By: Jim Taylor

Who you talk to

Years ago, when I was a brash young writer, I was sent to Brazil. In those days, Brazil was firmly in the clutch of the military. Thanks to church connections, I met people who would otherwise never have talked to me. I wouldn’t even have known how to contact them.

        So I talked to Fred Morris, a Methodist pastor. Fred introduced me to Catholic archbishop Helder Camara, a chronic burr under the military saddle. Camara got me into a blood donor clinic, run by his church, really functioning as a birth control clinic.

        Fred Morris said it was dangerous for him to talk to me. I didn’t realize how dangerous, until later. The police came for him. He was arrested. Imprisoned without trial. Beaten. Tortured, with electrodes clipped to his testicles.

        I talked to a labor lawyer. He wouldn’t talk in his apartment. He wouldn’t come to my host’s apartment. He would only talk while we strolled in a park. Near a playground, with children’s voices shrilling around us. To avoid electronic eavesdropping.

        I talked to people in squalid favelas. Family members had disappeared. By coincidence, they had protested their conditions shortly before.

        I talked to their pastors. I heard about the pressures that prevented people from speaking out.



Different credentials

Not long before, I had worked in a Canadian radio station. As a reporter, I made friends with the local RCMP detachment. I went jogging with them, three times a week. I drank beer with the staff sergeant.

        In Brazil, I realized how different his contacts would have been from mine. He belonged to Rotary. He was on the executive of the local Chamber of Commerce. He would have visited boardrooms and management suites. He would have been welcome in police stations and army barracks.

        He would have encountered quite a different Brazil.

        The truth often depends on who you talk to. You’ll get quite a different story from Jews in Jerusalem, than from Palestinians in Gaza.

        Around the time that apartheid was collapsing in South Africa, I was assigned to interview some Canadian bank executives. They felt unfairly under fire. Canadian churches were protesting against Canadian banks loaning Canadian money to support a racist regime in South Africa.

        It was good business, the bankers insisted. According to their sources, South Africa was thriving.



Creating credibility

Business people talk to other business people. Diplomats talk to other diplomats. Nobody important talks to the nobodies.

        History suggests that the churches of the world, committed to working with the people, have often grasped truth better than people who inhabit walnut-panelled boardrooms.

        The most important function of the worldwide Christian church may not be weekly worship. Or prayer. Or even fund-raising for good causes – service clubs do that as effectively. The church’s most important function may be its international network of connections.

        Other groups also work with people at ground level – social workers, teachers, nurses… But they often lack an international structure that enables people in other countries to hear their story – and to believe it.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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