The topic of this magazine is how the good news
of Jesus Christ engages with different cultures.
In the past Christian missionaries, attempting to
share the gospel, sometimes mistakenly
imposed Western culture upon a local
population. But the gospel can and should
adapt to different cultures, and that’s been
shown by the way in which Christianity has
grown around the world.
The early church was dominated by Jews and
centered in Jerusalem. Later it was dominated
by Greeks and centered around the
Mediterranean. Later the Christian faith was
received by the barbarians of northern Europe
and Christianity came to be dominated by
Western Europeans and then North Americans.
Today most Christians in the world live in Africa,
Latin America and Asia. Christianity will soon be
centered in the southern and the eastern
hemispheres.
The contrast with other religions is stark. The
centre of Islam is still in the place of its origin –
the Middle East. Likewise, the original lands that
have been the centre of Hinduism, Buddhism
and Confucianism remain the same.
Why has Christianity been so adaptable? There
are the unchanging core truths of the gospel but
there is a great deal of freedom in how those
truths are expressed and take shape within a
particular culture. For example, the Bible
encourages Christians to unite in acts of musical
praise but it doesn’t dictate the rhythm,
instrumentation, or emotional expressiveness –
all of that is left to be cultural expressed, in a
variety of ways. Such cultural diversity was built
into the Christian faith from the very beginning.
Jesus scandalized his fellow Jews by tearing
through racial and cultural boundaries. For
instance, his famous parable of the Good
Samaritan was shocking to its first hearers
because it cast a despised Samaritan as
the hero! In John Chapter 4 we read about
Jesus’ life-changing conversation with a
Samaritan woman – also shocking because a
Jewish Rabbi would
never engage with a morally-compromised
Samaritan woman, but Jesus didn’t care! Or
rather, he cared deeply about this marginalized
female foreigner.
This diversity of Christianity, kindled by Jesus,
caught fire after his resurrection. Before leaving
his disciples, Jesus commanded them to ‘go and
make disciples of all nations.’ In the Book of
Acts, God’s Spirit enabled them to proclaim
Jesus in many different languages! Moreover
the hyper-Jewish apostle Paul ripped up the
social barriers of his day – he wrote to the
Galatians ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave
nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in
Christ Jesus’.
Contrary to popular opinion then, Christianity is
not a Western religion that destroys local
cultures. Rather Christianity is more culturally
diverse than any other faith. Wonderfully, the
last book of the Bible paints a picture of the end
of time when ‘a great multitude that no one
and language’ will worship Jesus. That has
always been the multicultural vision of
Christianity. So if you care about diversity don’t
dismiss Christianity! It is the most diverse, multi-
ethnic and multicultural movement in all of
history.
Yours,
Simon