Abstract
Luke’s presentation of the encounter with a demon-possessed slave girl (Acts 16:16–40) is considered in intertextual dialogue with recalled missional experiences with children in Brazilian favelas. The study offers an example of the hermeneutical potential of scriptural-experiential dialogue to inform the missional enterprise, in this instance helping to expose the “lords” of enslaving contra-kingdom power structures that challenge missional enterprise in situations of deprivation, while also highlighting the transformative lordship of Jesus.
Missional experience, catalyzed by encounters with children in the context of social deprivation, prompted a rereading of the Gospel of Luke, which led me to identify in Luke’s work a missionally significant child-motif, particularly expressed in the child welcoming sign-act of Luke 9:46–48. 1 In this article I apply the insight to Luke’s presentation of Paul’s encounter with a demon-possessed slave girl (Acts 16:16–40). This passage, evaluated in its social and literary contexts, will be considered in intertextual dialogue with recalled missional experiences with children in Brazilian favelas. 2 The article offers an example of the hermeneutical potential of scriptural-experiential dialogue to inform the missional enterprise, in this instance helping to expose the “lords” of enslaving contra-kingdom power structures that challenge missional enterprise in situations of deprivation, while also highlighting the transformative lordship of Jesus.
Preparing for dialogue: The child of the favela in social context
In a surprisingly rare reference to children in the seminal Puebla Final Document, a compelling portrait is painted of the children mired in the Latin American poverty of the 1970s: “The situation of extreme poverty acquires real life faces . . . the faces of the young children, struck down by poverty before they are born, their chance for self-development blocked by irreparable mental and physical deficiencies; and of the vagrant children of our cities who are so often exploited, products of poverty and the moral disorganization of the family . . . the faces of young people, who are disoriented because they cannot find a place in society, and who are frustrated, particularly in marginal rural and urban areas, by the lack of opportunity to obtain training and work.” 3 More than twenty years later, at an urban mission conference hosted by the Baptist Theological Faculty of São Paulo, Brazil, I had the opportunity to present a review of my missional reflections on three years of engagement with favela communities in that city. The review included a profiling of favela life-experience adapted here to highlight impacts that I had observed in the lives of children, a profile that sadly continued to mirror the grim realities referenced in the Puebla statement.
Profile of a favela resident: A 1995 evaluation
The following list captures the harsh realities of life in a Brazilian favela: 4
Materially deprived: favela residents and their dependent children live in need of the most basic necessities such as food, clothing, adequate accommodation, and medical provision. 5
Socially de-structured: favela communities display a lack of family stability, driven by economic pressures and precarious commitment between adult partners. Children born from successive transitory partnerships commonly lack consistent male role models and suffer domestic discrimination or abuse from resident but unrelated adults. 6
Educationally and professionally ill-equipped: adolescent children find themselves excluded from educational or occupational opportunities that could offer the possibility of escape from a daily struggle for survival and are drawn all too readily into lives of criminal or self-destructive social behavior. 7
Threatened and insecure: personal and family life is characterized by successions of emotional, physical, and financial crises. Insecurity lays siege to the life of the favela resident. 8
Lacking personal and family privacy: inadequate family space threatens the physical and emotional safe-guarding of children. Inadequate community space renders individual, marital, and family life the public property of the favela. 9
Marginalized: the favela community is typically perceived as a social problem, and its residents, adults and children alike, are treated with disdain by police, authorities, and residents of the surrounding neighborhood. 10
In an insightful cameo of São Paulo life in the 1990s, Luíz Ruffato, an award-winning Brazilian social commentator, conveys something of the social chasm between favela and “regular” life. He presents a sixteen-year-old “favela girl,” making her way to buy some street food in the center of the city. He records her reaction to a serious-looking man whom she identifies as an evangelical churchgoer: “Ah!! a serious someone, believer, a home, little children. A long way from where the hard-life lives, houses sad shacks, sideways glances at dead bodies in the street on Monday, rapes on Saturdays, robberies on Tuesdays, on Wednesdays. . . .” 11
As I proceed to explore and reflect upon missional experiences in a specific situation that foregrounds favela children, I recall words of Jon Sobrino: “The faces of the poor become a positive mediation of the true, but hidden God, insofar as they are also a mediation of those false gods who choose death as the channel for their revelation.” 12
A recalled and recounted encounter: David and Tiago
The bullet that ripped through Tiago’s arm lodged in David’s twelve-year-old spine. The shooter, if he is still alive, probably can’t remember just another morning defending the boundaries of his drug turf that snaked along the shack-lined margins of the open sewer that formed the edge of the favela of Jardim Olinda. David would never forget. The wheelchair, from which he could no longer rise, would not let him. The chair could barely negotiate the rutted dirt roadway to reach the school that would no longer admit him, for his year-group met on an upper floor inaccessible to wheelchairs. During the day, from the doorway, he watched the friends in whose lives he could no longer share, and at night, through the shuttered windows, he listened to the drums and rituals of the Macumba spiritist center that faced the window just across the alley. David’s mother, a leader at the center, brought home the world of the spirits from across the alley to add yet another dark dimension to David’s world of economic, social, and physical marginalization.
Deprivation, compounded by disability, threatened to exclude David from involvement in the world beyond his wheelchair, but Tiago, motivated by his friendship and faith, insisted that this should not be so. Together with others from his church he carried David to take part in youth activities at the “church without walls,” where David was welcomed in the name of Jesus. He embraced IT skills, learning to program. He was daily carried up into his classroom while the church challenged the school’s continued exclusionist policy. Finally, with Tiago and the community looking on, I carried David down into the church’s open-air baptistry.
It was after David began volunteering to lead and train others in IT that antagonism from his spiritist mother became active. She persuaded David to move a case against the church for financial compensation for unpaid “work.” After a bruising year of accusations and mistrust, the case finally came to court, where the employment tribunal dismissed it out of hand. Personal faith and community confidence were gradually restored though hurt and damage had been caused. 13
Preparing for dialogue: The slave-child in Philippi in cultural and literary context
Like David, the unnamed slave girl of Philippi (Acts 16:16–18) suffered multiple marginalizations. 14 Also like David, her particular prehistory is not given, though the general context of abusive deprivation within which both children lived, whether in Philippi or the favela, can be helpfully researched. 15 In the status-obsessed Greco-Roman society of the first century CE, not unlike in the favela communities in the economically driven megacity of São Paulo nineteen hundred years later, children, outside of the affective relationships of family, were treated as socially inconsequential. 16 Deprived of family, the girl-child had lost even that possibility of affectional support and care. She was a slave, owned by lords (kyriois, Acts 16:16). Whether her condition was as a result of conquest or the desperate act of impoverished parents, we do not know, but at a time when the supply of slaves through conquest was diminishing, 17 it might well be that she began her life as a victim of the practice of exposing infants who were unwanted or could not be cared for. 18 It is well attested that in Greco-Roman culture unwanted infants, especially girls, were “dumped” to perish or to be picked up and raised to servitude of one form or another; they were basically nonpeople, owned and exploited for economic gain. 19
In a parallel with Jesus’s own journey to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51ff.), which is prefaced by the exorcism (9:37–43) 20 and affirmation (9:46–48) of children, Paul’s journey to confront the religious and sociopolitical powers-that-be in Jerusalem and finally Rome itself is grounded in the child-catalyzed experiences of Philippi.
At the outset it is worth noting two elements of missional significance. First, a superficial reading of the narrative might suggest that the slave girl, or rather the demon dominating her personality, is provoked into announcing the identity and mission of the Christian group as a reaction to their mere presence in the town. 21 However, Paul’s activity at the place of prayer (Acts 16:13–14) must have been witnessed, or at least heard about, by the slave girl because she announces that they “proclaim [present tense] . . . a way of salvation” (16:17). However, the subsequent missional activity takes place not in the relative security of “the place of prayer” or the house of Lydia (16:16). Rather, it is in the streets, before the public authorities of Philippi, in the prison and the jailer’s house, that the lordship of Jesus is announced and experienced. 22 This missional dynamic can also be identified in the narrative of David in São Paulo. It is the power structures of these “external” missional environments and their potential to affect the mission endeavor that will determine the course of the subsequent narratives.
Second, it was through the child and Paul’s challenge in the name of Jesus to the demonic and social powers oppressing her that effective missional engagement occurred. The strong foregrounding, or “motivated prominence,” 23 given to the girl (referenced eight times in Acts 16:16–18) is reaffirmed as the ground of all that will follow, when in 16:19 the antagonists of Paul are specifically identified as the lords of the slave girl. Luke’s presentation of the missional encounter with the slave girl should be read as the cause of the subsequent confrontations with other contra-kingdom power structures present in Philippi. 24
The missional impact of engaging with the child in the name of Jesus continues to ripple outward. The jailer and the city authorities, apparently in positions of power, are themselves shown to be living dominated by fearfulness of those to whom they are accountable, when each in turn appeared to have failed in their appointed civil responsibilities (Acts 16:27, 38). 25 The overawed jailer falls at the feet of Paul and Silas, addressing them as lords, but is immediately redirected by Paul to recognize that it is the greater lordship of Jesus that has been revealed, which he must accept in order to be saved (16:29–31). The superiority of the authority of Jesus is evidenced further in the backing down of the local lords, who are shown to have been misled by the lords of the slave girl and to have misused their authority under Roman law. The disciples, already provocatively identified as “slaves” of the Most High God 26 (a significant recognition of missional authority in the context of contrary power structures), are given permission to revisit the believing group in the household of Lydia (16:40), to encourage them before leaving the city unhindered to pursue their Lord’s missionary commission through Greece, Jerusalem, and ultimately to Rome.
Dialogue with deprivation: From favela to Philippi
A child’s-eye view of the power dynamics influencing David’s world can be helpfully presented by considering the social ecology of his situation. 27 As in Philippi, missional engagement began in personal interaction (microlevel involvement) and evolved through the mission community’s subsequent actions and reactions to the negative forces the children faced (mesolevel involvement). At the macrolevel, David’s drug-dealing shooter, who had consigned him to a wheelchair-bound social slavery, has a narrative role comparable with the violent and abusive conduct of those who had purchased the body and soul of the girl-child in pursuit of personal gain. At the exo-, or societal, level, both were victims of an unholy alliance of self-seeking interests that maintained the economic and attitudinal pressures that consigned David, child of the favela, and his first-century counterpart in Philippi to lives of multiple marginalizations. The negative dominance experienced by both children was challenged by disciples responding to the imperative of mission in the name of Jesus, who, following their Lord’s direction and example (Luke 9:48), reached out “in his name” and affirmed the kingdom value of a child in a society driven by self-seeking power and influence.
However, public challenges to the coercive spiritual and social powers-that-be could be expected to evoke a backlash. Despite the successful missional challenges to their local lordships, the contra-kingdom powers still retain coercive influence and are capable of bringing about hurtful consequences for the mission and missionaries of the Most High. Might such concerns lie behind Paul’s delay in responding to the persistent interference of the demon-possessed slave girl? Or perhaps he can anticipate the likely negative repercussions for the girl if her divinatory powers were to be lost—probable selling for prostitution or manual servitude? 28 Such moral dilemmas are not uncommonly faced by mission workers in conflicted social contexts.
Both in Philippi and in the favela, social prejudice is readily mobilized to serve the financial drivers of the predictable backlash. In Philippi the response, while based ostensibly upon an accusation of offending the mos maiorum (unwritten Roman custom), was driven by the financial loss sustained by the girl’s owners (Acts 16:19) and exploited the widespread prejudice against Jews that was typically prevalent among Roman army veterans like those who had resettled in large numbers in the colony. 29 Under pressure from such prejudice, the summary judgment gained against Paul and Silas from the colony’s magistrates was also undoubtedly politically expedient, given the magistrates’ accountability for social order.
Avarice, prejudice, and expediency can be seen at work, no less clearly, in the self-serving actions of David’s family and school. In eschewing these contra-kingdom attitudes, the favela disciples’ affirmation of the value and dignity of the child resonated with the missional call to “welcome this child” in the name of Jesus (Luke 9:48) and formed a basis to disarm the suspicion and threats being experienced and to reestablish a positive missional relationship with the community as a whole.
Concluding observations
“Whoever welcomes this child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me” (Luke 9:48). Luke, in both gospel and Acts, highlights the potential of child-focused missional encounters to catalyze significant demonstrations of kingdom transformation. My own experience in favela communities in São Paulo and across Latin America has echoed this observation. 30 The web of coercive and exploitative power structures experienced in missional engagement with David in the favela of Jardim Olinda stimulated and informed the reading of the encounter with the slave-girl in Philippi. The resulting dialogue serves to alert the missionary reader-disciple to recognize and to be prepared to confront and contend with the contra-kingdom power exercised by those structures as they pursue their own missionary journeys into communities of social and spiritual deprivation to become transformative agents of the Lord Jesus and the One who sent him.
Footnotes
Notes
Author biography