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The World Around Us
Jul 9, 06:14 PM
Dear Friends,
It is good for us to get out into the world, out of our own culture, and to see what is going on “out there.” I was amazing at how affected I was by being away from American culture for a month. I was even more amazed at seeing more of the world first hand. For instance, I did two weeks of preaching and leadership training in Tanzania got on a plane and went immediately to Scotland to do the same thing. In the process, I was reminded that training in Africa is distinctly different than it is in the West. Many of the principles are the same, but the mindset and assumptions differ greatly from one context to the next. You cannot simply plug in training from one culture and expect it to work in the other.
Those of us who live in the midst of Christian community in America may not understand fully what is happening in the world around us. In her book, The Preaching Life, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, It is one thing to talk about the post-Christian era and quite another to walk around in it.” For instance, the church in Scotland is struggling in the midst of the almost total secularization of their society. Very few people go to church. The church there is diligently seeking how to be relevant to a society which has little or no regard for Christianity. In the rest of Europe it is even worse. It is not like the American “Bible belt” South where most of your neighbors go to church. There is a general disdain toward Christianity because of its history in Europe and because of a tainted image closely aligned with American conservative politics. Millions of people are walking around “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenant of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world.” (Ephesians 2:12)
Do you have any idea what is going on out there?
We people of faith are asking ourselves and seeking God to know how to respond to the challenge of the current day. It is not the task of the church to vainly hold on to an American ideal of life in the 1950’s when everyone went to church and the stores were closed on Sunday. It is the task of the church to respond to the spiritual and social climate of the day and bring the reality of the Gospel to life. But is that not true of every generation? Is it really so different now than it was when the Gospel branched from its Jewish root into Gentile territory? Asia Minor was not any less secular than the Western world is today. The, as now, the mission of the church was not to hold on to something that used to be but to advance something that is becoming. The Kingdom comes and grows through the life of church community and mission.
Thank you for joining us in this mission as we seek to join God in His marvelous
work of redemption in the world.