Areas for Repentance

By Ian Johnson, September 2002, revised June 2004

These recommendations are by no means final. Discussion is invited, either through the discussion forum mailing list (link given below) or by private e-mail. Volunteer assistance is welcome!

1. Pride. Wanting religion our way, with catsup and cheese, hold the onions, rather than a relationship with the sovereign God.
2. Fear. Both individually and corporately, we fear losing control and not having our needs (primarily the material ones) met. Christians fear that, if we do what God says, instead of what seems right to provide for ourselves, God won't take care of us. Christians also fear social embarassment, but the dominant fear here in Topeka is a fear of material loss (see "Greed," below). Churches in Topeka have an inordinate fear that, if they really step out into proclaiming the whole counsel of God, members will be offended and find another church. ("Musical church" is a BIG problem here). When the Pentecostal Revival tried to start here 100 years ago, it was met with stifling fear. Churches also fear that, if they move beyond ordinary church "programs" into reaching out to the outsiders God would have them reach, people will leave and church budgets won't be met. After all, Jesus came to preach the Good News to the "poor," and the "poor," by definition, can't put much in the offering plate. Churches and church leaders also fear working together as they know they should because cooperation could lead to loss of both control and members. Finally, this same spirit of fear shows through in the policies of our city and county government and our city's economic leaders. Our city leaders make a big show, particularly around election time, of trying to attract new business to our stagnant city. But, every time an outside major manufacturing business has expressed an interest in Topeka in the last 30 years, the city has gone into overdrive creating bureaucratic raodblocks to the new development. Outside firms have complained publicly, in the press, that they have never seen a city as resistant to new industrial development as Topeka. Those in control of Topeka fear losing that control. This fear is an outgrowth of fear in the churches.
3. Injelitance. Incompetence plus jealousy. See page linked below for further explanation.
4. Double-mindedness and indecision. This sin dates to the very founding of the city by free-staters who, for the most part, while not wanting slavery here, also wanted to keep black people out of Kansas and keep those already here inferior. But this double-mindedness spills over into many areas other than race relations. For instance, there are many, many churches in Topeka, and some have very nice buildings. But we tend to want to keep them relatively ineffective—able to meet our social and emotional needs, but not so strong that they really change our lives, interfere with our business, or evangelize effectively enough to make us mix with people not like us. See the next point, below.
5. Lack and/or outright rejection of vision. Jesus commanded us to go out and make disciples of all nations. Yet churches here, though repeating Jesus’ command, often seem to plan their programs on the assumption that their whole target population is people who are already in church somewhere, and that the unsaved simply will never be interested. Programs often seem designed either to steal sheep or to prevent sheep-stealing, rather than to reach the lost. Structured, event-based programs also have a tendency to proliferate to the extent that church members who are fully involved in them will have little time to do anything but do their necessary daily work and go to church events. Little time or energy is left to develop relationships with the unsaved outside the members’ secular workplaces (where evangelism is unwelcome). “Evangelism” is thus largely reduced to a matter of asking people we don’t know very well, if at all, to attend church events in which they are usually not interested. We conclude from their disinterest in our church events that they will never be interested in a relationship with Christ, which may not be true at all. I recognize that this is a problem throughout the spoiled church in the United States, but I also recognize that there are cities here that have revivals going or large, fast-growing churches in which vision has replaced comfortable dependence on programmed events.
6. Racism. When it enters the Church, as it has from the start in Topeka (see discussion below), racism is an outright denial of the Gospel. Jesus died to make us one Body, of which He is the head, not two or three or five hundred separate bodies. See, e.g, Ephesians 2:11-22 (Jesus died to reconcile all Jews and Gentiles who would believe into one body, making peace); Galatians 3:26-29 (racial and cultural barriers don’t exist in Christ, since we have all clothed ourselves with Him); Colossians 3:8-11 (same); John 13:34-35 (love is the command which identifies us to the world as disciples); John 17:20-24 (Jesus prayed that all believers would be one, perfected in unity); I Corinthians 10:15-17 (we are all one body because we partake of the one bread, our sharing in the Body of Christ); I Corinthians 12:12-13 (we are all members of one body); I Corinthians 12:22-27 (the Holy Spirit gives each of us different gifts so that we will recognize that we need each other, and there will be no division in Christ’s Body); I Corinthians 11:23-30 (partaking of the communion, the fellowship, of the Lord’s table, unworthily, “not discerning the Lord’s body,” brings judgment leading to sickness and death).
7. Adoption into the Church of the idea that people are just “human resources” for the benefit of the human church organization’s program. Church members are not church property and don’t exist to service the church organization. Jesus died for us individually to make us one in Him, and our unity comes from Him, not from our human church organizations. The relationship between a local church and its members is very different from that between a business corporation and its employees, and we shouldn’t borrow the business idea of “human resources” into the church. But, to a large extent, churches have.
8. Greed, manifest in approval of exploitation of people for profit. Greed, though a commonly praised attribute in the US generally for some years now, was manifest in Topeka and in Kansas from their founding in ways that are more pronounced here than they are in the history of many other cities and states. The flip side of greed is the spirit of poverty. Both the rich and the poor here are affected by the spirit of greed, the conviction or intenal voice that insists that individual worth is determined by the value of one's possessions. For the rich elite of Topeka, this spirit of greed manifests as exploitation of the poor and a fear of losing control of the ability to exploit. Topeka was founded to exploit travelers and Native Americans. It still has nearly the lowest average wage rates of any city its size in the United States, and city leadership actively resists any economic development that might come in from outside and change that. The only new business that's welcome in Topeka is retail and fast food—i.e., minimum wage businesses. For the poor of Topeka, the spirit of greed manifests itself as hopelessness (since, having nothing, they are "worthless," even to most of the churches!) and as casino and lottery gambling. Topeka supports three nearby indian casinos.
9. We also need to develop some form of practical repentance for past genocide against Native Americans in the founding of the state and the railroads that built the city’s economy (see below) and some remaining social prejudice against them.

Links to closely related pages

Home page and site index

Injelitance

Summary of the founding of Topeka and its present implications.

Brief summary of race relations in Topeka to 1915

Past treatment of Native Americans as a stronghold

Link to Yahoo discussion forum