3. Hephzibah House

If you ever want a cheap place to stay in New York city, try Hephzibah House. It’s only $25 a night, right near Central Park at about West 80th street. Four blocks away is the Amsterdam Pool Hall, one block to a Tibetan store, and in the vicinity of several reasonable restaurants.

The name Hephzibah comes in Isaiah where the Lord says that the land will no more be desolate but a delight to the Lord.

When the missions committee of Grace Church, New York, began a home for departing missionaries, this is the name they gave it. How appropriate. These people were sure a delight to the Lord.

When Constance and I have stayed there, we have always been struck by the pictures at the landings of the four-storey home. Each landing gives a different category of personnel. Some were women, some men, some going east to China, some south to Brazil. Some of the pictures showed the ships at the New York wharves and the missionaries in their farewells to families.

Truly they are touching scenes on those walls, inspiring.

They went, if one may attribute uniform qualities to each of them, with a love for the Lord, a love for the people in their lands of destination, a thorough-going study of the Word, and probably some training in medicine, in music, and in linguistics.

They also took with them an incomplete view of the cosmology. This left them unprepared for meeting with faiths that saw their god in stones and wind, in statues and hills.

The reactions must have been multifaceted. For some they looked the other way and preached the Gospel. Others vociferously condemned and proclaimed truth. Some showed them as the source of false wisdom and pointed to the only wise God. Others moved into power encounters where the place of the gods was destroyed and the church of the living God constructed.

Each of these reactions can be found in the Bible and in the early history of the church. The difference is that those then knew what they were encountering, those more recently had received a world reduced to two tiers – the spiritual and the material – by the residual influence of Descartes and the Enlightenment.

In some of the lands where the ships from Hephzibah people landed, they absorbed the best of the teaching and themselves injected the truths to manage the paganism of their past. Other lands had such a deep life of the spirit world that the shallow cosmos of the western missionary has left wounds, distortions, resentment, and the need to re-educate. That was the legacy Achebe recorded in his narrative.