When Humility is Necessary

One of the greatest opportunities afforded to me during this journey has been an opportunity to examine American Christianity from the outside. I have experienced Christianity in many different forms in the US. In high school church was very big and followed the traditional evangelical formula for church, and in college I had the opposite experience, a small intimate church environment with a very inclusive approach to Christianity that focused on Christianity as an academic discipline as well as a practiced religion. Westminster today is kind of a hybrid of the two in a suburban setting. In Haiti there isn’t really anything in America that compares, so I have gotten a very fresh perspective on American church. The services are much longer, and they are more direct and less theoretical than in the US, but the church services themselves are a much smaller part of the entire church experience because the mission is so central to the community. Throughout all of these experiences, there have been some lessons I have been taught that have stuck with me, and others that made a strong initial impression but have not lasted through my spiritual development. One lesson I’ve gleamed from much of my personal study is humility. One of my favorite verses, Matthew 18:4 tells us that “whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven”. Humility is a central theme throughout the Bible. In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis writes that pride is the chief vice of all humanity, and that the opposite of pride, the principal virtue, is humility. 

Humility has been a common theme in certain church environments I have experienced and has been totally remiss in others. It wasn’t until I was in college that I even realized the central importance of humility, and at Westminster today the topic has become much more common than it ever was before. Unfortunately though, when I look out at American Christianity as a whole, I don’t see humility as much as I would like. There is a lot of discussion over homosexuality for instance, and though this is an important topic, homosexuality is mentioned only once in the New Testament while humility is a pretty consistent theme throughout. Yet more times than not homosexuality is discussed while humility is left behind. Since Rob Bell’s book Love Wins came out in 2011, the topic of universalism and heaven and hell has been very popular, yet many of those discussions leave out humility.

In Haiti however, humility is seen in almost every church activity. It is a topic preached from the pulpit, but it is seen every where throughout the mission. Most meetings begin with a prayer asking God to take control of the meeting and drive it the way he wants it to be driven, and any success of the mission is attributed to God. Pastor Pierre has spoken a lot about how God knows what is best for him and the community, and his job is to just follow along. He is very confident that there are only two forces that move the mission forward: God and his wife Erimette, not himself. Humility is also a huge piece of what the mission is all about. The pastors on staff have devoted their lives to the mission and work tirelessly not for themselves but for the work of the mission. The pastors on staff could work anywhere, but they chose to work here, putting in many more hours than they would at another church, because they really believe in the higher purpose of the mission’s work. Many of the teachers are products of the mission and have returned because they believe in the work of the mission. The mission pays well, but most of the people who work here are here because they see their work as being apart of something greater than themselves.

Doing this type of development work, serving the poorest of the poor in a place like Haiti, is extremely difficult. Figuring out how to help people without them becoming dependent on your work or without making things worse feels impossible at times. And once you do figure out a course of action, the work is extremely daunting. No matter how well planned any project is, unpredictable challenges will arise making the project more even more complicated. There is not always a clear path overcoming these obstacles, and many the only thing to be done is to modify the project’s outcomes. When I first came down I had what I thought would be an awesome plan for a vocational school that would be able to serve over 100 students by the end of the year. It seemed like a great plan when I wrote it, but as I integrated myself into the culture here I learned that most of my ideas needed to be adjusted, modified, or completely thrown out. In some cases I had to re-evaluate my goals. There is no way I would be able to create a school that could have served 100 students by the time I left. I tried and tried to figure out a way, but in the end I had to admit that I set a goal that was too high, and I had to readjust it. I could have pushed my plan forward and done what I wanted, I could have demanded that we hire more teachers, but then my project would have been a disaster. Not only would the school not have sustained itself in the long run, but it would have put the mission back financially by sinking so many resources into a bad plan. In order to be effective, in order to put together a school that would really serve the community, I had to take each step with great caution. I had to redesign my plans at certain stages, and at other stages I had to lower my goals and admit that I had been too ambitious. I always had to evaluate whether the project in its current form and its projected form was serving the community adequately. In this business, any time you think “I have planned the perfect project that does not need to be adjusted in anyway”, you’re about to fail. Humility is not just a quality we espouse to, but a virtue necessary for success.  

Humility isn’t easy, it is probably the most difficult virtue to uphold. Humility means admitting your own failures, fessing up to what we have done wrong, and taking ownership of it all. Humility doesn’t feel good, it usually feels pretty lousy, but fortunately humility isn’t the end of the story. After humility comes redemption. Only when we understand our own shortcomings, only when we acknowledge our own inabilities, can we begin resolve them. Only when we acknowledge that our plan for a vocational school might be misguided or poorly planned out, can we begin to correct it and create something that is truly great.