One of the things I'm most encouraged by in modern American missions history is how sophisticated the evangelism-minded groups have become. Sophisticated cultural analysis is now proceeding alongside a strong evangelism missions mandate. The 19th-century missionary pioneers in the U.S. were quite sophisticated in understanding culture and cross-cultural communications, compared to their own day and age. At the height of the imperial era, by contrast, say 1880—1950, there was a serious decline in cultural awareness and sensitivity in all the groups. But since World War II, there's been a strong awareness among everybody, including the strongly evangelistic groups, of the need for language training and cultural understanding, as well as for gospel urgency.Usually, we are feeling behind on the cultural analysis. Maybe we aren't as bad at it as we sometimes think (or feel). Thoughts?
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Global Christianity = American Christianity?
There is a fascinating interview in Christianity Today with church historian, Mark Noll, entitled "Does Global Christianity Equal American Christianity?" Well worth reading the observations of this learned man. I was particularly intrigued by his final comment:
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2 comments:
Thanks for alerting us to this article, Keith. I haven't read it yet, but am intrigued with Noll's observation. At the present time, our organization (CCCI) has discontinued cross-cultural training before sending missionaries and replaced it with cross-cultural training if transitioning from 1-2 year STINTs to permanent missionary staff. So, you get cross-cultural training after you've lived 1-2 years in another culture and have made most of the newbie mistakes. It's not a bad model, but seems at odds with Noll's observations. What do you think?
Keith no. 2,
I don't think that we completely leave our stinters without any cultural preparation. They have a briefing and part of their "playbook" involves "Learning a New World". They learn to enter another culture as a learner...I think this is most valuable.
As far as Global Christianity = American Christianity, I agree that we are far better than in the past. We get better all the time, but I think that we have a long way to go. Oscar Muriu gave a FANTASTIC talk at Urbana 06 on the global church.
http://www.urbana.org/archives/2006/session-info?session=3
As he points out, we still have a long way to go for a truly Global Christianity. But we're getting there. Praise God for progress.
-eric
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