Winter 2024 - Issue 2
Seeking Shalom
SHALOM, CHURCH!
Each issue of the Et Cetera has a theme to help prompt conversation. This issue’s theme is Seeking Shalom, and we’re trying to make space for those hard conversations that sometimes need to happen in the midst of a broken world. Please let us know what you think, or better yet, start talking with friends about some of the things you see that need Jesus’ healing touch.
If you’re wondering what kind of content we accept: Most kinds of prose (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, or visual art is welcome. Prose pieces should be 1,000 words or less. These can include anecdotes, book reviews, movie reviews, thoughts spurred by your academic studies (no actual assignments, please), things you’d like to talk about with the community...et cetera! Visual art must be submitted in a digital format; printing will be in black and white, so do keep that in mind. Priority is given to students, staff, and faculty of Regent College.
All submissions must be sent to etcetera@regent-college.edu. Publication is not guaranteed. All submissions are subject to proofreading edits and may be returned for more substantial revision. Views expressed in the Et Cetera do not necessarily represent the views of Regent College, the RCSA Council, or the Et Cetera staff.
We can’t wait to read what you write!
Steven Gomez, senior editor
Tess Fuller, associate editor
Reconciliation
by Sandra Park
The first time I ever considered studying theology was back in 2014. Existential questions about life, death and faith had been occupying my mind more than usual, probably due to the sudden death of a church friend who was only 23 at that time. However, in spite of the numerous unresolved questions that seemed to follow me almost everywhere, I decided to start up my own business in a different country.
It wasn’t until 2019 that the idea of studying theology returned to my arms like a long lost child. I was visiting a friend in Vancouver and as we talked about church and life, he decided to take me to Regent instead of being my Vancouver tour guide for the day. He threw at me the idea of studying at Regent in a low commitment mode, which was rather appealing as I was still working full time for the family business. But what really got me thinking more about studying theology was something that my friend said about seeing me ‘flourish’. Although I later learned that this is a very common term used at Regent and in the Western Christian world, it was the first time I had ever heard it in terms of human flourishing.
Fast forward to last weekend, when I attended a conference in Renton, Washington, on the topic of faith and race. Among the many reasons I could give for wanting to go, the main and most important one was because it was going to be about the ministry of reconciliation. Having grown up and lived for most of my life in a very racist country, I carry with me a heavy baggage of racial trauma, heavier than what I had reckoned until I came to Regent. The last 2 years have been an ongoing battle against cultural insensitivity, frequent triggers and a dominant culture that didn’t seem to be that interested in my flourishing. Yet against all my human impulses to give up and leave this place, God kept reminding me that this is where I’m supposed to be right now, and kept calling me to be understanding and forgiving, even in the face of ignorance and unawareness. And as many of you might imagine, this is way easier said than done. So in my attempts to learn how to do this in a practical and real way, I headed down to Renton at 5:20ish (am!) last Saturday.
Organized by a local church, the conference not only named the painful truths of systemic racism but also repented and lamented to God through prayer and offered a challenging call to be compassionate and work towards reconciliation. I experienced firsthand a godly solidarity that seemed to be contributing to the multilayered healing process I’ve been navigating for the past couple of years. And healing doesn’t usually come perfectly packaged. It tends to look messy and it demands endurance and growth in times of pain. It asks you to confront the truth both out there and within you, even when you’ve been wronged. So yes, the speakers at the conference encouraged and challenged us to pursue Christlike compassion despite the hopeless circumstances we might find ourselves in. I could copy-paste a list of inspiring quotes that I heard that day, but that’s not why I’m writing this piece. By the end of the conference, I heard something that provided more clarity on God’s work in my life: “Reconciliation and justice is a movement towards flourishing, towards shalom.”
If we understand that the Biblical story is about the ‘restoration’ of all the things that were broken by sin, I wonder if reframing it as ‘reconciliation’ instead would help us see the relational aspect of this cosmic restoration: reconciliation with God, with each other, with creation and with oneself. And if reconciliation is a movement towards flourishing, towards shalom, I can see more clearly his call for me to stay here to embrace his restoration in my life and in the lives of those around me as I try to live as a ‘tangible display’ of the power of the gospel. Pursuing reconciliation is not just about me flourishing in this world, it’s about pursuing, experiencing and extending God’s shalom for his glory and Kingdom. And this is a call that I can’t escape from. How can I? It’s too real and compelling for me to simply pretend I didn’t hear it. May we all, whatever the circumstances we’re found in, hear the call to reconcile with God, with others, with creation and with ourselves through Christ. ♰
Fatherhood
Anonymous
It’s my first year at Regent. I’m an older online student, grateful for the safety of attendance-at-a-distance.
One of my biggest fears about beginning at Regent had been that, walking through the halls, someone, sometime, would stop me and say my first name; ask me about my maiden name; react with joyful recognition. I would have to say, Yes, I am So-and-so’s daughter. Oh, but they were wonderful! So intelligent, such an asset to the organization.
I won’t be meeting anyone in a hallway yet. My husband’s surname, automatically appearing under my onscreen face, feels like a protecting veil.
It probably isn’t, only because—let’s be realistic—I’m sure practically no one even remembers So-and-so, these many years after Regent’s founding.
In Soul of Ministry, I note dispassionately that my heart rate is going up during the lecture on “dying well.” Cartoonish depictions of needles spurting evil-looking green liquid pepper the slides about the MAiD procedure which we must do everything we can to stop our fellow Christians from choosing.
I almost say with annoyance, “But it’s not green, it’s white: and it looks thick, as though the nurse had to make an extra effort to push it out of the syringe into So-and-so’s vein.”
I note that I am no longer taking notes. Just remembering a hand in my hand turning slowly purple. And cold. Remembering running to a tree outside afterward, rubbing my hand on the soft, green, living moss on its bark, breathing much too quickly, painfully.
What it took to hold that hand was a leap of imagination. Who will hold my sinful hands when I lie dying?
Don’t call it forgiveness. It is many degrees removed: I want to want to want to want to … . . . . . . . . …. to forgive.
Twenty years before Regent: I’m attending the last church before officially giving up for several years. It’s a lovely church, and a warm and welcoming family take me under their wing. I’m young, and just starting to face certain truths about myself. The father, who has become a mentor-friend to me, is twice my age. I confide, cautiously, only half the truth I am beginning to face. I say what has happened to me. I leave So-and-so’s name out of it.
On the one hand, the satisfaction of seeing someone incensed on my behalf. Okay, this wasn’t normal, then. On the other hand, now I am tainted. Perhaps this father has completely forgotten what I told him, the day I hear him say to his sons, “Make sure you don’t end up with someone who has been molested. It’ll put a damper on your sex life.”
Would love not dare…? I wonder, shivering with shame.
And boundaries have been relaxed now. The father feels free to make brazen comments to me, when no one else is around.
(Now that I am the same age he was at the time, and know in my bones this is no way to talk to a younger sibling in Christ, I cannot understand how he justified it to himself. I don’t think he knew what he was doing to my very body by talking about it; I think he only thought as far as, “It’s funny to see her make that face.”)
Fifteen years before Regent, a miracle! I’m going to a tiny mission church regularly. The priest hears my confession for the first time, but before I begin, he sets out some ground rules. “You should know this from the outset. If you ever, ever feel that your confessor has asked a question that is none of their business, or you’re just not ready to answer it, follow your conscience. You don’t owe a confessor anything and you are free to leave if you ever feel unsafe. All right?” I nod, and tiptoe into the shallows.
One night my priest is driving me and some others home from an outing to Bard on the Beach. It has been a wonderful night. Yet, something about the play causes me to burst when it is just Father with me in the car. My apartment is the last stop before Father goes home. We park in front of it and talk, and cry. Father prays for me: “God, if it is salvific for her, bring her a good man.” He gets out of the car, opens my door for me, takes off his coat and puts it around my shoulders, walks me to the front door.
I feel…fathered!
I’ve been at Regent a while now. No one has ever stopped me in a hallway to ask if I am So-and-so’s daughter.
I give my husband final drafts of school papers to look over. “Does this make sense? I’ve been staring at this too long.”
Sometimes after chatting about our work, we fall asleep holding hands like friendly, floating otters.
When I watch my husband get ready to take my teenage niece home after having her over for dinner, I have not even the slightest concern. I know he will respect and honour her. I remember his angry tears when I told him what I had told Father.
Here I am, saved, unashamed. Mindful still of repercussions should my story be widely known; but no longer sick with secrecy. Making friends (new friends! At this age!). Sharing food. Laughing till it hurts. ♰
An Interview with Dr. Vince Bantu
by Sean Beckett
Dr. Vince Bantu’s dedication to a life of scholarship grew out of a passion for evangelism. Growing up biracial in St. Louis, he discovered one of the main barriers to the Gospel was the legacy of church oppression and perception of Christianity as a “white man’s religion.” Bantu’s ensuing journey across thousands of years of church history resulted in him learning almost a dozen languages, earning a PhD, and becoming a professor and author. His book, A Multitude of All Peoples: Engaging Ancient Christianity's Global Identity details the discoveries he has made and argues that Christianity is not a western religion that has become global, but has always had global roots.
The following is just a teaser–a highly edited version of just one question of an interview with Bantu for the Etcetera. It feels almost criminal to leave out so much of his wisdom, so for the full transcript, email me at seanbeckettbc@gmail.com.
In my final question, I asked Bantu to give advice specifically to white, Western students like myself and then to majority world and ethnic minority students about how to live and work and engage in conversations together in order to seek true reconciliation. First, Bantu discussed how the church is a house of prayer for ALL nations, whatever their backgrounds, and the goal needs to be both unity AND justice: to pursue unity in a just way. He then gave some particular pointers for different groups of students.
Vince Bantu: I would encourage white students to really be thinking about how they can be lamenting and acknowledging privilege and the ways that they experience it and participate in it whether they want to or not, and moving away from any kind of defensiveness or colorblindness. But at the same time not hating themselves or wishing they were something different or forgetting that even whiteness and all of its variety is also made the image of God. John Perkins said that God wanted white people to be white, and that is absolutely true. They're made in the image of God, just like everybody. And also white culture is its own unique thing. Sometimes white people will say, “Other people have cultures.” And that's actually problematic, when we say Black theology or Hispanic theology or Asian or Chinese theology, but then when it's theology from white men, we just call it theology. That's problematic because that's white normativity. So white theology is white and white culture’s white and it's not all bad. There's a lot of it that’s good. So all of us should celebrate who we are, but also speak out against white privilege or white supremacy or white normativity.
White folks should use their seats at the table. This goes for anybody regardless of who they are: use your seat at the table to advocate and to speak truth. In Acts 5, when John and Peter were held before the Sanhedrin, Gamaliel stood and advocated for them. He used his seat at the table to advocate for them who were more oppressed, marginalized people. In fact, in Acts 4 it says that they were unschooled, ordinary men. They were from the hood. They were low-income. They were people from the margins and Gamaliel advocated for them.
And then you got Barnabas in Acts 4, who sells his property and gives it to the poor and to the church to give to the poor. All through scripture, whenever we see people of privilege of any kind, they are expected to use that privilege in the empowerment of those who are more marginalized—like Zacchaeus, who was welcomed into the household of the Lord and into the people of God through Jesus. But he also said he was gonna repay everybody his debts, right? So again, it's not just unity and reconciliation, but it's also justice. Even reparations, right? Making things right for people who have been hurt.
So that's where I would say white Christians need to be called into, repentance and also advocacy and prophetic engagement. Even if it's at a Thanksgiving or a Christmas dinner table with relatives or with colleagues and people that they know, calling them prophetically to empower those who are more marginalized, but also loving themselves as well. And really reframing what white identity is, away from the toxic, oppressive identity that it has been made to be.
For people of color, I would encourage folks to speak up and to take positions of leadership. Oftentimes it could be tempting to want to emulate the power structures or feel that we need the validation of the power structures, or we need to assimilate to the dominant culture to be valid. And I would encourage people to, with wisdom and discernment, bring who they are to the table and not to assimilate and not put their head down and just not say anything. Oftentimes people of color can feel that; “I don't want to be a problem.”
At the same time, white folks need to be the ones to really be taking the charge to speak up and not putting that pressure on people of color. Because honestly, a lot of these issues are caused by white people. At the same time, people of color need to share our experiences and take positions of leadership and not believe the lie of the enemy that we can't do this, that we really don’t have skills—but really believe the power that's in our ancestry and that the Lord has given us. So to really take up positions of leadership just like Peter and John did, who were unschooled, ordinary men, and yet they were the ones leading the church that actually included people who were more powerful than them. And they still did it with boldness, even though they were so-called unschooled, ordinary people, or idiotes as the Greek says.
Really allow yourself to feel the pain of what it is to be in a predominantly white institution, and to do the self-care needed. I remember when I was in college, at a Christian college, a lot of times white students would have a problem, even some staff and faculty would have issues with there being ethnic-specific groups and clubs and say, Well, why are you being exclusive? Why is that club or that thing only for Asians or for Black people or for Hispanic people? And I just think that's ridiculous, especially if you’re in a predominantly white school. Whiteness is everywhere, but people of color need to have spaces that are safe places. And it will enable folks to be able to engage with the dominant culture and with the broader multi-ethnic dynamic when people have their own space to be able to gather and to be able to build themselves up. I just encourage students of color to find that space, whether it's through students groups on campus or in churches or different organizations. Do not feel bad that sometimes you need time with your people and, and do not feel like there’s something wrong with that, or you're not being a good Christian or you're being divisive. To the contrary, you need time with your people. Paul, in Romans 10, expresses a deep desire for his people. James stayed in Jerusalem and really held it down for his people, for their people, for the Jews. And so there's a validity in needing time with your people and whatever else you have to do to really be able to do well and to make it. ♰
A God of Mercy
by Steven Gomez
I recently returned to the habit of daily prayer. Each morning and evening I open my Book of Common Prayer and Bible, mumbling the words in recitation, occasionally cutting parts out if I’m short on time.
But along with the liturgy, I also tend to hear other words, taunting me about my Anglicanism: it’s so long and boring, it’s based on distorted, unbiblical ideas; it’s imperialist. A lot of these are remarks I’ve heard in the Regent atrium. It was all in gentle good fun at the time, but it seems to have bored its way into my head.
I’ve heard other, equally biting remarks from my high church friends as well, about the hollow meaninglessness of Baptist services, the irreverence of evangelical communion, the lack of respect for tradition.
One of the things I’ve always loved about Regent is that it isn’t sectarian. It may have been founded by Plymouth Brethren congregations, but Christians of all traditions come to study here. Learning from each other’s denominations ought to be a selling point of our school. Sometimes that’s harder than it sounds.
What most of us have in common is the conviction that the Church should be a loving, compassionate community, extending the grace of God to the world; this is our mission and our mandate. Yet it can seem very difficult to extend that grace towards our fellow Christians, let alone to anyone else.
The liturgy for daily prayer includes Scripture reading. At the moment, I’ve been revisiting one of my favourites: the Abraham story. Called by Yahweh-the-God to make a long journey of faith after his father’s death, Abraham finds the journey more difficult than perhaps he’d imagined. But Yahweh promises that He will make Abraham the father of a nation that will bless the world. Most of us know that the Church is the fulfilment of that promise; we are the world that has been blessed through Abraham’s family. But we are also called to carry that blessing forward.
One of the most insightful passages in the story of Abraham’s journey is (are you ready for this?) the judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah.
Yahweh stands before Abraham and, mindful of His plan to bless the world through him, invites Abraham into His work. He has a decision to make about these twin cities, to discover whether their wickedness is as great as it seems. What follows is sometimes called a negotiation, but it’s the strangest negotiation ever.
Abraham asks if the cities can be spared for the sake of fifty righteous people. And the God says yes. For the sake of forty? And the God says yes. For the sake of thirty? And the God says yes. He continues down to ten. And the God says yes.
Yahweh is either a terrible bargainer, or else He isn’t bargaining. Having invited Abraham in, He simply allows Abraham to set the terms of His judgment. If Abraham had gone down to one righteous person, what would the God have said? And if Abraham had asked for mercy, unconditionally and without limits, what would the God have said?
We don’t have to wonder. In Exodus, Moses intercedes for Abraham’s descendants, Israel, after they have broken faith; Yahweh is ready to wipe them off the earth, but Moses asks for mercy. And the God says yes.
Yahweh is, above all, a God of mercy. As Moses learns, He is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, not overlooking wickedness to even the third and fourth generation, but whose love extends to the thousandth.
The God we worship and devote ourselves to, in all our different traditions and liturgies and denominations, is a God who accepts all of them as praise. He offers grace to those with an imperialist, colonizing past; He offers His presence to those who have low expectations of bread and wine (or grape juice). We may be strangers to each other, but we are not strangers to Him. He gives us all a place in His Church, and called us to live out His mercy and grace in our witness to the world.
We do not always live them out even among each other. I point no fingers; I’ve made my share of hurtful comments about Pentecostals. This is more than tragic. Unless we show each other grace, with the same welcoming hospitality we can show to non-believers, we are not His Church, and the promise to Abraham cannot be fulfilled. Only by loving one another are we recognized as Christ’s disciples.
Abraham was invited into the work of seeking the shalom of the land he lived in, though he was a stranger in it. We are invited into that same ongoing work of reconciliation, justice, and grace. Our shalom and the world’s goes hand in hand. As much as our salvation doesn’t rest on our work, our work still matters, for it is how we make ourselves witnesses to Yahweh, the God of gods and Lord of lords who so loves the world. When we truly live as His people, what we ask for in His name will be given us.
We are stubborn people living in a stiff-necked world. But we are all ruled and judged by a God who, however deep His commitment to justice for wrongdoing, prefers mercy to condemnation. Condemnation is not off the table—Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed, after all—but He has invited us, like Abraham, into His work. And if we ask Him for mercy on this world and on His Church, in the name of His only-begotten Son, what do we think He will say? ♰
A Prayer
by Freeman Yan Nok Lam
Our Father in heaven, we are gathered here as Your people.
May Your Spirit move our hearts to adore You as our sovereign, faithful, and good Father. We give thanks, for in You, all that is imperfect, fallen, and broken finds its rightful place. Hallowed be your name
Our Father in heaven, Your kingdom come, for in You, is found true shalom.
As we gather here from different lands, cultures, and languages, may Your Spirit unify us, so that as one body, we may long for Your will to be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Our Father in heaven, Give us this day our daily bread.
As we gather with needs great and small, may your Spirit humble us to know our need for You, to know the needs of the other, to know that in You, every place of need is not left unseen. Rather in Your time, in Your ways, and by Your will, we have the assurance that they will be met.
Our Father in heaven, forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
As we gather, acknowledging how painfully easy it is to hurt one another, may Your Spirit move our hearts, so that our prideful, divisive, and misguided ways may be placed before You in surrender. In so doing, may You guide our hands and feet to be like that of Christ's.
Our Father in heaven, do not bring us to the time of trial.
As we gather weary and burdened by the weight of sin, soften our hearts to see and reach out to our suffering and dying world, that we be reminded to call on Your Spirit, who is our ever present help in trouble. Rescue us from the evil one.
God of Heaven and earth, always present.
Hear our prayers.
For the Kingdom and the power and the glory are yours forever.
Amen.