Seeing The World Through Missionary Lenses
Or why the Gospel needs to be contextualised.
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. There, she observed one day 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 start-point was already one that was prejudiced and blinkered by her world-view 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[1] 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.
Paul Hiebert, the late great missionary anthropologist, 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.[2] Therefore, what you say and do in Jesus’ name may not always be seen and heard as you mean it.
But the challenge of rightly contextualizing God’s word and truth are not just the concerns of your average cross-cultural missionary toiling away in foreign climes.
We live in an increasingly globally-connected, well-traversed, melting pot of a world. There have 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.[3] Global migration and refugee movement is at an all-time high.[4] Many of the most developed nations of our world are irreversibly pluralistic and multi-cultural. Your town or street are filled with people from different cultures or sub-cultures, or 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 is 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 His 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 would like to 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 our contemporaneous experience of the now-but-not-yet dawning of the Kingdom of God, we need an awareness of how cultures easily particularise and partition us and our world out into nations, tribes, languages and peoples.
There are consequently no a-cultural Christians. We are all creatures of time, space and language. We may, often unconsciously, view events and experiences through the shades and lenses of world-views coloured 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. Developing an awareness of how this shapes our reactions, attitudes, behaviours and perceptions of the other is critical. Similarly, we need to understand why and how a person is motivated to do and say anything in particular by his/her culture before we make judgments on their behaviour. Perceptions and practices we encounter may not always be a matter of right or wrong - perhaps just different.
Thus we must take seek the help of God’s Spirit and His Word, which alone carry supre-cultural validity, if we are to become credible witnesses an global ambassadors of His 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 at all to her.
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 neighbour. And we are called to share God’s good news with them. ‘A secret Gospel ceases to be news and loses its goodness’.[5]
Christianity, unlike every other religious worldview, 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 Him and each other in mission into the world, the proper theatre of His 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 blind-spots, to mediate His love and truth to a world desperately in need of it.
Mission 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 He sends us – whether crossing oceans or the street outside your home. The onus is on us to speak and demonstrate His Gospel with all compassion, humility, clarity and wisdom. The good news is that as we go, Jesus promises to go with us for all times (Matthews 28:20).
[1] According to Dean Gilliland, the goal of contextualization is “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.” Dean Gillards, “Contextualisation” in A. Scott Moreau et al, Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, (Grand Rapids: Paternoster, 2000), page 225.
[2] Hiebert, Paul G., “The Missionary as Mediator of Global Theologizing” in Globalizing Theology – Belief and Practice in an era of World Christianity, eds. Craig Ott and Harold A. Netland, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), page 293.
[3] https://worldmigrationreport.iom.int/msite/wmr-2024-interactive/
[4] Current data estimates are that international migrants comprise 3.6 per cent of the global population. Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/05/migration-important-strategic-asset-we-must-not-undermine-it/
[5] Tite Tiénou, “Does The World Really Need to Hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ?” in This We Believe, eds. John Akers, John Armstrong and John Woodbridge, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan), page 183