Relieving Need – Love Made Visible
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is enormous. To fly from one side to the other is a journey of around 2,000 kilometres (1,400 miles). Much of it is forest. Its historic main highway is the river. Transport other than by river or air is very difficult indeed.
Its history over the last 150 years is terrible. It was for decades the personal property of the King of Belgium, whose colonial rule was appalling even by contemporary standards and a source of scandal before the First World War. Joseph Conrad wrote a book about a river trip called Heart of Darkness (turned into a film set in Vietnam and Cambodia by Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now). The DRC was then a Belgian colony, again badly run until it was given unprepared independence in 1960.
Civil war and strife combined with corrupt and tyrannical government have been two of many plagues in the DRC much of the time ever since. Since the mid-1990s more than four million people have died directly and indirectly from war. In the east there have been severe outbreaks of Ebola, measles is rife, as are most tropical diseases. More than 130 militia groups operate under warlords.
Goma is a city on the Rwandan border, set amid remarkable beauty, like much of the country. Lake Bukavu is on one side. Mount Nyiragongo, a very active volcano, on another. The city is often shaken by earthquakes or threatened and damaged by huge flows of lava. The lake contains vast quantities of methane in solution, which might escape, covering the city. In surrounding forests there is a national park with gorillas.
My friend Désiré Mukanirwa was an Anglican parish priest when I first met him in 2005, at a conference in Geneva. He was training in international development. In 2009 I visited him in Goma, in his parish. The city was under siege and many of the NGOs had been forced to go home. We spent time training people in reconciliation at a local level. He took me to a refugee camp, one of a number with a total of about a quarter of a million people in the region. Appalled, I asked him, ‘But what can you do?’ ‘We do what God enables us to’ was his calm reply. His church building, damaged in an earthquake and nearly destroyed by a lava flow, was rickety but full of people. His home was full of women, most of whom had been raped in the conflicts, expelled from their communities and now receiving medical help, pastoral care and food from Désiré, and his wife Claudeline, who taught them a trade in clothes making.
I kept going back, introducing him at the UN, also to a UK government minister leading on international aid. His goodness, cheerfulness and faith caught everyone’s imagination. About four years ago he became the first Anglican bishop of Goma. Unchanged by all this, he worked everywhere, travelling into conflict zones where militias threatened to kill him. He organized football competitions, bringing together teams of young men from opposing groups, vulnerable to being recruited as soldiers for the militias. In the morning they played football, then they were fed, and in the afternoon he taught them peacebuilding. The girls were taught and trained by Claudeline.
I last saw him in October 2019, when I spent time at some Ebola centres, in towns in the midst of the conflict, with other remarkable bishops and faith leaders. At the same time another English bishop, Michael Beasley, a skilled epidemiologist, taught a three-day course in Goma to local church leaders, ‘Faith in a Time of Ebola’, translated into Swahili and French. In the summer of 2020, Désiré died of COVID, after yet another trip into the forests. His funeral was attended by many; he was mourned by most of Goma.
I have told his story and its context at some length because it is a shining example of the holistic nature of peacebuilding, and of reconciliation. Désiré was remarkable, but not exceptional, among effective peacebuilders. His reconciliation work was aimed at relieving needs, all needs, in partnership with numerous NGOs – some, like Tearfund, faith based.
Relieving need is the third R of the six. It is what makes relationships solid. For most of us friendship means something tangible. We talk with friends, enjoy their company, share thoughts and opinions, play sports. But we also turn to them when we find ourselves in trouble. We visit them in hospital, offer them hospitality when they in turn face trouble, even go and see them in prison. The love expressed in true friendship is holistic; it relieves need.
In almost every society on earth, weddings are great occasions for friends and family. The way people get married varies, but it is a rare society where there is not a party of some kind. In many parts of the world the food is special, and very often there is wine or something equivalent. Certainly in the ancient Middle East, weddings were major community affairs. In John’s Gospel, chapter 2, Jesus attends a wedding in Galilee, along with his disciples. The wine runs out, his mother prompts him, and Jesus turns the water set aside for rites of purification into wine. Only those serving the wine – Jesus, his mother and the disciples – know about the miracle.
Jesus prevents the public shaming that would go with inadequate supplies of wine. The village would remember such a failure for years. The wine is very good quality. The sign is revealing Jesus as the one who brings radical difference, transforming the water of the Old Testament law into the wine of the Spirit. There is much that can be said, but one obvious point is that there is a huge amount of wine. On a rough calculation it is not far short of two thousand standard bottles. John is not just having fun in telling this, nor is he simply making the point that Jesus was a great guest who really would be welcome at a ‘bring a bottle’ party. The central points are overwhelming abundance and decisive change.
God’s love is expressed in super-abundance. Everything God does is more than just the barely essential. The creation itself is almost literally infinitely wonderful, complicated and beautiful. The love that is the offer of God covers every part of our needs, including the ‘luxury’ of abundant pleasure in one another and in the great events of life. The purpose of the work of Jesus, in his own words in John 10.10, is that human beings may have life in all its abundance.
That abundance is made available through God choosing to work with human beings as partners in prayer and in the actions of demonstrating the love of God. That is the most essential partnership. It is to work with God, to cooperate with God’s love in order to be God’s hands and eyes, and ears and feet and heart. That is the pattern of Jesus, who says that he only does what he sees the Father doing (John 5.19). Without that partnership with God the church is an NGO with some old buildings. With that partnership it is the channel of God’s love.
We know that God is love because God acts in practically loving ways. God’s action with and for human beings is normally, although not invariably, through the agency of human beings. The Church is called to be God’s image in its partnership with God, love for one another, in learning to forgive and to be a global community of immense diversity united in faith by Christ and living out abundant life in the power of the Holy Spirit of the Creator God.
God’s abundance and partnership reaches far beyond the Church. We see love expressed and blessing for human beings through all sorts of agencies, who act in God’s ways without being aware of it. The sharing of support through official aid, the innumerable charities in every field of life that work around the world in the places of greatest need, the free gifts given at times of crisis: all these are part of abundant life. Abundant life is declared in John 10.10 by Jesus as the reason for his coming into the world, The finding of abundance is at the heart of God’s purpose in reconciling humans to God and, by extension, to one another. It is not enough merely to stop fighting and quarrelling. Abundant life is seen as a vast diversity of character and nature and custom, a diversity that is negotiated in our world through the expression of love and a constant sense of curiosity about others, compassion for them in need, and attention to every need they have.
As has already been seen, Jesus breaks boundaries. In his time the barriers between Jew and non-Jew (the Gentiles) were immense. On one occasion recounted in Mark’s Gospel, chapter 7, he was away in a Gentile area, probably to get some time in peace with his disciples. A Syrophoenician woman comes to see him, begging him to help her daughter who is possessed by a demon. Jesus refuses, saying that the ‘bread’ – of his ministry – is for the family (the Jews), not for the dogs (the Gentiles). She responds with a spirited and deeply biblical riposte, saying that dogs eat what falls from the table, that God’s loving mercy is for all the world. In the Old Testament the Gentiles received abundant blessing out of God’s abundance towards the people of Israel. Jesus sees the woman’s faith and her recognition of him and heals her daughter. He has broken the boundary, acting not on the basis of merit but in an abundant overflowing of God’s love expressed in action.
Love Means Love-in-action
Throughout the Christian Bible, and in Jewish understanding of what Christians call the Old Testament, God’s love means the knowledge of love through God’s action. There is no such thing as passive love, because love expresses itself in action. A friend of mine has worked in hospital chaplaincy in the Midlands for many years. Recently the NHS has agreed to develop the outreach work he has led into a new area of work called ‘Compassionate Community Development Across Coventry & Warwickshire’. It’s one of those excellent titles that says what it does (as opposed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, he might reply). Compassionate means suffering with and bringing support for people, alongside them, rather than doing things to them. The department recognizes that healthcare includes spiritual care but that the whole human being must be reached. It is an expression of the love of God, from within the NHS, and with the far-reaching aim of bringing abundant life. It is ‘love-in-action’.
God’s love means action. God is not seen in the Bible as sitting on a remote cloud feeling loving and generally benevolent. The Bible tells of God’s love and faithfulness through the experience of people who encounter God directly and indirectly, from Moses as an exiled Israelite and Egyptian leader, meeting God in dramatic miracles, to Esther, caught up in political machinations and finding courage and faith amid God’s absence, to Ruth the refugee and throughout the New Testament, especially and supremely in Jesus. Yet even Jesus lived 90 per cent of his life in normal obscurity, with a trade. God’s love is not found only in great miracles, but in a day-to-day living presence expressed through the Church and through actions of people in the world. We know God loves us because we experience care and compassion in the world.
Love to the Limit of Capacity
Again though, we have to ask about limits. Bishop Désiré in Goma was at peace with himself and with God because he did what he could, what God enabled him to do, and trusted God for the rest. At its peak the number of refugees in the area he covered went over one million. Yet he still cared and served as much as he could.
Love given and received is an expression of our sharing in the needs of others. In this chapter and before, there has been much talk of partnership, with God and with others. Part of the third R of relieving is that it calls us to reconciliation in the form of partnership with others who are seeking to relieve need, and to humility in seeking for each partner to do what they do best.
The absence of such partnership has been a serious problem in many disaster relief operations, although there have been significant improvements in recent decades. A major influence in the work of the armed forces of the UK has been a brilliant book by General Sir Rupert Smith, published in 2006, The Utility of Force. Smith starts with the challenge that force continually fails to bring peace or reconciliation in areas of conflict. His argument leads him to the conclusion that peacebuilding, of which he had much experience as a commander of NATO forces in the Balkans, requires extensive partnerships and a team approach, drawing in civil society groups and NGOs. It is a process of partnership.
The obstacles that are usually encountered are in the unwillingness of many institutions to work in partnerships unless they are top of the pack. Peacebuilding requires attitudes of humble collaboration in which every partner seeks to contribute what they can.
The eastern part of the DRC has been a good example, especially during the Ebola crisis, where many of the lessons of the earlier outbreak in West Africa were shared and acted on. In the Ebola treatment centres various NGOs and local health officials worked well under the leadership of the Congolese government and the result was that despite the immense insecurity of the area the outbreak was brought under control.
However, the same collaboration was not seen on the battlefield, where there were poor relationships between regular army and UN forces, and the integration of local groups on wider health and security problems was not pursued. The result is that the disorder and often severe violence has continued.
The same lessons apply closer to home, in normal circumstances of community difficulties. One issue I worked on for a short while in a very diverse UK city involved rising violence between two gangs within the same, recently arrived ethnic group. Working with a – much more knowledgeable – local community leader we interviewed a significant number of people seeking to build up a picture of the problem and to map the conflict. The next stage was for local leaders to form relationships at street level with those from that ethnic group. However, the gangs were also involved in predictable sorts of crime, such as protection, exploitation of sex workers through people trafficking, and low-level but disturbing violence. One part of the response required police action in order to remove the key offenders from the scene. They would otherwise be spoilers and were shadow influences on the more local difficulties. There were also needs for education and job-finding skills, learning English as a second language and work with families. It can easily be seen that such a fairly basic problem would require expertise from those who worked with refugees and asylum seekers, including on legal matters of settlement, schools, education support for adults, jobcentres, debt planning, as well as police and local faith-based groups who could increase the sense of security in a deeply unfamiliar environment for those involved.
Finally, partnership with skilled community mediators was essential in order to create a capacity for working together and giving people the tools to take control of their own destinies through access to other agencies.
Writing it this way makes it all sound very obvious. However, these ingredients were mixed in with funding uncertainty, people who were very busy, varying priorities, and individuals moving from one place to another for work reasons. Continuity of relationship, sharing of knowledge and lack of resource were barriers to effective action. Bringing together such a varied group, who all had their own problems elsewhere, can be close to impossible. For that to happen community leadership is essential from within, and thus the cement that will be necessary to hold the bricks together is likely to be found with those in the community, locally, not from outside.
The need for partnership means that every agency and person does only what they can, but the combination is effective. Yet the difficulty of pulling together disparate teams leads to spending all the time in meetings about how to work together and combine better, rather than on the ground working together and combining well. That can often cause busy people to give up and either work less effectively on their own or simply not participate. It is an opportunity for perfection to be the worst enemy of action. The motto must always be, ‘Do what you can, not what you can’t.’ What you can do may leave huge and glaring gaps, but it is better to try something than to do nothing.
Love is Simple to Express, Complicated to Arrange
As has been seen in Chapter 4 on researching, we must accept and embrace the complexity of the problems discovered. At the same time, it is essential to keep the answers focused and as simple as they can be. Partnerships exponentially increase the number of relationships required to be maintained. Not only does the complexity of a conflict increase with more parties involved, but so does the complexity of the response. When the complexity of the response begins to be as great as that of the conflict, the result will be a sharp reduction on what we can do, and a very large increase in what we cannot do.
The essence of simple structures is trust. Mistrust leads to complicating oversight dramatically. Meetings end up much larger because every partner needs to be at everything. Often to show that they are needed every partner will feel a need to give a report. One arrives quickly at that point in a meeting where everything has been said, but not everything has been said by everyone.
Trust without accountability is gambling. There is always a need for a route by which people can express concerns about standards or behaviour, especially where large numbers of volunteers are involved. For facilitators who are at best consciously ignorant, the fear will be that the process of reconciliation is being used to bring advantage. Some of that will be inevitable, and missing it happening is part of the ‘only doing what you can’ principle. At the same time, keeping the initial two plates, ‘Researching’ and ‘Relating’, spinning securely will not only reduce the level of ignorance but also provide good bases for feedback about one’s own failures and about manipulation.
Identifying the Needs
It might seem that this particular ‘R’ does not always apply. However, it always matters. It may be better camouflaged in places of high resources but the need will still be great. It is just that its shape changes.
At one point I worked with a church in the middle of a university area.1 The minister (church leader) had been in post for about four years, was very different from his predecessor, and had changed a number of things at the church, including the form of the morning service. Relationships had deteriorated within the church, to the point where it seemed about to split and damage its ministry severely in the process.
Two of us worked together meeting lay and ordained members of the church individually, researching, and spending time getting to know people a little (relating). My instinct was that in this wealthy and very highly educated community of faith, with a strong tradition of large congregations, we could mentally skip the third ‘R’. What could a place like that need in terms of physical support?
Thankfully, my colleague was more sensible than I was. Several issues began to surface as we got to know people better. Being curious and being present, listening hard and attentively, began to bring out some common themes.
One was isolation and loneliness. The church abounded with activity, but it was all about doing things. There was little opportunity for its members to form close friendships that would weather the normal storms of life and strengthen them in hard moments. Many families had moved into the area for work and for the very good schools, and found themselves financially very stretched, with consequent strains on their marriages and households. Drugs were easily obtainable and the church youth group for teenagers did not seem to the families to address the issue.
The presenting issue was that the minister had changed the services to make them more student-friendly, seeing the call of that church as being towards the university. He spent a great deal of time on this sort of work. As a result, as one person put it, ‘those of us who have been around for a long time feel that we are only valued for what we give’.
Listening to the other group (for the sake of keeping it short I am somewhat simplifying) the story was very different. The minister had felt bullied from the day he arrived, with both he and his family not being welcomed into people’s homes, something they were used to at their previous post, where they had been for a long time. It seemed obvious to the generally younger part of the church that the students needed to hear the good news of Jesus Christ, and that the people in the church already were prone to be an obstacle to what they felt was God’s call. The list went on and on, and the regional head of that denomination was at her wit’s end, worrying about the health of the minister and the future of one of the flagship churches.
Even in such a well-resourced church there were needs for help, physical demonstrations of love. One example was to bring in experts in debt counselling. Another was to encourage home groups to have time to eat together and pray for each other, as well as reading the Bible.
On the other side there was a need for welcome to be symbolized, done in this case through a visiting programme and bring-and-share suppers in groups of twenty, with a town-hall-style question-and-answer session with members of the Eldership group and the minister.
The minister was given access to coaching and further training on leadership, and there was a service of repentance and recommitment, based on the beautiful Methodist Covenant service.
Resources used were thus psychological, time, hospitality, counselling in areas of pressure, and an open acknowledgement of where things had gone wrong.
Everyone has needs, even if they are intangible. Peacebuilding demonstrates love in paying attention to needs. The facilitator may not be able to do everything – in the church example, neither I nor my colleague were anywhere near doing so. But we did what we could, and sought to liberate the resources of the church to make their own reconciliation work.
Summary
• The nature of God’s provision is abundance, with generosity to a lavish extent. In the ministry of Jesus, especially in the ‘signs’2 in John’s Gospel, abundance often plays a role, particularly in the miracle of the water into wine and the feeding miracles. The abundance is gracious; it is not earned but is a gift of love. Imitating Christ, consciously or not, points us towards relieving need with abundant generosity.
• The actions of meeting need by Jesus are usually in dialogue with the person concerned or with those who can speak for the person concerned, for example Mary and Martha in John 11 when Lazarus is raised from the dead. In this way people are given respect; not treated as objects on which to demonstrate magic tricks but rather as people of value.
• Love is demonstrated by action. For those caught up in the insecurities of conflict, at any level, proof of love matters and is found through action.
• Relief is not to be guilt inducing. We do what we can, not what we can’t. That will, however, be sacrificial and costly.
• Meeting needs with relief will drive us to partnership, and that is always a test of character and values. Are we willing to wash feet, to be obscure and in the background, and see someone else get the credit if that means real progress can be made?
• The central partnership is with God, sometimes unconsciously.
• However complicated the conflict, seek to build trust in the partnership supporting and facilitating and thus to keep that group simple, but enable accountability. Very often the first reconciliation will be among the facilitators and other partners.
• Everyone has needs that will need relieving. In all situations, always. If we can’t see them it’s because we are not paying attention enough, not researching and relating properly (I speak from foolish experience) – not because they don’t exist.
Points to Ponder
• Look closely at one or more of Jesus’ miracles, for example the Marriage Feast at Cana in John 2, or the healing of Bartimaeus in Mark 10.46ff. There will be surprises but see how agency and dignity are maintained and abundance and generosity is demonstrated.
• Try and think honestly and write down how you feel about working hard and sacrificially and not getting the credit. In a situation you know, would you be attracted to help in peacebuilding on those terms?
• Thinking of a dispute/conflict with which you are familiar, in a club, church, at work, in the community or more widely, what are the needs on every side that require relieving to enable people to be freer, to have more of life in all its fullness?
• Regarding the same issue you just thought of, what can you do, and what can’t you do? If you are someone who prays, write it down and make a promise to God to do what you can and not feel guilty about the rest?
• If you worked with someone else, could you do more? Who might they be?
Case Study (continued)
Go back to the case study at the end of the previous chapter. Looking at the situation, what are the needs that require relieving that you, as the facilitator, can identify? What kind of groups need to be involved? Who is likely to want to lead? Who do you need to get onside first?