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Hunkering down

Andy Macpherson

When Canadian writer Farley Mowat was a young lieutenant serving with the Canadian forces during World War II, he wrote many letters to his father back in Canada. These letters and his father’s replies were eventually put together in a book titled My Father’s Son. In one of those letters, dated May 26, 1944, Mowat wrote:

“There is an astounding change in the enemy. He is still a good fighter – still wants and hopes to win, but now he is becoming a mole, a dweller under the earth. . . . The faces of most of our recent prisoners were white and pasty as cutworms. . . . These men have become so hole conscious that even when miles behind the lines they dig and dwell in noisome pits. . . . His weapons . . . have changed. . . . He no longer builds fast cruiser tanks for use in the attack, but immense, almost immobile steel fortresses like the Royal Tiger. His . . . artillery is now generally protected with thick armoured walls and mounted on tank chassis for ease of retreat. Immense quantities of steel are going into prefabricated defences. . . . Had the . . . troops . . . been . . . in exposed fighting positions, we would have had to fight a different and much costlier battle. Put a soldier in a bomb-proof hole and he’ll tend to hunker down and hope that hell will pass him by. But put him in a slit trench and he’ll fight back because he knows he has to fight or be obliterated. . . . Soldiers on the defensive . . . can do only one of three things. Surrender, flee or cover up. No one of these responses will win the war, but the coverup response may hold off defeat a little longer.”

As I read Mowat’s letter, it occurred to me that we could draw some disturbing parallels between the experience of the German army and that of the average evangelical church in North America today. There are some exceptions, but, from the look of it, “hunkering down in hope that hell will pass us by” seems to be the favoured strategy that churches are adopting in order to survive the war that rages around us. With few exceptions, most of our time, energy and money are spent down in the bunker on bunker programs, bunker maintenance, bunker worship and bunker safety procedures. Our own survival, comfort and protection seem to be the most important things to us. Our evangelism efforts are often little more than poking our heads up onto the battlefield, seeing the devastation and filth in our culture and hunkering back down again in fear that we might get bloody, dirty or even killed. We know that as soldiers we are trained for war and should be up there in the battle, but we content ourselves with the belief that if people really wanted shelter, they should wise up and come to join us in the bunker. Our willingness to have them join us in our bunker is communicated in the form of invitations to our services, Christian concerts, Easter and Christmas programs and church picnics. We seldom seem to notice or care that we get very few responses to our offer of “safety” – except perhaps from some bored people from other bunkers. Why aren’t people flocking to join our subterranean communities? Maybe Mowat’s description of “white and pasty faces” describes us more than we would like to admit.

Living in an underground shelter could not have been all that pleasant. I imagine they were stagnant, lifeless places untouched by fresh air and reeking with the smell of fear. The men hunkering down in them could not have been a happy bunch. They would have been bored mostly, and, without much to do, they would have probably turned on each other in endless bickering over petty issues of bunker governance and music selection. Without a common purpose to unite them, I should think they would eventually see their fellow soldiers as annoying threats to their own personal comfort and space rather than as comrades on whom their lives depended. Their world must have shrunk down to the size of their bunker.

Could it be that outsiders see the results of bunker life in us when we poke our heads out from our closed, purposeless communities and wisely choose to live out in the open air instead? Perhaps our version of “safety” isn’t all that appealing to them.

Perhaps, if we bunker dwellers were to be completely honest, we would have to admit that we long for the fresh air of freedom, even if it means we have to give up personal safety to find it. What if God never planned for us to be in positions of safety? What if faith was never intended to be a steel cage where we protect ourselves from the risks of full engagement with the world? What if the only way that God allowed us to be safe was alongside Him in the firing line? I honestly think that our brand of risk-free faith really isn’t faith at all, at least not the faith that Jesus gave us to live by. In His upside-down Kingdom, it would be just like Him to have the safest places be the ones that look the most precarious and full of danger. What have we done to faith when we make it out to be so comfortable, safe and “user friendly”? We may very well have ripped the heart out of the good news to the point that we are now offering a hopeless world a hopeless gospel.

The wonder of God’s good news is that He entered into our weakness, not to remove us from our world of pain and struggle but to make the pain and struggle have meaning. We subvert this work when we assume He came to make our life comfortable instead of to make our lives count. The faith Christ offers is not a safe faith, for it requires that we trust Him. To do this will mean our own natural desire for security and safety must be released. The world grudgingly respects and sometimes even honours faith that risks itself for others, but it rightly scorns those who talk about faith and yet hunker down in fear behind the thick, safe armour of their own particular bunker.

The hope we have to offer the hopeless is this: God longs to come beside them in the midst of their struggles and be their strength. In turn, He offers them the opportunity to come alongside Him in His efforts to make creation whole again. He is graciously offering them a relationship with Him that will give them a reason to live. When we as the church hunker down away from the battle of life, we hide away from Him, for He is in the battle to bring wholeness to a broken world. When we hide away, we show the world that we have faith in a god who is not worth trusting. But if we invite them to battle along with us as we follow God on His terms, we offer them hope for something better. In this kind of living, we will not be looking “white and pasty” or fearful, but will be able to look people in the eye when we make claims about our God’s greatness.

If we fight alongside Him, we may very well die. In fact, a good case could be made that if we truly follow Him, we will die. But if we remain hidden within our bunkers, we will not truly live – or inspire anyone else to.

Andy Macpherson is a member of Central Heights MB Church in Abbotsford, B.C.

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Last modified November 30, 2001.

© 2001 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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