As I have been thinking more about The Church, I realize that my perspective often is very narrow. I focus on the Church in the US, while there are more true followers of Jesus elsewhere in the world. However, my passion is for the American Church and its struggle to justify wealth, power, and success while preaching a gospel of humility, meakness, and peace.
This morning, I was reminded and challenged further in my understanding of cultural Christianity in the US. The guest speaker at our church stated that recently he was surprised to learn of a movement in Islam where people were coming to Jesus, transforming their lives, and yet still maintaining their cultural Islamic practices. They pray 5 times a day, maintain their dietary restrictions, and yet they have chosen to follow the one true God and be redeemed by the blood of Jesus.
If you're like me, you may not be able to envision this. It's not that I don't think its possible, it's that I'm fairly ignorant about Islam and what following Jesus would look like in that culture. The reason he mentioned this stemmed from the book of Galatians. The Apostle Paul wrote this letter in part to tell the people to not let things such as cultural difference, views on the Law, or other barriers keep people from truly and honestly choosing to follow Jesus.
One example was the argument that Gentiles should become Law-abiding Jews before they can choose to follow Jesus. To cut to the chase, Paul basically said this: there is no correct way to follow Jesus in terms of cultural practices, regional proximity, or any other restriction. It is by faith in Jesus Christ that we are redeemed. It is by loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves that matters. How someone models God's love, grace, peace, and forgiveness is different in different culture and circumstances.
Here's the challenging part of this for the American Church: we have packaged Christianity in such a way that many people want nothing to do with Jesus because of our actions. We export not only our faith in Jesus, but our cultural understandings, doctrine, and worship practices to the rest of the world. On a more dangerous level, we have mixed our culture with our faith. The American Dream becomes God's Dream. I have personally talked to people who look at American Christianity and see militarism, war mongers, greedy, wealthy, selfish, arrogant, and clueless people.
Americans try to justify our culture with our faith. We build our priorities, purpose statements, and church budgets around the subversive priorities of our culture. Its time for an awakening.
One last thing, I heard a pastor from Kenya speak at the Urbana Missions Conference in Dec. 06. He said this concerning The Church in Africa, "To drink from the cup of Western Christianity is to drink from a poison chalice."
6 comments:
Good thoughts, Brent. One cage-rattler though, when you refer to the Muslim followers of Jesus as following the "one true God and be redeemed by the blood of Jesus." While I get what you mean, if Muslims worship the God of Abraham, as they teach, then aren't they already trying to follow the one true God? My own Muslim friends have always maintained that they, we, and Jews worship the same God even though we diverge on who are/were His prophets and on the character of Jesus. I tend to agree.
I have always had a problem with people who claim that Muslims worship a false God. Allah, incidentally, is the word that Arabic Christians use for God as well as Muslims--and it clearly has its roots in the Semitic El which is one of the names for God in the O.T.
You know I don't claim a universalist we're-all-on-the-same-road faith, but our language about other faiths matters, even when we believe they're wrong.
Nevertheless on your broader post, you are right about the cultural pollution of Christianity.
so you believe that Allah is just another name for Yahweh?
Interesting point Dan. I admit, I'm a little undereducated on Islam.
I'm still interested to learn more about Islamic Christians. This is the future of Christianity across the globe: followers of Jesus from every tribe, tongue, and nation; not American churches planted across the globe.
Actually it's not so much a question of what I believe. . .ask any Arab Christian (Evangelical ones included), Allah IS the Arabic name for Yahweh. That's not a statement of faith, simply linguistics.
More to your point, however, is the question of whether the Allah worshipped by Muslims is also the Yahweh of the Jews and the father of Jesus (after all, the English word God does not always mean Jesus' father either). To that question, I believe the answer is still "yes." I do not dispute that Jews worship Yahweh simply because they deny the deity of Christ. Why should I dispute the claim of the Muslim any more, when he tells me he worships the God of Abraham? God said he'd make a great nation of Ishmael's seed too.
When Evangelical Christians make the claim that Muslims worship a false god, they are themselves in error IMHO. Don't misunderstand me--what you make of Jesus' claims is central and I'm not minimizing it, and therefore I believe Muslims' claim that Jesus is merely the last prophet before Mohammad is wrong (just as they believe that my insistence that Jesus is the son of God is wrong). But just because we believe each other is wrong on that vital point (both Christians and Muslims agree that this is a fundamental error in the other's doctrine) does not therefore mean we trace our faith to a different God.
I highly, highly recommend "The Prophetic Imagination" by Walter Bruggemann
Ok, thanks Jon.
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