Cutlure and the Body of Christ: Reflections on Work Part 2(b)

More than a month ago, I wrote about how part of our call as missionaries is to help the body stay connected. One aspect of this that I didn't discuss then is the idea of cultural exchange as a way of learning about Christ.

In the Bible we get several significant hints that culture will outlast the current era and enter into eternity. In Revelation we read that God will be worshipped in every tongue by every tribe; when John sees Zion he tells us that 'nations will walk by its light,' that the 'kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it,' and that the glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.' God created man in His image, but later created woman also; one gender alone apparently could not contain all the giftedness of God. I think the same could be true of culture.

And if this is true it means that different cultures have different strengths in seeing Jesus. Nothing radical so far; Paul calls his racially diverse churches the body of Christ made up of people with diverse gifts for the building up of the whole. I think given his context we can assume that part of what he meant was that cultural differences are given to us because we reflect Christ better together than we do apart. Our cultural worldviews and assumptions and commonalities, in other words, are too small to reflect God's imaging glory. So he made tribes and nations and races and peoples to reflect, mosaic-like, His glory to the world.

So missionaries have a rare opportunity of learning how another people group thinks. And I believe that if we keep our eyes and ears open, God will show us new things about Himself through the way "the other" looks at Him, and will convict us of our own culture's particular sins in light of another culture's. Because whether Kenyan hospitality and community solidarity convicts me of my own culture's individualism and greed, or whether my anger or frustration at Kenyan culture's seemingly lacking concepts of sexual morality remind me of my own culture's blindspots in the same area, living here is constant conviction through the new eyes of another culture.

My boss Horace Tipton is currently taking seminary classes at St. Paul in order to be ordained in the Anglican Church here one day. I recently asked him about his experience, and what he said really struck me: "I'm so glad I'm doing my studies here, because I couldn't learn this much about the way Kenyan Christians think anywhere else." In other words, Horace is seeing first hand that Kenyans envision and formulate their faith with nuances different from our own, and that knowing them is valuable for all of us!

It is far too easy for someone as arrogant and prideful as myself, coming from a culture as arrogant and prideful as our own, to walk through the world with my eyes squeezed tightly shut to legitimate differences of perspective to the Bible, to faith, to family, to finances. It is far too easy for me to believe that the narrow theological tradition where I find my roots contains the full counsel of what God has given to the world. Perhaps it is far too easy for us as American Christians, with the italics and word order all wrong, to view all things through our own red white and blue tinted cultural glasses, and to pretend that nobody wears glasses with any other hue. But being here has challenged Rebecca and I in that, and that is surely a gift from Jesus.

Peace,

Michael