Displacement, healing, & recovery, an author interview
Christopher M. Hays talks about his new book, *Eight Million Exiles*
Gentle reader,
I’m pleased today to share an interview with pastor, teacher, and author Christopher M. Hays, who spoke with us about his new book Eight Million Exiles: Missional Action Research and the Crisis of Forced Migration (Eerdmans, 272 pages), which tells the story of how “his interdisciplinary team of theologians, social scientists, pastors, and local partners combined efforts to support internally displaced persons of Colombia.”
The interview follows:
BFJ: The cover is really haunting. Can you tell us about it?
CH: The cover design is rooted in an ethical issue that we wrestled with throughout our project: that of using images of discrete displaced persons to portray (and promote!) our work and the temptation to capitalize on people’s suffering to generate more emotional verve for observers of our work. (This is sometimes called “poverty porn,” but I find that term especially disgusting.) We didn’t want to reduce displaced peoples to victims in need of rescue, but we also didn’t want to gloss over their suffering. So in all our work (most especially in this artistic volume created by my colleagues Isabel Orozco and Leonardo Ramírez), we tried to find ways to portray real displaced people as survivor protagonists, and we shifted away from realist imagery when exploring their suffering. Credit for the images shared throughout this post goes to Isabel Orozco.
I shared our ethical concerns with Eerdmans when they asked for input on cover art, and they understood what I was hoping for better than I did! I was so grateful for the image that Jamie McKee developed. It was so insightful to depict the back of a women carrying a child, walking away. You see, most displaced people are women, and an awful number of displaced households are led by single mothers. What’s more, over a third of those single mothers have personally witnessed the murder of husband or male child and then have to bear that trauma as they depart for an unknown destination.
Then, when they arrive, they have to try to build a new life for their children, even as they are falling apart. Eerdmans captures that reality poetically, with the way the mosaic at the bottom of the image evokes both disintegration and reintegration.
BFJ: Why did you write EME?
CH: Initially, the book was just supposed to provide an English-language account of Missional Action Research, which is the theory we developed to respond to the Colombian displacement crisis. But as time went on, two realizations shaped the book into something very different from the technical methodological volume I had initially imagined.
First, I realized that the best thing about the Faith and Displacement project was the way it drew on the giftings of a wide range of believers: theologians, social scientists, local ministers, and victims of displacement. Their diverse insights and experiences were better together, as opposed to disparaging or cannibalizing one another. I wanted to write a book that made that point, that the Body is one, but has many parts; that the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you. Because of that, you will notice that the book includes a lot of protagonists, even if most of them are only on the page for a few paragraphs.
Second, over the course of the project’s eight years, I came to believe that human experience was a locus theologicus, a source of theological insight (of revelation even!). I saw how God was revealing more of Godself to us in our work, in ways that made us better readers of Scripture. In fact, that’s actually what happens throughout the New Testament: human experiences of the divine generate theological insight, and then they interpret the Old Testament in that light! So what began as a book about missiological method actually ended up including lots of biographical and Scriptural reflection, which was pretty fun for me.
Image credit: Isabel Orozco
BFJ: I’ve come to that conviction as well, though it goes against my theological training. Thank you for opening up the experiences of so many protagonists for your readers. Can you give us the short version: what’s the book about?
CH: Eight Million Exiles is the story of how God called a fistful of faculty at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia to respond to the biggest humanitarian crisis you have never heard of: a population of eight million people driven from their homes by Colombia’s cruel, intergenerational violent conflict. We fused a Latin American theological idea called “integral mission” with a social-scientific research method called “Participatory Action Research” and then figured out how local Christian communities can foster healing and recovery with their impoverished displaced neighbors. So the book recounts how dozens of churches across the Colombia—mostly poor congregations themselves—ended up being light in the darkest corners of their nation.
Image credit: Isabel Orozco
BFJ: That’s amazing. Share a detail you’re fond of from the book?
CH: The book is shot through with stories, which is pretty unconventional for academic theology. Because it explores the way that human experience is a locus theologicus, I wanted to disclose how God guided us as a team: in seminar rooms, in the jungle, in crumbling sanctuaries, and even in a noisy brewery. What’s more, biographical vignettes are interleaved between the chapters, providing snapshot accounts of the displaced peoples we met along the way and of local pastors doing beautiful, sacrificial, and invisible work. I really love that aspect of the book and I’d venture that the stories make it engaging for people who might not otherwise pick up a theology text.
Christopher Hays is president of Scholar Leaders International. He previously served in Medellín as a professor at the Biblical Seminary of Colombia (FUSBC) and led a program that draws on insights from faith and social sciences to foster recovery of victims of civil war. Image credit: Jules Norton
BFJ: A lot of Christians don’t want to connect current events with stories of scripture. Why do you think this is?
CH: Well, I suppose that we are wary of that being done badly. If you were raised in the sort of evangelical context I was, you grew up hearing ludicrous assertions that contemporary events in Russia or the Middle East were playing out a sequence of prophecies mapped out in the book of Revelation (which they are not) or construing the United States as some sort of a new Israel (which it isn’t). Basically, we’ve been burned by bad hermeneutics, by ham fisted readings of Scripture that assert direct correspondence between the events in Scripture and events today.
That doesn’t mean, however, that we shouldn’t connect the contemporary world with the Scriptural world; we just need a different bridge, and at the risk of oversimplification, I’d say that the bridge between the past and the present is the unchanging God, whose character remains the same as the Holy Spirit continues to shape humanity into the image of God’s Son.
Image credit: Isabel Orozco
BFJ: Amen. How does the book relate to your experience of discipleship?
CH: Interesting question. I think the book captures how I have clumsily tried to figure out how to fulfill my vocation as a missional theologian, all the while being a white foreigner hailing from a colonial power that has done much evil under the illusion of doing good. It reveals how I bumbled between self-reliant individualism, postcolonial hand wringing, disregard for the power of the poor, and frustration when people didn’t do things my way. Even though I am no longer teaching in Colombia, in my current role with Scholar Leaders, I’m still navigating that space: discerning how to be part of a community of theological leadership and how to steward my privileges in ways that amplify the giftings of others.
BFJ: Are there difficulties in the spiritual life that your book can help to address?
CH: I’m encountering an increasing number of theologians, scholars, pastors, and even philanthropists who feel stymied, even a little despondent about whether they are having an impact in the world. I suppose some of this is because I’m a millennial who has recently entered middle age, but I know lots of fabulously talented people who are not living up to their dreams for their futures. For those of us in academia, our professional incentives are not designed to channel our gifts towards the most important issues, the challenges that really do need the insights of the Church’s best-trained theological minds. An awful lot of human brilliance is being directed towards writing dense peer-reviewed articles that will be read by fewer people than attend a Sunday sermon at a dying church.
But I really do think we can do theology differently … better, even. Missional Action Research was our attempt to do theology that directly changed churches and communities. It’s certainly not the only way folks like us can draw near to “the wounds of the world,” but I do think that the souls of many in our line of work are aching to do something differently.
Image credit: Isabel Orozco
BFJ: You’re preaching to me now. If you could gift everyone with one insight from the book, what would it be?
CH: The people we all feel called to help already possess a potency, a dignity, and a divine potential that God has been cultivating since long before we arrived. Our job is to support them in realizing their own divine vocation.
BFJ: How has your spiritual life and prayer life changed as you’ve matured?
CH: Gosh, this interview is like a spiritual exercise! But a couple things come to mind.
First, I have come to see that I am more of a Jesus follower, more “Christian,” when I have the emotional wherewithal to be present with people’s sorrow, woundedness, and fear. I have learned that their suffering shouldn’t threaten my faith; it shouldn’t make me feel uncomfortable or defensive. Instead, the disclosure of fear and sorrow is a gift, an opportunity to love far more robustly or intensely than is typically afforded by our quotidian routines.
Second, I have an intensified craving to be enmeshed in the prayer and hymnody of the historic people of God. Now, I became an Anglican during college, but during our eight years in Colombia, Anglican liturgy wasn’t on offer. Returning to weekly Anglican worship has reinforced my sense of gratitude at being part of a community of faith that stretches across the centuries, a community whose worship isn’t primarily defined by the homiletical prowess of a preacher but by jointly singing and praying that which the Spirit has shown us collectively to be true.
Image credit: Isabel Orozco
BFJ: What would your 10-year-old self say if he learned you’d grow up to write about this stuff?
CH: At the age of 10, I was acutely aware of not fitting in. (I know that’s a common sentiment among pre-teens and adolescents, but in my case it was probably more strong, because I was a super weird kid!) I think that, if 10-year-old Christopher knew that he would get the opportunity to be the person he wanted to be, and that he’d have a little community of people who would want to hear about it—well, he’d feel pretty relieved.
BFJ: Besides EME, what are your top reading recommendations for folks who want to think more deeply about these matters? Why do you recommend them?
CH: Stephen Bevans’ book Models of Contextual Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002) is amazing. I wish I had found it before I became a missionary theologian, but my first encounter with it was last year! Bevans talks about experience as a locus theologicus and about different ways to do theology in and for specific contexts. It’s an exceptional read.
Anyone who cares about Latin American missions or theology needs to read René Padilla’s Misión integral: ensayos sobre el Reino y la iglesia (Grand Rapids/Buenos Aires: Eerdmans, Nueva Creación, 1986)—published in English under the title Mission Between the Times. It’s an epoch-making work, which defined the shape of Latin American theology for the next two generations. We are still waiting to see who might pick up Padilla’s mantel.
Going further back in time, John MacKay’s book A Preface to Christian Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1941) sounded a clarion call for Latin American theologians of that generation, calling them to do theology “on the road” rather than “from the balcony.” I think that it would speak just as forcefully to contemporary theologians who are feeling ennui about how they are living out their own callings.
Many thanks to Christopher for sharing with us! Buy his book here.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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