June 2010

• Cambodian Experience - by Kit Schindell


• Coming Renewal Fellowship Events


• A Spirited Life: Calvin on the Holy Spirit - by Richard Topping

"So how was your trip?"

I was home from Cambodia, back at work, chatting with a couple of colleagues about the wretched little village where we worked so hard every day. I chatted about the work, about the task before us, about the seeping evil of the village, about child sex slaves, about imprisoned girls, about human trafficking... and suddenly stopped, realizing I had gone too far. They were uncomfortable, distracted... they wanted to get on with other things. I apologized and the subject changed immediately, and Cambodia was once again just another place on the map. I could feel my face burn with embarrassment.

Now, when people ask, I say, "Wonderful weather! Greatest mangoes in the world." -- and for many people that's enough.

Fairview Church has had a connection with Cambodia for several years now. I first went to this complex, recovering country in 2008 as one of two women on a team of ten -- a team I have often referred to as "eight strong men and two ancient nurses". That time we renovated a dank, hideous, former child brothel into a church, medical centre, and school, now known as Rahab's House. We obliterated the ugly cells where imprisoned little girls serviced their adult male pedophile clients, and turned the place into a bright airy centre.

The ten of us came back to Canada, changed forever. We returned to our jobs and fell into the familiar pace of our Canadian lives. Oh, we were a motley crew: pastor, health care administrator, sous-chef, classics professor, businessman... but we'd faced things together that we had never before even considered. To this day there is a special bond among us.

And then this year, I had the tremendous honour of being selected to return. That this old girl had the opportunity to go once was a huge blessing. A second trip was an incredible opportunity. This time, four of us from Fairview Church joined up with four from an Anglican church in Vancouver and two men from a church in Australia. Our leader was Grant Wilson, Fairview's pastor and a veteran of several Cambodia trips.

"The Sanctuary" (shown at the right) -- just a few doors down from Rahab's House, our first project -- was originally built as a hotel for pedophiles and a brothel for the children -- one-stop shopping at its worst. But the economic downturn and increased interest by international police agencies caused the owners (organized crime personnel) to abandon the project. And one day, Brian McConaghy, founder of the Ratanak Foundation, looked up at the unfinished building and saw the windows and thought, "It looks like a sanctuary."

The Ratanak Foundation bought the building, and two teams from Canada went to do the work to turn it into a school, a meeting place, and a couple of apartments for mission personnel.

Our team went first, followed by a wonderful team from a Baptist church in Ontario. Our ages ranged from nineteen to mid-seventies. Our health ranged from excellent to "I-really-want-to-do-this-but-...". Our skills were likely excellent according to our chosen careers. But here we were painters. In this capacity, our skills were... well... negligible. Our teenage team member had worked summers with College Pro painters. One of our Australian guys worked in construction. We accepted their expertise with eager faith and got to work. We painted and painted and painted. Forty-eight rooms. We cleaned, we trimmed, we sealed, we primed, we second-coated, we "cut", we rolled. I do not want to see yellow paint for a very long time.

I walked up to the fifth floor one morning, looking for our nineteen-year-old painter. He was nowhere to be found. I looked from room to room, I looked on the balcony, I checked the "break" area... and then I looked up. There he was, ten feet above me, standing on a plank, cheerfully painting. I shuddered. Suffice it to say my prayers were heartfelt and fervent. My personal prayer every day was that no one would suffer any calamity beyond my clinical skills, and God graciously answered that prayer.

Ten of us, basically strangers to each other, were suddenly thrown into spending the best part of every day together. We shared rooms in twos and threes. We rose shortly after five a.m., shared a time of corporate worship, ate a rushed breakfast in the hotel "dining" room, gathered equipment and supplies (including first aid) and thirty litres of bottled water and piled into the van at 7:30 a.m. to head to the village. Paint, paint, paint. Paint, paint, paint.

After lunch (chicken with bowls of rice and plates of sliced mango was a team favourite, accompanied by fiery sweet chili sauce, bottled water, rolls of pink toilet paper for napkins), we went back to work. We left the village late in the afternoon as the village heated up in more ways than one. The temperature rose, and the paying clientele started to arrive to consume the children's innocence.

We headed back the eleven kilometers to Phnom Penh. We were filthy, exhausted, sweaty, covered in the red dust that is everywhere in Cambodia. Sometimes we were too tired to speak. But the day was by no means over. The daily debrief was only an hour away so we hurriedly took our showers, put on clean clothes, dried our hair... and met for the debrief.

A debriefing is pretty tough when one is working in a village where children are trafficked, children are raped, children are abused, children disappear... but we talked to each other and poured out our frustrations, our anger, our worries, our hopes.

Fairview is a small church, and the concept of "family" is alive and well in this congregation. This trip was a family trip, even though only four of us actually got on the plane. Every night we were greeted, encouraged, and cheered by emails from church members. They met regularly to pray for us. We had a "Skype" meeting at a congregational breakfast -- it was 9 p.m. in Cambodia, and we were exhausted. We were expected to blog and to post pictures -- the family cared. It was very moving to return late one rainy Sunday evening to find dozens of Fairview people gathered at the airport to welcome us home. They waved a banner with greetings and signatures from many more. It meant so much!

What do you do when you look out the front of the building, knowing that young girls across the road, behind shuttered windows, lie sedated and imprisoned, waiting to be trafficked to anywhere in the world; or when you look out the back of the building to the shanty that has a world-wide reputation in the online pedophile community for providing tiny little girls as young as three or four to meet the sexual desires of men from Canada, America, Sweden, Korea, Germany...? I did not recognize even one little girl from when I was there in 2008. Where were they? I can only assume they have been trafficked to other countries.

What did we do about all this? We painted. Inch by inch, we worked against the evil that sustains this small village. And when I got depressed or overwhelmed, or when that ugly voice in the back of my head chided me that we really were doing nothing of value, that our hard work was a mere speck... then I remembered the songs and shrieks of delighted laughter coming from the happy kids at Rahab's House, and I smiled. And I painted and painted and painted.

"Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." - Matthew 25:40

If you would like to know more about the work in Cambodia, please go to http://www.ratanak.org

In Central Canada
Attend the Dorothy Lake Family Camp, July 26-30th. The theme is "Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: A Biblical Perspective".
Dates: July 26-30. Speaker: Calvin Brown
Contact: Dorothy Lake Family Camp
P.O. Box 1058
Kirkland Lake ON
P2N 3L1
Or e-mail us at: <dlfc@dorothylake.on.ca>

B.B. Warfield, renowned theologian, wrote that John Calvin is "pre-eminently the theologian of the Holy Spirit." On predestination and God's sovereignty, Calvin simply picks up the theological tradition (Augustine, Aquinas and others) and repeats it. Where it comes to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, however, Warfield says we arrive at "Calvin's greatest contribution to theological science. In his hands for the first time in the history of the church, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit comes to its rights."

It is interesting to puzzle over why the Reformed tradition -- one that takes its cue and has its roots in the theological work of John Calvin -- has not always drawn into itself Calvin's doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Let me suggest three possible reasons for why this might be the case.

Could it be fear of losing control? The Reformed tradition -- and Calvin -- are big on order and structure, and the Spirit can be perceived as a threat to institutional and personal continuity. On his deathbed, among Calvin's final words, were these: "Change nothing." And to be fair to Calvin, he had struggled long and hard to reform the city of Geneva and didn't want these gains lost.

On the other hand, an understanding of church and the Christian life that features the work of the Spirit tends to play up disruption, rupture, amazement, bewilderment-- and that's hard on us ordered types. Settled structures, patterns of order and liturgy do serve to promote the life of the church, and some institutional shape is a requirement for the life of the people of God.

However such structure can be both instrument of and barrier to life in the Spirit. The Gospel, I believe, is a great deal less serene than we may be tempted to believe. Before ever church is institution with a natural history and organization, the church is a creature of the Word -- a gathering that is animated by the Spirit of Christ. And the Spirit is wind and fire; the Spirit blows where he will, which is to say the Spirit is not under our control. Maybe that's why the movements of the Spirit sometimes suffer death through protocol. We hear what the Spirit is saying to the church, and it could change our direction -- as a minister it creates more work for me; as a parishioner I could be displaced in the new arrangement; and so on and so on. When the fire of the Spirit ignites, we are at least tempted to extinguish it by presenting the 74 steps that will be necessary according to wont and usage to make the idea a reality. Control (and sloth and envy) sometimes means we quench the Spirit.

But maybe there's another related reason for this reticence where it comes drawing more deeply upon Calvin's understanding of the Holy Spirit. We Presbyterians tend to lead with the mind -- understanding is the lead human faculty for Calvin (and Plato), the one by which others (will and affection) are ordered. That might not in itself be all that bad; it keeps us from what Peter Matheson calls, "glandular excess in worship," which is the root of superstition. We don't let our enthusiasms run away with us, we Presbyterians. Piety is theologically controlled by Scripture and the cool Reformed mind.

However, reasonableness -- on this side of the Enlightenment-- tends toward expunging divine agency out of everything. What do I mean? Well, it usually means that like most secular people, we make sense of our lives, our denomination, and the church in terms that almost always leave God out of account. We don't, like Calvin, see reason as a servant of the Gospel but as a capacity independent of faith for making sense. Church meetings take place in which (after we pray to open them) the predominant language is psychotherapeutic, sociological-demographic, or marketing. And to my surprise, this happens right across the theological spectrum. Whether it's budget time or we're trying to envision what the future of our precarious institutional life might look like, we've been lulled into naturalist (one-dimensional) ways of figuring out the world and even for figuring out the probable future of the church. What's "really important" is a rational business plan that takes account of church as a human and historical artefact, as if that's all there is and no more. Talk of the Spirit, prayer for the Holy Spirit, can be regarded as so much "avoiding the real world; pious talk; escapism" when and where people live in the shrunken-down world of rational secularity.

I'd suggest one final reason (and I sure you can think of others), why Calvin's really delightful doctrine of the Holy Spirit doesn't always filter into the life of the Reformed tradition. If you love Calvin, I'm sorry, but here comes a criticism: he never once mentions imagination in a positive light. It's not that Calvin didn't have an imagination, clearly he had a wonderful architectural imagination, and it's not that his work didn't give rise to a distinctly reformed imagination. His work at Geneva, it might be argued, was the work of sanctified or faithful imagination. However, he never once says a good word about it as a human capacity, and there were from the classical writers he knew positive senses of imagination in circulation.

He does speak of reason, will, and affection as fallen human faculties which, through the sacrifice of Christ and the communication of His benefits by the Spirit, begin to be regenerated. God initiates setting right what is wrong with our minds, hearts, and wills by the grace of the Word and the Spirit. Imagination, however, is at the center of the human predicament where it comes to God. Imagination is the faculty where sin has its way with us. Where our sense of God from creation and from within ought to move us toward piety, imagination interposes and starts churning out idols. For Calvin, Voltaire was right: "God created us in his imagine, and we've returned the favour." Here's a typical passage from Calvin on imagination:

Man's mind, full as it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity (deum pro captu suo imaginari audet); as it sluggishly plods, indeed is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance, it conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God. (1.XI.8)

Imagination always takes us in the direction of idolatry -- the imagination generates blueprints for images which the hands make. Imagination however, unlike reason, will, and affection, never gets reordered for use in the fellowship of the redeemed.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but my theological sensibilities tell me that imagination and the work of the Holy Spirit are related. Faith, which for Calvin is the principal work of the Spirit in the believer, is the ability to live by and see what is not yet. Faith, according to the book of Hebrews, is trusting God's promises for what doesn't yet obtain on the ground; trusting God for what is around the corner... receiving promises at a distance. And it seems to me that imagination enlarged and formed by the promises of Scripture and the grace of the Spirit is crucial here.

Calvin will speak of the Holy Spirit's comfort to us in the present when what will be -- eternal life, happy resurrection, our full actual justification, God's coming fully to us in our need, abundance of blessing -- is not yet.

Commenting on Hebrews 11, he writes, "The Spirit shows us hidden things, the knowledge of which cannot reach our senses." And he asks, "What would become of us were we not supported by hope and did our minds not emerge out of the midst of darkness above the world through the light of God's word and of his Spirit." (Commentary on Hebrews, 11:1, 157-158)

I think that Calvin is writing here about sanctified imagination, imagination stoked by Gospel and Spirit -- it's just that he doesn't use the word. I think that's too bad for the history of the Reformed tradition not only at the level of the Spirit's creative conjuring of hope in imagination by the Word, but also in the form of an austere, white-wash aesthetic. Alas we are Reformed and always reforming...