Transforming Culture: A Challenge for Christian Mission

Author

Preface

The second edition of this book has been substantially revised. The first chapter reflects my growing understanding of the nature of culture as both our palace and prison. The second chapter is new and, I hope, much more accessible to the general reader than was its predecessor in the first edition. The middle chapters contain many of the same case studies of conflict, but much of the ethnographic description, which was burdensome to some readers, has been removed. I have omitted the final three chapters of the earlier edition and have written a new concluding chapter that focuses on the biblical challenge of being disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, living as servants, shepherds, pilgrims, and strangers in a world of diverse and complex cultures.

The case studies presented in this volume are the result of field research that I have done in various settings around the world. I am deeply indebted to Louis and Lisa Shanks, Bob Mantel, and Jay and Beth Grant for their assistance and hospitality during the summer of 1986 as I visited and studied with them in African-American villages in the interior of Surinam. I am indebted to Gordon and Lois Koop, who were my hosts and coworkers for more than three months in 1977 in Brazil and without whose assistance I could not have written the material in this volume on the Deni Indians. The people of the Yap islands in the Federated States of Micronesia have allowed me to study their culture and to live among them for a period of nearly three years since 1967. I am especially indebted to Fran Defngin, Gabriel Ayin, Cyprian Mugunbey, and an elderly couple, Fithin-grow and Marungweg, for their help on Yap culture. Many other Yapese men and women, from whom I have learned much, are too numerous to name here. I am also grateful to many pastor friends in southern California and my colleagues at Biola University, who have helped me to understand the people and culture of middle-class Americans as they relate to other minority groups in the southern California region.

I am especially indebted to people at Biola University for their support in preparing the manuscript. Wendy Walker and Peg Fosmark have typed drafts of the manuscript and contributed to all of the major revisions, including the preparation of the final manuscript for the publisher. I am especially grateful to Clyde Cook, the president of Biola University, who views scholarship as an important part of my work and has freed me to spend time in the summers on the mission field and to continue my scholarship as part of my administrative work as provost.

As is the case in the production of any book, I am deeply indebted to readers who have given me critical feedback. I am particularly grateful to students in my classes who have given me feedback from the first edition, colleagues Ed Harris and Steve Barber, and missionary friends from the Summer Institute of Linguistics in East Africa who have read some of the revised chapters and given helpful suggestions. I hope they find this edition a useful tool for training others.

1

Transferring or Transforming Culture?

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Rom. 12:1–2)

A few years ago some missionary colleagues and I attended a Sunday morning worship service in a large evangelical church in Cameroon’s capital city of Yaounde. The African pastors led us in a familiar service, selecting songs from a standard evangelical hymnbook and preaching an inspiring, doctrinally sound message, given in English and translated into French. We missionaries, a few white faces in a sea of black believers, enjoyed the service thoroughly. As I walked away praising God, it suddenly occurred to me that this service was almost identical to those I had experienced in North America. Momentarily stunned, I wondered why I should feel as comfortable in Africa as if I were at home.

A week passed. I traveled to the interior in the northwest province of Cameroon, where I attended another worship service. There, the congregation sang unfamiliar music, the musicians played instruments dissonant and grating to my ears, and, while the pastor read from the King James Bible, he preached in a language foreign to me. Remembering my experience in Yaounde, I thanked God for the unique expression of worship in this African church. As I observed more carefully, however, I discovered many familiar things. These people had constructed a church building with gabled roof and steeple, arranged their benches in rows, and copied the platform and pulpit of a New England church. The men sat on one side and the women on the other, as was common in the home churches of early missionary pioneers. In the order of service only the language and the music were unfamiliar. As I reflected further on this African congregation, I discovered a structure nearly identical to that of the Baptist conferences with which I am familiar in the United States.

Why is it that in the process of establishing churches in non-Western nations we transfer our culture of the church? Can we find a biblical basis for this practice? Are missionaries planting biblically founded indigenous churches, or are they transferring their culture of Christianity to every nation of the world?

In Europe, Latin America, and Asia, I have found in every area a similar pattern of church planting. In North Borneo, the Anglican, evangelical, and Roman Catholic churches are all modeled on patterns brought by missionaries from various denominational and cultural backgrounds. It is difficult to find in the two-thirds world a truly indigenous church. Most churches reflect more the culture of the missionaries who planted them than they do the culture of the new believers.

Missionaries have succeeded in bringing a biblically informed worldview, but one that is thoroughly contaminated by their culture. Is it possible to bring a truly transforming gospel, or are we always limited to reproducing our own cultural reflection of Christianity wherever we carry the message?

Contextualization and Indigenization

The idea of contextualization is to frame the gospel message in language and communication forms appropriate and meaningful to the local culture and to focus the message upon crucial issues in the lives of the people. The contextualized indigenous church is built upon culturally appropriate methods of evangelism; the process of discipling draws upon methods of instruction that are familiar and part of local traditions of learning. The structural and political aspects of leadership are adapted from patterns inherent in national cultures rather than imported from denominational organizations in the home countries of missionaries.

On an assignment with a mission in Surinam in 1986, I had the opportunity to observe such a contextualized indigenous church among Surinam Javanese. The pastor of this church was a Javanese man who for more than ten years had concentrated his ministry effort on evangelizing the youth among his people. Deeply discouraged to see these young men and women leave the fellowship of believers at the time of their marriages, he abandoned the youth ministry and began to concentrate on evangelizing adult men.

Through his contact with a Bible translation organization this pastor had gained a great appreciation for the Javanese language. He organized a band and wrote Christian songs using the familiar melodic pattern and appeal of Javanese music. Saturday evening became the prime time for evangelistic outreach; believers and unbelievers enjoyed a time of celebration in Christ. These evangelistic meetings offered food, fellowship, singing, and a fifteen-minute sharing of the gospel.

Seeing the response of people to these meetings, the pastor was inspired to launch a Sunday afternoon radio program. Drawing listeners through Javanese Christian music, interviewing men and women who were especially knowledgeable about Javanese culture, and focusing on a message of joy and hope, the pastor brought many listeners to respond to the gospel. He gave his home phone number and address to his radio listeners and received inquirers at any time of the day or night. Within the first year of the radio program more than eighty men, women, and children had received Christ through his ministry.

The organization of local churches growing out of this ministry reflected Javanese values and priorities. The pastor delayed baptizing new believers until the whole family was ready, and he concentrated on discipling men. In turn, each family head discipled his wife and children. Worship services, emphasizing celebration and introducing unbelievers to the body of Christ, were held on Saturday evening. Small-group Bible studies were held in various locations on Sundays to disciple new believers.

The particular patterns developed in this Surinam Javanese church are a combination of Javanese and missionary strategies. The national pastor adapted the Christian faith to the unique needs of his own people. The outcome of his effort was a dynamic, growing church, as many Muslim men and women received the gospel and committed themselves to the Lord Jesus Christ.

In spite of the appeal of contextualization and indigenization for generating more effective church-planting ministries, these strategies are not without risk and potential abuse. Indigenization may lead to dead churches in the third and fourth generation of believers. Even in the New Testament we find Christians quickly defining the parameters of Christianity in terms of their own cultural limitations. The Book of Acts records an anti-Gentile mentality among Jewish converts. When Peter returned from his evangelistic trip to Joppa, he was immediately challenged by fellow believers who were critical of his eating with uncircumcised Gentiles (Acts 11:1–3). Some were not content with Peter’s explanation, and later a faction of Jewish Christians proclaimed that unless converts did what believers did in Jerusalem, they could not be saved (Acts 15:1). When Paul arrived in Jerusalem late in his ministry, he discovered thousands of Jewish converts, all of them zealous for the law (Acts 21:20). The gospel had become completely conformed to Jewish culture, and the church had drifted to a particular, rather than a universal, vision of evangelism.

Gentile churches were no less susceptible to this indigenization problem. Before the death of John the apostle, five of the seven churches in Asia lost their vision, and two, Pergamum and Thyatira, had completely compromised the message of the gospel (Rev. 2–3). Both the indigenous Jewish churches and the indigenous Gentile churches succumbed to the pressures of culture and lost their vision and vitality.

How can we escape the dilemma of the dead indigenous church? Andrew Walls (1982, 97–99) contrasts the indigenizing principle—pressuring people into independence and isolation so that they conform to their own cultural surroundings at the price of detachment from the universal church—with the pilgrim principle, which draws the church in the direction of the universals of the faith, rooted in obedience to Christ and the Scriptures. Jesus is the author of kingdom teaching and of the pilgrim principle, as recorded in his final hours with his disciples; Jesus prayed and asked the Father to protect his disciples and to keep them pilgrims, not of but in an evil world. In John 17:13–19 Jesus declares that they were not of the world, yet he concludes, as you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. Walls suggests that pilgrim churches arise only when believers receive faithful instruction in the Word of God and respond with obedience as followers of Jesus Christ in a hostile world.

Contradiction:

The Pilgrim and Indigenous Principles

The contradiction between the pilgrim principle, with its emphasis on the universal church and other-worldliness, and the indigenous principle, with its emphasis on self-support, self-government, and self-propagation in independent this-worldliness, is implicit in all church ministries. Indigenous churches, common in the history of the church, result from effective contextualization. While in their formation they serve as a powerful force for spreading the gospel, they may become a vehicle of compromise and death. The pilgrim principle, connecting local believers to the universal church with a vision for outreach to the world, provides a necessary counterbalance. Christians retain a commitment to bear witness to the world without becoming part of the world. The indigenous church without connection to the universal church and the Word dies. Entrenched in its own private vision of righteousness, it ceases to contextualize its message to needy people and loses vision and outreach.

What leads a local church to the privatization of the vision of Christ for the world? Members of every society hold a collective worldview and participate in structured social environments. Learning from parents and peers to accept and live in accord with certain values, beliefs, and procedures for action, they create a collective this-worldliness, which becomes a prison of disobedience. So entangled, they live a life of conformity to social images that are in conflict with God’s purpose for humanity. Paul suggests that human beings are in a prison, a cell of disobedience: God has imprisoned all human beings in their own disobedience only to show mercy to them all (Rom. 11:30–32 NJB). In Galatians 3:22, paraphrasing Psalm 14:1–3, he observes that the whole world is a prisoner of sin. God has penned up all people in their self-created cells of culture, including Jew and Gentile, pagan and missionary.

This view of culture is at odds with the perspective of earlier missiologists. Charles H. Kraft and Marvin K. Mayers, working from the viewpoint that cultures are integrated, functioning systems, argue that culture is a neutral vehicle through which God communicates to human beings. Kraft (1981, 113) states that culture consists of forms, functions, meanings, and usage . . . a kind of road map made up of various forms designed to get people where they need to go. These forms and the functions they are intended to serve are seen, with few exceptions, as neutral with respect to the interaction between God and man. Cultural patterning, organizing, and structuring of life . . . are not seen as inherently evil or good in themselves. Mayers (1987, 251) suggests that it is entirely possible that the gospel can enter a life and a society without change being called for.

In this volume I reject the notion that culture or worldview is neutral. Analogies such as Kraft’s map or a tool for communication and interaction (Lingenfelter and Mayers 1986, 122) are inadequate to capture the pervasive presence of sin in the lives and thought of human beings. Using the analogy of a tool, we can say culture is more like a slot machine found in Las Vegas’s gambling casinos than a wrench or a screwdriver. Culture, like a slot machine, is programmed to ensure that those who hold power win and the common players lose; when or if the organized agenda is violated, people frequently resort to violence to reestablish their programmed advantage. Every cultural system brokers power to its members, although the power advantage may be held by either individuals or groups. The structures and organizations of cultures are not neutral; people define and structure their relationships with others to protect their personal or group interests and to sustain or gain advantage over others with whom they compete. Video games provide better analogies to culture than does Kraft’s map, because they reflect the various power advantages, access to survival resources, and hostile opposition that typify cultural systems.

Culture is created and contaminated by human beings; culture is the pen of disobedience from which freedom is possible only through the gospel. H. Richard Niebuhr (1951, 165) elucidates how the writings of Paul address this issue, portraying Christ in the role of the judge of culture and the redeemer to Christian culture. Culture seeks to maintain social control through its rules, norms, and sanctions for behavior, and thus it limits certain kinds of sinful or deviant behavior. Yet the rules of culture reflect a natural knowledge of God (Rom. 2:14–15) that serves to expose sin rather than bring people to righteousness.

The gospel, in contrast, liberates men and women from the cell of disobedience. Peter writes, You were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers . . . with the precious blood of Christ (1 Peter 1:18–19). The gospel brings a contradictory message to the peoples of the world, challenging their social order and beliefs. Peter again clarifies, But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God (1 Peter 2:9–10).

The Scriptures show clearly that Jesus challenged the accepted society and worldview. Although he was living as a Jew in the Jewish world, he shattered that world with his preaching and teaching. His good news brought conflict and change. People in Judea and Samaria hated him and plotted to kill him because he challenged their system. They did everything they could to destroy Jesus and his followers.

Likewise, when believers carried the gospel into the Greco-Roman world, they overturned traditional beliefs and provoked social conflict. The Greeks in Ephesus, furious at Paul’s message because it was bad for business,