Gospel and culture

Editor’s note: The following post arises from small group reflections from The Rise of Global Christianity, 1910–2010, taught by Dr. Todd Johnson at Boston University in the Fall of 2010. Led by doctoral students, the small groups discussed lectures given by Christian scholars in various disciplines, including significant changes that have occurred in global Christianity over the past 100 years.

This week our guest lecturer was Dr. Dana L. Robert who wrote the article “Missionaries Sent and Received, Worldwide, 1910-2010” in our text Atlas of Global Christianity 1910-2010. With an analysis of how mission practitioners have used the term “frontier,” she gave an engaging lecture about how missionary conceptions of the “mission field” have changed over the last 100 years. Early on, the mission frontier was conceived in terms of territorial expansion, while later missionaries envisioned engagement with movements that addressed political, labor and race relations as new frontiers. In the post-colonial context the student movement used the metaphor of crossing boundaries, such as that between belief and unbelief, and there were arguments between those who saw crossing geographical boundaries as integral to mission and those who understood frontiers metaphorically as those places where the church meets the world. Today it is the movement to evangelize unreached people groups that most appropriates the discourse of mission frontiers. Dr. Robert noted the work of humanitarian movements, the West as a new mission field that nonwestern migrant missionaries engage, and the English Pioneer Movement as mission frontiers in the 21st century.

Our group conversation focused on the missionary dilemma of how to navigate the interaction between culture and gospel, starting with the case of how western missionaries were successful or not in identifying and managing their own cultural roots as they shared the gospel of Jesus Christ. Once again we enjoyed an engaging discussion that grew out of our different experiences in North America, Africa, India and Korea. We noted a number of factors that help missionaries today keep from imposing unhelpful cultural particularities on the gospel they present. Large immigrant movements allow people to engage other cultures and expressions of the gospel and in the process lose many of their cultural biases. Post-colonial critiques of the missionary movement have helped correct bad methods. In addition, missionaries who take advantage of training that prepares them culturally as well as theologically know better how to engage people different from themselves. Perhaps most importantly, many of today’s missionaries are not foreigners in the regions in which they work but minister in their own culture.

Yet separating gospel and culture is not always easy. Western missionaries still sometimes expect Christians in other cultures to follow western theology or forms of worship for example. We heard from our Indian member about native missionaries who expect their converts to appropriate western dress. From our Korean participants we heard that Korean missionaries also find the issue to be a challenging one, sometimes exporting very westernized forms of educational and health institutions that were imported some generations ago to Korea by Westerners. Western education is often very attractive to people and provides for a way for Korean missionaries to “get their foot in the door”, teaching English for instance. If people want certain aspects of western culture it is perhaps difficult for missionaries to know how much to facilitate that.

On the other hand, we heard that many Korean missionaries have excellent training and are taught to take issues of culture very seriously. They work hard at getting to know the culture they work in and prepare themselves and their contributions in light of that. Inevitably though, missionaries use traditional structures and methods that they know from their own experience, Korean or otherwise. Korean methods, we heard, are often very much influenced by Confucianism, a particularity of that culture that might not be as helpful in other places.

It seems that the issue of the relationship of culture and gospel, especially as it relates to the missionary task, is not simple and must be worked out with careful training and much thought.

Bruce Yoder, discussion moderator