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“Reaching the Worlds”
by Captain Jonathan Gainey
Captain
Jonathan Gainey, host of “The Flock’s Diner” website
discusses how we reach out to those we are trying to win to
Christ.
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Reaching the world for Christ is a task for which many
Christians long. For those of you who take this task
seriously, realizing that it means much more than knocking on
neighborhood doors and asking, “Do you know Jesus?”, you are
aware of the importance of communication.
It’s fairly obvious that a Christian who wants to share the
Gospel in a foreign land must know the language of that
foreign land. And you also know that sharing the gospel in the
vernacular is the only way to effectively seed the gospel in a
foreign country. Unless a people are able to receive and teach
the Bible in their own tongue, Christianity is doomed to
disappear. Even those evangelized by the great Augustine of
Hippo no longer exist as a body of Christ, due to the fact
that the North African’s to whom Augustine taught the gospel
were expected to receive the Gospel in Latin and worship as
Westerners. It only required the Christians there to be
persecuted before they quickly gave up their “Western”
religion.
Ralph D. Winter, General Director of the Frontier Mission
Fellowship, spent many years as a missionary in foreign lands,
and he has brought to the attention of his readers in his
article, “The New Macedonia: A Revolutionary New Era in
Mission Begins”, that language and oceans are not the only
barriers that must be crossed. It is just as important to
understand the boundaries of social differences within our own
communities.
Interestingly, many congregations want to reach every person
in their neighborhood, but they only have one songbook and one
form of worship. I am not an advocate of blended worship, as
this would be like trying to develop a congregation where
Japanese and Hispanics worship together. As Winter says, “Some
go as far as granting separate language congregations, but
hesitate when the differences between people are social and
non-linguistic.”
The next time you wonder, “Where are all the twenty-somethings?”,
consider the culture of your congregation. The generational
arrogance of the young and the old often separates us by
assuming that we should be able to easily accept one another’s
culture in worship. But is this reality? Even Paul argued over
whether the Greeks must live like the Jews (see Acts 15). This
is often read as if it means that Jews are not to live like
Jews any longer either. However, this is a misunderstanding of
the text. The Jews were free to continue following the Jewish
commandments, but they were not to force non-Jewish Christians
to do the same. And even with their cultural differences of
Christian worship and practice, there is neither Jew nor
Greek, slave nor free. “I personally have come to believe that
unity does not have to require uniformity, and I believe that
there must be such a thing as healthy diversity in human
society and in the Christian world Church” (Winter).
As Dr. Steve Strauss, Missions Professor at Gordon-Conwell
Theological Seminary in Charlotte, NC, pointed out, there is a
group of Christians, north of Mecca, who were previously
Muslims. Although they now worship the One True God, confess
that Jesus is the only begotten son of God, read, study, and
teach the Bible, they continue to pray five times a day and
worship on Friday, the Muslim holy day. These practices are so
embedded within their culture that to tell them to do
otherwise would destroy the opportunity to see them continue
in their Christian faith.
Although it would not be ideal to say that people of different
generations, ethnic groups, and financial status cannot
worship together, it would be just as wrong to suggest that
they cannot congregate and worship with those of similar
social norms. To worship in a context that is familiar,
throughout history, has been the one overarching recipe for
the survival of Christianity among people groups in any
culture or nation.
Forcing earlier generational worship styles, music, and even
times upon newer generations is just as ineffective a form of
evangelism as asking non-English speaking citizens to worship
in America’s mostly Anglo, middle-class congregations.
There is one territory of The Salvation Army where every
divisional youth leader has been told that, at every
Divisional Youth Councils, only songs from the official
Salvation Army songbook are to be used in worship. This is a
case of confusing nostalgia for legitimacy. In this case, the
older generation (younger generations also commit the sin of
generational arrogance) has placed such a high value on the
preservation of their historical forms that they don’t
recognize the underlying message of their generational
arrogance—We are not as interested in your worship as we are
in your preservation of our expression of Salvationism.
If we are going to reach the world, we must recognize that
there are many worlds within our own communities, not just
across the oceans and national boarders.
And here is the irony: although single-culture congregations
are more successful in growing and longevity than those which
are more multicultural, it is the homogenization of cultures
into worship which is the goal of Christ’s desire for the
unity of his bride.
Small group ministries are often very effective in serving
both of these purposes—giving the freedom of cultural
expression to small groups and then having all of those
individual expressions come together for weekly worship. This
is somewhat accomplished through Salvation Army music, Sunday
school, and program groups, and there are still many other
options which may be more suitable for others who are unable
to be a part of corps programs, and are available for worship.
Even our programmatic ministry is an expression of a
particular culture, which leaves room for the
non-programmatically minded, postmodern cultures that are so
often left out by such ministries.
“I see the world Church as a gathering together of a great
symphony orchestra where we don’t make every new person coming
in play a violin in order to fit in with the rest. We invite
the people to come in to play the same score—the Word of
God—but to play their own instruments, and in this way there
will issue forth a heavenly sound that will grow in the
splendor and glory of God as each new instrument is added”
(Winter).
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