Interview with Ray Bakke
by Paul Grant
Ray Bakke is Regent’s Chair & Acting Academic Dean, Bakke Graduate University in Seattle, Washington. More about Dr. Bakke here.
What is the place in the global church for wealthy, college educated North Americans?
That’s
very interesting, because I have a millionaire brother—Harvard
educated—who lives on 1% of his income, and gives 99% away. We’ve
created a family foundation to invest this money. He knows he got it because
he’s white, and American, so he’s stewarding
it. That’s an up-close and personal model.
I always thought, as a white male in Chicago, what I could do was build a bridge to allow ethnic people, who normally live in silos—whether they were Hispanic, Black or Asian or whatever—to create the connectivity. There is a surplus of white males in the world, and one thing we can still do is connect, help people meet one another, and interpret their stories. That’s still true.
Increasing numbers of today’s immigrants are missionaries from the global south. How can we in the North American church best receive them, serve them, learn from them, and correct them?
Mission today is in the migrant streams. And the migrant streams are to and from the cities. We should not just look at individuals in the city as individuals, but see them as often being sent here, or migrating here—as the tip of the iceberg. The rest of their family and roots are back home.
One thing whites need to do is not pull them out of their network, but rather see them as perhaps temporary residents, here in the school of life, for reconnecting back home (if possible.)
When you look at the way the Chinese are here, the Japanese are here, you have to say: this is not an accident. We’ve had missionaries in Japan since 1552, but Japan is one third of one percent Protestant; less than one percent if you include Catholic and Protestant.
So now that the Japanese are here, I don’t think that it’s so that we can absorb them into our church. It’s like the Diaspora Jews in Babylon and Alexandria: they’re learning things that they’re going to bring back from the Diaspora, to light the fire of the church back home.
We need a global worldview about mission. Since Abraham to the present God has used refugees and migrants to spread the gospel. We’ve now become a destination place for missionaries from the south, but that’s true on every continent. The biggest migration in human history is going on right now—rural to urban, South to North, East to West, etc.
In A Theology as Big as the City you discuss the story of Philemon, and what really struck me was the 57-year cycle of the events. [By the time the runaway slave, who had returned home to face his fate, ultimately became Bishop of Ephesus, the story had outlived most of its participants.] In the face of the complex problems of the world’s cities, how can we act in a sustainable fashion, beyond our own lifetimes?
The passion for that book, and the approach I took to understanding the city in scripture, was when I realized the evangelical church was fleeing the cities—literally—all claiming to have the right view of the Bible. And I said: if this is a game I’m not going to play it. But as it turned out, I didn’t have a theology as big as the city, either. Ironically, as a graduate of Moody, Trinity, Seattle Pacific and so on, I’m not alone.
The word “city” occurs in the Bible 1250 times. If you just pulled out the Jerusalem texts alone, we have 1100 years of Biblical history of Jerusalem. Just try to imagine all the different ways God spoke to that city over 1100 years—all the different methods, models, prophets, priests, kings, Jesus. Then you get some perspective of the depth of possibilities of being immersed in this in scripture.
That’s been a burden of mine, because I’ve seen people graduate out of these schools, these evangelical schools. Theology is in these neat boxes, and they really don’t have a worldview that is big enough.
The other thing I’m seeing is: most Christians are functional Unitarians. They live in Jesus, or they live in the Spirit, or, if they’re mainline, they live in “God the Creator”, and it comes out one-dimensional. I know evangelicals who would say, “Ray, I know that’s all in the Bible, but isn’t it true, that if 2 billion haven’t heard, evangelism is still the number one priority, chronologically and logically?”
There are two things wrong with that. One is: you’ve just set up a canon within the canon of scripture, and said “these texts are more important that these texts”. You’ve also devalued the calling of people, who are called to live into the work of the first person of the Trinity—the creator and sustainer—or the third person—the helper, the indweller, and said “the only member of the Trinity that is important is Jesus the redeemer. That’s what you have to get at all the time. Being in the city, you have to fight the reductionism. I like Augustine’s idea—and this is a paraphrase—that for the Christian the past is the present memory, and the future is the present possibility. He was writing about the Trinity. We live simultaneously in these three “time zones”.
You can never get trapped in a narrow slice of urban crisis. You really have to come with a hermeneutic that says, “This may be just a little slice of God’s huge agenda in the world.” That’s hard for us, because we’re so pragmatic. The money runs out.
How has your city, Seattle, changed since you first laid eyes on it?
It’s gone from Boeing to Microsoft. It’s gone from lunch-bucket builders of airplanes, to high tech. The place looks the same. It’s a fragile ecosystem. The other thing that’s happened it that it’s no longer the back door of the U.S. It’s the front door of Asia. It has turned around in my lifetime. Sixty percent of the world lives in Asia, and Seattle is part of the rim of the Asian world.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
Print
Email
Comments
Be the first one to add a comment.
To post a comment, please login or register