Transforming Culture

A Challenge for Christian Mission

Sherwood G. Lingenfelter

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780801021787
• eBook ISBN: 9781441205865
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Revised edition gives readable case studies, more material on conflict resolution and specific applications on how to transform culture from the mission field.

1

Transferring or Transforming Culture?

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Rom. 12:1–2)

A few years ago some missionary colleagues and I attended a Sunday morning worship service in a large evangelical church in Cameroon’s capital city of Yaounde. The African pastors led us in a familiar service, selecting songs from a standard evangelical hymnbook and preaching an inspiring, doctrinally sound message, given in English and translated into French. We missionaries, a few white faces in a sea of black believers, enjoyed the service thoroughly. As I walked away praising God, it suddenly occurred to me that this service was almost identical to those I had experienced in North America. Momentarily stunned, I wondered why I should feel as comfortable in Africa as if I were at home.

A week passed. I traveled to the interior in the northwest province of Cameroon, where I attended another worship service. There, the congregation sang unfamiliar music, the musicians played instruments dissonant and grating to my ears, and, while the pastor read from the King James Bible, he preached in a language foreign to me. Remembering my experience in Yaounde, I thanked God for the unique expression of worship in this African church. As I observed more carefully, however, I discovered many familiar things. These people had constructed a church building with gabled roof and steeple, arranged their benches in rows, and copied the platform and pulpit of a New England church. The men sat on one side and the women on the other, as was common in the home churches of early missionary pioneers. In the order of service only the language and the music were unfamiliar. As I reflected further on this African congregation, I discovered a structure nearly identical to that of the Baptist conferences with which I am familiar in the United States.

Why is it that in the process of establishing churches in non-Western nations we transfer our culture of the church? Can we find a biblical basis for this practice? Are missionaries planting biblically founded indigenous churches, or are they transferring their culture of Christianity to every nation of the world?

In Europe, Latin America, and Asia, I have found in every area a similar pattern of church planting. In North Borneo, the Anglican, evangelical, and Roman Catholic churches are all modeled on patterns brought by missionaries from various denominational and cultural backgrounds. It is difficult to find in the two-thirds world a truly indigenous church. Most churches reflect more the culture of the missionaries who planted them than they do the culture of the new believers.

Missionaries have succeeded in bringing a biblically informed worldview, but one that is thoroughly contaminated by their culture. Is it possible to bring a truly transforming gospel, or are we always limited to reproducing our own cultural reflection of Christianity wherever we carry the message?

Contextualization and Indigenization

The idea of contextualization is to frame the gospel message in language and communication forms appropriate and meaningful to the local culture and to focus the message upon crucial issues in the lives of the people. The contextualized indigenous church is built upon culturally appropriate methods of evangelism; the process of discipling draws upon methods of instruction that are familiar and part of local traditions of learning. The structural and political aspects of leadership are adapted from patterns inherent in national cultures rather than imported from denominational organizations in the home countries of missionaries.

On an assignment with a mission in Surinam in 1986, I had the opportunity to observe such a contextualized indigenous church among Surinam Javanese. The pastor of this church was a Javanese man who for more than ten years had concentrated his ministry effort on evangelizing the youth among his people. Deeply discouraged to see these young men and women leave the fellowship of believers at the time of their marriages, he abandoned the youth ministry and began to concentrate on evangelizing adult men.

Through his contact with a Bible translation organization this pastor had gained a great appreciation for the Javanese language. He organized a band and wrote Christian songs using the familiar melodic pattern and appeal of Javanese music. Saturday evening became the prime time for evangelistic outreach; believers and unbelievers enjoyed a time of celebration in Christ. These evangelistic meetings offered food, fellowship, singing, and a fifteen-minute sharing of the gospel.

Seeing the response of people to these meetings, the pastor was inspired to launch a Sunday afternoon radio program. Drawing listeners through Javanese Christian music, interviewing men and women who were especially knowledgeable about Javanese culture, and focusing on a message of joy and hope, the pastor brought many listeners to respond to the gospel. He gave his home phone number and address to his radio listeners and received inquirers at any time of the day or night. Within the first year of the radio program more than eighty men, women, and children had received Christ through his ministry.

The organization of local churches growing out of this ministry reflected Javanese values and priorities. The pastor delayed baptizing new believers until the whole family was ready, and he concentrated on discipling men. In turn, each family head discipled his wife and children. Worship services, emphasizing celebration and introducing unbelievers to the body of Christ, were held on Saturday evening. Small-group Bible studies were held in various locations on Sundays to disciple new believers.

The particular patterns developed in this Surinam Javanese church are a combination of Javanese and missionary strategies. The national pastor adapted the Christian faith to the unique needs of his own people. The outcome of his effort was a dynamic, growing church, as many Muslim men and women received the gospel and committed themselves to the Lord Jesus Christ.

In spite of the appeal of contextualization and indigenization for generating more effective church-planting ministries, these strategies are not without risk and potential abuse. Indigenization may lead to dead churches in the third and fourth generation of believers. Even in the New Testament we find Christians quickly defining the parameters of Christianity in terms of their own cultural limitations. The Book of Acts records an anti-Gentile mentality among Jewish converts. When Peter returned from his evangelistic trip to Joppa, he was immediately challenged by fellow believers who were critical of his eating with uncircumcised Gentiles (Acts 11:1–3). Some were not content with Peter’s explanation, and later a faction of Jewish Christians proclaimed that unless converts did what believers did in Jerusalem, they could not be saved (Acts 15:1). When Paul arrived in Jerusalem late in his ministry, he discovered thousands of Jewish converts, all of them zealous for the law (Acts 21:20). The gospel had become completely conformed to Jewish culture, and the church had drifted to a particular, rather than a universal, vision of evangelism.

Gentile churches were no less susceptible to this indigenization problem. Before the death of John the apostle, five of the seven churches in Asia lost their vision, and two, Pergamum and Thyatira, had completely compromised the message of the gospel (Rev. 2–3). Both the indigenous Jewish churches and the indigenous Gentile churches succumbed to the pressures of culture and lost their vision and vitality.

How can we escape the dilemma of the dead indigenous church? Andrew Walls (1982, 97–99) contrasts the “indigenizing principle”—pressuring people into independence and isolation so that they conform to their own cultural surroundings at the price of detachment from the universal church—with the “pilgrim principle,” which draws the church in the direction of the universals of the faith, rooted in obedience to Christ and the Scriptures. Jesus is the author of kingdom teaching and of the pilgrim principle, as recorded in his final hours with his disciples; Jesus prayed and asked the Father to protect his disciples and to keep them pilgrims, not of but in an evil world. In John 17:13–19 Jesus declares that they were not of the world, yet he concludes, “as you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.” Walls suggests that pilgrim churches arise only when believers receive faithful instruction in the Word of God and respond with obedience as followers of Jesus Christ in a hostile world.

Contradiction:
The Pilgrim and Indigenous Principles

The contradiction between the pilgrim principle, with its emphasis on the universal church and other-worldliness, and the indigenous principle, with its emphasis on self-support, self-government, and self-propagation in independent this-worldliness, is implicit in all church ministries. Indigenous churches, common in the history of the church, result from effective contextualization. While in their formation they serve as a powerful force for spreading the gospel, they may become a vehicle of compromise and death. The pilgrim principle, connecting local believers to the universal church with a vision for outreach to the world, provides a necessary counterbalance. Christians retain a commitment to bear witness to the world without becoming part of the world. The indigenous church without connection to the universal church and the Word dies. Entrenched in its own private vision of righteousness, it ceases to contextualize its message to needy people and loses vision and outreach.

What leads a local church to the privatization of the vision of Christ for the world? Members of every society hold a collective worldview and participate in structured social environments. Learning from parents and peers to accept and live in accord with certain values, beliefs, and procedures for action, they create a collective this-worldliness, which becomes a prison of disobedience. So entangled, they live a life of conformity to social images that are in conflict with God’s purpose for humanity. Paul suggests that human beings are in a prison, a cell of disobedience: “God has imprisoned all human beings in their own disobedience only to show mercy to them all” (Rom. 11:30–32 NJB). In Galatians 3:22, paraphrasing Psalm 14:1–3, he observes that “the whole world is a prisoner of sin.” God has penned up all people in their self-created cells of culture, including Jew and Gentile, pagan and missionary.

This view of culture is at odds with the perspective of earlier missiologists. Charles H. Kraft and Marvin K. Mayers, working from the viewpoint that cultures are integrated, functioning systems, argue that culture is a neutral vehicle through which God communicates to human beings. Kraft (1981, 113) states that “culture consists of forms, functions, meanings, and usage . . . a kind of road map made up of various forms designed to get people where they need to go. These forms and the functions they are intended to serve are seen, with few exceptions, as neutral with respect to the interaction between God and man. Cultural patterning, organizing, and structuring of life . . . are not seen as inherently evil or good in themselves.” Mayers (1987, 251) suggests that “it is entirely possible that the gospel can enter a life and a society without change being called for.”

In this volume I reject the notion that culture or worldview is neutral. Analogies such as Kraft’s map or “a tool for communication and interaction” (Lingenfelter and Mayers 1986, 122) are inadequate to capture the pervasive presence of sin in the lives and thought of human beings. Using the analogy of a tool, we can say culture is more like a slot machine found in Las Vegas’s gambling casinos than a wrench or a screwdriver. Culture, like a slot machine, is programmed to ensure that those who hold power win and the common players lose; when or if the organized agenda is violated, people frequently resort to violence to reestablish their programmed advantage. Every cultural system brokers power to its members, although the power advantage may be held by either individuals or groups. The structures and organizations of cultures are not neutral; people define and structure their relationships with others to protect their personal or group interests and to sustain or gain advantage over others with whom they compete. Video games provide better analogies to culture than does Kraft’s map, because they reflect the various power advantages, access to survival resources, and hostile opposition that typify cultural systems.

Culture is created and contaminated by human beings; culture is the pen of disobedience from which freedom is possible only through the gospel. H. Richard Niebuhr (1951, 165) elucidates how the writings of Paul address this issue, portraying Christ in the role of “the judge of culture and the redeemer to Christian culture.” Culture seeks to maintain social control through its rules, norms, and sanctions for behavior, and thus it limits certain kinds of sinful or deviant behavior. Yet the rules of culture reflect a natural knowledge of God (Rom. 2:14–15) that serves to expose sin rather than bring people to righteousness.

The gospel, in contrast, liberates men and women from the cell of disobedience. Peter writes, “You were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers . . . with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18–19). The gospel brings a contradictory message to the peoples of the world, challenging their social order and beliefs. Peter again clarifies, “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God” (1 Peter 2:9–10).

The Scriptures show clearly that Jesus challenged the accepted society and worldview. Although he was living as a Jew in the Jewish world, he shattered that world with his preaching and teaching. His good news brought conflict and change. People in Judea and Samaria hated him and plotted to kill him because he challenged their system. They did everything they could to destroy Jesus and his followers.

Likewise, when believers carried the gospel into the Greco-Roman world, they overturned traditional beliefs and provoked social conflict. The Greeks in Ephesus, furious at Paul’s message because it was bad for business, rioted against him. When the gospel challenges with power any worldview, unbelievers react to defend their view and may inflict great distress upon Christians.

Paul Hiebert (1985) argues that Christianity provides a new hermeneutic for cultural living. Every culture and every person must change in light of a new perspective—Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and exalted. Jesus came to save not cultures but people, and he came to transform them into his likeness. But whole cultures will not be transformed! The opposite is true. Church and mission history suggests that the larger culture neutralizes the church of Jesus Christ, as is often evident in the third or fourth generation of its new or renewed existence.

Perhaps Christians have accepted a common notion that God has a system that includes particular kinds of behaviors, institutions, and personality traits. Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and other leaders of Reformation theologies and institutions proclaimed that their version of the church most closely represented the system called for in Scripture. They articulated how the kingdom teaching of Christ should be expressed in their social and cultural worlds. While church leaders have not always seen eye to eye on the relationship of the gospel and culture (Niebuhr 1951), they have all struggled with corruption in culture and sought ways to purify the church from that corruption. In every case, however, in just a few generations the Reformation churches reflect more the social worlds of Germany, Switzerland, and England than a dynamic, universally oriented, culture-transforming church.

Transformation is neither bridging from one system to another nor transferring a Christian system to another place and people. Rather, transformation means a new hermeneutic—a redefinition, a reintegration of the lives of God’s people (the church) within the system in which they find themselves living and working. Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). He thus denied the existence of a Christian sociopolitical system but called for the transformation of his disciples’ thinking and social relationships with others.

The argument of this book is that the social and cultural systems of a missionary and a local, indigenous community exert powerful pressure on new believers and churches, pressure to conform to habitual standards, values, and practices. Christians cannot live apart from the social games of the church or the wider society, and therefore they are subject to these unrelenting forces. Further, Christian leaders teach and practice standards and values that are inextricably intertwined with those of their social world.

Nevertheless, the gospel may become a significant powerful force in the continuous restructuring of any social environment and worldview. As believers become mature in their faith, their interests reflect more and more those of the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore Christians will experience tension and contradiction with old patterns of self-interest and greed, provoking them to contradict old social rules and judge many inadequate as they attempt to imitate the person of Christ in their lives and work. As believers increasingly obey the truth of the gospel, they will discover new ways of managing resources and relationships.

Synthesis: Prisons, Pilgrims, and Transformation

How can Christian workers avoid transferring their culture and nurture maturing, indigenous churches that are committed to evangelism and the transformation of their local culture as disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ? The solution presented in the chapters that follow is similar to that presented by Mayers (1987, 247–60) in his combination of biblical absolutism and cultural relativism. We agree on the truth and authority of Scripture and on the pluralism that characterizes cultures and affects the ministry enterprise. We differ in our view of culture and worldview: Mayers has a high and neutral view of culture, while the view of culture presented here is a low view, that of culture inextricably infected by sin.

The first task is understanding our prison and the cultural prisons of others. The notion of a prison of disobedience is repulsive to many. We often picture a prison as a medieval dungeon, deep underground in a stone castle, with bars, clanking iron doors, and a small trapdoor through which the keeper thrusts our daily rations of moldy bread and water. No wonder readers resist this conceptualization of culture. Perhaps a different illustration will help. A beautiful walled park in the center of Seoul, Korea, contains the homes, gardens, and servants’ quarters of the king and royal family of Korea. During the nineteenth century the king and his family occupied this famous residence, the Palace of the Secret Garden. Because of his extremely high status, custom declared that the king could not leave the palace grounds; he was in fact a prisoner in his palace. However, life within the walls was magnificent. He enjoyed the most beautifully furnished, heated, and decorated living quarters in Korea. He had household servants to care for every need. He enjoyed a beautiful garden and pond where the finest scholars, poets, and artists in Korea came to do their work. The only catch: he was a political prisoner, unable to see and experience the outside world. To compensate for this deprivation, he had a second palace built on the back of the palace grounds. This palace, decorated in b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Transferring or Transforming Culture?
• 2. A Model for Analysis of Social Order
• 3. Property: The Silent Enemy of Church Growth
• 4. Labor and Productivity: Divisive Values in Mission
• 5. Generosity and Exchange: The Stone of Stumbling in Interpersonal Relationships
• 6. Authority and Family: The Foundation of Social Order
• 7. Authority and Community: The Context of Local Churches
• 8. Disputes, Conflicts, and Communication: To Command or to Serve?
• 9. Transforming Culture
• References
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• About the Author
• Other Books by Author