Ward Cleaver, Meet Homer Simpson
From Subversive Influence:
Missionaries have the challenge of learning the language and culture of the people among whom they work. To be effective, they have to learn not only how to communicate with words, but to master all the symbolic gestures, signs, and customs that define a culture. A missionary who ignores culture not only sabatoges communication, but also violates the incarnational model of Scripture in which God became one of us.
Good, we’re on the right track here. This is something that missiologists have known for decades, but the church doesn’t seem to think this applies in their own backyard. Communication is key, of course, and understanding culture is the basis for communicating. Here’s where the missionary effort’s greatest failing has been for the past number of decades. While successful in understanding other cultures and beginning communication within those contexts to the extent that the gospel is spread and new churches are established, there remains a failing, namely the phases that follow the establishing of a church. In this phase, colonialism rears its ugly head as the new converts are taught to be more like the culture from whence the missionaries came rather than the one from whence the convert came — and in which he still lives…
we don’t see our own culture as cross-cultural. It’s where we live and work, and it’s what we know… but we don’t stop to think that our version of it isn’t our neighbours’ version of it. Worse, some of us get to thinking that our (christian) subculture is representative of the whole culture around us; it isn’t. Ward Cleaver, meet Homer Simpson.
Yeah, my thoughts exactly.
My thoughts too. I think I’ve called it ‘cultural imperialism’. We change people alright! but into a middle-class value system. The first thing we must do is overcome and see our own biases before we do much else. Rather than transforming we conform. And I think our religious cultures/traditions are fiercely reinforced but what we do yet we don’t even notice it. The heavy reliance on teaching, teaching, teaching, and our theoretical christianity rarely gets road tested.
I read somewhere that someone likened their church to an SUV, all shiny with all the extras, but they couldn’t remember the last time it was taken off-road. I kinda liked the analogy.
Can I just squeeze another comment in? Having lived outside the structured church community for several years now (not in protest…just experimenting with questions) I honesty find the hardest thing in visiting is the cloud of church culture that is so now obvious to me as an ‘outsider’. I had enjoyed many years in youth, outreach and music ministries but with so much of that behind me now. It amazing the new perspectives on ‘church’ and church culture that happened given enough time and space from it. I’m not suggesting anything negative, just that I had an opportunity to not only see things, but feel things from the other side.
I actually find church culture a bit abrasive, and dare I say somewhat plastic at times. So its been interesting to see what my non christian friends had found difficult to traverse. They were interested in God per se, but not Church.
Perhaps one of the best things we can do for ourselves is separate the two in our own minds because our contemporary version of church may not be as biblical as we presume. I think we need to get back to a place where church is not something we do….but something we are. That takes a lot of punch out of our event based Christianity with its central focus on the success and attendance of a ‘service’.
Any thoughts?