The Gospel and Society

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”

-Matthew 28:19

One of my former students from years ago called me last week wanting to sit down and catch up. He graduated seventeen years ago and I haven’t seen him since, although we have had phone conversations a few times, the last about a dozen years ago. His journey has been unexpected. He came to seminary after about twenty years of church ministry in a large church in the San Francisco Bay Area. There he had been part of a large staff. He wanted to become a senior pastor, hence the seminary route. When finished he expected, like so many that the doors would open and he would settle into a church preaching the Word and ministering to people’s needs—but it didn’t work out as planned. Instead of being called to a church he got rejection after rejection. This caused him to look at what God had called him to do. He shared with me his exploration of spiritual direction (he walked away from that because it was to Jungian and too eastern mystical).

He traveled abroad and taught in Argentina where he saw a country that was economically devastated and without hope. There he saw the Evangelical community which had been marginalized socially and politically living out their faith and sharing hope with a country in despair and without hope. He met leaders there that transformed his vision of the power of God to work in the hearts and bodies of individuals and also to transform a culture.

He has traveled to Africa several times and has seen the power of God at work there in ways that we as Westerners can’t begin to imagine. In Mozambique, a country that is incredibly poor and without any significant infrastructure God is working in ways that it is hard for us as technologically savvy westerners to comprehend. This is a country so technologically backward that the people cook with charcoal (which has been a contributor to the country’s deforestation). Here he has witnessed a work of God in which over seven thousand churches have been founded in the past few years. He has seen people journeying for miles pushing themselves to the point of collapse from lack of food and water to come and hear the Word of God proclaimed.

He has seen some cases of a spiritual hunger and desire so great that people would bypass food and water and risk physical collapse in order to get to meetings on time and to be nourished spiritually. The church is exploding so rapidly the leaders are unable to keep up with the pace.

A couple of weeks ago I was having coffee with another former student who is a pastor at a church in the area. During the wide ranging conversation the topic of the growth of the church in the developing world came up. In this conversation the lack of leadership in the church in Africa came up. He told me of practices among African Christians that shock our western Christian sensibilities. (It is easy to overlook the fact that our culture is one that has been born out of a Christian worldview and that other cultures do not share some of our most basic assumptions of right and wrong.) Again the context is rapid church growth and the lack of leadership. But in this case the problem was one of abject poverty among women, particularly widows in the church. They have no means to support themselves. Christian women have no means to get food to survive, let alone thrive. They go to the pastors of their churches (who are generally the tribal leaders/chiefs) and they are given food, in exchange for sex. (I have confirmed this account through a couple of different sources.) Shocking—yes. Strange, before we say yes we need to understand that this is a practice deeply engrained in the tribal culture. As the gospel has penetrated the culture people have heard and responded, but have remained untaught. Particularly the leadership has not been challenged with this inconsistency of cultural practices with the implications of the gospel.

Transformation of culture by the gospel has been seen throughout history, but transformation must come from within as opposed to being imposed from without. On the one hand transformation comes from minds and hearts that are open and receptive to the redemptive message of the gospel. But that transformation does not occur in a vacuum, there must be teaching (with modeling-discipleship) of all that our Lord commanded.