions, minority rights needs many more champions. John Dayal wears many hats. He is the Chairman of the All India Catholic Union, he is also a Catholic member of India’s National Integration Council (a stone age body resurrected by the UPA), he is also the secretary general of the All India Christian Council.

John Dayal has been instrumental in bringing to national and world attention the violent Hindutva fundamentalist agenda against minorities within India. His pioneering work in documentation, networking and public mobilization has been largely responsible for the majority community in India coming to the assistance of the minorities in countering the challenge of its opponents.

This is especially true because a great deal of the violence, harassment and victimization is directed towards tribals, Dalits and other marginalized sections of the community whose voice unless it is amplified and reported in time, will never reach the desks and tables of those in authority who can make a difference. At a time when temperatures typically run high, keeping a cool head and making a factual and dispassionate analysis and assessment requires a commitment and a calling that not many have.

John Dayal, a professional journalist and documentary film maker specializing in politics and diplomacy, has been active in Human rights and civil liberties since 1971 when he published his research papers on drug addiction among the youth in the national capital of Delhi, followed by a series of investigations into child prostitution, sexual exploitation of young boys, and police torture of under-trial prisoners in Delhi and neighboring states

John has been instrumental in documenting the recent communal violence in Orissa’s Kandhamal district as part of a three member fact finding group and released a White Paper on the prevailing situation after their visit. The committee condemned all forms of fundamentalism, whether Hindu or Christian and demanded a judicial probe by a sitting judge of the High court or the Supreme Court.

Don't Look Back - Profiling David Bussau

Most donors from the West like to hold on to their turf. They make grants and preach a lot about sustainability and self reliance but most often their programming support does not reflect that. So they will carry on funding their clients for a stipulated number of years and then move on, whether the client is prepared or not. If the recipient is smart enough, they would have adequately prepared themselves for this day but more often than not, that preparation isn’t in place and so when one donor moves out or even before, the search begins for another donor to replace the departing patron.

David Bussau, who has been described by the Far Eastern Economic Review as a cross between the 18th century preacher and reformer John Wesley and the father of capitalist economics, Adam Smith is one who is conspicuously different. David grew up in a New Zealand orphanage till the age of sixteen and then left without a penny to set up a hamburger stand. In business, David, a born entrepreneur had the Midas touch in every thing he attempted to do and over the next nineteen years, he spent his life making lots of money. After an interesting transformational experience twenty years later at the age of 35 and with numerous successful businesses to his credit, he “retired”. he had reached what he refers to as the “economics of enough”. He quit his businesses, sold off his interests and over a period of five years put his money in the Maranatha Trust which today exists to support social entrepreneurs and organizations. Apart from the work of the Trust, for the last sixteen years and more, David has been along with his partners in the Opportunity Network, one of the world’s most successful bankers to the poor.

What makes David Bussau different from other providers of micro credit like say the Nobel Prize winning Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank who may have a bigger loan portfolio? David is an incubator of institutions. Opportunity has been setting up and nurturing institutions around the world for decades so that the developing world has successful micro credit institutions of their own. With that objective in mind, the philosophy of Opportunity is to set up micro credit institutions and then help them with an initial grant and start up funds with a reasonable rate of interest that need eventually to be repaid. David likes to describe the Opportunity programs as “a charity that doesn’t give any thing away.”. Experience has shown that with adequate training and hand holding, each Opportunity partner eventually learns how to manage its loan funds in order for it to pay its own way.

With this philosophy of planting partners and hatching them into independent, professionally run institutions, Opportunity has launched nearly fifty partners in Asia including India, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe and creates a job every 35 seconds in 27 countries around the world. A Manchester University study has shown that for each job created, on average six people are permanently taken out of poverty and 13 people in the community benefit, so over thirteen million people were potentially helped by OI in 2006 alone. After being awarded 2003 Ernst & Young Australian Entrepreneur of the Year, David Bussau made history as the first ever social entrepreneur to be inducted into the World Entrepreneur of the Year Academy in Monte Carlo.” The life of David Bussau, chronicled in his biography appropriately titled Don’t Look Back is the story of an abandoned orphan boy who never moped over his situation but instead learnt to celebrate it by saying that becoming an orphan provided him freedom to discover life on his own, as it really is.

Does Prayer Heal ?

The other day, I was at a function organized by the Christian Medical Association of India an umbrella of close to 300 plus non profit Christian Hospitals, many of them close to a century old and some older. They were observing World AIDS Day and the topic of discussion was the unique contribution that a community of faith can bring to the table. By now, every one sort of knows that HIV & AIDS is not a medical issue alone – there are myriad dimensions to it – social, economic, gender being some. The issue of the discrimination that those who are HIV positive flashes across our media radar all the time, be it children thrown out of schools, widows thrown out of their marital homes, or HIV positive men losing their jobs.

So the question was can religious institutions, in this case, specifically the church contribute anything? Hospitals provide treatment, activist groups lobby for access and availability of treatment and reduction of stigma, donors like Bill Gates and others can give money, so what can a faith community provide? Many people said many things, like sponsoring families which have people who living with the virus, or financial aid to those who have lost jobs, providing training to women who have lost their husbands so that they can find a niche in the job market. The final conclusion though was that a community of faith’s niche was – well faith. Defining health in integral terms meant that physical, social, economic, emotional and spiritual concerns needed to be addressed to address healing concerns fully, and who better to address spiritual dimensions of health than religious institutions?

I returned home thinking and asking a question that I have asked myself many time before. Does faith make any meaningful difference to the quantum of healing really or is it a warm, fuzzy feeling that makes you feel good when there is nothing to feel good about? I have been to many funerals and heard many eulogies where it was said that the faith of this and that person made a lot of difference to the way they handled their diseases and I am sure that is all true. But still that does not make any wiser than before. So I came back and did some reading on the subject of faith, prayer and healing.

TIME magazine which has published numerous essays exploring the relationship between faith, prayer and healing says that even a couple of decades ago, the scientific community would not have dared to propose a double-blind, controlled study of something as intangible as prayer because the scientific temper is all about trying to ridding yourself of remnants of mysticism and obscurantism which is what many people think faith and prayer is – a lot of mumbo jumbo.

But what I found in TIME is interesting. “According to Dr. Harold Koenig, a co-director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University, from 2000 to 2002 more than 1,000 scholarly articles on the relationship between religion and mental health were published in academic journals--as opposed to just 100 from 1980 to 1982. Such studies indicate that religion buffers its adherents from worry. Religious people are less depressed, less anxious and less suicidal than nonreligious people. And they are better able to cope with such crises as illness, divorce and bereavement. Even if you compare two people who have symptoms of depression, says Michael McCullough, an associate professor of psychology and religious studies at the University of Miami, "the more religious person will be a little less sad.” The BBC cites another study conducted at the University of Kansas that finds that patients admitted to hospital with heart trouble fare better if some one is praying for them. The study does not make sweeping claims but claims “We have not proven that God answers prayer or that God even exists. It was intercessory prayer, not the existence of God that was tested”.

But coming back to Dr. Koenig and his research, The American Journal of Psychiatry, while reviewing his book “The Healing Power of Faith: Science Explores Medicine’s Last Great Frontier” comments that the book could be summed up in the singular observation that that “although fear of death was a major stress factor in the lives of many older people, his patients who were religious seemed to have less fear of death even when seriously ill. He found that elderly people who were "very likely" to rely on religious faith and prayer when they were under stress were less likely to report a strong fear of death.” Nothing more really needs to be said. Considering that one of the singular work in working with those who are HIV positive lies in introducing them to the fullness of life that is still possible and in alleviating their fears and anxieties, it would seem that the communities of faith have their work fairly well cut out.

A Question of Identity

I met Sein Myint in a refugee camp, the only home he has ever known. He doesn’t remember much of his childhood except that he was born in a remote village in Burma. When he was still a small child, the soldiers came to his village and burnt the place down. They needed the land as the village stood in the way of a gas pipeline that was going all the way to India.

When the soldiers had finished, they had lost all their belongings. With just the clothes on their back, the family fled into neighboring Thailand since when he has been living a tenuous existence as in the eyes of the world, without any papers or documents, he does not legally exist. His Burmese birth certificate was burnt by the soldiers and though Thailand allowed him and many others like him to live in enclosed refugee camps, they did not issue him any papers or identity card.

Sein Myint’s loss of identity and lack of papers is more than symbolic. When he entered Thailand, he was a small boy and was enrolled in a minimalist school in the refugee camp that provided education until the 10^th grade. With little access to books and other tuition, Sein Myint nevertheless passed his examinations. But he does not have a pass certificate as the certificate requires a name and place of birth to be entered and the refugees do not have papers to prove that their names are what they say they are and where they born. They can not prove that they are Burmese citizens and they obviously are not Thai subjects. Without a high school certificate, there are no hopes of any further education if he could at all get out of the camps legally which he cant. Which means that after all this education, he can do stray menial jobs or clerical work at the camps.

Jesus had a clear understanding of his identity. When his mother reproached him saying, "Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you." He replied, "Didn't you know I had to be in my Father's house?" He did not dispute the authority or responsibility of his earthly parents, but he clearly saw and stated his identity based on his unique relationship to his heavenly Father. He would continue to be a part of his earthly family, and he would identify himself fully with the people of God, but first and foremost he knew God to be his Father, and God's house to be his home. His earthly life and growth flowed out of this identity.

We also must come to a secure sense of identity as a child of God in order to grow up like Jesus. The Lord Jesus came to make this possible for you and for me. If we put our trust in Christ who died to take away our sins and rose again, he gives us the right to become children of God. This is where the journey to grow up in God's way begins. Knowing ourselves as God's child allows me to grow up like Jesus and become God's man.

A child of God is not merely a person who is forgiven and gets to go to heaven. A Christian, in his or her deepest identity is a saint, a child born of God, a child of light, a citizen of heaven. Being a Christian is not getting something; it is a matter of being someone. Being born into God's family, like being born into a human family is becoming someone who was not there before. Christians, hear what God says about our identity.

The question of identity is always an important one but perhaps no where more so than in the case of people who are stateless – those who are in desperate need of papers of some kind to prove who they are, what there name is and where they belong to – the most elemental of all. It is an eye opener to sit and meet with people like Sein Myint- flesh and blood humans like you and me and realize that in the systems and databases of this world they simply do not exist – they have never been born, never went to school, never worked and in short did none of the things that define the life and existence of almost all of us.

As Christians, we know that out final destination and identity lies in the ramparts of heaven. But like the people of God in the Old Testament who struggled long and hard for a Promised Land, we who follow Him today are also called to do both – invite the displaced and the stateless to find their identity in Christ and gain a citizenship in heaven and also at the same time look out for our friends like Sein Myint, stateless and marginalized people also have a place and an identity to call their own while on earth.

People outside the church doors

Recently I had the occasion to attend a Christian wedding involving a convert family, some one who had come to know the Lord from another faith. Like most people, they chose to have the celebration in a church. In a way perhaps that was unfortunate. The church was less than half full as the convert family perhaps did not have too many people who would have felt comfortable in a church setting or perhaps had not even given their consent. As for the church, it was as bland as a bald man's pate and perhaps even on a routine Sunday, the church looked more alive, there being hardly available to decorate. One of the parties in the wedding was from a Christian home but his parents lived far away and for some reason, they too could not come. A priest with a vacant look intoned the vows and another gentleman got up and gave a canned sermon. At the time of the signing of the registers, there was a scramble to see who all were there in the congregation from whom witnesses could be found. The bridesmaid, the best man and all the accessories were provided by one party to the best of their ability. At the end of the ceremony refreshments were served out of the back of an ancient van.

I was reminded of own wedding. Knowing that I had no one to handle all the elaborate paraphernalia of a “Christian wedding”, I proposed dispensing with a church wedding and having a court ceremony under the Special Marriage Act of 1956. Later we could have a pastor stand us up in the Sunday service and pray for us. The Special Marriage Act incidentally is far more progressive and gender sensitive than the archaic Christian Marriage Act under which practically all church marriages happen. Over the years , I have also seen that marriages conducted with pomp in the church can fail, as can secular marriages and again both kinds of marriages can succeed and b a blessing. God is not any more or less present in a church than in a court room.

In the case of own marriage, I lost the battle to keep life simple, inexpensive and uncluttered. But fortunately I had a huge number of friends who turned up out of the woodwork and came forward to offer every kind of and help and I will always be grateful to them for what they did and ensure that the wedding ceremony was not bereft of a soul. Since then , I have usually kept my counsel on this matter , but after attending the wedding that I did , I realized afresh as to how traumatizing and complicated it is for converts with little or no support to put on and go through the trappings of a lifeless ceremony because that is the only model on offer.

Looking at the number of ministries that exist solely to save 'lost souls' and even otherwise, I would presume that the man outside the church walls is our primary customer. And yet, like the people whom the Jews sought to convert by crossing the seas and having converted him or her made life infinitely more difficult by their petty laws, we too have not made much progress. A big chunk of our “spiritual” activities is about witnessing to others and how to go about it, but our customer service is glitzy as long as the target is a prospective customer – jazzy camps, snazzy tracts and all that but once on the inside – the customer service turns sour-- dry doctrines and preaching, pious platitudes and advice but no organized effort really to lend a helping hand, except of course the few good men ----- and women that God in His grace brings.

There are many areas in which we can move to make life easier for those to whom we witnessed and who because the Holy Spirit then worked, accepted Jesus and chose to walk with Him believing that Christian Fellowship was for real and believing that left behind their families and the shelter and fellowship they offered. We cannot make Christian life easy, because in a fallen world, there will be always pain, tears and heartache but we can make it easier certainly. The elaborate rites of passage that we have – Baptisms , weddings, funerals --- all with their jaw clenching , socially draining , expensive and cumbersome rituals – are they really necessary the way we conduct them? Can we simplify life, just a little bit for the man and woman still outside the church door, so that they feel that they can breathe and thrive in Christ without the burden of history and tradition stifling them to death?

The Church as Peacemaker

It is Christmas time, a time for which some of us wait the year round – an occasion to hum those hauntingly memorable carols, buy new clothes and presents and get ready in many other ways to rejoice in the birth of our Savior Lord Jesus, the Prince of Peace. In his first coming, he came to leave his peace with all those who acknowledged Him as their Lord and Savior through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. The seeds of a Kingdom to come were sown – A kingdom that will come to completion at His second coming.

The means that he left behind to spread His gospel on earth and to offer a sample of the kingdom to come in the end days is the church. The church on earth is an ambassador of the prince of peace in thought, word and deed and in the words of St. Francis of Assisi, we are asked individually and corporately to be channels and instruments of his peace- not just peace in our hearts and souls in the sense of having received personal salvation but also peace in our nation, society and world. The picture of the kingdom as a time when God will one day wipe away every tear from every eye and swords will be melted into ploughshares means just that – a time when weapons will be out of date in an environment of amity and harmony.

Examining the church’s past history in acting as an instrument of peace is informative because it might provide us with a road map for peace initiatives in the future. The need for the church to be involved in such initiatives is no lesser today than it was in the past. In taking part of the peace initiatives, the involvement of the church in the North East deserves some recognition and study.

The north east of India has a chequered political history. For instance, the Nags had declared their independence from British rule on the 14th of August 1947, a day before the birth of independent India. In fact in 1947, Mahatma Gandhi had told a delegation of Naga leaders, that Nagas have every right to be independent.” But after Gandhiji was assassinated, his promises die ended with him as the new Indian government decline to accept Naga hope for independence. Naga protests and resistance to the incorporation of their land into the Indian union began to steadily grow.

Then in 1955 the Indian army occupied the Naga areas and martial law was declared. Violence quickly escalated. In the 1960s and 1970s, Baptist Church leaders initiated efforts to halt the violence. Eventually the Shillong Accord was signed in 1975 as a result of these efforts, Although the peace agreement was flawed as Key Naga resistance leaders were left out of the process, the accord agreed to incorporation into the Indian union and although not every one was satisfied and happy with the happy with the arrangement and the Naga underground split after the agreement, it did bring down the level of violence and allow some manner of governance and development to occur in the state.

In many instances, the church though powerful was still a distant second in commanding loyalties compared to tribal and ethnic allegiance. Christianity after all is only 125 years old in Nagaland but tribal and linguistic identities go back centuries. It is commendable that in spite of its many limitations, the church tried to be a moderating influence in a spiral of terrorism which might have otherwise completely spun out of control.

The story has been more successful in Mizoram. In 1958, a proliferation of rats attacked the rice crop, bringing famine to the Mizo hills. That became the catalyst for an uprising against the insensitive bureaucracy in Assam. An organization, known as the Mizo Cultural Front, metamorphosed into the Mizo National Famine Front. In 1961, under the leadership of Laldenga, the Front morphed into a military outfit called the Mizo National Front (MNF). The different denominational churches in Mizoram, under the initiative of the major Churches such as the Presbyterian and the Baptist, came together by forming committees, in order to work together toward conflict resolution and peace building. Eventually, the church was actually successful in bringing Mizo National Front to the negotiating table and getting them to sign a Mizo accord which has largely lasted to this day Mizoram has now become one of the most peaceful and fast developing states in Northeast India.

Today the challenge before the church is to attempt to bring peace in settings where the threat is terrorism in its various forms and the church is not necessarily as powerful or as influential as in the examples cited above. But the church can still be a peace making voice. It can tell the world that terrorism is not spread only by the poverty of money as is often thought but that it becomes viral when there is a poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is when people or nations are humiliated that they really lash out and engage in extreme violence. In such settings, the church is called to bring the message of peace and the greatest peace maker of all.

Happy are the peacemakers, says Jesus. Those who know that peacemaking is hard but that the ball is always in our court and it are more important even than worship. Happy, says Jesus, are the peacemakers. Those who know that conflict is inevitable, who know we can never escape it, not that we want to create it but who are willing to take a step into it where ever necessary to bring about God’s peace. Not to run away. Not to perpetuate conflict. But to be a peacemaker.

Christians –Chasing Elitism or Excellence ?

Recently St. Stephen’s college in Delhi held a debate to argue whether the institution is a centre of excellence or a centre of elitism. The two opposing sides were represented by a faculty member, a student and distinguished alumni. After all the arguments were finished, the college debating society decided that the institution was indeed elitist, presumably on the strength of the arguments presented.

Since then I have been confused - I know that elitism and excellence are not the same but are they similar? is excellence is usually to be found in places where the elite gather and are only the elite capable of excellence and the rest of us are mediocre fluff that can stay or go away without society being unduly bothered. And then, is being elitist a proud of badge of honor. I remember the former president of the Delhi Gymkhana Club in a recent conversation with the Indian Express proudly defended his club being elitist and a watering hole for a highly selected group of people.

But for a moment, leave alone the Gymkhana Club though I suspect that women might have a bone to pick- for in its exclusive class of the elect, it excludes the married woman from applying from membership. Its web site clearly specifies that only single women and widows are eligible to apply which means that any widow choosing to apply needs to presumably keep her husband’s death certificate handy to attach with the application form.

Coming back to St. Stephen’s College and other such oasis of excellence, I think I am a stakeholder in whether this institution and others like this ought to be majoring on elitism or excellence and if excellence is only the domain of the rich and the powerful which basically constitute the elite. The reason I am a stakeholder is that colleges and institutions like these are substantially subsidized by the tax payer, a large number of whom are not going to darken the doors of any college – elite or mundane. But considering that St. Stephen’s College is a Christian institution, there is another question to ask. And that is the biblical stand on excellence and elitism. What do the scriptures have to say about excellence? The Book of Philippians Chapter 4 says this:

“Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

The Bible tells us, exhorts us to pursue excellence. To be fit for the 21st Century we need to pay attention to the quality of what we do. The Church of Jesus Christ is not the place for the left-overs. It's not the place to do the minimum required or what we can get by with. It is surely not the place for mediocrity. From the ancient days of Israel comes our lesson – The Old Testament taught the people of God to bring their best. From the modern lessons of business comes the word: pay attention to quality. If we want to make disciples of Jesus and reach generations that have come to expect quality in return for their commitment of time and energy, then we need to listen

Paul calls us to focus on “any excellence” and “anything worthy of praise” (4:8). We cannot afford for the church, or theological education, or any of our lives to be an example of mediocrity masquerading as faithfulness. There is too much mediocrity, too much “playing church” and “feigning academic rigor” and “being nice” among Christians, rather than holding ourselves to standards of excellence and an ambition for the Gospel. The Gospel calls for excellence in our study, in our worship, in our service. But we are not called to “competitive excellence. But while the scriptures encourage us to always pursue the spirit of excellence; what does it have to say about promoting elitism?

In Matthew 15 , we read of a story where as soon as Jesus and his followers enter the district of Tyre and Sidon a woman immediately approaches them and cries out, "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Well, Jesus does not reply at all, and the disciples seem to sense from his silence that he is blowing her off. So, ramping up their excitement and nastiness, they call out, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” It's like the disciples are saying, “Hey, Enough enthusiasm! Can’t you tell Jesus doesn’t want to have anything to do with you and for that matter neither do we?”

The disciples are demonstrating their own sort of elitism. The 12 apostles here see themselves as the chosen few, the cream of the crop, the entitled elite, the devoted dozen, the Lord’s own Dream Team. They are without a doubt passionate about Jesus. However, apparently they don’t have much interest in sharing their teacher with those, who like this woman, they consider the unenlightened masses.

When Jesus makes the comment that his ministry is directed only to “the house of Israel,” the disciples, most likely feeling justified, must be thinking, “Exactly.” They are, after all, the insiders. They are a part of God’s chosen people—and, moreover, they’re disciples of the long anticipated Messiah, Jesus, who God has anointed to be King of the Jews. Who does this woman think she is accosting them of all people? Well, despite the fact that this woman is an outsider, she is compelled to come to Jesus and in the end she receives that which she seeks—her daughter’s healing.

Very often we christens come across like the first disciples, insiders who were certainly excited about their faith, but also cranky and basically uninterested in sharing their discoveries with the outsiders around them. It's important to be willing to bend and even break our patterns, and to learn from the culture around us and try shake of our elitism.

We can’t wish away the Doon Schools and the Scindia School and their modern day equivalents and perhaps they have the right to their place in the sun. But we are in worrying times if the Bible endorsed pursuit of excellence is perceived to be the same thing as the pursuit and preservation of an elitist class. The way I see it, excellence is inclusive – it is open to embrace any body; on the other hand, elitism is like a wall- it keeps people out of the charmed inner circle of things.

Wisdom and Age

When my seventy-seven year old mother met with an accident recently and fractured her hip, during one of her "dark nights of the soul", she expressed the view that people like her had already lived out their productive lives and had nothing more to contribute to society. She recalled that in the olden days, people would live a much shorter life span and did not usually have to contend with the specter of degenerative diseases that would render them increasingly frail and dependant on others. She also mentioned that once one got to that point, it was a frightening situation because while some people were lucky to be well taken care of, many others were treated callously as burdens to feed.

Since then I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be productive. If my mother in her late seventies worries about being productive, I need to worry too. Often as I buy and read business magazines at airports and railway stations, I note that one of the main features of today's knowledge based economy is that people who are needed are often those who are young and who bring with them the latest technologies and domain knowledge that are needed today. It is of course another matter that today's young people become tomorrow's middle aged and today's emerging platform is tomorrow's obsolesce. I noted though that in the manufacturing industry, experience was valued above youth perhaps because technology does not evolve as rapidly there as else where. The trick is in reinventing ourselves in every age, every decade, so that we remain forever productive.

But how to define productivity? Is it all about moving our hands and feet and being seen to be visibly agile and mobile? I think that is how youth defines it - speed is every thing and you ought always to be visible as doing some thing. Being productive is being active; no being productive is being pro active, being there before any one else has got there. Of course these attributes are important- doing the right thing at the right time at the right pace is the sina qua non of being strategic.

There is a trait, a quality that we use every day of our lives but it is one that is forever hiding itself in the shadows. It is called wisdom. Wisdom is never a part of the curriculum of any management school or institution but can only be learnt on the job as one goes through life in its many shades. And the longer one lives, the longer one in engaged with the world, the sharper its nuances as it is expressed out and lived out in life's diverse situations.

Some times, I feel that we haven't quite learnt to value and evaluate the weight of experience, wisdom and the value addition that it provides. And so our propensity often to sniff at the gifts they bring and the insights they offer as the obsolete thinking of outdated senile minds. Because their understanding and practice is often not expressed in the vocabulary and idiom of the here and now jargon, we often look upon their opinion and insight with a dismissive air.

In the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, old age is a blessing. To die “full of years” is the fondest wish of biblical characters. Zechariah 8:4-5 shares a vision of the new kingdom of God in which those of old age sit on the streets of the New Jerusalem. They carry canes, but the youthful children play around them. The elderly are respected members of this new society. Interestingly, in such prophetic passages the benefits of old age are never “explained;” they are “assumed.” The prophets share other such concerns for the elderly. Isaiah 46:4 reads, “To your old age I am the one who will look after you; to gray hair, I will carry you, I myself have created you and will lift you up; I myself will carry you and deliver you.

The most venerated role posited to the elderly can be found in the book of Proverbs. Old age and wisdom are synonymous. Proverbs 22:17-24:22 contains a vast collection of sayings that instruct the young to obey their elders and to always deal wisely with the elderly. Negatively the same assertion is made in Proverbs 30:17, where the young are scolded for their foolishness if they do not “heed the education of the elderly.

Similarly through out the Book of Proverbs we find that being wise is not about having knowledge per se but rather about an individual's response to that knowledge. And in his opening chapter Solomon tells us what a fitting response looks like: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline" (1:7). Wisdom is thus rooted in relationship; or, to turn a contemporary aphorism on its head, "It's not about what you know; it's about who you know." To be wise is first and foremost to surrender in awe before the God of the universe, our Creator and Redeemer. Furthermore, wisdom is personified—wisdom actually speaks—in Proverbs. Wisdom declares, "I, wisdom, dwell together with prudence; I possess knowledge and discretion. To fear the LORD is to hate evil; I hate pride and arrogance, evil behavior and perverse speech" (8:12, 13). Wisdom continues, "I love those who love me, and those who seek me find me" (v. 17).

Wisdom and its importance cannot be ever weighed on a scale. Its power is subtle and its influence nuanced. It cannot easily be captured on balance sheets, nor can its astuteness be easily encashed as dividends. Yet this is the one commodity that our senior citizens have in abundance and on tap and yet a resource we rarely remember to tap as we busy ourselves paying obeisance at the altar of youth. The spring fountains of youth are indeed enthralling but can they match the depth of eyes and ears that having seen off spring have witnessed, summer, autumn and now winter?

A Call to Be Inclusive

A lot of introspection has gone into the achievements of the last six decades of Indian independence. Thinking has begun about the future of India. Former President Abdul Kalaam had challenged the country to first begin envisioning as a country by sharing publicly his 2020 vision. Now we have people beginning to talk of India in the next 60 years. This is a good question to begin thinking about, although it is possible that it is not very easy to envision so far into the future and the vision of 2020 is some thing that we can more easily grasp. In the last two decades or so, the economic landscape of the country has been so transformed that we are getting used to measuring success and progress in plain vanilla economic terms.

Economic growth and empowerment is important; but is that enough? I think some how that it is more important and vital that we grow and mature as a nation, as a country and become a more inclusive society in every way, which today we are not. Without that inclusiveness, our economic growth and financial growth will carry us nowhere as the vitals of the nation will keep getting eroded with money generated being used not to bring prosperity but to hire, train and deploy more troops and police, kill and maim more people, fill our prisons more and more and construct new ones and in the process perpetuate a cycle of increasing discontent. We must learn to break that deadly cycle.

We need to learn to be an inclusive people at two levels – economic and emotional and Christians need to be leading the way because in the Kingdom to come , all the Nations , Languages and cultures and customs purged of their fallen ness will pay homage to God in all their finery. Yet in India, all we have is a political integration which Nehru, Sardar Patel had some how hastily patched up but without the emotional and the economic buffering and the result is discontent practically every where in the country. We are proud of being the largest democracy in the world in the sense that we have elections every five years or sooner, but a good question to ask is if the common man thought that this was adequate enough or representative enough, then why would insurgency flourish in so many parts of the country? We have the right symbol in the shape of a reasonably fair electoral process, but without giving people a sense of belonging and emotional integration, we don’t quite have the substance of democracy.

But political integration alone is not enough. The kingdoms of this world, we are told, will become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ. Think of the way we view strangers in our midst. Are we not defensive about them and do we not work to protect ourselves from them? Our parent’s persistent counsel, never speak to strangers; to the policy of our police forces which urge us to report the presence of strangers. It may be a linguistic coincidence that stranger rhymes with danger, but our natural fear of the foreign and our social conditioning against those we don’t know, both tie them tightly together.

We all make judgments of strangers, and assess them according to their similarity to the norm. Do they match our expectations? Challenge our fears? Appear strange or startling or disquieting? What will they do to rock our comfortable world? It is hard to accept outsiders. After all, if they were one of us we would already know them. We’d see them at parties or attend the same concerts. We’d be able to fit them into the larger pattern of our society. This is how the world used to be. People lived in small towns or social circles, divided by class and ethnicity. Everyone had their place and was expected to stay there, moving within certain bounds. So you knew who was miserly, and who had failed 6th grade, and you heard the stories about your neighbor’s first wife. When push came to shove, everyone stuck together. You knew where you belonged. People are tribal creatures. We form relationships within circles of cultures that have expected behaviors and forms of communication. We learn how close to stand to each other when we talk, what kind of eye contact to make, the rules of hospitality when paying calls or celebrating a birth.

Having said all that, as Christians, we know where Jesus could usually be found: among the strangers most religious people considered unfit for their presence and deserving of exclusion from their company. He was constantly among those classes of people he taught us to care about: the tax collectors, like Matthew and Zacchaeus; the sinners, like the thieves on the cross; the women, like Martha and Mary; the children, like those he took up into his arms and blessed, over the protest of his disciples; the Gentiles, like the Syrophoenician woman who was willing to eat the crumbs that fell from Israel’s table; the poor, like the widow who gave her last mite; and the lame, the halt, the blind and the lepers, like the ten he healed and received thanks from only one.

But perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson for a broad, open theology of God’s inclusive love is none other than the man who began his journey at the opposite end of the theological spectrum, the Apostle Paul. Paul was an expert in religious exclusivism and triumphalism. He was a Jew, a Pharisee in fact, an expert in keeping and interpreting the Law of Moses. He was so zealous in his faith that he attacked and hounded and persecuted the followers of Jesus. In fact, he was on his way to Damascus to root out Christians and have them imprisoned when he was knocked off his horse and blinded and turned around by God, a remarkable conversion if there ever was one. And then, the scholars tell us, he began a theological journey from narrow exclusivism to a broad, open, grace filled theology of the cross, which finally concluded, amazingly, that God’s purpose in Jesus Christ is as big as the world itself. God sent Jesus, not just to save a few fortunate ones who happened to be lucky enough to hear the news and believe it, but to heal and restore and redeem the whole creation.Paul began as a Pharisee — proud of his exclusive ethnic and religious identity, with an enormous wall of tradition and rules and laws and rituals to protect him from others — and by the time of his death he was saying and writing things like: “In Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ…. He is our peace … he has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” With every terrorist attack, walls and fences between people are rising and not breaking down in our country. And our work as a church, as a community of God’s people seems to be neatly cut out for the next six decades at least…..

Ladies Coupe by Anita Desai - Christian Reflections on Singleness

Ladies Coupe by Anita Nair

A Christian Reflection on the Single State

Ladies Coupe is a novel by an Indian author, Anita Nair which looks at the issue of whether a single woman can be happy or is she incomplete without a man. The main character is Akhila, an unmarried woman in her mid-forties. Akhila was the eldest of 4 children and after the death of her father the responsibility of running the family fell on her. All her brothers and sisters get married except her. Her younger sister Padma stays with her because according to Padma a woman cannot be left alone, lest she go astray. Then one day she gets herself a one-way ticket to Kanyakumari. She gets reservation in the ladies compartment. She shares the compartment with five women, Janaki, Sheela, Margaret, Prabha Devi and Marikolanthu. Akhila strikes up a conversation with these women. Each of the women tells Akhila of their lives. After hearing out these five women and their stories of living in a cocoon sheltered by men or rampant exploitation again by men, Akhila decides that she can live alone. She needs no one. No man and no woman either. The book ends with Akhila asking her younger sister to leave because she feels that she does not companionship of any kind to live and thrive.

This book made me think of the many people, particularly women in our fellowship who are single, perhaps for many years and what the scriptures have to say on marriage and singleness. Whereas books like Genesis seem to indicate that in a large measure, marriage is largely God’s plan for people, in the New Testament, the single state is also celebrated.
Most times, when we talk about families in the church, it's easy to forget that not everybody fits into the same situation that we're in. Because I'm married, and because I have young children, it's natural for me to think about issues that married people with young children face. It's almost possible to believe that everybody is in the same situation that I'm in.

Therefore in our churches, there is very little teaching on coping with the single state. In fact, it is quite likely that our congregations have people who are struggling with these issues with since explicit conversations about marriage; singleness and loneliness are generally frowned upon except in very intimate circles. The Bible says that God sets the lonely in families (Psalm 68:6) but these families come in many designs and one of them is the fellowship and friendship to be offered by the Lord’s people.

In the novel, though Akhila is the eldest sibling, who has run the family after her father’s death, due to societal norms is not in control of her own life, which is remote controlled by her younger sister Padma. That is sad. But what is equally sad is her resolve to eventually cut herself off from all forms of social contact. That would not be what the scriptures would teach. They would teach people to cope with singleness in dependence on God …. But equally importantly, the scriptures would demand that genuine Christian fellowship provide a kind of family even if it is different from the one established through marriage. It is a denial of all Christian concern if there are any lonely Akhilas in our fellowships who not finding any one to reach out to, retreat inwards into isolation and withdrawal.

There used to be a time that singleness was identified as a temporary period that young adults faced before they got married. Some people still define singleness that way. My older brother didn't marry into his thirties, and it was amazing to see some of the comments that were directed at him. People wouldn't leave him alone because he was still single. People were continually matching him up with girls - sometimes a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. It all depended on how well they got along.

The underlying message, though, seemed to be that he was incomplete, or that his life hadn't really begun. Sometimes, even singles feel this way. Some of the markers that take place in married people's lives weren't as visible - the mortgage, the first child, the first child going to school, and so on. Sometimes we communicate subtle messages that say to a single person, "You haven't really lived and you can't be fulfilled because you're not married." They're made to feel almost like half a person. But that's not God's view at all.

When it comes to church, I've found that there's a group that's significant and growing, and yet many times we don't see this group. The ironic part is that all of us have spent time in this group, and yet I've found personally that those days are easily forgotten. Sometimes, without even knowing it, we make this group feel ignored or second-class. The language we use - talking about family picnics and family get-togethers - and the actions that we take can sometimes make this group of people feel like we don't even see them.

Truthfully, sometimes we don't. But it's not because they're not there, and it's not because this group isn't large, and growing. Maybe its naïve, but I'd love to be a church in which we saw past our marital status, and we acknowledged the significance and the value of every person in Jesus Christ. I'd love to see us develop deep and significant relationships beyond those who are just like us. I'd love to be a church in which singles didn't feel second-class, because the greatest person who ever walked this earth was himself single. I want to be the kind of church that affirms people both in marriage and in singleness - a church that recognizes the value of sacred singleness

Our Virtual Friends

If you ask the average person, what is the purpose of people gathering together Sunday after Sunday in church, the probable answer that most people will give is that they gather together to worship. Another answer that one might expect to receive is to listen to God’s Word. Very few will perhaps say that the purpose of the church and the gathering together of God’s people is to provide fellowship. In fact, fellowship is an essential ingredient of the church’s role. One could conceivably worship in solitude, it is possible to listen to some very edifying sermons on tape or on the radio, but fellowship is some thing that can happen only when people gather and relationships develop. It is the thing that cannot happen over the radio waves or in isolation. Fellowship requires people to gather together and pray and meet together and bear one another’s burdens.

In fact, in the many sermons that I must have listened to over the years, the one sermon that I clearly remember was delivered over twenty years ago from the opening verses of Philippians chapter two on the theme of fellowship.Today, it is the age of social networking sites. Orkut, Facebook and My Space and so many others. They are all supposed to bring people together. They have their uses. They do bring people together. People who would otherwise have never met get to meet. I have joined a few and sure, have met some people. We don’t exchange post cards there. We count scraps. And it has its zip and zest, I must say. But when I look at some of the profiles and see that they have 50, 100, 200, 300 contacts, I wonder. Can you really have some thing meaningful to say to 300 “contacts”? Are Orkut notes balms that can heal the soul or merely scraps that itch? Christians are not lagging behind in this race.

There are plenty of Christian social networking sites too if one does not fancy the secular ones, though Orkut and all the others too have their share of tradition groups and “communities”. These are all good. These are all good. If technological innovations are happening and they are redefining the manner in which friendships and social equations operate, there is no reason for Christians not to take advantage of them. I myself can recollect many people who I met fro the first time on line and then these ties were then cemented by off line exchanges and friendships. There are many people who I would never have met had it not been for the online platform that is available today and I am in that sense grateful for technology and for all that it enables us to do.Having said that, I must also say that on line encounters, no matter how long and how often cannot automatically translate into friendship and fellowship.

The writer to the Hebrews cautions his readers that believers ought not to forsake the meeting together of each other because meeting together, talking together and praying together, physically and face to face serves a purpose that chats and scraps simply cannot. Christian Fellowship is about bearing one another’s burdens before as said before and also about rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep. But can we share out our heart’s concerns or deepest joys on scraps and notes for the world to peep at on Orkut’s scrap books?Yes, Orkut is popular today. It generates a lot of traffic. It is a buzz to be on Orkut and collect scraps. But will Orkut last like friendships do? Do edifices built on sand and largely cemented through scraps and hits survive? Or is it that when the storms come and the waves rise, the foundation will give in and collapse? Will Orkut last a generation? will groups that are largely “virtual” really survive? Really? If not, why bother to destroy some thing that is already programmed to self destruct ?