At an event dubbed “Jamaica Pray”, held in Half-Way-Tree last Sunday evening, the Jamaica Umbrella Group of Churches (JUGC) made good on their promise to seek divine intervention with regard to the severe crime epidemic that is tearing apart the fabric of the Jamaican society. The former minister of national security, Peter Bunting, along with the incumbent, Robert “Bobby” Montague, was in attendance. One of the first questions that came to my mind is what percentage of churches in Jamaica are represented by the JUGC? How far has the ‘umbrella’ been spread to include such denominations as the Roman Catholics and Anglicans? I ask these questions not to be disruptive, inquisitive, pedantic, or churlish but just to ascertain the level of participation in this initiative that the minister was seeking.

Furthermore, the questions are aimed at calling attention to a common misconception in Jamaica that when one speaks of a particular grouping of churches one is talking about the collective Christian experience in Jamaica. Not even the Jamaica Council of Churches, which has the largest grouping of churches in Jamaica, speaks for all Jamaican Christians. So when the minister speaks to a particular group, as he did to the JUGC, and seeks to solicit help in dealing with a national problem such as crime, he ought to be clear as to how far his appeal is being heard.

I raise this concern because people are not always willing to admit that the Church is one of the most divided institutions in society; that it feigns unity but its various denominations are fractious, even within their own denominational settings, but even more so in their relationship with those outside their fellowship.

Where it relates to prayer and seeking divine intervention a number of things need to be said. At the risk of offending the holy sensibilities of some Christians who may read this, it must be said that, while each person must own his own spiritual sense of who he or she is in Christ, there are some approaches to prayer by the Christian community that are plain out of sync with what the Lord requires. To begin with, most prayers tend to be petition-oriented. We go to God because we have a problem, we need something and we believe he can grant it. If we are desperate about the thing we crave, as in the matter of crime, the decibels to God will be raised to their highest level; the public screaming and “bawling out” to God will become more evocative. The “Jamaica Pray” initiative must be seen in this context.

It is a truism that crime, a product of human conduct, behaviour and initiative, is tearing the country apart. Like his immediate predecessor at the ministry of national security, Montague, playing on the sensibilities of a supposedly Christian nation, believes that the answer, or at least part of it, lies in beseeching the Almighty to come to the aid of the nation. This is where I am going to offend a lot of people when I say that this is hardly likely to happen — at any rate in the way we may expect God to intervene.

There is a mistaken notion of God as a “deux ex machina” who goes around correcting every problem that pops up in one’s life, or that of a nation or anywhere else in the world. I can see God correcting imbalances in nature since as human beings we do not possess the power or the capacity to undo or restrain the forces of nature, except to take cover or batten down like in a hurricane. But happenstances, which are largely the fabrication of human beings, are within the remit of human beings to correct. It is an insult to the divine intelligence to believe that God is going to stick a finger in every dyke of human misery and plug every hole therein. God is not a “stopgap” God who intervenes whenever we want him to, and to be forgotten when things are going well. If we are expecting God to magically turn up and come among us and thereby correct the mess in the heart of every criminal and divert criminal intentions to good, thus turning the crime problem around, I make bold to say that this will not happen.

And this after he has already shown us how to live. In Jesus Christ he has shown us the way of love, justice, compassion and how we can secure peace. In Micah, in the Old Testament, he made it clear through the prophetic voice, that the divine requirement for the good, prosperous and peaceful life is to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God (Micah 6: 8). Through the work of the eighth century prophets culminating in the life and work of Jesus, he has shown how the poor and downtrodden are to be treated.

Having being weighed in the scale of justice, mercy, compassion and love for the downtrodden, how have we fared in Jamaica? When the truth is faced we are a society under indictment and one would even say divine judgement. Since Britain allowed us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling in 1962, we have built a society of corruption and injustice; we have marginalised whole communities in our lust for power; we have exploited or allowed the exploitation of the poor and weak in inner-city communities in order to perpetuate our hold over them and thus secure power; we have allowed people to live in subhuman conditions surrounded by zinc fences and in filth and squalor. While all of this is happening, we have presided over the evolution of a society that has the most glaring income inequality of any country in the Caribbean.

In situations like these do not expect God to rend the heavens any time soon and come to do our bidding. Prayer in such contexts is tantamount to an evasion of personal responsibility for our own behaviour. I get real upset when people apply the easy solution of prayer to seemingly intractable problems. We approach God about our personal problems in the same way we do our national. God becomes a “boops” to be “nyammed” out. It is a cop out that flies in the very face of God. Instead of putting on a public show of annoyance about crime and appearing to be doing something about it by bawling out to God, it would be of greater service to the country if the umbrella group of churches would seek to persuade other Christians to come together to discuss a common initiative to use its enormous resources to tackle poverty in the inner-city areas of our country. This is the kind of intervention with which God would be pleased, because we would at least be using that great instrument that God gave us, the brain, to its best effect and outcome.

Such an initiative would be an enterprise based on what I would describe as functional love, the putting into practice (praxis) the agapeic love of which human compassion and understanding of the intrinsic worth and value of the individual is based. But we know what the problem would be for such an initiative to get off the ground among the churches in Jamaica. We know that such functional love cannot operate in an atmosphere of division, the protection of denominational loyalty, or subservience to traditions and practices. It demands a far greater openness and involvement than can be readily seen.

Together, the churches in Jamaica own more real estate — and thus more wealth — than any other individual or entity save the government. Yet the unity for which Christ prayed (John 17), and which alone can elicit the full blooms of functional love, continues to escape us as each denomination brings its own prejudices and biases to the work they purport to do for the Lord. The prophet Isaiah envisaged a day when the lamb would lie down with the wolf and the child will play with the snake. Can we envisage a day in Jamaica when a Church of God minister would preach from a Roman Catholic pulpit and a Roman Catholic priest from a Seventh-day Adventist’s? Can we envisage a day when we can release our buildings from a culture of holiness and allow any Christian grouping to be able to come into them to hold a class for homeless mothers and for kids from the inner city? Can we envisage a day when in Jamaica we do not judge each other on the basis of their denominational cleavages but on who they are striving to be in Christ? These are the hallmarks of functional love and until we really begin to live as Christians as we have been shown and taught, no amount of praying to God to correct our own excesses will suffice.

Dr Raulston Nembhard is a priest and social commentator. Send comments to the Observer orstead6655@aol.com.