Lausanne World Pulse – Before Contextualization: Critical Incarnational Living

June 2007

By Bryan Galloway

New Christian believers sometimes borrow what they see others outside their culture do. This is called cultural appropriation.

Several years ago my wife and I returned to our first church plant for a Christmas worship service. Some years had passed since we worshipped with the believers and many changes had taken place. The church had a full-time pastor. New families were a part of the church with some now serving in key leadership roles. As we worshipped together, we sang songs to celebrate the birth of Christ. The pastor preached on a familiar Christmas passage from the Gospel of Luke. We then collected the offering. As the offering was collected, the pastor left the worship hall and departed through the back door. The ushers collected the offering and then the children and youth presented a brief drama on the historic event of Christ’s birth.

My wife and I delighted in how the church had grown numerically and how the believers had grown to become leaders in the church. Then something happened. The pastor came back into the sanctuary dressed like Santa Claus. As he paraded around distributing gifts, the pianist began playing a familiar tune and the church members began singing “Ding Dong Hong, Ding Dong Hong.” In English, that song is “Jingle Bells.”

My wife and I looked at one another in astonishment. What happened? We did not teach them to celebrate Christmas with Santa Claus nor did we teach them to sing “Jingle Bells.” I wondered, where did the people learn these expressions of Christmas? When asked, they said they learned to celebrate Christmas with Santa Claus and “Jungle Bells” by watching movies from the United States.

Cultural Appropriation
In the above situation and in many countries, new Christian believers sometimes borrow what they see others outside their culture do to celebrate events such as Christmas and Easter. In some situations, this borrowing often comes from the West and more specifically from American culture.

This process of borrowing from one culture another is labeled cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is “the taking—from a culture that is not one’s own—of intellectual property, cultural expressions or artifacts, history and ways of knowledge.”¹ No matter the context, people constantly experience changes through innovations (internal) and diffusion (external). Through the process of diffusion, they borrow things, ideas and behavior patterns from others. The amount of cultural diffusion varies from place to place with the amount of contact among cultures. That is, the more contact among cultures, the more likely that things, ideas and behavior patterns will be diffused and borrowed. Anthropologist John Yellen has shown how a total culture (the Kalahari !Kung) can change when exposed to foreign goods and ideas.²

Critical Incarnational Living
Borrowing is inevitable. It is going to happen as people are exposed to new cultural forms, ideas and behavior patterns from others. With this in mind, cross-cultural workers should realize that people are watching us. They observe what clothes we wear, the food we eat and the conversations we have with others. They observe and learn what we value most (our own cultural values) and see those things that drive our everyday activity and behavior. They see how we strive to initiate change. They also watch what cultural forms we use to worship. In so doing, the people might mistakenly borrow some of our Western traditions and ways of celebrating Christ events, believing that those very traditions and ways express the true meaning of the Christian faith. In other words, we might unintentionally be the very reason why something less than the true Christian faith is planted.

Bryan Galloway has served in roles such as church planter and regional administrator in cross-cultural missions for twenty years with the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Church. For the past eight years, he has served as the regional research coordinator for the IMB-SBC Pacific Rim region.