Gospel’s ‘second coming’ – through First Nations Believers
by Frank Stirk www.canadianchristian.com
FOR Christian native leader Ray Levesque, the “first coming” of the gospel to Canada’s First Nations was a disaster best exemplified by the Indian residential schools tragedy – the century-long attempt by Europeans who tried to Christianize Indians by first robbing them of their heritage. It was a calamity from which many are still suffering.
But Levesque also believes there will be a “second coming.” And this time, it will involve primarily natives themselves, who will help their own people understand that they do not have to abandon their ways to become followers of Jesus.
“When it comes the second time, it’s actually going to be good news,” he says.
“It’s going to come . . . from people who look like them and talk like them and understand them. It won’t be from aliens – people who don’t get the culture, don’t understand protocol, don’t understand the humour, don’t understand the suffering and don’t have any [native] relatives.”
Culturally sensitive
Levesque heads the Society for New Gatherings, based in Surrey. It is made up of a younger generation of native Christians who believe that the way to introduce their people to the love of Christ is not through the traditional means of church-planting and evangelization, but by developing culturally sensitive leaders who can build relationships within native communities.
“It is not anti-church movement,” he insists, even though their approach “is often not going to look at all like ‘church’,” at least not in the way that non-natives understand it.
“We’re not trying to professionalize, not trying to create a clergy-class, not requiring theological education, not requiring that they have a written language,” says Levesque.
“We’re trying to develop spiritual leaders in a way that’s faithful to what we understand from how leadership developed in the New Testament.”
Bill Tarter, executive director of the non-native-led North America Indigenous Ministries (NAIM) in Ladner, is convinced that Christians are about to witness a Canada-wide “church movement” among First Nations peoples.
“It’s a like a tsunami coming. It really, truly is,” says Tarter. “I’ve heard the same message from too many independent sources – native leaders in Canada and some in the U.S. – that . . . in the space of five years, that dynamic’s going to happen . . .
“A First Nations spiritual tsunami is about to hit Canada.”
Tarter adds: “First Nations believers will not be the objects of this tsunami; rather, they will be the force behind it.”
Three years ago, best-selling author Henry Blackaby (Experiencing God) received a similar revelation.
When he was nine years old, he began praying for revival among the native peoples of North America after listening to the Haida chiefs his father brought to their home in Prince Rupert.
It took 60 years, but Blackaby is certain that God finally – and audibly – answered him in the affirmative.
“Never have I been so aware,” he says, “of God preparing a highway for the native people and the aboriginal people like he has today. . . . I do sense it’s a different time and a different moment in God’s economy to bring revival.”
Blackaby estimates that 95 percent of them have no personal relationship with Christ. “They’re just an unreached people group,” he says.
Such is the tragic legacy of the residential schools, according to Levesque. “That’s the single biggest piece of baggage for people who are trying to do native ministry,” he says.
“It’s like [asking them,] ‘What’s evangelism?’ And most natives will say, ‘Oh, that was residential school’ . . . So now when the church comes and says, ‘We want to evangelize you,’ it’s like, ‘What are you going to do to us now?’”
Deep spiritual hunger
Yet Mark MacDonald, the Anglican Church of Canada’s first-ever national indigenous bishop, believes that even the lingering distress from the residential school horror was not enough to quench their “deep spiritual hunger.”
“There’s something deeper than the human failure that is still critical and abiding,” he says. “You look at the elders who over the years have held on to hope in Christ and trust in his word, trust in his promises. There’s always been a sense those promises were not limited to the way they were presented by western institutions.”
Where Christian leaders differ is over how best to satisfy that hunger which is being felt across a highly diverse community that is also growing rapidly in number.
In 2006, Statistics Canada counted 698,025 people who identified themselves as First Nations.
That was a 29 percent increase over 1996, and more than three times the growth rate among non-aboriginals. As a result, their median age was 25 – or 15 years younger than the rest of the population.
“That means [native young people] have been influenced by different forces – some good, some bad, but some significantly different from their parents’ generation or their grandparents’ generation,” says Terry LeBlanc, national director of the cross-cultural ministry My People International, in Evansburg, Alberta. “Some have been raised in their culture, some have not.”
To Levesque, “the whole notion of church planting is pretty much nonsense to a community that already exists – as a band, as families, as relatives, etc. . . . People know each other, people respect each other. There’s elders, there’s programs, there’s relationships.”
Talking circles
“I would say that we replace church worship services with talking circles,” he says. “A talking circle generally has the idea of going in a circle where everybody talks or somebody can offer a prayer or a song. . . . . There’s no cross-talking, and we trust each other to share what’s on our heart. We’re not talking about other people.”
Yet with 615 First Nations and 10 distinct First Nations language-families in Canada, Tarter points out that what works in one community would be completely rejected by another.
“The differences between the nations is as different as someone from India and someone from China . . . in terms of their cultural view,” he says. “Which is why if we work through the leadership that God has raised up in these nations, they will know intuitively how to best reach their own people.”
LeBlanc adds that not only are talking circles never used by some native groups, their format can vary greatly between particular tribal groups.
“My tribe is Mi’kmaq,” he says. “Doing a talking circle among Mi’kmaq people the way that it would be done among Plains Cree people would be an offence and a wrong-headed approach.”
Catholic tradition
The Mi’kmaq also illustrate Leblanc’s caution against assuming that all native people want nothing to do with the European-style church.
He points out that among his people, there is a 450-year-old “tradition” of Catholic Christianity.
“Out our way, you’ll find people who are more open to at least a Catholic expression of Christianity as a legitimate part of what it means to be traditionally Mi’kmaq,” says LeBlanc. “So there, a church plant might be received differently than it might be among the Salish on the west coast.”
“The living word of God takes form and shape in very different ways, from place to place,” says MacDonald. “When we start saying ‘it has to look like this,’ that’s when we make idols. The western churches have kind of failed on that level of thinking.”
The challenge that all this poses for missions like NAIM, says Tarter, is they will need to surrender their traditional ‘Paul’ or leadership role among the First Nations and step back and try to become a ‘Barnabas’ or encourager to the emerging native leaders. If they do not, they will quickly become irrelevant once the ‘tsunami’ hits.
Sitting as equals
“There are already lots of native-led ministries that have sprung up in Canada,” he says. “And they don’t take to patronizing or someone who feels they’ve got the answers. They want someone who’ll sit with them as true equals and engage with them.”
The time is long overdue, says Tarter, for non-native Christians to forego the notion that there is a one-size-fits-all approach to following the Jesus way.
“The dilemma comes if we come from the outside and we think we know what those [native] expressions mean,” he says. “And we often don’t know what those expressions mean unless we’ve really been exposed to the culture for a long, long time.”
Yet far too often, says Levesque, competing denominations – in “a very arrogant abrogation of band authority” – have entered native communities in search of converts, and have ended up causing much more harm than good.
“They go for the weakest, the loneliest, the most vulnerable people. And frankly, I consider that pretty low,” he says.
“To me, it’s actually treasonous to the gospel and to the kingdom of God to be going in and destroying a community along denominational lines. . . . And yet many, many reservations have been damaged by this.”
By contrast, Blackaby predicts that when God’s Spirit descends upon Canada’s First Nations, not only they but potentially all of humankind will be blessed.
“I think God has prepared the world for that message to travel. There are aboriginal peoples in almost every country of the world, and they know each other – at least they know about each other – and they gather,” he says.
“And so if God were to begin a mighty movement of his Spirit among the native people here, and then spread that around the world, he could take ‘the despised and the rejected’ and use them as a means to bring revival globally.”
Comments
As a contributor to this article, it should be clarified that I did not participate in any conversations with Terry Leblanc or the others, although it appears we were in a conversation.
A couple clarifications might be useful here. First, the "new gatherings" we sponsor among native communities often take the form of a talking circle, but it varies widely by the culture. And we go only to those who do not attend any kind of church. We don't want to be in the business of convincing Catholic Mikmaqs or Anglican Lakota that our way is more authentic. We simply create gatherings which welcome natives to participate in ways that are more culturally familiar. As natives, we do what is acceptable locally in each area, which can often include talking circles. By the way, the talking circle is used almost universally across bands and tribes in North America in counseling, recovery programs (i.e. WhiteBison.org) etc. so we are not talking about some ancient cultural form of just the Plains Indians. All cultures constantly change including aboriginal cultures, so the use of talking circles should be no surprise to anyone living in aboriginal settings.
In our work, we are not trying to reach "churched Indians" and "bring them into our camp". We don't have a cultural mission to try to make "churched" Indians more traditional. Often we are not welcomed by natives in Western Church settings who see our more cultural approach as "backwards" or "syncretistic". The reality is, however, that we are receiving the seed of the Good News and planting it into the culture just the way it is, without having to convert people to Western European Christianity first before they can become followers of Jesus. So many churches spend inordinate amounts of time "protecting" their churches against culture -- which is like trying to help a fish by keeping it out of the water. Jesus sent us to all people groups (tante ethne), to bring the seeds of the Good News and plant them. We were never called to convert people from one culture to another. The Gospel is strong enough to change any culture, and it doesn't need our interference by making it more European or more Protestant more Catholic. In the end, as in the beginning, it's all about Jesus.
This is our story: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word become flesh, and He lived with us. Thanks for listening.
Ray Levesque - www.newgatherings.com email ray at: tellray@gmail.com
