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Cross-Cultural Conversion |
December 29, Evening Session
Cross-Cultural ConversionRay Aldred
"As you begin to reach out beyond your own boundaries, as you choose to love the other people, as you chose to make yourself vulnerable, as you begin to try and communicate the gospel in the heart language of other people, you realize that your world, your construct of reality is too small. You realize that to communicate in another heart language you must speak from your heart and live out your spirituality on the level of human suffering. You realize that your presentation and your words are not enough. They are limited. You begin to understand that you are out there trying to convert the lost but you are still in need of conversion and re-creation. And you begin to hear the gospel story again."
I want to talk about cross-cultural conversion. Why do we always try to mash these two ideas together, cross-cultural and conversion? We all understand the importance of conversion, of people receiving the Lord Jesus Christ, but why is it so important to communicate that across cultural lines? Because there are many who would argue that the missionary enterprise has been hijacked by colonialism and neo-colonialism and only serves to spread the influence of Westernization. So why do we continue to talk about this? Talk about the advancement of the kingdom of God has most often meant the advancement of some earthly kingdom. Inevitably whenever a nation try to bring heaven to earth, they end up bringing hell up instead.
I can testify to that reality. I come from a people group who has been the target of powers who have sought our eradication through cultural assimilation often carried out by the Church. Well-intentioned folks attempted to Christianize our people through the residential schools. These schools were thought to be able to create a kind of Christian training ground that would give children the skills for life. Instead these institutions brought death and destruction. To this day there is a basic mistrust among our people toward Christianity, because it is seen as the whiteman's gospel. In a society that is more and more prone to a pluralistic individualism that has everyone inventing their own religion, why continue to try and put together cross-cultural and conversion?
To answer this question there are the obvious answers: we need to reach out because we are called by God to take the gospel to the ends of the earth; the world is lost without Christ and we have the good news. But there are other issues involved with reaching across cultures. I believe there are deeper reasons why Christ would continue to have us do cross-cultural evangelism, and reach across cultures, and to try to call people conversion across cultures. In this whole talk, it is my prayer that you will catch the divine irony that is in the gospel. You see the call of God to radical conversion and become what he made you to be is the story of history and like all good stories there is a twist at the end.
The essentials of God's radical call to conversion
What does it mean to communicate the gospel across cultural boundaries and call for conversion? For most here we understand conversion as to turn around to stop from going in one direction and turn back the other way. Sometimes we forget that the early church thought of conversion as recapitulation or re-creation. These ideas speak to me and say that conversion is about becoming who we were made to be. Conversion is about turning to Christ, and he takes us back to Adam again. Christ's genealogy in Luke 4 makes it plain: that in Christ we are taken back. Luke takes us back to Adam with Christ's genealogy and this time, Christ does it right. We were made to follow God through Jesus Christ and conversion is about becoming who we were created to be. This call to conversion comes through the gospel or the good news of Jesus Christ. And through Christ, God is willing to forgive us and adopt us but we must communicate this across some kind of distance and that has some challenges. So how does it happen? Let me read from the sequel of Luke, the book of Acts 26:12-18, the story of one of the most famous converts in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul:
With this in mind, I was traveling to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests, when at midday along the road, your Excellency, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining around me and my companions. When we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, 'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.' I asked, 'Who are you, Lord?' The Lord answered, 'I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But get up and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you. I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles - to whom I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.From this passage let me suggest three things that are essential to communicate the gospel across cultural boundaries and what is involved in God's radical call for conversion.
- The Gospel must be in the heart language of the people
The gospel must accept, at least provisionally, the understanding of the receptor culture. Paul has the Damascus road experience which Luke writes about three times in the book of Acts - in 9:5, 22:7, and 26:13 (all the Hebrew students will ponder the importance of telling this story three times). If Luke repeats something it important and this repetition fits here because Acts is about the witness of the Spirit through the followers of Jesus because this is the fulfillment of the promise of Jesus given at the end of Luke and in Acts 1:8 that we will be his witnesses to the ends of the earth - across cultures, to the ends of the earth. The Spirit comes with the tongues of fire and people of many languages hear the gospel story of Jesus - another picture of cross-cultural conversion. If people are going to hear God's radical call to conversion, the gospel must be in the heart language of the people (verse 14: "I heard a voice speaking to me in Hebrew.")
The gospel must be in the heart language of the people. Paul heard Jesus speak to him in Hebrew, his mother tongue, his heart language. Missionaries spend every day learning the language of the people, so they can communicate in their heart language. It must be the same for us: if our presentation of the gospel is going to be heard by others, it must be in their heart language. But this means more than just proper vocabulary and syntax, how you say things and put words together - it's more than that. To be in the heart language of a person the gospel must take into account all of a person's culture, all the categories.
The presentation of the gospel in a people's heart language must accept at least provisionally the understanding of a people. It must speak to the categories that exist. Heart language includes art, economics, and traditional religion. If the gospel is going to be in the heart language of a people it must embrace or speak to peoples' political and economic aspirations. It's not a coincidence that the language of the American revolution and the language of the early American revivals were very similar. The gospel spoke to the aspirations of freedom and fulfillment. And it continues to speak to our aboriginal people. I sit on a committee of men who oversee Native ministry in Canada for one denomination. And so also to speak the language of our aboriginal people, we ask on our committee, will this speak to our people's aspirations for self-government? I understand that liberation theology perhaps goes too far, but there is a way that the gospel must speak to a people's desire for freedom. It must take into account those categories.
The language of people also exists in traditional religion and art. You see God has a way of speaking to us where we really are. The gospel must be in heart language of people; and in art, and in musical patterns - these things go deeper than the intellect. The extended worship session tonight is an example of worship that flows from the heart of our aboriginal people.
It is interesting that as you read the testimony that Paul gives three times in the book of Acts, he tailors his testimony to suit his audience. In Acts 22 it says he spoke to them, his audience, in Hebrew. Verse 2 says, "and when they heard him speaking to them in Hebrew," - their heart language - "they became even more quiet." In Acts 26:14 Paul adds the phrase, "it hurts to kick against the goads," which is a Greek expression referring to fighting against God, and he uses the phrase here because King Agrippa will understand the expression. Paul is crafting his message to the heart language of his audience allowing for the categories of the receptor audience.
However, we can do all these things - craft a presentation of the gospel in perfect syntax, taking into account the social, economic, artistic, and religious concerns - but there is one more thing needed. We must also add to our presentation our pain and suffering. I am not talking about just sharing about the difficult times we have had, but I am talking about living around the edges of the pain that dwells in the center of our being, as we live in the here-but-not-yet of the kingdom of God.
You see, heart language is on the level of human suffering. In weakness sharing is most genuine, but we are tempted in the West to share out of a position of power, thinking we have everything here in North America, and they over there have nothing. "I am just going to go over there and share a bit of knowledge with them, to help those poor people." In sharing from a position of power, it does not open us up for true sharing of hearts because we build walls around our hearts and don't really share our whole being. We build a persona of strength so no one sees our weaknesses, but then they don't see us either, and they respond with a persona of their own. Sharing from a position of strength means we do not see value in others because we do not want to open ourselves up to receive from others - so we believe they have nothing to offer us. Many times we can find ourselves thinking of people outside the church as having nothing to offer us. Of course, scripture makes it clear that everyone is made in God's image and has good things to bring and if they were to be in relationship with us, we would be enriched by them and they would be enriched by us.
This point was driven home to me while taking a class on community development from two people involved with World Vision. On a certain day we did an exercise. The instructor told us, "shout out some words that you think of when you think about poor people." I remember that without much trouble we had a very nice list of 20 words. Then we began reviewing each word asking, "is this word positive or negative?" With the exception of only one or two words our whole list was negative. Now don't get me wrong: no one in the class thought, "the poor are stupid," or anything like that. But we did use words like hopeless, sickly, poor hygiene, and uneducated. We said these words with great compassion in our voice because we felt sorry for the "the poor."
But then the instructor had us look up a series of bible verses and then asked, in this verse, is it positive or negative? Over and over again, as we read verses like blessed are the poor, or The Lord almighty says, 'I dwell with the humble and lowly', we had to say, "well, that is positive." Then the instructor asked us, "Do you think if you have a mostly negative view of a group of people, you would want to hang out with them Friday night?" Probably not. "Do you think if you have a mostly negative view of people you would see them as having anything to offer you?"
And it struck me at that point that I had been looking at the poor as having nothing to offer me, and as being less than human. And we could never really communicate like that.
You see often when missions was done in the past it had at its heart the idea that these noble savages (noble but savages nonetheless) out there needed to be trained and converted to a more useful lifestyle. The Christian idea that 'we are the strong reaching to the weak' has perpetuated a kind of Christianity that has said to other people, "you are only useful if you become exactly like me." This is not talking at a heart level but is a sort of neo-colonialism that is still intent on Westernizing the world and does not see others as having anything to offer. If we are going to communicate on a heart level we must share our need and our weakness. We must go to other cultures as learners not as the learned with everything to teach.
You see Jesus spoke to us on the level of human weakness, on the cross. We meet and can communicate at the cross for this is where Christ meets us and this is where our spirituality is to be lived out.
The cross is the level of human suffering. Again, Jesus said if I be lifted up, not on a beautiful ornate religious system, but if I be lifted up on a cross over looking the city garbage dump, I will draw all people to myself. On the cross Jesus was finally recognized for who he really was. My friend Dr. Andy Reimer of Canadian Bible College points out in his teaching, Christ on the cross reveals what God is like, he reveals the glory of God. The Roman soldier said, surely this was the son of God. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate wrote, "The King of the Jews." Heart communication happens on the level of human suffering.
Notice how Jesus talks to Paul. He asks him, why are you persecuting me? You are only hurting yourself. Jesus speaks on the level of human suffering. Paul is completely dependent upon God, he is stuck blind by the light and is of no real value anymore. All his power his gone because his position is taken away from the Jews. They want to kill him now. He has no standing with the Gentiles, yet it is at this point that Jesus sends him to be a witness. Paul's salvation is lived out in the context of mission to the gentiles.
We read in the book of Acts of Paul witnessing to kings and rulers all while being a prisoner for Jesus Christ. We always think that if we could be a Christian politician or a Christian millionaire, then we change the world. But that's not how the gospel works. And those things are not necessary for the gospel. In fact, those things are temptations to be resisted. For on the level of human suffering, that is when we can share heart to heart and across cultures. Story is most appropriate to share heart to heart: that's why the gospel is so suitable, because it's the story of Jesus Christ. It's the story of God stepping into history. It calls people to a radical conversion.
Culture is important because it is all we have to share Christ. Our culture makes it possible to share the story. Without culture we wouldn't be able to understand the story. The gospel story is suitable for calling us to conversion. Because it is story, we can all understand it, because no matter what culture, tribe or people, we all have story. If we want to share the gospel story in our context we need to understand how our stories work. The ethics of story I learned from my culture, it makes it possible for me to hear God's call to conversion, and to share God's story. We could not hear the gospel if it were not for our culture. Paul heard Christ speak to him in the context of his culture. "I heard a voice speaking to me in Hebrew."
Interestingly it is our real cultural story that is most valuable but often the thing we think is of little value. This is ironic for me - especially for me - an aboriginal person in North America, because I thought my culture had no value, and I had no value.
I grew up hating that I was an Indian. I like so many little Indian boys who grew up before Dances with Wolves believed the Cowboys were good and Indians were bad. When people would call me Indian they would say it in a way to tell me "you're dirty, and you're stupid, and you're lazy. They would say, "you're just an Indian." I would get mad and fight them. I hated being an Indian because many of my relatives did have lots of those problems. I thought I could just pretend I was something else and saw no value in my Indian blood. I was the third generation to try and hide this part of me. My mom didn't even tell us we were treaty Indian until I was 28 years old. She would always say, "we have some Indian blood but we are mostly Scottish and French." It is interesting that at my Grandmother's funeral, I sat with my brothers, and I leaned over about halfway through everyone was arriving, and said "I wonder when are all those Scottish and French relatives are going to show up?" My Grandfather forbade any speaking of Cree because he said it just causes problems in school if you talked that kind of talk. He sold his treaty rights and joined the Canadian Army during the Second World War. We all saw our Indian culture has having nothing to offer. We saw our story as of no value.
That is not limited to my family. I talked with a teacher recently in Regina, where I live, who had a little 6 year old Native boy in her office asking how he could change the color of his skin because his best friend was white, and his best friend's parents had said, "we do not play with Indians." This little Indian boy loved his friend he just wanted to change his skin color, to become a non-Indian so he could play with his friend.
I was talking with a friend of mine who for years preached against me because I had dared to ask the question, are you sure you just reject everything from our Indian culture? He said to me after he had changed his mind and we had begun ministering together, "you know, I grew up hating being an Indian and I liked hearing the gospel preached because it hated Indians too."
We find no value in our real story, but it is our story that Christ wants to enter into and it is this story and culture that makes it possible for us to speak on Christ's behalf. My ministry began with a question someone asked me. It was kind of a rhetorical question. He came up to me in the hallway of Canadian Bible College, where I was studying, and said, "you're an Indian." I replied, "I know that." He said, "You should come to our church." And so I did. And eventually I began pastoring that church. And my ministry started.
My real painful, messy story has taken me more places and made it possible to speak about Jesus more than anything else. The thing I thought was worthless, God thought had great value. My Indian identity had made it possible to talk to people about Jesus and to call both Native and non-Native to conversion to Jesus Christ. My real story that shares my weakness. When we share our weakness, our frailty - this is what God uses to impact people in their hearts. In the book of Acts God calls Paul to cross cultures and take the gospel to the Gentiles. But in doing that it does not make him less Jewish. Paul's preaching the gospel is a fulfillment of his Jewish-ness. For God had promised to Abraham, that through him God would bless all the families of the world. And Paul is more of a son of Abraham reaching out to the Gentiles, than he had ever been before. He was becoming exactly what God made him to be, not some chameleon always shifting cultures, but a Jew set free to move outside the limitations of his own cultural confines.
The creator doesn't make mistakes. Who God made us is who we are called to be. When we are mature we will not be something that we never were, we will be completely human situated where we are. The gospel must be in the heart language of the people, where they really live. It must accept at least provisionally how that group sees things. But to speak to another's heart language you must speak from your own heart.
The Gospel will call the understanding of that receptor culture into contradiction
The Gospel will call the understanding of that receptor culture into contradiction. It will call them to radical conversion. Paul hears the voice of Jesus and he must turn around completely from where he is going. In verse 15 Jesus says, "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting but now stand on your feet and you are going to be my witness." Paul must now turn and stop persecuting the church and must begin to build the church. He must stop from trying to resist the Gentiles from "polluting" his religion, to reaching out to the Gentiles.
Paul's culture makes it possible to hear the gospel. He hears the voice of Jesus speaking to him in Hebrew, but then he is asked to not just settle for expanding the borders of his own culture. God asks him to reach out past his own people, to people who are radically different than he is. Paul's faith and mission is about being converted and reaching out in mission to the Gentiles. The Gentiles were all us - the non-Jewish nations; Paul's salvation is lived out in embracing this his new mission. New in the sense of fulfillment of what God had always intended for his people.
If you read the letters in the New Testament, Paul is often imploring people from different cultures to listen to each other, to see the value in each other. You see, whenever you hear the gospel story it contradicts our understanding. The gospel takes what you thought and turns it on its head. Paul thought he was being a good Jew by being zealous in persecuting Jesus and Christianity, but he heard the voice of Christ saying why are you persecuting me. Paul had to turn to Jesus and in turning to Jesus, reached out across cultures becoming a fulfilled Jew.
Conversion is the work of God through his people by the spirit empowering the word.
Verse 16-18 Jesus makes it plain to Paul that this is about what He is going to do through Paul. "I have appeared, I will appoint, I will rescue you, I will am sending you, so they can receive forgiveness through faith in me." The work of conversion is all God's work and we are but instruments in his hands. But we have a problem, that we must continually battle against. We want to find the right technique. That's what we want to do in the West. We're always looking for the right technique to produce converts and that undermines dependence upon God. It undermines relationship. True conversion is not possible by technique but in the West we are consumed with technique. We want to find the technique that will bring about transformation - thus being re-created - without any pain. But transformation only comes about through God's word in the context of his community, the church. This requires that we become vulnerable. And we don't like to do that.
Two of the ways in which we rely upon technique in the West is by reducing the gospel, the canon of scripture, the good news of Jesus Christ - we reduce it to a set of propositions or personal experience.
When we reduce the gospel to a set of propositions or truth statements we are guilty of attempting to take control of our salvation and everyone else's. The Bible says that unless our truth statements actually describe how we live we are lying. 1 John says it: "if we way that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true." We can only say Jesus is Lord and be speaking truthfully, if Jesus is actually Lord of us. To just state propositions without actually living as those propositions describe is only a power play and an attempt to control salvation. The West has tended to reduce the gospel to doctrinal statements, and when they do that, they have removed the gospel story - the canon of scripture - and made it inaccessible to new peoples and new cultures, who are coming in.
Reducing the gospel to a set of propositions makes theology something you know, instead of something that you do. And it makes it the exclusive property of experts. Theology is something we do not just something that we know. Reducing Christianity to a set of doctrinal statements without teaching how these things fit into the gospel story, we make Christianity a religion of the mind. And seem to think if we only know the right stuff everything will work out. We not only have to understand, we have to be what this gospel says.
Western Christianity also tends to reduce God's work and salvation through the gospel of Jesus Christ into personal experience. This turns scripture into myths because if all we have is our personal experience than the gospel story is just something that happened long ago, and we are just a spectator of these events, and can never enter into them. If we just have personal experiences, we are cut off from all the history of what God has done over the years. And we cut off new communities of people from embracing the gospel story, from making it their story and being changed - the Holy Spirit working through his holy people by his holy word bringing about conversion and re-creation. We receive Jesus, and the canon of scripture becomes our stories and they shape us by his spirit, and we are changed.
At the same time our story, our life is taken into the gospel story and it shapes us. All of who we are is brought into the gospel and we are changed. Paul was still Jewish but now he was reaching out to the Gentile. It is a love relationship with Jesus. Our culture and identity changes how the story looks and sounds but does not change the essence of what the gospel story and Christ is like. At the same time God in Christ at work through his word in the midst of his people under the power of the Holy Spirit is changing who we are but not in our essence. It is a love relationship: we will grow and mature and become who we were always meant to be.
But there is a twist. There is always a twist.
The Divine Twist: Cross Cultural Conversation
One realizes the limitations of one's own language
In my years of ministry one thing that I have realized is that God is concerned with what I do but He is more concerned that what I do flows out of who I am. Ministry is about becoming, not primarily about doing. The gospel story includes you and me for you see we have been taken into this unfolding story of the gospel, which is the meta-narrative of history. And every great story has a twist. And cross-cultural ministry has a twist and is rich in irony. As we reach out across cultures - because it is the will of God for us to go to the ends of the earth - but sometimes we realize that in doing that, God is not only concerned with saving those who live at the ends of the earth but also with saving us. Cross-cultural conversion is as much about our hearing God's ongoing call of conversion as about converting others.
As you begin to reach out beyond your own boundaries, as you choose to love the other people, as you chose to make yourself vulnerable, as you begin to try and communicate the gospel in the heart language of other people, you realize that your world, your construct of reality is too small. You realize that to communicate in another heart language you must speak from your heart and live out your spirituality on the level of human suffering. You realize that your presentation and your words are not enough. They are limited. You begin to understand that you are out there trying to convert the lost but you are still in need of conversion and re-creation. And you begin to hear the gospel story again.
Hearing the gospel told back by the receptor culture, one's own understanding is contradicted.
Hearing the gospel told back by the receptor culture, one's own understanding is contradicted, and the ongoing call for conversion or recreation is heard again. You see, when we do missions and we reach out past our own cultural boundaries, we hear the gospel told back to us. As we listen to new Christians tell us the gospel back, we hear the call to conversion because we can see our own shortcomings.
Western Christianity is syncretistic with modernity; thus its call for conversion has become only a call to become more pious and better-behaved. Western Christianity has become syncretistic with Western culture and thus has become the folk religion of the West. If we make Jesus just a good teacher, we have reduced him to the level of folk religion. Folk religion is only concerned with maintaining the status quo. It is a religion motivated not by sharing the gospel story with others, so they can become what God made them to be, but about making them like me, so I can love them.
For years Western Christianity has pursued that course, and has tried to assimilate people into its mold. That is why we have fights about music, about form, because it wants to preserve it own ideas about how to do things. Paul was fighting to maintain his Jewish religion but Jesus told him, you must go to the Gentiles. Salvation meant he no longer could live only for himself and for his people, but he must now turn to others, because this is the will of God. He would be singing new songs, eating new food, coming home smelling like bacon and ham roast.
God was calling him to the non-Jews, but it did not mean making people keep Jewish customs. It meant that in their Greek pagan culture they would turn to Christ. They would end up with a Greek-looking Church, not a Jewish-looking Church. We seem to have forgotten that in the West. In the past and in my own experience, we want Native churches to look like and sound like any other church in the West. But that is not conversion. But to change, to hear God's call for conversion in our Western culture, we need to hear the gospel told back to us from other cultures.
Western Christianity still thinks that science will prove everything. And we hold science over, and on top of the gospel. We evaluate the gospel according to our science. We make Christianity a private affair. And in the public world, science and economics, making money is king and we do not know how to move past that. Western Christianity will not be able to move past that. Western Christianity will not be able to move from having science evaluate the gospel, to the gospel evaluating the scientific worldview unless we hear the gospel told back to us from other cultures:
That is the gift that our aboriginal people and all our non-Western cultures have to give to Western Christianity. We can help the West move back to the real world of values. When we hear our world described by Christians from other cultures, we are called back to conversion. For example, we all hear that we are materialistic, and we understand that. But as I sat talking with a Vietnamese friend of mine, who had fled Saigon just before the communists took over, he said that "in Vietnam during the fall of Saigon they threatened to kill me. But in the West, they offer you money to give up your faith. That's harder than the threat of being killed." I was brought face-to-face at that point with my materialism in a way that had never occurred before.
When we begin to reach out cross-culturally, we understand that there are limitations to our worldview, to our own word-games. We hear God's call to conversion again. And of course, this is the ongoing work of the Spirit.
This on going work is also the work of the Spirit
You see, it is God's plan. He wants to make us who he created us to be. God is calling the West to the ongoing conversion, and the twist is that it will happen as we continue to reach out across cultures. The twist or the irony of the gospel is that as we strive to be a witness to the end of the earth, to see people converted and to be all that God intended them to be, we find that we are becoming who God made us to be. In attempting to proclaim the gospel to others, we hear God's call for radical conversion. We hear God calling us to be re-created.
The book of Acts ends with Paul speaking to his persecutors. It reads, "let it be known that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles. And they will listen …" Urbana, we are still there, living out this verse. This great salvation is now-but-not-yet. We are here because God has extended his salvation to us. It is our time, the time of the Gentiles. And as we make a commitment to reach out with all of who we are, with all of our pain, with all of our weakness, Christ will be made known to the hearts of the nations, and they will listen.
Our father is working. Jesus is working. The spirit is working. We also must be working, while there is still day.
Thank you, mequech, merci.
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