W12 D5- Usurpation of His Office

“Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his.” ( 2 Tim 2:19) If God knows who his children are, why we Christians work ourselves into a lather if the Word as preached by us among nations are refused ? First we call them names: Pagans and Sons of Belial and what not. Consider the days the British Empire held sway over most parts of the globe. Were the missionaries from the West then so burdened for the souls of Chinamen, the Malays and the Indians that they had to convert them first and create them in an image they were most comfortable with? In doing so they only served to create a special class and cut them adrift from their cultural moorings. Did this lumpen race make a perfect fit in the Western soceity? Their new epithet? ‘Wogs’ as a class whom the West tolerated but in many ways despised for being neither here or there.
Religion and Culture go hand in hand whether one likes it or not. Of this I shall come to by and by.

Coming closer to our times what is lurking beneath our Islamophobia? The Children of Islam are entrenched in their way as we are. Can God only work with faith as we are used to? Didn’t Jesus say,” The other sheep I have , which are not of this fold; them also I must bring..” (Jn.10:16) It is the Lord’s doing. In His own time whether it be in this world or in another is not for us to know.
2.
Mexican Americans who are living in the south-western border states of America may be citizens of the U.S.A but they trace their origins in Mexico and pattern of belief-systems as it is impressed in them go still deeper. The Roman Catholic beliefs imposed on the New World by force and coercion some 500 years ago serve now as the basic religion in Mexico. It did not mean that the Mexicans could not work from within, their own beliefs which the Church once tried to supplant. The policy of the Church in the sixties was to Americanize these people. But it was not much of a success. The Church that whenever the priests offered masses in other than Spanish the flock tended to go to other churches where Masses were in Spanish. In Haiti the Church was first associated with the Francophile elite, and which by 1940’s became identified with African values. Naturally reconciliation with voodoo was inevitable. The Masses are now sung in Creole accompanied by voodoo drums. Devotion of the celebrants see no distinction between the Christian, Indian or African spirits which are merely lubricants that smoothen their daily grind of living. No Church can hope to establish dogmas per se and expect it to be held pure. It is people who give its vitality to beliefs which the Prophet who supposedly bring from the Highest. People give it life and in the process it is transmuted into something unforeseen by the Church .
benny