A Missionary Mandate for the 21st Century: Why It’s Not Just for Cross-Cultural Workers Anymore (Part I)
The following is the first part of an article I wrote for the BFC’s Fellowship News. I thought some of you would be interested to read it.
For years the protestant church has successfully sent out cross-cultural workers to places all over the world. They have left the comfort of living among a Christianized society in order to take the gospel to those who have never heard. They have (albeit sometimes more appropriately than others) contextualized the gospel message to address the questions and needs of the host culture in which they were ministering, have produced many dedicated followers of Christ, and have begun many new churches. In order to do this effectively, they had to shed some of their western baggage and discover creative and appropriate ways to personify the gospel message.
Christianity in a New Context
Whether we like it or not – and whether we realize it or not – we as twenty-first century American Christians are beginning to find ourselves in their shoes. What happened in the twenty years before us in Europe is slowly but surely happening in our society. We are progressively discovering that we no longer live in a traditional Christian culture with traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs. While it is true there are still Christian influences in society at large, Christianity no longer holds the position of dominance that it once did in the life of the average American.
As this trend has progressed, conservative evangelicals have found themselves increasingly frustrated by its effects. It has been increasingly difficult to find success in ministry endeavors, our attempts at outreach seem to be producing less fruit, and we lament what seems to be increasing secularism both in our society and in our own young people. The most frustrating thing to us is that we don’t understand why these ministry models no longer work. As far as we can tell, we continue to be faithful to methods of reaching people that the Spirit has used in our churches for many years.
The World on Our Doorstep
What we fail to realize is that the attitudes and actions of people in our society have both been caused by and are due to fundamental shifts in American’s beliefs about religion, knowledge, morality, and spirituality. Unfortunately, the ways many evangelical churches do ministry and even the ways we understand and talk about the gospel have not adapted to reflect this change.
One illustration of this is the terms and categories we continue to use in reference to cross cultural ministry. In the past, because of the marked differences that existed between the pagan “foreign fields” that our cross-cultural workers served on, and our modernized, industrialized, and Christianized societies, we termed those that ministered to them as missionaries and sent them out as pioneering workers. They were in a class separate both from our clergy and our laity. However, as the world continues to come to our doorstep, there is no longer such a thing as a “foreign field”. Additionally, the increasing secularization of our society means that more and more, we are encountering many of the same challenges that “missionaries” faced as they tried to live and share the gospel in pagan cultures.
Carrying Out God’s Mission
While these distinctions may have been helpful in the past, they are not inherent and should be reconsidered. We are all (or at least all should be) missionaries in the sense that we are all active participants in God’s mission to restore his relationship with humanity and bring glory to himself. As such, seeing some as church laity and others as sent out missionaries is not a helpful designation. However, this shift to a missional approach is not simply semantic. It has bearing on how we do ministry and how our churches operate. When a person begins cross-cultural ministry, one of their most immediate concerns is understanding the language and the culture of the people they are trying to reach.
We in the United States need to be doing the same. In order to effectively reach the secular culture that surrounds us, we need to understand what drives them. This requires understanding culture’s signposts – observing what our culture views as entertainment, the activities they participate (or don’t participate) in, and things on which they choose to spend their money. But more than just knowing what they are, we must actively engage those areas. We must be involved enough with them to understand the desires, concerns, and longings that they reveal. We must then be able to intelligently critique them and respond to the needs they portray.
This ability is even more critical for those in the pews than those in the pulpits. Those who are in what has traditionally been understood as lay roles, now have the greatest opportunity for ministry as they interact daily with those outside the faith.
So what does it look like to incarnate the message of the gospel into today’s American culture? If the methods we are using seem to be losing effectiveness, what can they be replaced with? In one sense, in order to reach our society we may need to take some of the paradigms we have operated out of for centuries and turn them on their heads. In part II, we will consider some practical implications to changing the way we incarnate the gospel in our society
Part II is due to be published in October and I will post it to the blog at that time.