What Kind of Christian Leaders Will We Become?
When I was a teenager, I used to think that people outside of Christianity saw Christianity with only one face, namely, as a religion full of goodness. In the mind of a teenager like me at that time, I felt great pride because I believed that many people must think that Christianity is noble. After all, the central core of Christian teachings is love. However, as I went through my teenage years, where my social circle and information references increased, I found that Christianity did not only have one face. There were other faces that I had just heard, read, and accepted at that time. These faces were internal conflicts and power struggles. Another face was the colonization carried out by people who were Christians, including what our nation had experienced for centuries. Today, we are faced with so many different faces of Christianity; some are moderate, embracing, and empowering, but some are exclusive and overly fanatic. I also found that there are so many different views from other people about Christianity itself.
When I read this final reading of the semester and the concluding piece for the entire program, Tom Holland presented a piece on Christianity that he said was very challenging to write. He describes, “Christianity may be the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history, but it is also the most challenging for a historian to write about.”[1] Holland shows how Christianity influences Western thinking and brings positive changes in his book. However, he also shows the faces of Christianity in the form of violence, oppression, and exploitation. Holland tries to be as objective as possible when writing this book. However, he also admits that the influence of the teachings and traditions of Christian values and morals is also on him, which he also uses in assessing Christianity itself from within.[2]
Through his research, Holland shows the face of Christianity that has a positive and constructive impact on world civilization, especially in Western society. Holland describes Christianity as the first to demonstrate universal and inclusive love, which embraces anyone based on faith regardless of social status and background.[3] This made Christianity seem more attractive than other very exclusive and particular communities. Another exciting thing that Holland explains in his book is how the Christian value of giving to the poor also had a revolutionary positive influence on the creation of laws later on that emphasized human rights. Holland explains, “That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, though, was a matching principle: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was – in a formulation increasingly deployed by canon lawyers – a human ‘right’.”[4]
Furthermore, Holland also shows that what makes Christianity have such a significant influence throughout history on the change of Western society and a just world is the teaching of divine love that is so pervasive in Christians and transmitted to the people around them. Holland insists, “The knowledge of what constituted a just society was written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on human hearts. Love, and do as you will. It was – as the entire course of Christian history so vividly demonstrated – a formula for revolution.”[5] This reminds me of Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York. In his 2020 Annual Borderlands Lecture, he articulates, “The power to keep on loving when everyone else is full of wrath and hatred is the greatest power of all. It is the only way that hatred is defeated. It is the pattern of Christian discipleship and therefore the pattern for the Church’s leadership. But it also has something vital to say today to all leaders.”[6]
From Holland’s abundant notes on the positive impact and influence of Christianity on Western society and the world, he also shows the ironic opposite face of Christianity. One thing that caught my attention was Holland’s explanation of the colonization of Westerners on other continents, such as Africa, which would undoubtedly question the concept of justice and love in Christianity, which colonized other nations. Holland describes, “How were Africans to believe talk of a god who cared for the oppressed and the poor when the whites, the very people who worshipped him, had seized their lands, and plundered them for diamonds, and ivory, and rubber?”[7] This situation is similar to what the Indonesian people experienced when several Christian countries colonized us for centuries in the past.
Holland also emphasizes the practices of hierarchy and subordination carried out by the colonizers, which contradict the principles of equality and justice taught by Christ. Holland writes, “A colonial hierarchy in which blacks were deemed inferior had seemed a peculiar and bitter mockery of the missionaries’ insistence that Christ had died for all of humanity.”[8] This calls me to Yascha Mounk’s research. He unveiled a historical pattern indicating the latent propensity for humans to inflict cruelty upon individuals possessing divergent identities. He writes, “In dealing with people whom they think of as members of an outside group, they are capable of frightening cruelty and callousness. This tendency to favor the in-group over the out-group helps to explain much of what is noble and most of what is vile in human history.”[9] Holland then added, “As I read more and more about the great sweep of Christian history, about crusades, and inquisitions, and religious wars, about popes with fat, jewelled fingers and Puritans with stern, beetling frowns, and about all the great shocks and convulsions that Christianity had brought to the world.”[10] I then probed further, do Christians also have the concept that Fukuyama calls megalothymia, which refers to the desire when a person or group of people is dominated by the desire to be superior?[11]
I appreciate Holland’s honesty in showing the two sides of Christianity, the positive and constructive influence on one side and the harmful and destructive impact on the other, which often appear together. Indeed, we cannot cover up or erase the dark history. However, it challenges me as a Christian leader to fight and ensure that things like that do not happen again in the present and the future. Christianity have to spread love and peace in the world. In the book Jesus and The Powers, Wright and Bird wrote, “Christians in a pluralistic and multicultural setting need to find unity in diversity, practice hospitality as a political discipline, and build for the kingdom by contributing to the common good of all.”[12]
However, after finishing this book, I reflected deeply on why it was presented as the final reading for this semester and even for the entire series of this program as well. I suppose that our Lead Mentor intended to guide our cohort, at least myself, toward engaging in discernment. The reflection I mean is, after going through the long process of this lecture program (with various inspiring reading books and stimulating discussions), will each of us, or I, continue the dark history of Christianity by becoming a Christian leader who brings harmful and destructive impacts or, each of us, or I, will become a Christian leader who brings positive and constructive change by practicing the values of the kingdom of God that Christ taught?
[1] Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (London: Little, Brown, 2019), chap. Acknowledgment.
[2] Holland, Dominion, chap. 21.
[3] Holland, Dominion, chap. 4.
[4] Holland, Dominion, chap. 9.
[5] Holland, Dominion, chap. 20.
[6] Stephen Cottrell, Undefended Authenticity: A Christian Understanding of Power and its Relevance for How Power and Leadership is Exercised in All Organisations, The Annual Borderlands Lecture 2020. https://www.archbishopofyork.org/speaking-and-writing/sermons/keynote-address-annual-borderlands-lecture Accessed September 13, 2023.
[7] Holland, Dominion, chap. 20.
[8] Holland, Dominion, chap. 20.
[9] Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2023), 191.
[10] Holland, Dominion, chap. 21.
[11] Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), xiii.
[12] N.T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies (London: SPCK Publishing, 2024), 170.
About the Author
Dinka Utomo
Dinka Nehemia Utomo is an ordained pastor of the Protestant Church in the Western part of Indonesia (Gereja Protestan di Indonesia bagian Barat or GPIB). He has served for more than 15 years. The first five years of his ministry were in the remote area of East Kalimantan, including people from the indigenous Dayak tribe in the small villages in the middle of the forest, frequently reached using small boats down the river. For more than 15 years, Dinka has served several GPIB congregations in several cities in Indonesia. He has always had a passion for equipping Christian families, teaching and guiding them to build equal relations between husband and wife, maintaining commitment, love, and loyalty, creating a healthy and constructive Christian family atmosphere, and rejecting all forms of violence and sexual violence. Dinka's beloved wife, Verra, is also a GPIB pastor. They have two blessed children. Dinka and his wife and children love to spend quality family time, such as lunch or dinner, and vacation to exotic places.2 responses to “What Kind of Christian Leaders Will We Become?”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Hi Dinka,
Great post.
You wrote, “Will I become a Christian leader who brings positive and constructive change by practicing the values of the kingdom of God that Christ taught?”
I am certain that the answer is yes. While impacted by the past, your NPO is focused on the future. A Christian future.
All of our NPOs are HIS work. I believe that we are responding to Satell’s Cascade…creating ripples of change.
On Thursday, I am speaking about immigration (probably to a hostile audience). I hope to lead with scripture (it is a Bible study) and then discuss the personal actions I have taken to contribute to the immigration process. (My NPO is interlinkt.org)
My hope is that my actions will speak louder than words.
I lack the eloquence to convince anyone, but my desire is that my NPO will demonstrate how big problems do start with small solutions.
At the end of it all, I am willing to let them be wrong.
Shalom.
Hi Dinka,
You did such an excellent job of making connections with other authors we have read. Your quotes from Yascha Mounk were very insightful. I kept thinking there was a link there but I didn’t bring that book with me. The concept of in-groups and out-groups is steadily represented in our history. In your context in Indonesia, are their out-groups that concern you that you would like to move closer to in some way? Who has the church in general forgotten about or under-served in your region?
I have enjoyed your posts. You have a deeply reflective, elegant, and intelligent writing style. You have given me much to consider!
Have a wonderful Christmas!