Celebrating 50 years of Koinonia
Feature
David Batstone 6-01-1992
The chief of El Salvador's national police stares intently across the table. Though the mere mention of the colonel's name strikes fear into the heart of many a Salvadoran activist, at this particular moment he is looking rather perplexed and unsure of himself. For seated on the other side of the table is Athol Gill, who, having just introduced himself as a Bible professor from Australia, continues to explain that he has traveled from the other side of the globe to find out why the national police have tortured and imprisoned a local Baptist pastor.
The colonel's confidence waxes while announcing that the pastor is a communist, then wanes again as the calm Aussie asks if serving the poor is always a crime in El Salvador. By the end of the hour, the colonel is signing a declaration that the Salvadoran Baptist community will be permitted to continue its ministry with the poor without fear of reprisal.
As incredible as it may seem in view of the final result, only two hours before Athol and I had sat in a hotel room in San Salvador with virtually no idea what we might say to the colonel. We had hopped on a plane and headed directly for El Salvador within days of hearing of the arrest and brutal treatment of the pastor. Yet that was the easy part. Now we were faced with the daunting task of how, with mere wit and moral suasion at our disposal, to battle forces that were armed with arrogance and impunity.
We could only come up with one strategy: Athol would negotiate with the colonel while I would take my time translating messages between them, thus buying Athol precious time to think on his feet. As we then looked at each other nervously, he remarked with a wily smile, "We will make the road as we walk it."
4-01-1992
Sidebar to "God's Transforming Initiative"
Yvonne V. Delk, Kathy Osberger 10-01-1991
We are a people on a journey—a journey from centuries of conquest, genocide, and slavery to conversion, repentance, and new history; a journey from exploitation and oppression to a time of turning, healing, reparation, and redirection. When a people are on a journey, there are two inseparable questions: Who am I? Where am I going? Identity and direction.
I struggle with answers that flow out of my distant past when African-American people experienced the whips and the chains, slave ships and auction blocks, plantations, the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, separate but equal, bus boycotts, picket lines, and now the racism of the '90s, which continues to manifest itself East, West, North, and South while our president attacks the "politically correct" movement, states in clear terms his view that the government does not have the responsibility to provide for the human welfare of the people, and vetoes the civil rights bill.
The 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America has become the occasion to ask the question of identity and direction for all of us who have been touched and shaped by the world-changing realities that it set into motion. The world has not been the same since. The impact of Christopher Columbus' arrival on each of our histories in the particular and in the collective created a new world order defined by genocide, conquest, and slavery.
For some of us, this is a kairos moment—a moment of truth, a moment of turning, a moment of redirection and new commitments, a moment to forge covenants that will lead us from the despair of our past and present to the promise and hope of our future.
AS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN, I experience with a great deal of pain the history that was set into motion when Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492. Six years later Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. As the indigenous people in the Americas were exterminated, the invaders found themselves forced to locate an alternative labor force to continue the exploitation of the vast resources. They turned to Africa as a supply base of labor.
It was in 1518 that a Spanish ship carried the first cargo of our people from the Guinea Coast to the Americas. This opened a slave trade that was to endure for three-and-a-half centuries. The human cost is staggering. Some statistics put the total number of Africans who lost their lives during the middle passage (or before by resisting capture) at 200 million. The number of our people who reached the Americas as slaves was in the tens of millions.
Madonna Kolbenschlag, Mary Judith Ress 5-01-1991
Breaking through myths of power and spirituality: An interview with Madonna Kolbenschlag
