Lausanne World Pulse – Stories of Lament and Hope: Burundi Gathering

By Stephanie Wheatley and Jen Stallings

What Can We Learn from the Stories of Hope?
Discussing the significance of these three stories and drawing from a workbook compiled for the gathering, the participants affirmed three critical practices the Church must learn in order to faithfully engage the ministry of reconciliation:

1. Lament. We must not move too quickly to solutions. We must learn to see, feel, and name the contradictions between the beauty of our surroundings and the unthinkable violence that has occurred here, between the pervasiveness of Christianity and the scale of bloodshed in the region. We must take time to remember, mourn loss, and experience discomfort in the fact that we are part of the problem. We must learn to ask hard questions and tell the stories of how we have become bewitched by tribalism.
2. Learn. We must learn to examine the historical, social, and political contexts and complexities that make tribalism an enduring problem in the region. How did we get so messed up? Like the Corinthians, how have we identified ourselves more with our “tribal” or “ethnic” identities than with Christ? How did this become so natural? More often than not, Christianity has uncritically built onto this “tribal” grid.
3. Live Out. Finally, inspired by God’s story in scripture and the “new creation” which is God’s gift in the resurrected Jesus, we must learn to dream of new possibilities for peace in the region and explore innovative alternatives already underway.

The group of women and men gathered in Bujumbura were one such alternative. Together they embodied a new “we,” a community whose identity is grounded not in tribe, race, or ethnicity, but in the story of God. It is a community shaped by the biblical vision of a new creation, a people committed to saying no to violence and division and yes to forgiveness, peace, and love. As participants prepared to leave the gathering, one participant from Sudan testified to why he had come: “Because when a family gathers, you come, no matter how far the journey.”

Stephanie Wheatley (left), a graduate of Wheaton College, serves as the global outreach coordinator for the Duke Center for Reconciliation. Jen Stallings (right), a graduate of Duke Divinity School, is a candidate for ordination in the United Methodist Church.