An Interview with Tony Weedor: September 15, 2011
“If anyone was born after 1972, they have never seen peace in Liberia.”
At Aqueduct Project, we talk a lot about theological education—the need for it, our duty to provide it, the best way to do it. It’s easy for us to say education’s important, but sometimes it’s better to hear it from those who have lived the stories we can only repeat.
We hope you’ll take the time to listen to Tony Weedor’s story. For those who may not be able to access the video or simply prefer to read about the events he describes, please read on as we follow Tony’s narrative and engage some of his ideas.
Tony Weedor was born and raised in Liberia, a West African republic founded in 1847 by former slaves from the Americas. Although the freed slaves comprised only a small percentage of the population, they maintained firm control of the government and treated the indigenous peoples under them with the same disregard they had experienced while slaves in the West.
This Americo-Liberian government would last over 130 years, continuing all the while to recycle political power among the former slaves’ descendents, a minority that comprised barely 5% of the population. Dissatisfaction mounted until a group of indigenous people brought the Americo-Liberian government to an end by military coup in 1980. The transition was anything but peaceful, and eventually the country was drawn into a bitter civil war that would leave a quarter of a million people dead and many thousands more displaced.
Tony Weedor was one of those thousands.
Tony and his wife had been Christians for years, and Tony was known locally as a pastor and church-planter when the fighting suddenly intensified around them, forcing the couple to take their 14-month-old daughter and flee. In one day, he and 22,000 others lost everything—their homes, pictures, jobs, mementos.
The only thing he took with him was a five-volume set—the complete works—of Francis Schaeffer.
Killing people was a kind of sick entertainment for the rebel soldiers. Tony learned later that at one checkpoint where the refugees were streaming through the soldiers asked a friend of his if he was a Christian. When his friend said yes, the soldiers decided to shoot him. “Don’t waste a bullet,” one of the rebels said. They beheaded him with a machete instead.
Tony and his family was on the run for 3 months, sleeping in bushes, frightened every day for their lives. They were eventually able to reach a village where Tony had started a church and the people knew him and his family. They sheltered there for a short while, meeting with the church and trying to encourage one another. Life was so uncertain, they took to holding funeral-like services for people who planned to leave the area after church meetings, knowing they might never see their friends alive again.
However, this stop wasn’t a long-term solution. The safest course was to join the flood of refugees crossing the border into the comparative calm of the Ivory Coast. When Tony and his family finally reached the Ivory Coast a year after their journey began, his normally 150-pound frame had worn down to a scant 85 pounds.
The family found their way to a refugee camp in the Ivory Coast and discovered to their shock that begun to work an eerie change in the political situation. Many rebel soldiers—their former tormentors—were now refugees in the same camp, and when a prominent missionary in the camp left Tony in charge of distributing food and medicine to his fellow refugees, he couldn’t help but notice some of the former soldiers in the line before him.
Men who had murdered his friends. Men who had destroyed his family’s life. Men who had poured gasoline on his uncle and his uncle’s wives and burned them alive.
Now these former soldiers were just as hungry and lost as he had been.
Despite his faith, the change in position offered an almost irresistible opportunity to show the rebels how it felt to be powerless. He imagined withholding food and medicine from his enemies.
Then his wife said something he would remember word for word more than a decade later. “Let me know when you are done getting even with them,” she said. “Let me know the difference between you and them.”
He gave food to his enemies while the tears ran down his face. He gave them the mercy they never gave others.
Through connections in the Christian community, Tony was able to apply for and receive a scholarship to a seminary in Colorado. They left the refugee camp on a Friday and arrived in Colorado on Saturday, an unreal study in contrasts. After completed his degree at Denver Theological Seminary, Tony and his wife felt called to use their experiences and training to minister to refugees, first in Ethiopia and then in Sudan and Somalia.
As Tony says, the United Nations can come in and offer amnesty to those who will put down their weapons, but they can’t teach people to forgive. Even today the UN keeps over 10,000 personnel stationed in Liberia and the peacekeeping work there is one of the most expensive ongoing operations of its kind. “It will take hundreds of years before reconciliation and forgiveness make sense in Liberia,” Tony says. Fortunately the power of God doesn’t always follow human timetables. And however long it takes Tony Weedor is committed to being part of the work.
To serve this purpose, he founded an institute for theological education in Liberia where he and other experienced Christian leaders help to prepare new pastors for the ministry. His institute is focused on reconciliation, a journey that can only happen when we begin to understand who God is and who we are as human beings.
The work of reconciliation—both spiritual and more broadly political—begins with education. Tony Weedor recognized the enormous value of education when he chose to take the works of Schaeffer with him when he fled his home, carrying them the many months and miles he walked after his escape. Now he continues to list educational resources among the top needs of his young institute, despite the fact that they also lack electricity and running water.
These are the people and the stories that inspire us at Aqueduct Project. We are so blessed and privileged to serve our brothers and sisters who have so much to teach us about faith and faithfulness. As you think of this story in the coming days, please pray for Tony Weedor and his work in Liberia and please consider how you might get more involved in supporting theological education around the world.