Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category

Heart and Mind

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Zeal is well and good, as long as it is tempered with knowledge.  We who teach and preach must be careful not to call people to heart-felt commitment and excitement without explaining the need to go on to maturity via careful and adequate instruction.  In fact, to challenge people to zeal and not provide the means to grow in their understanding is less than responsible.  Too many people begin like a flame only to burn out with the passing of time or when things become difficult.  Zeal and knowledge must walk hand-in-hand.

Part of the problem is a common opinion in the church that knowledge destroys or undermines faith.  I have heard people say …
“If you study theology, you will loose your passion for God.”
“God looks on the heart more than the mind.”
“Doctrine only confuses a person.”
“Simple faith is the best faith.”
“Knowledge puffs up.
And while many of us would deny such a lopsided opinion, our emphasis on a commitment response in contrast to our lack of attention to and opportunity for discipleship and formation indicates what we really think.

And yet, Jesus clearly makes the point that we are to love God with more than the heart (Luke 10:27).  His definition of love of God includes the mind (as well as soul and strength).  I believe he did this for several reasons.

  • We are more than one-dimensional beings, and thus, truly loving God requires more than an emotional response.  Loving God requires more than a partial-person commitment. It demands our whole being.
  • The heart can lead us astray.  We can actually dishonor God through uninformed actions while all the while acting with fervor and passion.  The heart is not to be trusted to act alone.
  • An intellectual pursuit of God provides the necessary refinement of our misconceptions and development of our capacity to believe.
  • When the circumstances of life become difficult and problems sap our emotions, it is knowledge of who God is and how he acts and the truths of the faith that can sustain us.  Feelings wane, emotions come and go, and thus, we need more than a ‘heart-tether’ for faith.

Because it is convenient to measure commitment to God by emotion, passion, or fervor in worship, we assume that if people are not ‘excited’, or continually smiling, or animated in their worship that something is personally wrong with them or there is something lacking in their love for God.  Emotions, at best, tell only part of the story, and, at worst, they can be deceptive.  In the end, the ultimate proof that we belong to and follow hard after Jesus is our steadfastness and faithfulness to him in the best and worst of situations.  Such faithfulness requires our whole person – heart, mind, and soul.

So, we must …
-actively and consistently read the Bible, both Old and New Testaments
-embrace life’s questions and not push them under the table
-avail ourselves of opportunities to gather with other believers in study, conversation, and questioning
-read the opinions of others (books, articles, commentaries)
-ask God to catch our mind up with our heart and vice-versa

If I am to faithfully face the challenges of the present day and be active in my witness of Christ to those around me, I must diligently pursue God in both my zeal and understanding.

Posted in Change, Culture, Formation | 3 Comments »

Service

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

 ”The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.”
    Mark 10:45 

Just as Christ came as a servant, service is the role of the church.  And yet, the church is constantly tempted to be a triumphant and victorious community that aligns itself with power, privilege, and place rather than finding itself in the places of service.  There is a fine line between the the “victorious Christian life” and the assumption that privilege and rights belong to us irrespective of others.  An indicator of when we have crossed that line is when we expect to be served by the powers in society, to be at the head of the table, to be respectable and honored – to be socially advantaged. 

History shows that the people of God usually do not voluntarily move toward service.  Rather, service is forced on us via humiliation, loss, and exile.  Quite possibly the American church is at the brink of such loss.  The Christendom arrangement within the American context (particularly in the South) has run its course, and Christianity is being disestablished in school, by government, in polite society, and within the wider popular culture.  Many Christian leaders act as though it is still 1950 and that society still cares about what they have to say or is looking for them to determine what is right or wrong.  However, the year is 2009 and society is not listening, nor does it care what we think.  At best, the wider culture only wants to manipulate and corrupt Christianity for its ends. 

The need for the gospel to be at home in its context (contextualization) must be balanced by the necessity of critical self-examination.  Christianity becomes un-Christian when its essence is severely diluted by societal forces.  Patriotism and gospel, consumerism and gospel, entertainment and gospel, sports and gospel, wealth and gospel are dangerous mixtures that can and will mute the church’s voice and disengage it from mission.   Thus, the church constantly needs are reminder; a means to assist it in strking the right balance.

Service is the means through which we remember who Jesus is and are reminded who we are to be.  Jesus was in the world, for the world, and serving the world.  Our renewal as the people of God will not come through accumulating more power, or recapturing a golden era, or re-inventing ourselves.  Rather, renewal comes as we realign our mission to that of the Suffering Servant by taking up a towel, kneeling before the maimed and marginalized-washing feet, dressing wounds, and loving without conditions. 

Service is not resignation from or a forfeiting of the church’s role in society.  It is the means through which it actually is salt and light, permeating the whole of society.  The power of the gospel is made real not in our alliance with the state or in political maneuvers but in our service.

Jesus came to serve; we are called to serve.  Either we freely pick up the towel or circumstances may force it on us.

Posted in Change, Church, Culture | 1 Comment »

The Corporate Hurdle

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Ronald Johnson in a 2004 article entitled, “Mission in the Kingdom Oriented Church”  (Review and Expositor, 101, pp.473-95), lists a number of hurdles that prevent local churches from being the church in mission.  For him, the “corporate hurdle seems to be the most formidable.” 

“The corporate model has caused churches to invest in cooperation as the model for mission and to fund home and overseas missions by sending money to central mission agencies.  The passion for mission has been delegated, along with funds, to the work of agencies who send others on mission for the churches.  As a result, the passion (sometimes, if any) of local churches for mission has been generally local or community based and has not been inclusive of the world except through the work of the mission sending agencies they sponsor.  The average church member is led to feel that giving money to missions is the sum total of mission involvement in the world.” (page 476)

Posted in Church, Culture, Mission | 4 Comments »

True Freedom

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

Czech theologian, J. L. Hromadka, explains why Christians in Hungary and China can have true freedom, even though the state does not afford them simple liberties and rights.

“As theologians we are aware that the Church in the true sense must always be shaped by forces which come from above and which liberate us internally-or are we not aware of this?  The crisis of the Church throughout the world consists in Churches not realizing this, in that they constantly seek support where they should not, and do not have the courage of inner freedom which her true substance gives the Church.  The question of freedom is a difficult theological problem, for true freedom is not something served up to us on a platter: ‘Help yourself!’  On the contrary, it is something which must always be fought for and won in spiritual courage against our own human self and everything to which we are accustomed.  What joy it is when we realize that the Church is actually living by this freedom and that it cannot be taken from her by anyone.  What breadth is necessary here, what inner liberation and what love for those who are around us.”  Cited in Stephen Neill, The Unfinished Task (1957), 80-81.

Could it be that those of us with the benefit of liberties and rights find it more difficult to win for ourselves true freedom?  Is there the need to affirm that freedom in Christ – true freedom – is not dependent upon the type of government under which we live or the whims of a ruler?  What we have in Christ cannot taken from us by anyone.  What joy!

Posted in Church, Culture | No Comments »

Humility and Weakness

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

The church reflecting its culture and culture defining the church. 

Such is the state of affairs after centuries of the Christendom arrangement.  The proof of such a statement can be seen in the manner in which church and culture find identity and power in common symbols, ideas, and institutions.  The arrangement is both positive and negative.  Positively, the church reflecting its culture demonstrates that the gospel has made itself at home and has become part of the context.  This points to the translatability and universality of the gospel.  Whether the soil is American, Indian, or Russia, the potent seed of the gospel sprouts and makes particular sense in each context.  However, this positive can turn into a negative, as culture co-opts the gospel for its purposes and goals, many of which are contrary to the Jesus Way.  The church is then unable to speak to the evils, abuses, and powers of its culture.  It has been captured by something other than the gospel.

The correcting forces in the balance between reflecting culture and being defined by culture are humility and weakness.  By living in humility toward my cultural traits and stengths, I acknowledge that the gospel way must always trumph the cultural way.  I should never join the chorus of those who brag about culture – my country right or wrong.  Even if my culture is (were) the most technologically advanced or the most wealth-producing of modern times, I am to readily admit that these traits have at the same time produced tremendous social and moral problems. 

Weakness guards me against an unhealthy mix of gospel and power.  Most of the world does not have the options I have, and thus cannot choose power or privilege.  I can choose.  So, I choose to live solely in the power and privilege my culture affords or in solidarity with the diseased, troubled, trafficked, impoverished, and abandoned of the world.  In choosing weakness, I demonostrate that the gospel is the kind of power that can transform me into a different kind of person, and changes people and society for the good.  When others see us as powerful people who come to lord over or exert our cultural identity and strength, they will hate us even more and continue to hate our gospel. 

Culture is not bad.  It acts as a force to organize life and give identity.  It is necessary and good.  However, it can overwhelm our good intentions, seduce us toward evil actions, and eclipse our identify in Christ.  If we are to be the people of God, living according to the Jesus Way, then we must live in humility and weakness.  For, you see, it was in humility and weakness that Jesus created a new kind hope that allows me and you to reach beyond our national aspirations and find release from our cultural bondage.

Posted in Change, Church, Culture, Formation | 1 Comment »

Exploding at the Edges

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

Dana Robert’s new book has finally arrived.  Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 192 pages) recounts the history of Christian missions but not from a strict partisan perspective or as a mono-toned description of western institution and theology.  Rather, Robert presents missions as “a central process in the formation of Christianity as a world religion” (p. 2).  Missions gives strength and vitality to the faith through its multi-lingual and multi-cultural expressions right from the beginning (p. 17) and expands as it provides “catalyst for identity-formation” (p. 2) for the various peoples, locales, and cultures it encounters.  “Cultural fluidity” and translatability, Robert maintains, are the engines for the expansion of the Christianity into a worldwide religion.

Alternative histories, especially those written from a western and/or denominational orientation, give the impression that the success of Christianity is due to one type of Christianity triumphing over errant forms.  In this attempt to frame the success of Christianity as the rise of orthodox faith, other ‘Christianities’ are characterized as heresy and dismissed from the main storyline, or they are not mentioned at all.  Such a one-sided interpretation of missions and Christianity is being revised by African, Latin American, and Asian historians, as well as westerners, such as Andrew Walls, Philip Jenkins, and Dana Roberts.  The story is truly much broader and more diverse than we’ve been taught.

Christian Mission belongs on your list of books to read.  When read along with Philip Jenkin’s The Lost History of Christianity, one cannot help but see the expansion of Christianity as greater than western colonialism or a religion exported from Britain, Germany, and America.  Until you get your copy of Robert’s book, here is an enticing excerpt.

But the story of Christianity around the world is not that of a simple, linear progression.  To become a world religion, Christianity first had to succeed on the local level.  Specific groups of people had to understand and shape its meaning for themselves.  What in totality is called a “world” religion is, on closer observation, a mosaic of local beliefs and practices in creative tension with a universal framework shaped by belief in the God of the Bible, as handed down through Jesus and his followers. … growth takes place at the edges or borderlands of Christian areas, even as Christian heartlands experience decline.

Robert’s history reminds me that I as go forth in mission I must do more than replicate my particular denomination and its theological formulations.  I am to proclaim Jesus Christ and then trust the Spirit to bring understand and hope from within every language, culture, and locale.  Robert and others give me hope that as I witness the demise of Christianity at what has been its center, it is exploding at the edges of the world.

Posted in Culture, History, World Christianity | 2 Comments »

I am what I Eat

Thursday, February 26th, 2009

Food is such an integral part of life, and thus, we should do more than just consume food but eat with thought and intention.  Because we are more than animals, we should eat sensibly and spiritually.  I quickly admit that I am a novice on the subject of food and eating, but I want to know more and I want to become a much more responsible consumer of food.  Here are the issues for me … 

  • I am what I eat.  What I eat, how I eat, when I eat, and with whom I eat are life-defining issues.  Eating is more than a necessary bodily function; eating determines who I am.  I pull up to food and eat at least three times a day – it cannot help but define who I am.
  • I am to be an active eater.  This does not mean that I eat fast or am a voracious eater.  It means that I am not to be passive as I approach food.  I am to know where my food comes from and who prepares it.  It also means that I am actively thinking of why I eat what I do.  An active eater asks:  Why am I eating this?  Do I really need this?  What nutritional value is in this food?   
  • I am to be a social eater.  While eating is certainly for health and nutrition, it is also meant to be enjoyed and taken with others.  Rather than being a solo act, eating should connect me to friends, family, strangers, and enemies.  Eating is to take place around a table with other people.  Conversation is the spice of food and the sweetness of a meal. 
  • I am to be a conscious eater.  Eating must be more than getting what I want, when I want it, and at the cheapest price.  Serious thought needs to be given to where food comes from, how much oil has been expended to get it to my mouth, whether pesticides and antibiotics have been used in its production, have those who produced it gotten a fair wage for their product, is it from a corporate farm or locally grown, was it ripe when harvested, has it been genetically modified, has all the nutritional value been processed out of it, etc.
  • I am to eat spiritually.   On the question of what is permissible to eat, Paul challenges the believers at Corinth that whether they eat or drink this or that, or whatever they do, they are to do it all for the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31).   I can say with certainty that if I waste food when others are starving, I am not glorifying God.  If I consume more food than my body needs and thus do damage to my heart and develop diabetes, then I am not glorifying God with my body.  If I am obese and gluttonous, I give witness to the fact that my appetite is out of control and my desires are unchecked and undisciplined.  Eating is a spiritual matter.

I am a reformed and reforming ‘mindless-overeater’.  I admit that when it comes to sensible and spiritual eating, I am a neophyte.  But I am actively being tutored by the women in my family and others.  I invite you visit the blog of my mentor in all things food – What Would Jesus Eat?  Lucas seeks to identify issues related to food and eating and develop a thoughtful and active theology of food.  But be careful … he is a convincing radical who just may change the way you buy, consume – and eat!

Posted in Change, Culture, Poverty | 4 Comments »

Deep and Native

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

In The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-and How it Died (HarperOne, 2008), Philip Jenkins recounts the growth, influence and glory of churches beyond Rome and the empire.  It is a fascinating story that most of us (self included) are only mildly aware of.  It is also a story of the rise and fall of the church in places like Ottoman Turkey, North Africa, and Syria.  I found the following quote particularly instructive for modern missionary practice.

The key difference making for survival is rather how deep a church planted its roots in a particular community, and how far the religion became part of the air that ordinary people breathed.  The Egyptian church succeeded wonderfully in this regard, while the Africans failed to make much impact beyond the towns.  While the Egyptians put the Christian faith in the language of the ordinary people, from city dwellers through peasants, the Africans concentrated only on certain categories, certain races.  Egyptian Christianity became native; its African counterpart was colonial.  This difference became crucial when a faith that was formed in one set of social and political arrangements had to adapt to a new world.  When society changed, when cities crumbled, when persecution came, the faith would continue in one region but not another. (p. 35)

Faith must go deep, go native.  It must become part of the air.  And yet, for faith to go native, it must be native.  It must arise from the context, root itself and grow within the local soil.  This punctuates the absolute necessity of local believers and local church acting as the primary agents in the contextualization process.  While the outsider (missionary) has a role (which is another discussion), it is the insider who takes the faith deep, puts it into the vernacular, and translates it into daily actions, routines, and forms.  Ultimately, the faith survives not because it is coddled and protected, but because of its inherent power to transform communities.

Posted in Church, Culture, History, World Christianity | 5 Comments »

Church as Christendom

Thursday, February 5th, 2009

The notion of a Christian West or Christian nation is gasping its last breath, and yet, Christendom is not dead.  It has just relocated. 

For many Christians, Christendom has shrunk from the broader national and political spheres to the narrow arena of ’my church’.  For them, their church is the embodiment the kingdom of God on earth.  Everything beyond it is wrong, flawed, or evil.  Thus, church language, activity, and code of conduct do more than qualify and define it as different from the world but put it in opposition to the world.  High walls have been constructed, if not physically then mentally, and now the borders of Christendom lie at the edge of church parking lot.  Most everything beyond this border is a threat to the gospel and personal faith. 

While such an attitude can be attributed to a reaction to secular humanism, deteriorating social mores, and national politics, it has come to include expressions of Christian faith that are historically and culturally different.  Because they do not look, feel, or sound like us, they are a threat.  For example, reports of a vibrant, growing church in Ghana, West Africa can be ignored or dismissed by a church in Waco, Texas with the simple statement that it is foreign, aberrant, or syncretistic.  The siege mentality of Christendom gives my church permission to establish its forms of worship, polity, theology, and program as the norm for the church worldwide.  If they sound like us, act like us, and agree with us, then quite possibly there may be an outpost of us in Ghana.

Or it may be that I see the church of Ghana as simply irrelevant.  My church is in the midst of battle with its society and everything it teaches and does must be for the reinforcement of its border against society, for fear that it will be overrun by evil forces.  So, the church in Ghana is a distraction and irrelevant to our struggle.  We simply do not need them nor do we have time for them. 

So, when my Church is Christendom, then I will ensure that my granddaughter is schooled in real Christianity and protected from tainted or less-than-ideal forms of faith.  Africans in a cinder-block church half-way around the world have nothing to do with her and could even pose a threat to her formation in orthodox faith.

But to the contrary, Christendom must die.  I have come to believe that my church desperately needs to know about, learn from, and live in solidarity with believers in Ghana.  The church in Ghana has so much to teach me about what it means to live in a society of competing religions, the world of spirits and powers, and the kind of reliance on God that trumps money and privilege.  My granddaughter needs to be schooled in the richness and diversity of Christianity, to understand the power of the gospel in the face of disease, poverty, and evil, and to worship Jesus in dance and jubilant song.  She needs to know that walls do not hold this gospel and that the gospel has no borders.

Posted in Church, Culture, World Christianity | 2 Comments »

The Jesus Virus

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

We assume that the manner in which we do faith and theology is the gold standard for Christians around the world.  Theology in Africa is contextual, while what we do in seminaries and churches in America is ‘the truth’.  The manner in which believers in Kenya act out their faith is ‘indigenous’, while the way we do faith in America is Christianity.  While we would never admit to such a condescending attitude, our language gives us away.  Contextualization and indigenization are terms we use to refer to foreign beliefs and practices but never to our own.  Could it be that the same terms should be applied to our beliefs and practices?  Isn’t all faith contextualized and every church indigenous to its locale? 

David W. Smith points to the contextual nature of theology and faith and explains why it is difficult to transmit the same throughout the world:

For the past few centuries the churches of Europe found themselves responding to the impact of new ideas in philosophy and science, with the inevitable result that theology in the West became highly contextual.  As they endeavored to translate Christian beliefs into Enlightenment categories, Western theologians accepted the existence of a clear distinction between the realms of sacred and the secular, and they granted a privileged place to rational thought and investigation as the path to knowledge.  Theology involved the systematic articulation of belief, biblical interpretation and preaching was to be logical, and truth itself came to be understood in terms of propositions requiring mental assent.  As we have seen, it was long assumed that this form of Christianity was capable of meeting the spiritual needs of peoples everywhere, so that missions become the means by which a more or less secularized form of faith was transmitted to the rest of the world.  What is now clear is that a theology that exalted the cerebral above the instinctual, gave priority to the individual over the communal, and accepted the matters of faith and ethics were private concerns, contributed to the loss of faith in what was once known as ‘Christendom’, even as it was being rejected as inadequate to the real needs of growing churches in the new heartlands of Christianity(Against the Stream: Christianity and Mission in an Age of Globalization, 2003, p. 21).

Smith’s words evoke a number of questions, but I want to address one – Given the fact that my theology and faith are “highly contextualized” should I engage in efforts to transmit the gospel across cultures?  My answer is – Absolutely yes!  Because the gospel of Jesus Christ has changed my life and brings meaning to my existence, I share it as the best hope for the troubles, hurts, bondage, rage, greed, conflict, and hate that plagues my near and distant neighbors.  It must be shared.

However, this urgency to share does not give me license to export wholesale my brand of Christianity.  I must see the gospel not as the intellectual property of my group or culture to be downloaded across language, ethnicity, tribe, or social status.  Rather, the gospel is like a virus that possesses its host and mutates into a multitude of strains resistant to uniformity.  Thus, I cross into another culture and boldly share my hope because of a confidence in the power of the gospel to transcend my limitations and to reproduce meaning and life within that context.  Potency is not in the carrier but in the virus.

Of course, there are attitudes and actions that I can adopt to foster credible transmission.  As a transmitter of the Jesus Virus, I need to … 

  • examine my faith and concede that it is shaped by a context.
  • recognize and confess that I am only a man, and thus, give witness to eternal truth via my limited language, symbols, and culture.
  • trust the power of the Holy Spirit and the Bible in the life of a man or woman whose way of thinking, acting, and believing is completely different than my own.
  • live a transformed, hopeful life.

The Jesus Way has become pandemic; it has spread to Brazil, Beijing, Swaziland, Dublin, Hico – to the ends of the earth.  No one group of people from any particular locale controls or manages this Virus.  Credible carriers of Christ infect others, who then carry this life-changing hope across borders, into prisons, via obscure languages, in spite of racial hatred, cultural bias, and impure motives.  For you see, it truly is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”

Posted in Culture, Formation, World Christianity | 10 Comments »

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