De-Westernizing the Gospel

I preach and teach and talk extensively about the “gospel being out of control” in our world. Today that includes not just numbers but the fact that it is taking root in the cultures, the People Groups, the Ta Ethna of the Great Commission and the New Testament. This is as it was following the 10th chapter of Acts, when through the vision given to Peter the Good News of Jesus was set free in the Gentile world. It was in Cornelius’ house where the Gentile Pentecost took place, where we have the birthday of the Gentile church. In missiological terms we call this the contextualization or indigenization of the gospel that is a large part of the “out-of-controlness” of the gospel these days.

We are living in another New Testament time. The reality of that is finally breaking out in our Western churches through writings like Jenkin’s blockbuster book, The Next Christendom. The title of his October 2002 Atlantic Monthly article, “The Next Christianity,” is a more appropriate one; it might better be described as the original New Testament Christianity spilling over the face of the globe. He writes that we are in the midst of a second Reformation, greater than the first! For a Roman Catholic author, that is saying something! I hope all of you have read it or will give priority to it in your reading.

I have written of this as the de-westernization of the gospel to help Presbyterians understand what God is doing in our day. I experience it as I travel in the world helping develop PC(USA) Frontier Mission projects. It was the thrust of our missiology in Ethiopia, where I served for 22 years, as we refocused ourselves, beginning about 1960. I believe that New Testament emphasis, along with a charismatic revival, has a lot to do with the explosion of that Christian community which now numbers almost 4 million members! We need to become not only comfortable with what God is doing in the world; we need to learn once again the lessons which Peter and Paul learned and which we have forgotten as we tried to keep the gospel captive to our Western culture. We not only need to give people the Bible in their mother tongue; we need to be the messengers of Jesus who do and say everything we can to encourage those people to live out their discipleship in their mother culture.

When it comes to evangelism in the western world of Europe and North America, we might better speak of New Testament church planting not as de-Westernizing the gospel but of de-WASPing the gospel! The Jewish community has said it would not have been as bothered if the new church there had a nice WASP name like First Presbyterian Church and conducted the service in a WASPish fashion. It wouldn’t have had much effect, just as the present church in the world didn’t really explode as long as it was basically contained in a western form. I think we can say that the Roman Empire would not have been threatened by those early Christians if they had kept their Jewish roots — insisting that everyone who became a follower of Jesus had to de-culturize, leaving their Greek/Roman culture, and becoming cultural Jews. It was when the Good News of Jesus became romanized that it threatened the established powers and authorities. That Good News called for a new way of life lived out in the context of God’s love and justice and mercy and reconciliation as revealed by Jesus, the Word of God, the incarnation of God, the Way. The Good News became a threat when it was realized that Jesus had come both to challenge and to fulfill every culture in the world. It was then the lions and the sword and the fire were turned loose. As is often quoted, those early Christians out-lived, out-loved and out-died the Roman Empire.

We need to be sensitive in our witness to other religious groups, and especially to the Jewish people because of what we have done historically as a domineering people who love power and authority and our “enlightenment culture” too much. We should share our Good News in such a way that our dominance is not the primary witness, but our own form of living and loving and dying is. We struggled with that in the denomination’s evangelism paper, “Turn to the Living God: Evangelism in Jesus Christ’s Way,” that I helped write. We tried to express our convictions around that last phrase, especially as they relate to witness among other religions. But we can never back away from the core conviction we hold that all the Ta Ethna have the right to follow Jesus and worship God in the context of their mother culture. As the WCC document on evangelism says, we owe the gospel to all people.

So, it is perfectly in keeping for a community of Jewish people to have their mother-culture symbols at the center of their worship. It is their decision to make, not ours, as to what is the most meaningful atmosphere to lead them into the presence of God. It is not being deceptive, dishonest, condescending, duplistic nor distorting the message of Jesus. It is doing what we try to do all around the world—urging people to become the followers of Jesus without committing cultural suicide! That is de-WASPing the gospel in our society. The contemporary worship services where I preach across the denomination are also a form of de-WASPing the gospel — and I know many places where that creates a lot of debate and tension! It is clothing the Good News in the cultural context of the younger generations. Some of us with the Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship spent time recently in Minneapolis with Yaqub Mohammed from Somalia, helping him think through how a Muslim community of believers might want to worship in the midst of a predominantly WASP Christian culture, but expressing themselves in mother culture forms.

In India we are closely tied with an exploding untouchable community that refuses to call itself Christian. They say, “No, we are not Christian. We are Indian,” since Christian indicates in India a foreign, de-culturized community! They don’t worship in churches but in shrines that have their own worship symbol. That symbol has at the center a cross, but underneath the crossbar are six branches. They know they need to recover from 3,000 years of Hindu abuse. Those branches — spiritual, intellectual, physical, economic, social and bold witness of their new life — indicate what they feel are the six areas of their true humanity which need healing. Jesus died to give them the way to be whole again.