Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – What Does It Mean to Be the Church in Specific Cultures?
Universals of the Church
Of course, wherever the Church is, regardless of cultural context, it has the universal obligation to be true to Christ and his word, to be in spiritual togetherness with one another (e.g. Acts 2:44) and to be in prayer for the world and the culture of each context.
It will see itself obliged to proclaim the gospel to all who have not heard, to disciple those who have come to faith and to bring into reconciliation all who are alienated or divided from one another. It will stand as the symbol of hope and it will be the bearer of it. It will declare and show how people who are lost can be found. It will prophetically address societal issues in terms of justice and righteousness. It will care for the poor, marginalized and oppressed. It will uphold biblical family life and both affirm and demonstrate Christian marriage as monogamous and heterosexual. All these tasks and others the Church will seek to faithfully perform regardless of cultural context. These are the universals.
However, the Church does not dangle in thin air; its message and witness therefore must be culturally rooted and contextually applied.
Culture and Context
This is where the real challenges of relevant and meaningful witness come in.
On the one hand, the hard fact is that culture is absolutely critical because culture is all about how people live and behave in different situations, nations, tribes, races or contexts. On the other hand, the gospel is all about God addressing us from his perspective concerning how he wants us to live and behave in our various cultural contexts. For example, God has not called us to live in the first century or in the Middle Ages; he has called us to live in this new millennium in the context of a very secularised, Western and neo-pagan culture. We must therefore struggle to relate our faith to the contemporary scene and help Christians develop both a Christian critique of its presuppositions, values, standards and behaviours.
Therefore, we will not reshape the gospel in sympathy with the relativistic assumptions of most modern cultures. In fact, it is this set of assumptions we need to critique.
Defining culture further, one of my former colleagues in African Enterprise, Jonathan Wilson, made this observation:
“Culture is the totality of learned assumptions and behaviours associated with any distinct social grouping. We all belong to cultures. Cultures assume truths about life, principles of social interaction, priorities and values, and build structures and patterns of behaviour that give life to these beliefs and values. Therefore, all cultures are rooted in worldviews. Worldviews are those deeply, often unconsciously, held assumptions about why life is the way it is and how life works.”
And of course, all of life and behaviour are affected by our worldview.
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Michael Cassidy is the founder of African Enterprise. Author of a number of books, he has also played a key role as a Christian leader involved in reconciliation in South Africa. |