Fire and Faithfulness

The first church in our presbytery that I visited last November with Kes Tariku was Strasburg.  They had suffered from a disastrous fire on July 2, 2011 that reduced their education building to basically just a shell, and left their sanctuary unusable.  They continue to be grateful to God that they were meeting outside when the fire happened and that no one was trapped inside the destroyed building.

Tariku has had experience with fires in churches.  Beginning on March 2, 2011 international news reported systematic attacks against Christian homes and churches in the Jimma zone of Ethiopia, which is part of the territory of Illubabor Bethel Synod (IBS).  First Church Harrisonburg has a church-to-church partnership with the Jimma church, so we felt that friends of our presbytery were being directly effected by these events.  When it was all over, 13 churches in our partner synod had been destroyed by fire, as well as the homes of 39 IBS families.  (An additional 53 churches of other Christian denominations were also destroyed, as well as other private Christian homes.)

Immediately, as our partners made us aware of what had happened, they asked for our prayers, not only for the victims, but also for their enemies, for those who had inflicted the damage.  This was a powerful Christ-like witness:  to pray even in the midst of their own loss "for those who have done this violence."

Under Tariku's leadership the cause of the fires were thoroughly investigated and the detailed reports indicate that it was an extremist group with its own radical agenda that had incited the local Muslims to violence two days after a Christian allegedly desecrated pages from the Koran.  Because they refrained from blaming their Muslim neighbors and instead prayed for their enemies, thereby refusing to escalate the conflict, many of the Muslims who had participated in the violence against the Christians, repented of what they had done, expressed remorse and then joined in side by side with Christians to begin rebuilding the homes and churches they had destroyed.  To me this seems like a great victory for the Gospel, and a great frustration for those who were trying to turn Muslim and Christian neighbors against each other.

So Strasburg was not the first charred remains of a church that Tariku had walked through.  It was all too familiar.  He listened intently as Pastor David Howard described what had happened and the overwhelming sense of loss that people at Strasburg were feeling.  The grief of such a loss can be immobilizing and the way into the future as clouded as the dark smoke that had filled the sanctuary.

There is a predictable epic struggle that follows such a catastrophe and presents a crisis all its own.  Should we put everything back the way it was?  Should we start from scratch and envision new possibilities for mission and ministry?  Should we seek a path somewhere in between those two options?  Yet even in the midst of Strasburg's own struggles, David Howard was interested in what was happening in the churches in our partner synod and the conversation moved freely back and forth across the ocean to mission and ministry opportunities that might be opening up.  

At one point in the conversation David asked Tariku, "What would be the best thing we could do as your partners?"  Tariku thought for a moment and then said, "More church-to-church partnerships."  As our time for this visit was running out, we could not explore that idea very much, but we closed our time together in prayer for Strasburg, and for sister churches in Jimma, and for the witness of faithful Christians, whose congregational and personal history has been marked by a time of being tried by fire.