HONOLULU (ABP) — Should Christians ever abandon their cultures for the
sake of the gospel? Baptists from all over the planet struggled with
what to “embrace” and what to “release” of their cultures during a
discussion session held in conjunction with the 20th Baptist World
Congress in Honolulu.
Their discussion guides embodied mixtures of cultures that confront global Christians in an era of speedy transportation and instantaneous communication.
Henry Mugabe, president of the Baptist Theological Seminary of Zimbabwe, earned a doctorate in the United States, taught at several seminaries in America and travels all over the globe. His wife is from South Africa, and their adult children live in Australia, South Africa and the United States.
Graham Walker, professor of theology at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, grew up in Singapore, studied in the United States and served as a missionary in the Philippines before returning to America to teach. He is co-pastor with his wife, Mimi, of the once-prosperous and once-prominent Druid Hills Baptist Church in Atlanta — a congregation that now ministers to the poor and other hurting people in a cosmopolitan community filled with many races and world religions.
A Christian culture?
“The question of cultures — whether we should embrace one and release another — is interesting,” Mugabe acknowledged. “We all have different cultures, and they make us who we are. We cannot be separate from our identity.”
A problem surfaces, however, when people assume the United States and Europe reflect the “Christian culture,” and other societies do not, he said.
“There is no such thing as a Christian culture,” he said. “But there are Christians who live in different cultures.”
For example, a president in Africa claims his nation is a “Christian country,” but he won is election with the support of money gleaned from the drug trade, Mugabe reported.
Walker illustrated by telling about a respected Christian elder in the Philippines village where he ministered. The elder wore a suit and tie to church and sang 19th-century hymns because that mirrored the American missionaries who brought the gospel to his village. Yet he refused to participate in historic tribal practices, simply because the Christian missionaries did not participate.
The elder rightly wanted to criticize his culture, yet he vigorously embraced aspects of Western culture that have nothing substantial to do with the gospel, Walker noted.
In the United States, many Christians embrace a “theology of glory” and triumphalism, he asserted. These perspectives assume bigger is better and cultural expressions that are longstanding and comfortable are correct.
This leads Christians either to flee changing aspects of culture or put up walls to keep away people and groups who are “different,” he said.
Changing local ministry contexts
Walker’s area of Atlanta was home to 166 Baptist churches in the 1960s. That number has dropped to 39 today, even though the population has increased more than 20 percent. When Baptists were dominant, Druid Hills Baptist attracted more than 4,000 worshipers each week, and now 150 to 200 members struggle to maintain a huge, aging facility while they also minister to homeless in the neighborhood and figure out how to relate to Muslims, Sikhs and atheists down the street.
“What part of my culture do I embrace? What do I release?” Walker asked.
A benefit of the decline of Christendom — the dominance of cultural Christianity — in the United States is the potential it offers to link U.S. Christians to the church in other parts of the world, he said. Christians in small, struggling congregations can experience what life is like for Christians whose faith is costly.
Often, the American church has been part of the dominant culture, Walker said. “We’ve played to the advantages of wealth and power.” But increasingly, the church can understand and identify with “the side of the weak.”
'Culture' is neutral
Culture itself is neither right nor wrong, Mugabe proposed. Cultures simply do things differently.
“The challenge, then, is this ethnocentrism, where we judge other cultures by the standards of our own,” he said. “And it’s worse when we think our culture is biblical.”
Just as Jesus challenged and criticized his own Jewish culture, Christians should study and criticize their cultures, Mugabe added, noting a primary standard for that critique should be the model of Jesus.
And even when Christians claim aspects of their culture are based on Jesus, they should ask, “Which Jesus?” Mugabe said. “I’m saying this because a number of things have been done in Jesus’ name. … Jesus [sometimes] has been presented as captive to a particular culture….
“Jesus came to give us life,” he said. “A tradition that persecutes people ought to be abandoned. A tradition that liberates people ought to be embraced. Whatever is life-giving in culture ought to be embraced.”
“We proclaim a God who is empathetic to those who are abused and oppressed,” Walker said.
The challenge of critique is discernment, Mugabe stressed.
“Some traditions you want to abandon may be very much cherished in the culture. There will be resistance” to dropping harmful aspects of culture, he acknowledged. “But is faith going to mean something, or not?”
Walker pointed to the simplest historic Christian confession — “Jesus is Lord” — as a guide for offering a critique of one's culture.
“Work that out,” he urged. “It’s always an ongoing process. When we say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ we daily decide what to embrace and reject.”
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Marv Knox is editor of the Texas Baptist Standard.