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The World Is Our Parish
Nov 2, 07:38 AM
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Proverbs 9:10
One of the benefits of teaching both American and international students is the ability to see the different personal, social, and religious perspectives held by people in various cultural contexts. At the end of one of our recent class sessions, I invited each of the students to pray in his or her mother tongue. Prayers were lifted up in Cebuano, Swahili, English, Yoruba, Igbo, Indonesian, and Tagalog. How stirring it is to be reminded that the Kingdom of God is made up of people from every tribe, nation, and tongue! Teaching in such an environment is a bonanza as I share principles and concepts and listen as the students contextualize them to their own settings.
Teaching and traveling as I do to different parts of the world affords me the unique opportunity to see how diverse we really are as a species while at the same time having the same needs as human beings. What is becoming increasingly clear is how very different the American mindset is in contrast with much of the non-Western world. Our affluence clouds our vision and distorts our perceptions. We have the ability to insulate and insure ourselves from many of the challenges common to the rest of the world. Being able to control our environment and in many ways our destiny creates in us the expectation that life is supposed to work for us. Everything that inhibits our free expression and self-determination is a nuisance we simply will not put up with. Our expectation therefore becomes an arrogant demand. The rest of the world has no such luxury.
It is not just our wealth that sets us apart. Our sense of individual personal independence renders Americans virtually incapable of understanding the concept of community, especially as Christians. For most Americans, the church is an organization to which they belong and a cause they support. It is nearly impossible for the American mindset to comprehend that we actually belong to one another and as Christians we are organically linked to every other believer on earth. One of the greatest symptoms of this radical independence shows up in our propensity toward consumption. The mantra of the American is, “If I can afford it, I can buy it.” There is little regard for how individual personal choices and behavior affects others.
Therefore, the American Church tends to look more like America than it does the Kingdom of God. The preaching in most American churches is a process of proclaiming our cultural values and dressing them up in religious language. In the West salvation is defined primarily in personal and individual terms. In many other cultures, salvation is also defined by the positive way in which the society at large is blessed. How desperately we need a global perspective on life and on our faith! The world has globalized, the Kingdom has always been global; it is the American Church which has yet to catch on. Instead of humbly learning from our brothers and sisters in other countries, we export our own Americanized version of the faith which is big church, big money, and big show. Sadly, many in world actually aspire to this brand of Christianity.
I notice the stark contrast in mindsets within our own students. Speaking in admittedly gross generalizations, I would say that the biggest differences between our American and international students are in such areas as the fear of the Lord, respect for authority, and reverence for the Word of God. American students tend to be impressed by very little while the internationals are thrilled and grateful at the venture of learning. International students tend to gravitate more readily toward faith whereas American students are afflicted with the hyper-rationality of Enlightenment thinking. The international students as a whole are less fearful and insecure whereas many of the Americans are quite self-absorbed and paralyzed by their fear of what others think. My prayer for future spiritual leaders is that they begin to gain an internal strength which will free them to lead effectively. I pray that the American church will be less prone to try to conform the world to our way of thinking and begin to listen and learn from other cultures. It would be wonderful if we could be delivered from the prison of elevating the human intellect to near god-like dominion and rediscover the reverential fear of the Lord. The end result, I pray, is that the American Church begin to courageously embody the true Kingdom – the one arrayed before us in Scripture and personified in Christ.