I once heard a story of a Cambodian woman who was fleeing for her life when the Khmer Rouge was ravaging her country. She had found refuge for a time in an old Roman Catholic church in the countryside. One day there she observed the crucifix above the altar—the twisted, bloodied figure of Jesus hanging from a cross. Derisively, she wondered to herself: ‘How could they even respect and worship a man who had obviously such terrible karma?’
She was looking at Jesus through distinctly Buddhist eyes, assuming that he was suffering and paying for wrong done in a previous life!
Now, think how you would help her understand that the Lord of glory gave his life for her? Her starting-point was already one that was prejudiced and blinkered by her worldview and primary beliefs about what she saw and experienced in the world.
This begs a larger question: How do we share the Christian message in a way that makes it intelligible to peoples who do not share similar conceptual-belief system to ours, or one near enough for us to find common ground? How can the gospel speak through us to a people of foreign tongue and disparate beliefs?
Coming soon to a street near you
I am Singaporean by nationality and Sri Lankan/Indian by ethnicity. I have also been a cross-cultural missionary for more than 20 years. For 13 years, my family and I served in a church-planting work in Buddhist-majority Thailand. Prior to that, I worked for 5 years on a church-planting team in Colchester, England, where we reached both un-churched English people and international students studying at the University of Essex on the edge of the town.
Working in such contrasting contexts have helped me learn to appreciate the power and sway of cultures and world-views on human understanding and responses to the Gospel.
Simply put, the gospel of Jesus Christ has to be contextualized if it is to make sense to anyone on earth, because all peoples within different cultures and sub-cultures may invariably see and hear it differently. According to Dean Gilliland, contextualization seeks to “to enable, insofar as it is humanly possible, an understanding of what it means that Jesus Christ is authentically experienced in each and every human situation.”
The late great missionary anthropologist, Paul Hiebert argued that socio-linguistic backgrounds order and organize our world differently. He said, "People in different cultures do not live in the same world with different labels attached but in radically different conceptual worlds." Therefore, what you say and do in Jesus’ name may not always be seen, heard, and interpreted in the way that you mean it.
But the challenge of rightly contextualizing the gospel, the Bible, and God's truth are not just the concerns of your average cross-cultural missionary toiling away in foreign places.
We live in an increasingly globally-connected, well-traversed, melting pot of a world. There has never been a time like ours when record numbers of people (1 in every 30 people on earth) are living and working outside of the lands of their birth. Global migration and refugee movement is at an all-time high (3.6 percent of the global population). Many of the most developed nations of our world are irreversibly pluralistic and multi-cultural. If your town or street are not filled with people from different cultures or sub-cultures, they soon may be.
The Western world is now almost wholly post-Christian, while many other parts of the world, the Majority World, are still functionally pre-Christian. But in all places, the missionary challenge remains the same.
We are all called to be disciples on mission with God, loving and seeking out neighbor and strangers alike, to take the Gospel, duly contextualized, from us to everywhere so that new disciples are made (Matthew 28:18-20). Fired up by God's Spirit, we are a ‘sent’ people called to boldly proclaim and demonstrate his love, truth and power in our everyday lives to people very different culturally, socially or even economically from us.
Learning to see with missionary eyes
I propose two important requisites to beginning to live as truly missionary disciples wherever God sends us.
1. Awareness of our cultural conditioning.
God alone sees people as they actually are. We see people and situations as we perceive them. We are all born partially-sighted in this regard. In our common experience of the now-but-not-yet dawning of the Kingdom of God, we need to be aware of how cultures of the world remain distinct as nations, tribes, languages and peoples even as they interact and live within shared societies.
There are, consequently, no a-cultural Christians. We are all creatures of time, space and language. We often, unconsciously, view events and experiences through shades and lenses of worldviews colored by sin, prejudices, ignorance, cultural mores, imperfect understanding and subjective experience.
As a result, we all make value-judgments based on our cultural preferences, conditioning and worldviews shaped by our upbringing. Developing an awareness of how this informs our reactions, attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions of those different from ourselves is essential. Similarly, we need to understand why and how a person is motivated to do and say things by his or her culture before we make judgments on their behavior. Perceptions and practices we encounter may not always be a matter of right or wrong—perhaps just different.
Thus, we must seek the help of God’s Spirit and the Bible, which alone carry supracultural validity, if we are to become grace-filled, credible witnesses and global ambassadors of God's truth to all peoples.
2. Reliance on divine wisdom.
Mitsue was a Japanese student whom I got to know well when I worked in international student ministry in England. She had started to attend one of the evangelistic Bible studies we ran in the hostels. But what she heard did not seem to make sense to her at all.
One day, she told me a story. She spoke of a person who had spent all their life drinking tea, in a country where everyone drank the same and believed in its benefits. Then out of the blue, a stranger from a far away place came into her community and began to tell that person that coffee was a far better drink and that she ought to give up her tea for it. Her question to me was, ‘What gave anyone the right to tell her that her culture’s tea was not good for her and to say that my coffee was better?’
I understood the painful implications of her question. Praying silently for wisdom from the Holy Spirit, I eventually said to her, “With all due respect to the tea you have been brought up with, you will never know the difference or the truth of the claim that coffee is better until you tasted it for yourself.”
The gospel of Jesus Christ and his Kingdom, with which every believing Christian is entrusted with, is good news not just for us, but for the world. God has a great plan for you... and your neighbor. And we are called to share God’s good news with them. As Tite Tiénou has written, "a secret Gospel ceases to be news and loses its goodness".
Christianity, unlike every other religious teaching, is predicated not on human reformation but on divine transformation. God is seeking a new breed of men and women who are wholly changed by his work and grace.
And so the gospel we have to live and tell is wondrous—from Eden to eternity, God is looking for a people for his own, diverse yet united in worship and submission to him (Revelation 7:9).
We are called to go with the Spirit of God and each other in mission to the world, the proper theater of God's saving work. We need to see people sensitively with new eyes, and with God’s wisdom, trust him to use us, in spite of our brokenness and cultural blindspots, to mediate his love and truth to a world desperately in need of it.
Missions then, isn't just about getting on a plane to a strange or exotic culture. It begins where you are and ends on the day we die. We are all called to be disciples on mission into all the places God sends us—whether crossing oceans or the street outside your home. The onus is on us to speak and demonstrate the gospel of Jesus with all compassion, humility, clarity and wisdom. The good news is that as we go, Jesus promises to go with us for all time (Matthew 28:20).
Originally published by on Manik Corea's Substack, "The Upward Call". Republished with permission.
Manik Corea is a Singaporean of Sri Lankan/Indian descent. He is the National Director of the Singapore Centre for Global Missions (SCGM) and Associate Pastor of Crossroads International Church in Singapore. Prior to this, Manik served for 22 years as a missionary with the New Anglican Missionary Society (NAMS) in the USA, UK, Thailand, and Singapore. He is ordained in the Anglican Church of North America and serves his diocese as a Global Consultant in Missions. Manik has a Masters in Intercultural Studies (Church-Planting) from Asbury Theological Seminary and is currently on their Doctor of Ministry program.
