Mark Labberton:
I’m really delighted today to welcome Myal Greene as our guest on Conversing. Some of you will know Myal because he serves as the president and CEO of World Relief, a Christian international aid organization that particularly helps in refugee relocation, both in the United States and the attentiveness to the poor in various countries around the world. He worked for eight years for World Relief in Rwanda and has been serving now as president in a way that is really trying to bring together church-based programming in relationship to global need and to refugee resettlement. Myal holds a BS in finance from Lehigh University and a Master of Arts in Global Leadership from Fuller Theological Seminary. It’s such a gift to have him here as he shares his faith and shares his perspective on the moment that we’re in. Myal, I’m so delighted to welcome you to Conversing. Welcome, and thank you for being with us.
Myal Greene:
Mark, it’s fantastic to be here. I’ve been a longtime listener to the program, and excited to sit down and chat with you today.
Mark Labberton:
Well, I want to start in maybe a surprising way because I don’t think I’ve told this to you, but in many ways you have what, in my earliest days as a Christian, was my dream job. I was from the Northwest and World Relief was an early encounter for me when I saw their work, especially with refugees in the Northwest. And I thought the gospel had exploded my world. It was now a world that included the world instead of just my world or my most known parts of the world. And I just had such admiration for the work of organizations like World Relief. And I felt like, well, maybe someday, and that would’ve been a long ways away from where I was at that moment as a freshman in college, maybe I could somehow know something about that world and contribute to it. I’m just very eager to jump into this conversation both because of who you are, because of your role as a leader of World Relief and because of the particular times and challenges that we’re facing right now. Thank you again.
I think it’s always helpful for people to be able to contextualize a guest, so just give us a brief contextualization of how it is that you came to be the CEO of World Relief. What had been the earlier parts of your life and career? And how did your spiritual formation lead you in this direction?
Myal Greene:
Well, thank you for that invitation just to share a bit of my background and my own experience. And I oftentimes tell the story of how I ended up at World Relief; I think was deeply connected to my faith journey. And I came to be a believer in Christ in my early 20s. And I’d grown up around the church, sometimes in the church, sometimes not. Went to an Episcopal high school and heard lots of Christianity over the years, but I didn’t truly come to faith until I was in my early 20s.
And in an experience really from the beginning of my faith journey, God was working in me and instilling in me a deep understanding of His heart for the poor. And so He was opening up the scriptures to me, whether it was the words and the prophets Micah or Isaiah or just a clarity of Jesus’s ministry to the poor and all that He did. And then I was reading books like Rich Christians in An Age of Hunger, Gary Haugen’s Good News about Injustice, Bryant Myers’ Walking with the Poor. And to put these books and these materials into the hands of someone who’s a believer but for a year or two years, it just laid out to me a very clear, distinct difference between the world and what it means to follow Christ and what it means to put the needs of the poor at the heart of that.
And so I was working on Capitol Hill in my early 20s and spent five years working for a couple of different members of Congress. In that period, I was going to a church in the Washington, DC area, McLean Bible Church. And through that, I was also introduced to some short-term missions trip experiences. And World Relief had a relationship with McLean Bible Church at the time, and I’d heard about it, and I was at a missions conference in January of 2006 and went to hear a woman by the name of Debbie Dortzbach speak. And Debbie was a leader in the HIV-AIDS work. She led World Relief’s HIV-AIDS work for many years. And I was just captivated hearing her talk about the book that she and Meredith Long had written about the story of the church at worked with HIV and AIDS. And then six months later, I found myself serving with World Relief in Rwanda, and that was the beginning of an 18-year journey with World Relief.
Mark Labberton:
Wow, wow, wow. That’s an amazing thing. What was it in your early 20s that brought you to such clarity about your faith and its connection to the poor?
Myal Greene:
Yeah. Well, I’d gone to Lehigh University and gotten a degree in finance. And I think I got a minor in all things substance abuse in that period as well. And I really saw the challenges of that lifestyle. And so much of getting a degree in finance from a business school leads you to one view of the world.
And I remember this very distinct moment. I was reading a copy of Business Week, and it was talking about how the global economy had been affected by HIV and AIDS. And I remember picking up that article thinking I would never want to go there and experience that or have anything to do with that.
And then I contrast that just a few years later to the true heart work that God does in terms of reorientating what we want to have as our priorities for life, how we want to conduct ourselves, the ethics by which we want to live, but also knowing that I was saved out of that in those challenges by the redeeming work of Jesus. And one of the scriptures I come back to regularly is in Psalm 31, verses seven and eight. And this is probably seven or eight months after I became a Christ follower. I was reading this passage, and it says in that passage, “I will be glad and rejoice, for you have seen my troubles and you’ve seen the affliction of my soul. But you’ve not turned me over to the enemy, you’ve set me in a safe place.”
And for me, this is what God has done in my life. And I was overjoyed by that. And really, so much of my life from that point on has been around how can I allow others to experience that joy that comes with realising that not only will God transform your life, but what it means to actually have experienced that and to feel that and to make that a very real personal experience?
Mark Labberton:
Wow. Rwanda’s genocide happens in ’94, and you arrive in Rwanda in 2006. Where have things come to by 2006 after that war?
Myal Greene:
Yeah, it was 2007 I got there. And that was 13 years after the genocide. I arrived right as they were finishing the memorial period for that year. And so Rwanda always would mark and continues to mark the period of the genocide with a 100-day period of mourning and period of reflection. And at that time, the effects of the genocide were everywhere, but it was still something that was not always talked about. And so as an outsider, you would come in and you wouldn’t be able to see it, but it was always there. And you would have conversations with individuals and hear their story, hear the connectedness. And you could see whether it’s within the institution, whether it’s within the church some of the strains of continued ethnic strife that was there. But you also saw the power of the church leaning into reconciliation, prioritizing reconciliation, driving towards that. And I think some of my most distinct memories is this was in the era of the Gacaca courts, which was-
Mark Labberton:
Why don’t you explain that? Yeah.
Myal Greene:
Yeah. The Gacaca courts were built upon a traditional form of mediating and resolving disputes where the community would come together, elders would mediate the discussion here. And they used the Gacaca courts to mitigate many of the community level effects of things that happened during the genocide. Most of the cases of mass murder and conspiracy were handled by the higher courts, but people who stole from, perpetrated violence, things like that had the justice carried out by their neighbors. And they would come and they would talk about what had happened, what the person had done, what the expectations of restitution would be.
And in each community, they would have their Gacaca court on a different day of the week, but everything would stop for that day. The markets would close. If we were in the community for a week for doing ministry, we had to stop. And just sometimes we would be invited to go and sit and observe the courts and watch it and see it. And for me, that was a very powerful explanation just to see a person saying, “Yes, I acknowledge I was the one who,” after their aunt and uncle were killed, “went and robbed and stole their possessions and took them to my home.” And to hear these things and to say the attempts at apology, the attempts at reconciliation that were there. And when there’s so many stories from Rwanda of true reconciliation where people have forgiven the people who have killed their family members or have forgiven people who’ve done terrible things to them and to see the rawness of 12 or 14 years later is still very fresh in people’s minds. And even only coming up on 31 years this year, that’s still a very short-
Mark Labberton:
Very short. Yeah.
Myal Greene:
… period of time. And that’s really one and a half generations removed.
Mark Labberton:
Right. When it happened, there were so many things about the genocide in Rwanda that were devastating, but one of the things that as a Christian was acute to me was the sense that Rwanda was in name one of the most Christian nations in Africa; exceedingly high Roman Catholic population, pervasively religious and Christian in particular. I’m curious, how did the Gacaca courts see an interweaving or not of Christian faith in the process of the acts of forgiveness?
Myal Greene:
Yeah. Well, I think I look more broadly to the work of the church as well. Certainly I think the church did many things intentionally to lead with reconciliation. I think of the work of Bishop John Ritchie Hanna who became a friend. We served together on a board together for a period of time and during my tenure there. And he was such a leader in that and led through things like prison fellowship ministries and through the work of the local church.
And I think what is complicated is know Rwanda is unique. And I think the government did some very wise things, whether it’s the Gacaca courts or some of its policies with prisoners and work release and those things, and really the legal frameworks to drive reconciliation forward. But inherently, reconciliation for people who have done the worst things imaginable to you is not a human thing. It’s something that we see really, truly and best in the example of Christ and in the teachings of Christ to forgive one’s enemies and to forgive people who’ve done things for them.
And so I think where the hard part and the amazing part of the reconciliation story in Rwanda is deeply connected to the individual cases case after case after case that make it possible because I think you can’t really have reconciliation without the individual reconciliation that goes along with that. And so I think what’s happened there has been a merging of the power of the state, the power of the church, but also the power of the people and wanting to forge a better future. And I think that’s so remarkable about the journey in Rwanda.
Mark Labberton:
Right, right. We could talk much longer about Rwanda because it’s a never ending pool of experiences and good, bad and otherwise, political, spiritual, economic, social. It’s just an extraordinary story of the 20th and 21st century. But I’d like to move on to where we are today.
Just for those who may not know World Relief that Myal Leads is an organization that’s a partner or an expression really of the National Association of Evangelicals, which has been, since the mid-20th century, an organization that has gathered together evangelicals of all different kinds of denominations and no denominations. And one of its burdens, I would say fairly early on, was really this sense that there had to be a response to global need and particularly among the poor. And it has thrived in so many significant ways. And right now, it’s an example of an organization like a number of others that stands at a exceptionally important crossroads. First and foremost, I would say in the long term, it’s really about the global refugee crisis that we’re facing, which I want to start with, but then it’s also about all the entailments that come with that, all the particular details that are involved in that work. Why don’t you take us into that narrative, how World Relief has entered it, and then in particular where you are at this stage in your leadership and in World Relief’s own work?
Myal Greene:
Well, I might even go back to the origin story of World Relief a little bit in this because it’s hard to understand why we engage the way that we do in this moment without thinking about what’s the history of-
Mark Labberton:
Please.
Myal Greene:
… evangelical engagement with these issues for the last 80 years. And so World Relief, we were founded in 1944 in Park Street Church in Boston. And Park Street has a very storied history of deep commitment to the gospel and deep commitment to issues of justice and really at the heart of the neo-evangelical movement at the time. And so there was a war raging in Europe. There were churches that had been deeply affected. There were millions of people displaced in Europe at the time. And a group of Christ followers committed during the Lenten season to skip meals throughout the week and to take that money and use it as a special offering on Easter. And Park Street and some other churches in Boston came together to mobilize more than $400,000 in 1944. Which we did the math last year for our 80th anniversary, and that was around $8 million. And to think what is the challenge today that you could get at church or a small network of churches to commit $8 million in sacrificial giving over a period? And it’s truly astounding.
And so what we’ve seen is whether it was engaging in the refugee crisis in Europe or in the ’50s being very present in feeding 180,000 people a day in Korea during the Korean War, or fast forwarding to the HIV-AIDS crisis in the ’90s and being at the forefront of speaking to the church about these issues or in the 1970s and 1980s welcoming Southeast Asians who were arriving on boats and through many different means to this country as refugees.
And so we went through a process of really revisiting what our mission statement was and to say our mission statement for the future is the mission that has been the work of World Relief for the past. And we’ve said for 80 years we have stepped into the world’s greatest crisis, and we’ve always done so in partnership with the church. And so last year, we reoriented our mission around that to boldly engage the world’s greatest crises in partnership with the church. And so if we come today and say, “What is the greatest crisis in the world?” There is no greater crisis than the global displacement crisis in my mind. And today, there are 122 million people who have been forced to flee their homes as a result of violence and persecution, credible threats to their safety.
It’s always hard to put our hands around numbers. I’m a numbers guy, so I always forget that other people are not numbers people the way that I am. But when I started as a humanitarian at World Relief 18 years ago, the number of people who fell into that category of forcibly displaced was under 40 million. And so we’ve seen almost a fourfold, more than a threefold increase in the last 15 years of the number of people who have become refugees, internally displaced persons, asylum seekers and others who have been forced to flee their home country.
And that happens at a time period when the number of people living in extreme poverty has been reduced by 2/3rds. The people who are dying from preventable diseases has been radically reduced. But what we’re seeing in the world today is a handful of the most fragile nations of the world are experiencing extreme violence, fragility, rising poverty, the effects of climate change. And people are being forced to flee and put into desperate situations, and so we’ve really made a decision wholeheartedly to fully engage these issues at the heart of what we do.
Mark Labberton:
It’s very inspiring to me. And it is that aroma of what you’ve just described that I caught wind of when I was just becoming a Christian. And I could see and feel the impact of this drawing closer to pain and suffering and injustice as opposed to pulling away. And consistently over the decades, World Relief has been one of those organizations that has just been exemplary in my mind.
And I do think that I want us to now try to step into this particular moment. You’ve described the numbers and the reach, but there’s been an intensification of this because of American governmental decisions. We don’t have to get necessarily into the politics of all of that, but there’s been devastating impact. And I’m curious if you could describe to us how different the work and challenge that World Relief is facing before this new administration began and where we are now.
Myal Greene:
Yeah. To lay just the framework a little bit more clearly, World Relief, we are one of 10 refugee resettlement agencies. And we have been a refugee resettlement agency partnering with the US government since 1980 to do the work of welcoming refugees who come to this country. And we’ve partnered with every presidential administration since Jimmy Carter to do this work and have done so proudly. Politics has affected the refugee program over the years. Historically, it’s been an apolitical initiative. When there’s been need in the world, the US has responded by being a welcoming nation to that. And so that’s been deeply affected in this season by some of the decisions of the new Trump administration. In particular, the halting of new refugee arrivals to the United States has taken place. And so that’s been devastating for us as an organization who cares deeply about welcoming those individuals that I just spoke about who have been forced to flee and what that means and the implications there. And have not had new refugee arrivals since the 20th of January.
And we’ve experienced challenges of even some of the resources and the grants designed to support those individuals being cut off and being shut down. And so that’s difficult. And I think we need to reconcile what does that mean in the midst of the changes in immigration policy to so acutely target refugees? And what does that mean for us as the values of a country? Put politics aside, just wrestle with that as a set of values.
And parallel, World Relief also works in 13 countries overseas. And in a handful of countries of those, four of those where we serve some of the worst crises in the world: Sudan, South Sudan, Haiti, DRC, Chad. We’ve seen interruptions to some of the federal funding that we had. Now, we only worked with USAID in four of 13 countries, but we saw some interruptions and some challenges there and continue. Now, thankfully we’ve seen some continuation of that funding, but it still is on a very tenuous space today. And so what that really means is that the US and other foreign nations are making decisions to pull back from foreign aid following the lead of the US in this season. And what that means is at a time when people experiencing crisis are facing the greatest need, the generosity of the country is not being seen.
Mark Labberton:
A couple of follow up questions about that. How many refugees does that mean that you would’ve expected to have received from January 20th until today that have been cut out because of the ending of this process?
Myal Greene:
Yeah. Last year, the US welcomed just under 120,000 refugees, which was a record number for the year. This year, we were expecting around 12,000 for the year. And so that’s roughly 1,000 per month that we would hope to welcome and work with. World Relief maintains a network of 16 offices around the country, and they would’ve been integrated into communities in those areas.
Mark Labberton:
Right, right. And when you break the pieces apart into different things, whether it’s the end of the refugee welcoming process or whether it’s the impact of the end of USAID and so forth, it’s hard as a person trying to understand this without being directly involved what are the greatest impacts? The first, the refugee stopping is presumably the number one thing, but then it leads to other things. How does that burden compare to the burden of the decline of government funding through things like USAID?
Myal Greene:
Yeah, I always view… And it could be a whole discussion simply discussing whether Christian organizations should accept federal funding. And I think that’s for a variety of spaces. I’ve always viewed it as the federal funding is an opportunity to serve. And so what we see in this season of spaces, to participate in the Refugee Resettlement program, you have to be a recipient of the federal funding that goes along with each case that arrives. And for us, it’s always been strategic to be wanting as a Christian organization to be an agency receiving and welcoming and being the first people to welcome individuals who had lived a vulnerable life into this country. And what we’ve seen in this season is an ending of that opportunity.
And for others who have come in recent years, other policies are sending people home or are revoking legal status that people had. Not refugee status, but people who’d come under temporary protected status or parole and other things are seeing those statuses in jeopardy or removed altogether. And for me, what that says is individuals who were forced to flee their home country oftentimes ended up in a neighboring country that did not want them either, and then finally came to this country thinking this would be their final landing spot in a place where they could rebuild their lives are being told that, “No, you’re no longer welcome here.” And so I think for me, that’s the biggest, most devastating piece of this.
And we think about internationally with the humanitarian work and the interruptions here, USAID funding is a part, but not the whole of what we do. But it’s typically the part that goes towards feeding people who are living in refugee camps or paying for medical services and medical care and some of the very specific service-oriented things. And what that means is there’s less opportunity to meet the needs of individuals and to build the relationship and really lean into what does it mean to see someone flourish and have that opportunity for flourishing? And it either puts lives in danger or it pushes people back to fragility in this era.
Mark Labberton:
Talk a little bit about PEPFAR, what it is, first of all, just to be sure that people know it, and then the cutbacks on PEPFAR that are additional to the cuts to things like USAID.
Myal Greene:
Yeah, PEPFAR was the… Or is the HIV-AIDS specific program that was started underneath the Bush administration in the mid-2000s and just celebrated its 20-year anniversary and has really proven to be instrumentally successful in saving the lives of… 25 million lives I believe is the quote that the reviewers of the program and the auditors had reviewed and identified was the success of the program. Before PEPFAR came to be, HIV was highly prevalent throughout much of Africa, parts of Asia, other countries. And through the program, transmission was radically reduced. People received access to ARVs and treatment drugs.
The first project that I worked on at World Relief or when I joined the work in Rwanda, one of the things that was very much that we were doing daily was visiting people living with HIV and AIDS who, through a project funded by PEPFAR, we were training churches to do a variety of things, one of which was provide palliative care for people living with AIDS. Another was about a youth abstinence program that we were leading in every district of the country.
And so this work has carried out for many years, and PEPFAR is among the casualties in the USAID cuts and the reductions. And I think we will see the two areas, and it’s still, I think, too early to tell, but the indications are the two areas that will have some funding from foreign assistance for USAID will be in health and humanitarian life-saving support. And so that’s encouraging, but I think we will not see the investment, the levels that we’ve seen historically.
Mark Labberton:
When you think about these circumstances and the challenges that it raises, that, for me at least, it seems the devastation is just so exceptional and overwhelming. And for me, many days of headlines are just full of deep discouragement about where things seem to be moving and how aggressively things are ending and being curtailed. It naturally causes me in a somewhat naive way to be curious about the degree, if any, that philanthropy has followed the government’s example or been a counter to the government’s example. Have these cuts increased philanthropic giving or has philanthropic giving dropped almost as a mirror of the government policy change?
Myal Greene:
I think time will tell. We’ve seen an outpouring of support from many private donors in our constituency and many churches in our constituency. And so when all of the effects happened early in the Trump administration, we saw some of the cuts that were announced and planned that acutely affected World Relief, we went to partners and churches and foundations across our network and had one of the most successful fundraising campaigns that we had ever had because we spoke to the urgency, the significance, and said, “The government is not doing things that it used to do, and we need you to stand in the gap.” And that was tremendously successful. And I think what that stemmed from is a point to, A, be vulnerable with the donor community, to be transparent and honest about the needs that people are facing and to have urgency and the front page news story. And we did so faithfully, and God truly provided through the commitment of the church. And what I’ve learned in this is I think the church is more committed to the vulnerable and more committed to their immigrant neighbors than many in the media or many in politics would like the rest of the public to believe and to understand.
And so I think the bigger question are related to philanthropy and major foundations, and some of that remains to be seen. I think that there’s a lot of stored wealth and stored resources and donor advised funds and foundations that’s waiting to be unleashed upon the world and generosity. And it’s my hope and my prayer that we’re not storing up treasures in accounts for future philanthropic need when there’s great needs in the world today. But I think how some of those decision-makers shift their resources, a lot remains to be seen. And I think a lot of it will be individualized based on individual foundations and their commitment.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah, yeah. As the leader of World Relief in this time, what are the greatest leadership challenges?
Myal Greene:
Chief among them is just the level of uncertainty that we see right now. And I think it’s uncertainty for the program participants that we work with every day, whether they’re refugees or vulnerable immigrants in this country, not knowing what legal status may hold for them in the days and weeks ahead. It’s uncertainty for people who are living in refugee camps that are seeing the funding, supporting those camps reduced and not knowing if their choice is to go back to the community they came from, leave the camp searching for food and resources somewhere else. And it’s also uncertainty for our staff and recognising that they serve with World Relief because they have a deep heart for the vulnerable and a deep heart for the church and a deep commitment to serving. But also knowing that as some of these programs end some of the resources from the government dry up not knowing what’s next for them.
And so I think that managing uncertainty is a difficult thing. I think that the solution for that in many ways is trying to be really transparent about what you know and what you don’t know. And I think I found that people have responded well in that season to hearing, “Hey, this is what we know, this is what we think, and this is what we don’t know. And this is the set of decisions we’re making as a result of that. I think that’s one.
I think one of the hard things is also knowing when and how to use one’s voice in a meaningful way. We’ve said in our mission statement that we want to boldly engage the world’s greatest crises, and a significant portion of that is using our voice to speak truth to power. And I think to do that in a way that brings others along, not just shames a policymaker or a decision maker. And I think that there’s something in that where our personal frustration, we want it to boil over and call someone out. And hey, that’s absolutely called for, and I think there’s a biblical example for that in many cases, but I think there’s also a very specific space for how do we, in making our case, invite others to come with us? And what we’ve seen is that I think more of the church and the polling data that we’ve done and perspectives and research that we’ve done is more of the church is probably with the heart of compassion on these issues, and so how do we welcome people to participate in a meaningful and intentional way?
Mark Labberton:
Right. There’s an element of resistance, but there’s also that that is one side of a story that also has to include invitation, encouragement, collaboration, partnership, et cetera.
Myal Greene:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think if World Relief goes out there, and we can think of the most eloquent press release to put out there, and my colleagues in the PR team, we reflect on what’s going to be the quote that’s going to get noticed, or is this too harsh or is this too simple? But real movement, I think change happens when the church unites and uses its voice. And I think where it’s a challenging situation now, especially with all of the things immigration right now, we’ve done polling and research every year for the last few years with LifeWay research polling evangelicals on their thoughts and opinions related to immigration. And consistently, we have seen that the narrative portrayed in media and the narrative that many politicians try to leverage that evangelicals are the biggest opponents to immigration is false if you go by polling people individually issue by issue.
And so we talked about refugee resettlement, and over 70% of evangelicals believe the US has a moral responsibility to welcome refugees to this country. 68% of evangelicals voted for Trump agree with that statement as well. And evangelicals overwhelmingly, according to the statistics, support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants provided they pay restitution and maintain employment and support for DACA recipients and many, many other factors.
And I think what we’re seeing right now is there’s no one bringing attention to that. And the culture that we live in today is driven by pointing out that the strongest, loudest voices and not looking at what is a larger silent majority in the middle. And I think that that’s in some ways a crisis for the church to see how what we care about is misunderstood and oftentimes.
And I think one of the things that I’ve seen is in that same LifeWay research that I mentioned, one of the questions we ask of you is, “Where do you get your information about immigration?” And consistently, “The Bible and my pastor,” ranks very low on the list and below things like, “My friends, the news, politicians.” And so I think for me, and I’m not a pastor, you’ve been a pastor, I’m not a pastor, so it’s easier for me to say these things, but it would sit very uncomfortably to me if that statement was true on abortion or human sexuality or use of money. Any pastor would hope that their congregation is first and foremost getting their information about the Bible on these things. Why would we not, on what is one of the front page news issues of the day, hope and desire that our people are educated by what’s a biblical perspective?
And this is an issue that’s talked about time and time again in the scripture, and it’s one that’s undeniable in the commitment to the scriptures there. But I think pastors find themselves in this difficult place where they’re trying to figure out, “How do I talk about this issue without losing my job and splitting my congregation?” And I think that that’s just a tough reality for people to wrestle with.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. There’s really two things there that stand out to me. One is the dissonance between the way the press represents evangelical opinions about immigration, and the other is this question of whether the church’s voice has enough authority to be able to actually affect people’s real-time decisions about how they live in the world. And let’s start with the first one. Why do you think there is the distance, particularly around immigration, between the statistics you just quoted and the representation in the media? Why is that story not getting more attention?
Myal Greene:
Well, I think it’s in part because evangelicals, especially white evangelicals, have overwhelmingly supported President Trump, and I think that that’s there. And so then the assumption is then they must agree with him across the board on the issues. And I think what you see is that’s just not the case on the immigration issue. And there may be different motivations for why an overwhelming number of evangelicals have supported President Trump. And some of those I understand, some of those I don’t understand. But I think then they will assume that his centerpiece policies are deeply aligned there when perhaps it has more to do with issues with court appointments or issues of values-based issues and those things that are driving these views. And I think one thing that’s so crucial is how we can, as the church and as an organization that works with the church, think about can we broaden what it means for Christians to think about these issues?
As I mentioned earlier, I spent five years in the halls of Congress working for Republican members of Congress. And I don’t always talk about this in telling my story, but I remember a very transformational moment. I was in Rwanda and we had invited a Kenyan pastor to come to a pastor’s event and speak to the group. And this was a couple years after the terrible riots that had happened after the 2007 and 2008 presidential elections in Kenya. And that happened in December of 2007, the riots into January. He said a couple things in that. First was to be truly a follower of Christ, you can’t be completely for a politician or completely for a political party because then you put that ahead of your faith in Christ. You can still be a member of one, but you have to be able to have that freedom to disagree with the leader or the party.
And second, he used this analogy, and in Kenya, and I’m oversimplifying here, but the denominations were largely formed along tribal lines, and political candidates were connected to tribalism. And I’m oversimplifying here and apologize for that, but he used this example. He said, “A dog with a bone in his mouth can’t bark,” in references to the church leaders. And to say that everyone had their own piece of interest that they were waiting for, and in that they were unwilling speak out about the other things that were wrong.
And I think that that’s where we find ourselves as a church right now. We want certain victories through political means, and we’re willing to sacrifice our moral authority in order to get those. And I think that that’s a very dangerous place to be in as a church. And I think that means that a lot of people will misinterpret or misrepresent the intentions of the church and the focus of the church.
Mark Labberton:
Yes, yes. Those are very, very significant observations, and I think a good summary of what I see as well. I’m curious. I don’t know enough about the details of LifeWay’s polling to know if their polling pools are really the same polling pools that are used by media, but I’m also interested in whether the people who self-identify as evangelicals have in the LifeWay context a greater degree of engagement. Because certainly in the case of the 82% that voted for Trump, a lot of the studies that I’ve seen indicated that more than a plurality of people who identified as evangelicals had had little to no contact with church in even a number of years and were not actually actively publicly pursuing their faith, or so it would seem by that measure. It makes me wonder if LifeWay is simply closer into the church and polling people who are more truly active, which is then a different slice of the population than those who would simply roost, as it were, in a poll that might just say, “Do you consider yourself evangelical?” End of the story.
Myal Greene:
Yeah, I know LifeWay in that work they have. And their polling as I think general public and Christians, and they get to that. But they will distinguish in the data that we’ve published, and I can share the link if it’s helpful for you to share with the listeners afterwards, they distinguish both between evangelicals by self-described or those who meet their criteria, which is reverence for the scripture, respect of personal salvation. I think one or two other factors that they’ve identified that make someone distinctly evangelical even if they don’t use that terminology. And there is a slight skewing more towards those who fit the category of evangelical by adherence or what they say they believe versus those who just are by statement. There’s a slight more openness generally we see in the data on some of the immigration issues from that population, but it’s not significantly different.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah, that’s helpful to know. I do think that the observations that you made are really profound because they put their finger on all sorts of questions behind that about why has the church arrived at the place that it has been? This is not unique in history, of course. The church has often found itself in complicated times and with complicated positions and approaches to power and the changes of power. And the scriptures, you see plenty of evidence of the problem of leaders and leadership that rises and falls in part based on the loyalty of the people, which may have little or nothing to do with the revelation of God through the Hebrew scriptures or in the New Testament. This is hardly a surprising circumstance, but in another way, it’s a painfully disorienting one when you’re wanting to believe that a time like this could actually evoke the church showing the best of itself in this sort of a time. And I think what you’re saying about the statistics is that underlying some of the counterpoint where it feels like the church has vacated perhaps elements of its Christian identity, there is this very strong support for the actual affirmation of biblical values that really do centre on the kinds of examples that you’ve illustrated.
Myal Greene:
Yeah, I would agree. I think maybe the one counterpoint to that is on an issue by issue basis, there may be agreement, but the level of intensity and prioritization of this issue versus something else is not as high. Whether that’s views on human sexuality or the cost of eggs in the aisle, those things may be more important than the immigration issues even though they might agree on principle. And I think that, again, is also a lesson for holistic view of what it means to be a Christ follower and a holistic view of what it means to be dedicated to one’s neighbors.
Mark Labberton:
Yes. A moment ago I said that your comments had elicited to me two threads why is the media representing such different statistics about evangelical attitudes toward immigration? But the other one is the question of what it is that is meant to create the, quote, “best” version of the authority of the Christian faith in the world and the role that scripture and Christian community play in that and/or don’t play in that based on people’s own experiences or choices. Do you want to make any comment about the authority of the church and how is exercising or failing to exercise its voice right now?
Myal Greene:
Well, I think it’s hard to generalize the totality of the church in that.
Mark Labberton:
Indeed. Yeah.
Myal Greene:
And I think that there’s some great examples of individual church leaders who are using their voice very well. I think at the end of the day, it comes back to understanding who the global church is and seeing our own individualized church experience in context of the broader expression of the global body of Christ. And I’ve thought a lot about 1 Corinthians 12 and the body of Christ and what that means in this season. And World Relief, we just, along with the US of Catholic Bishops and our parent organization, The National Association of Evangelicals, recently released a report that highlights the fact that one in 12 Christians in America will either be deported or live with someone who is subject to deportation in this season if the Trump administration plans go forward. That’s one in 18 evangelicals, one in five, Catholics fall into that category as well. And so what does it mean to conceive that the whole body of Christ is being deeply affected by this or to recognise that religious persecution is one of the driving factors in the displacement crisis today?
And another report that World Relief has done with Open Doors is the Golden Door report. And we do this annually and look at comparing data from the countries that Open Doors has identified are the 50 countries for greatest persecution, and then the religion and country of origin of individuals coming to this country and found that 1/3rd of refugees who came last year to the United States were Christians from countries on the Open Doors’ top 50 list of most persecuted countries in the world.
And so are we thinking of the whole body of Christ in this season? Or are we just looking in terms of our own local space? And I think if you look at the epistles of Paul, this was the key discipleship issue that was just again and again being hammered from place to place. And it’s hard to go through his letters without finding that reference somewhere. And I think that Christ was as well trying to teach us to understand how to live with one another. And if we’re failing by a very narrow definition of who our neighbor is in terms of who we’ll help and who we’ll support as opposed to being challenged by an expansive view of that, then I think we’re always going to get it wrong. And if I think we’re looking more expansively about who is our neighbor and who is part of the body of Christ and what does it mean to love people in the church and love people outside the church and to do so uncompromisingly, then I think we’re more likely to get things right than wrong.
And I think that that’s the challenge that we’re in today is that I think too many are trying to narrow that scope and that perspective. And it means that we are in monocultural churches and we are limited in our scope and perspective to our community. And then there’s a hesitancy to speak about other people in that season. And so I think that that more than a failure of the church just to speak up is at the heart of some of these issues.
Mark Labberton:
Amen. Yeah, I totally agree. One of the things that is clear, I think, in the New Testament is that the church is meant to be the collection of people who demonstrate and act and body the credibility of the gospel. And when the church does that, it’s an extraordinary witness and has a beauty and power and influence that’s never able to be controlled by governments or change of policies.
And I just want to say in closing how grateful I am to you personally for being a person who brings credibility to the gospel by who you are and how you speak, but also leads an organization that exists for the sake of simply showing the credibility of the gospel in places with people who are often unseen, unrecognized, and under loved. And I just am so grateful for your witness and so thankful for World Relief. And I want to thank you again for your conversation here today. You have always brought both data to the table, but even more wisdom to the table. And it’s a beautiful gift, and I’m very grateful for your leadership. Thank you for being a guest today.
Myal Greene:
Well, thank you, Mark. It was a pleasure to converse and catch up today.
