I clearly remember the first time visiting a culture with a significantly different standard of living than my own. I was 14 years old — the summer between junior and senior high school — and my father and I were going to spend a month in Haiti, a small island nation in the Caribbean. The plan was to visit and volunteer in the same places where he had served as a Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam War.
From the moment I was slammed by the thickly-humid heat when we exited the plane, my little middle-class, Midwestern world was turned upside down. Families living without power, very little in the way of waste management, limited access to good food and healthcare, a massive disparity between the wealthy and the poor — it was all there.
Being with folks living in poverty shifted my understanding of the world and my place in it. I saw excess in my own life and in my church where most others seemed to see none. I began to wrestle with the status quo, the seeds having been planted for the Worthwhile Adventures we’ve been on now for nearly 10 years.
Mennonite Mission Network, our sending missions agency, recently offered me the opportunity to film a project with ministry partners La Casa Grande in Benin, a small western-African country with several historical ties to Haiti and the slave trade. Of course, I accepted.
Despite the professional nature of the visit, my experience there quickly became very personal and meaningful. The many similarities to my time in Haiti touched me on a deep level while my adult eyes saw things more profoundly. For one, it was a great reminder that joy and physical poverty are not directly connected. I noticed that, despite the relatively poor surroundings, folks didn’t actually seem to be that miserable. In fact, the Christians I spent time with were straight-up joyful!
Video still from Beninese youth worship service.
I felt compelled to share about this when I returned to Barcelona. In Beninese church communities that had very little in the ways of earthly wealth, they overflowed with jubilation. This stood out to me because our community in Barcelona has a lot of wealth by comparison, but few if any of the members would currently use the word “joyful” to describe the current spirit of the church.
It feels like there’s a heaviness hanging over us.
I started reading Galatians 5, the chapter that talks about the “Fruit of the Spirit,” in hopes of finding a connection to what I had been experiencing. To my surprise, I discovered the context of the passage is actually as a direct response to a community and their relationship with the law. Legalism.
“So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law. Listen! I, Paul, tell you this: If you are counting on circumcision to make you right with God, then Christ will be of no benefit to you.”
The law was created to help Jewish folks understand how to honor God and it united them as a people. However, at some point serving the law was viewed as synonymous with serving God. Jesus rejected this tendency repeatedly with his, “You have heard it said ____, but I tell you ____” way of teaching.
In the passage, we see the ease with which communities can lose focus, with the implication that the church in Galatia was back to focusing on legalism rather than the freedom that comes through Christ’s words. In Galatians 5:13-15, Paul points out that when legalism becomes a community’s focus, it has a tendency to lead to the “biting and devouring of one another” — ironic considering that the law exists to support one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
The author continues in verses 22-26 to give the solution: ask that the Holy Spirit guide our lives, not the law. And, in doing so, we are marked by the production of what he describes to be as fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
“There is no law against these things!”
The Beninese Christians I met had a very Anabaptist theology wrapped up in a very Pentecostal understanding of how we encounter and interact with God. They seemed attuned to how the Holy Spirit was moving and ready to respond boldly when necessary.
In our Barcelona community, it feels like folks tend to get the most passionate and opinionated when we talk about issues surrounding our governing statutes and finances. That’s not to say those things are unimportant! But when we spend more time talking about the systems that give structure to our community than where we see the Holy Spirit guiding us (and how to respond), the focus has shifted.
Video still from Beninese youth worship service.
I don’t write this to air our community’s dirty laundry but, rather, because this tendency runs rampant in churches all around the world and it’s causing them to implode. It’s easy for wealthy folks like us to ask how we can help poor folks. It’s harder for us to embrace the reality that we can learn something from our brothers and sisters in Benin. They have many problems they could focus* on but instead, they find joy in serving God and walking with Christ.
A good place to start is to concretely answer a few questions both individually and communally: Where do I/we find our joy? What keeps me/us from feeling joy? Can I/we name specific things and address them?
*We are certainly not implying that folks living in poverty should be content. Rather, we can learn a lot from the poor and marginalized folks in this world.
In retrospect, we can pinpoint the spring of 2021 as the time our laughter disappeared — when our four-year ministry in Barcelona began to fall apart. As concerns regarding COVID-19 began to ease, expectations in the local church community changed. Gradually, things arrived at a point where our family needed to step away.
It's hard to laugh when it feels like the world is crumbling around you. It's an act that feels almost audacious considering the state of the world: pandemic losses, church divisions, guilt and anger over White privilege and indirectly benefiting from systemic racism, environmental collapse, rampant economic ruin, and war. How can one laugh when the world we live in is so far removed from the one Jesus describes throughout the gospels?