by Manik Corea, C4SO Global Consultant
I once heard a story of a Cambodian woman who was fleeing for her life during the years the Khmer Rouge was ravaging her country. She found refuge for a time in an old Roman Catholic church in the countryside. There, she observed the crucifix above the altar – the twisted, bloodied figure of Jesus hanging from a cross. Derisively, she wondered to herself: ‘How could they even respect and worship a man who had obviously such terrible karma?’
She was looking at Jesus through distinctly Buddhist eyes, assuming that he was suffering and paying for wrongs done in a previous life. Her conclusion was prejudiced by her worldview and primary beliefs about her world.
We face a similar problem in post-Christendom North America. How do we share the Christian message in a way that makes it intelligible to people who do not share a similar conceptual-belief system to ours—or one near enough for us to find common ground? How can the Gospel speak through us to the North American populace, people of foreign tongue and disparate beliefs?
Coming Soon to a Street Near You
The Gospel of Jesus Christ has to be contextualized if it is to make sense to anyone on earth, because all people within different cultures and sub-cultures see and hear it differently. And the challenge of rightly contextualizing God’s word and truth is not limited to the experiences of cross-cultural missionaries toiling away in foreign climes!
We live in an increasingly globally connected, well-traversed, melting pot of a world. There has never been a time like ours when record numbers of people (1 in every 30 people on earth) are living and working outside the lands of their birth. Global migration and refugee movements are at an all-time high. Many of the most developed nations of our world, America included, are irreversibly pluralistic and increasingly multi-cultural. Your town or street is filled with people from different cultures or sub-cultures, or soon may be.
The Western world is now almost wholly post-Christian while many other parts of the majority world are still functionally or majority non-Christian.
But in all places, the missionary challenge is the same.
We are all called to be disciples on mission with God, loving and seeking out neighbor and strangers alike, engaging people everywhere with the Gospel (Matthew 28:18-20) through the power of the Holy Spirit. We are a ‘sent’ people, called to boldly share His love, truth and power with people who are different culturally, socially or economically from us (John 20:21-22; Acts 1:8).
Learning to See North America With Missionary Eyes
I would like to propose two important steps to seeing North America through a missionary lens.
1. Become aware of your cultural conditioning.
God alone sees people as they actually are. We see people and situations as we perceive them.
We are all born partially sighted. In our experience of the now-but-not-yet Kingdom of God, we need an awareness of how cultures easily partition us and our world into nations, tribes, languages and peoples.
There are no “a-cultural” Christians. We are creatures of time, space and language. We may—often unconsciously—view events and experiences through worldviews colored by sin, prejudices, ignorance, cultural mores, imperfect understanding and subjective experience. These covert undercurrents easily exert control on our perceptions toward peoples of different ethnicities, often in discriminatory fashion. False perceptions can kindle acts of violence and oppression, such as those tragically being played out in our day toward Asian- and African-Americans.
For us as leaders, it’s therefore vital not to make value judgments based solely on our cultural preferences, conditioning and worldviews. I also believe it’s critical that we develop an awareness of how this shapes our reactions, attitudes, behaviors and perceptions of “the other.” We must begin to understand why and how the people around us are motivated to do and say things by their culture or personal experience, before we make judgments on their behavior. It may not always be a matter of right or wrong—perhaps just different.
If we are to engage North America effectively (or any culture for that matter), we must seek the help of God’s Spirit and his Word, which alone carry supra-cultural validity.
The Church after all, is God’s alternative global community, a family where all peoples are (or ought to be) valued, healed and heard, all brought as one around a Jewish savior hung from a Roman cross at the crossroads of nations.
2. Rely on divine wisdom and power.
I worked a number of years ago in international student ministry in England. One day, a Japanese student named Mitsue told me a story. She spoke of a person who had spent all her life drinking tea in a country where everyone drank that tea and believed in its benefits. Then, out of the blue, a stranger from a faraway place came into her community and began to tell her that coffee was a far better drink and that she ought to give up her tea for it.
Mitsue asked me, ‘What gives someone the right to tell me that my culture’s tea is not good for me, and to say that their coffee is better?’
I understood the implications of her question. Praying silently for wisdom from the Holy Spirit, I said, “With all due respect to the tea you have been brought up with, you will never know the difference until you taste it for yourself.”
You and I must have confidence born out of God’s revelation, that the Gospel of Jesus Christ and his Kingdom is good news not just for Christians—but for our friends and the world. The kingdom life is meant to overflow from us to others. ‘A secret Gospel ceases to be news and loses its goodness.’
Mission is not just about getting on a plane to a strange or exotic culture. We are called to be disciples on mission going together to all the places God sends us – starting with North America and on to the ends of the earth. This is our lifelong calling.
The onus is on us, then. As missional leaders, we are called to engage North American culture, and any culture, by God’s wisdom and power, with all compassion, humility and clarity. The good news is that Jesus’ power and presence will be with us as we go to make disciples of all peoples (Matthew 28:18-20).
The Rev. Manik Corea is Singaporean by nationality and Sri Lankan/Indian by ethnicity. Ordained as a missionary priest in C4SO, he is the Global Executive of the New Anglican Missionary Society (NAMS). Manik and his family recently relocated back to Singapore to co-ordinate the global work of NAMS, following 13 years in Buddhist-majority Thailand where they planted All Nations Bangkok. Prior to that, he worked for five years on a church-planting team in Colchester, England, reaching international students studying at the University of Essex.