For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And all who have been united with Christ in baptism have put on Christ, like putting on new clothes. There is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. [Galatians 3:26-28 (NLT)]
Pastor Chris recently shared a devotion she read in which the author gives his office globe a gentle spin each morning. After a moment or two, he places a finger on the globe, stops its revolution, and prays for the people wherever his finger lands. Chris said she’s adopted this practice but, to make it more than a quick uninformed prayer, she does some research on the country’s needs and religions to guide her petitions.
Sounding like an interesting prayer discipline, I thought I’d give it a try. I don’t have a globe to spin but, since my hairdresser just returned from visiting her family in Albania, I thought I’d pray for her native land (a nation about which I knew nothing). Located just north of Greece, the Association for Religion Data Archives [ARDA] reported that about 59% of Albanians identify as Muslim and nearly 38% as Christian with the Christians almost evenly divided between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. Less than 2% of the population identify as Protestant or other.
Although about 97% of Albania’s population claims to believe in God, few would have dared admit that 50 years ago! In 1967, communist Albania officially became an atheist country with a constitutional ban on all religious belief. Participation in any religious ceremony was a punishable offense, clergy of all faiths were jailed or killed, believers were ruthlessly persecuted, and churches and mosques were turned into factories. Possession of a Bible or Quran was prohibited and even making the sign of the cross could land someone in jail. With the fall of communism, the ban on religious observance was lifted in December 1990 and, in 1991, thousands of Christian missionaries flooded into Albania.
I learned that a fair amount of ignorance and arrogance came with those missionaries and we can learn a valuable lesson from their mistakes. Thinking they were the first to bring the gospel to Albania, most missionaries didn’t know that Albania’s Christian roots went back to the first century when Paul brought the gospel to Illyricum and Titus went to Dalmatia. That was today’s Albania! Evidence of Christian families in the Albanian city of Durrës in 58 AD leads scholars to believe Paul and Titus also visited there.
The uninformed evangelists didn’t know that Christianity thrived in Albania for twenty centuries until God was outlawed in 1967 or that 40% of the nation had a Christian background. They didn’t know that some priests had continued to baptize, say the liturgy, and have prayer vigils in secret and that many suffered for doing so! The evangelical missionaries were completely unfamiliar with Orthodox Christian or Roman Catholic traditions. When people showed their foreign visitors the icons, missals, rosaries, and crosses they’d kept hidden (at great risk) for over 25 years, they were told to put away their idolatrous items and to stop being superstitious by making the sign of the cross! Rather than build on these believers’ displays of faith, uninformed missionaries rejected them outright.
The Orthodox priests often found the supposedly non-denominational Christian groups unwilling to work with them. Unfamiliar with their ancient traditions and liturgy, many of the evangelical missionaries viewed them with suspicion. Of course, it went both ways. The Orthodox, unfamiliar with denominational Protestants, Evangelicals, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, Adventists, and Unitarians, lumped them all together in one category of “heretical cults” and often resisted efforts to hand out their Bibles. Ignorance, arrogance, and prejudice on both sides impaired Christian witness.
On the plus side, some groups were sensitive to the history of Albania and successfully worked in conjunction with the local churches. Today, in an effort to combat misperceptions, exchanges are done between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic seminaries and the Evangelical Bible Institute in Albania.
If we ever hope to introduce Christ to the world and spread God’s word, Christians everywhere need to overcome their ignorance of other people, cultures, traditions, and faiths—even when they seem very different from ours. Saying he did everything to spread the blessings of the gospel message, the Apostle Paul told the Corinthians that he tried to find common ground with everyone in his effort to save them.[1 Cor. 9:22-23] We can do nothing less! Rather than Christians competing with one another, we need to understand that we’re all on the same side—the side of Jesus!
There’s nothing like face-to-face contact and the developing of relationships for breaking down walls of prejudice. We have to start seeing one another as brothers and sisters from whom we can learn and grow. We shouldn’t let our arrogance or ignorance, and even our differences or different beliefs create walls that nourish fear or uncertainty of the other. As Christians we have to love the other through encountering them, and trying to understand who they are and what they believe. [Fr. Luke A. Veronis]
Devotions of the Heart 