ing Way, a relief and development
department of Canadian Baptist Ministries ( www.thesharingway.org).
“Africa,” she says, “is not only difficult to understand but also difficult to
address. Where there is extreme poverty, hurts that haven’t healed, families
that aren’t together and a lack of food,
people act in desperation. Yes, you pray
against it, but you must also actively
aim to fix it.”
Canadian Evangelicals
and Reconciliation
With First Nations
Cassidy attributes South Africa’s
current troubles less to militant nationalism, and more to unemployment
– “around 30 per cent to 40 per cent
by my calculations and, in some townships, as high as 90 per cent.”
Have we made any progress on encouraging
healing with our aboriginal brothers and sisters? A brief overview n By Ron Csillag
That’s why it’s not enough to “come
to Africa and only preach John 3: 16.
You have to act as well,” he adds.
In her work developing assistance
programs for Rwandan orphans – especially those young children who head
households – Ward finds that reconciliation isn’t only about peace but also about
restoring people to wholeness, especially
after something has destroyed them.
“The new heavens and new Earth passage in Isaiah [65: 17-25] is not some future event but here and now. That means
alleviating the conditions by helping
people to gain sustained access to food
and clean water and to build a community’s ability to care for children.”
Hope lies in the children, she finds.
“They want to move forward. They
work together repairing homes, play
soccer together and encourage each
other. Although it can be overwhelming
and discouraging to see how much more
still needs to be done, Rwanda has some
amazing stories of reconciliation.”
Cassidy echoes her sentiments:
“The work is exhausting and wearying,
and the path ahead is daunting, but the
gospel challenges remain. It requires
people of goodwill not to give up but
to carry on.”
Alex Newman is a freelance writer in
Toronto.
In the raw post-apartheid days of the
new South Africa, Nelson Mandela
saw the need for a healing, recuperative process for all citizens. To the
delight of many and surprise of few, he
was quick to acknowledge the need for
political reconstruction and the need to
empower the indigenous black population – and also the need for reconciliation.
The result was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The commission’s chair, Anglican
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, quickly realized that the term “reconciliation” was
vague and risked becoming a cliché. So he
carefully fine-tuned his definition of the
word and of synonyms such as “
restorative justice” (in contrast to retributive
justice).
“The central concern,” Tutu wrote in
his book No Future Without Forgiveness,
“is the healing of breaches, the redressing
of imbalances, the restoration of broken
relationships, a seeking to rehabilitate
both the victim and the perpetrator, who
should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community that he has
injured by his offence.”
It is through that wide and deep
definition that non-native Canadian
Evangelicals may wish to view their own
efforts and successes in the reconciliation work of engaging Canada’s First
Nations. Emboldened and empowered
by many biblical injunctions to heal
broken relationships, Christians may
also look to the distillation preferred by
aboriginal leader Ray Aldred, chair of
The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s
Aboriginal Ministries Council: “Listen
to one another, tell the truth, then come
up with some plan of how you are going
to fix this.”
Seeking to reconcile today’s First
Nations with non-native Christians,
whose forebears once proudly oppressed
aboriginal people and committed acts of
untold brutality against them, has been
a slow, sometimes painful process for
both sides. The Canadian government
began to establish an Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation
Commission last June, but the original
commissioners resigned in October
and new ones had not been selected by
press time. Throw in violent protests
over never-ending land claims and the
failure of the Kelowna Accord, a $5-bil-
lion program to improve First Nations
health, education and housing, and the
potential is high for mutual disaffection
if not outright hostility.
Yet non-native, Evangelicals and
First Nations have embraced in recent
decades in several highly emotional instances of healing and repair. The first
major breakthrough in relations \was in
Winnipeg in 1994. Instigated by Terry
LeBlanc, who has a foot planted in
both the First Nations and evangelical
