Being a Global Christian: God Is Already There

Two years ago, a few Christians and I were having a Bible study with a Muslim man from Sierra Leone.  When we got to one of the exorcisms in the Gospel of Mark, I told him that none of us at the table had ever seen anything like a demon possession, and maybe he could speak more to the issue.  So he started talking about the witch doctor in his village, and how he could point at a goat and kill it with his voodoo, and about how he put spells on people, making them go crazy.

When my friend read the Gospel of Mark, he was glad to see that demons obeyed Jesus. Because he knew what a demon was in a way that we don’t.  As soon as he told us that story, I looked around the table and realized that this was a holy moment for all involved.  For all of us at the table, the world had suddenly become re-enchanted.

Who was teaching whom?

I don’t know about your context, but I serve a church in a university town, and I often hear about something called Post-Colonialism.  If you are not caught up on that terminology, Post-Colonialism is a fascinating discipline that exposes some of the ways Western nations throughout history have exploited other countries.

But often when someone talks to me about Post-Colonialism, I am inclined to think something like, “What a very colonial idea.”  The conversations I have about it tend to be brought up in the context of talking against Western missionaries or evangelism, and they tend to be brought up with a tone that hints, “If you only knew what we knew…”

But the best impulses of this discipline will make privileged people curious about the world around them, and humble enough to learn about it.  The best impulses of this discipline shouldn’t stop Christians from evangelizing and sharing their faith, but should shape the way we do it.

So this is a short series talking about the ways that the church I serve is changing the ways that we approach missions. I’m writing about this because I’m proud of the stuff that we are doing, I think it’s sincerely going to be both good news for the world, and for us. And today I want to write about our 4th initiative:

Restoring the World Through Restoring Highland (our church)

Part of what we are beginning to recognize is that missions goes both ways. Often when churches in America think or talk about missions, we act like God or the Gospel is something we possess and that we will take with us to some God-forsaken part of the world. But the truth is that God is already there and working, even among people who haven’t heard of Jesus!

If that sounds like an overstatement, consider the book of Acts, where no less than God Himself, tells the apostle Paul as he is sending him to the very pagan, unevangelized city of Corinth “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent. For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city.”

The task of any missionary is to find out how God is already working in where they are sent and join.

But more than that. Because of the incarnational nature of Christianity, every church takes a different shape and across the globe, there are not only a variety of traditions with rich resources rooted in the Jesus story, but also

We can learn a lot from our brothers and sisters across the Global South where Christianity is growing, we can learn a lot from our Orthodox and Pentecostal and Catholic brothers and sisters who are faithfully living out the Gospel in their context. In a Western world filled with racial tension and segregated churches, we can learn from our international neighbors how they’ve learned to have such rich diversity across racial and economic lines.

As America grows increasingly secularized, we can learn from the Christians in Europe how they have found ways to speak the Gospel into that culture. I love the way Justo Gonzalez puts this:

The fact is the Gospel is making headway among many tribes, nations, and languages–that is indeed making more headway among them than it is among the dominant cultures of the North Atlantic. The question in not whether there will be a multicultural church. Rather, the question is wether those who have become so accustomed to seeing the Gospel expressed only or primarily in terms of those dominant cultures will be able to participate in the life of the multicultural church that is already a reality.

The point is that missions isn’t just for “out there” where they speak different languages and have customs that we find odd. True missions involves an openness to the reality that God is already at work in the very places we are being called to work, and that we might learn just as much as we can teach.

Missions at it’s best doesn’t just change that area of the world, it changes the sending church as well. We discover that the Gospel is bigger and better than we had imagined. We go to the ends of the earth and we find that God was already there.