Seminary CM10: The Rise of the Nones

This is the tenth post on the Contexts of Ministry in my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom for the previous posts in this unit, "The Person and Contexts of a Minister." I have completed one other unit in this series, The Pastor as Leader.
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In this stretch of the Contexts of Ministry series, we are exploring the historical and cultural context of American Christianity. Today we are looking at the state of the American church in relation to the rising demographic of the "nones," those in America with no religious affiliation.

1. From 1990 to 2014, the number of individuals who do not identify with any religion whatsoever has almost tripled in America. In 1990 the number was 8.1%. In 2014 the number was 22.8%. Here is the Pew Research Data from 2014.

Here is a paragraph from the study: "The drop in the Christian share of the population has been driven mainly by declines among mainline Protestants and Catholics. Each of those large religious traditions has shrunk by approximately three percentage points since 2007. The evangelical Protestant share of the U.S. population also has dipped, but at a slower rate, falling by about one percentage point since 2007."

The drop is strongest among Millennials. "Fully 36% of young Millennials (those between the ages of 18 and 24) are religiously unaffiliated, as are 34% of older Millennials (ages 25-33). And fewer than six-in-ten Millennials identify with any branch of Christianity, compared with seven-in-ten or more among older generations, including Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers. Just 16% of Millennials are Catholic, and only 11% identify with mainline Protestantism. Roughly one-in-five are evangelical Protestants."

Unlike earlier generations, these young people are not re-entering the church after sowing their wild oats in college.

2. Ed Stetzer has offered an interesting evaluation of this phenomenon. He points out that the percentage of people attending church has remained pretty steady over the last 70 years. Indeed, the percentage of the American population that self-identified as evangelical had grown to 35% in 2014.

His conclusion was thus that the rise of the "nones" (no religious affiliation) was coming from nominal Christians. "Convictional Christianity" was going strong. "The nominals are becoming the nones and the convictional are remaining committed," Stetzer wrote.

There is perhaps a theological perspective to take here as well. Jesus said, "Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it" (7:14). We can wonder whether the number of "true believers" is ever really much more than 30%. Are the hoards of Americans who go to church true followers of Jesus Christ? It seems doubtful.

Hebrews 11:13-16 suggests that, in this current age, Christians are always strangers and exiles on the earth. Even when Christianity is culturally dominant, real Christians probably will only make up a minority. Indeed, the situation is perhaps most dangerous and deceptive when Christians think they are in the majority. When the institutions of society are "Christian," they probably aren't.

3. What are some of the cultural dynamics that may keep many Millennials from the church?

The "civil religion" tendencies of American Christians are probably a major factor in the decline of Christianity among Millennials. Civil religion is the inability for a person to tell the difference between God and country. Patriotism and political party tribalism mix imperceptibly with one's religion. Flag goes on pulpit. "Only Republicans can be Christians." No doubt when we have the next set of data we will find that the recent election has caused an even more significant drop in Christianity among Millennials.

Four out of five self-identified evangelicals apparently voted for Donald Trump to be president. It seems clear that Millennials consider him morally reprehensible. Despite a tape that came out with him boasting of his ability to grope women, despite hateful comments he made during the campaign toward countless types of individuals, despite video clips that seem to show a tendency not just to lie about big things but to lie about almost anything, still evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for him. To Millennials, greed and narcissism seem to be the only fixed points in his decision making process, with everything else free to change according to what he thinks is most advantageous to him at the moment.

An event this past week is only likely to increase this perception. Neo-Nazis, KKK, and white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia a week ago Saturday, and they were met by large numbers of anti-protesters, including an anti-fascist group called Antifa. One of the white nationalists plowed his car into a group of peaceful individuals, killing a young 22 year old woman. The President was not only slow to condemn the neo-Nazis, but appeared to view both sides as morally equivalent. While numerous individuals withdrew from Trump advisory boards, leading to their disbandment, his evangelical advisory board largely remained intact.

Fighting abortion, which we will see in a later post was the issue in the 1980s that corraled evangelicals more than anything else into the Republican corner, is not the central moral issue for Millennials. How you treat people who are not like you is the central concern. Millennials are also concerned for the planet and climate change in a way that is incomprehensible to many older evangelicals. Given this mix of values, American evangelicalism seems morally reprehensible to many of them.

This is an important point. It is not that they are uninterested in God or morality. It is that they actually consider evangelicals to be morally reprehensible in numerous respects. Christianity in this form seems immoral, even evil to them.

4. Issues of race and gender thus feature large in the Millennial moral perspective. White evangelicals--and the evangelical demographic is overwhelmingly white--tend to be blind to issues of color. Because they do not face the same history and biases, they often do not see the struggles of people of color. Indeed, when the cork of these pressures pops off, all they see is the disruptive result, not the structures that caused them. What they see is that such individuals are sometimes hired and they are not. This inability to see one's own advantages as a white person is called "white privilege."

To most Millennials, gay individuals are real people, their friends, their family. To much of white evangelicalism, gay individuals are somewhere else. They are an idea, a stereotype, a theological discussion. Millennials largely do not see the distinction between "loving the sinner, hating the sin." Many of us try to make careful distinctions between homosexual acts and the person doing them, but this distinction seems largely rejected by Millennials.

Accordingly, it is not surprising that even this past week, several Christian groups were labeled as hate groups, primarily for their lobby against gay marriage.

This cultural dynamic puts churches in a difficult place, and there will be many Millennials who will reject the church for this reason. Even more, churches may face significant difficulties from the state going forward because of our stances on these issues. After the reactionary blip of Trump is gone, these forces will likely rush forward on the church with a vengeance.

5. A recent book wrestling with Christianity and evolution has suggested that conflicts between science and faith are the number one reason young people leave the faith. Whether we like it or not, Millennials tend to see evangelicals as forces of ignorance in American culture. The technological revolution and the seemingly never ending stream of scientific improvements even in their lifetime have led them to believe that scientists are smart and genuinely in pursuit of truth.

So when scientists say, "Climate change is real and very dangerous" or "Evolution is beyond reasonable doubt," they tend to believe them. When the Bible is offered as a counter-argument, they ask "which Bible" or "whose interpretation of the Bible"? They have not grown up in isolation from other churches and religions. The internet has made it all available to them.

We will have to see fully what the dynamics of the generation after the Millennials will be. Having been raised in the shadow of 9-11, it is possible that "Gen Z" will be more traditionally conservative in its values. The question is whether it will equate those values with Christianity. Conservatism without Christ is truly scary indeed. Ask the Germans.

6. What are we to do? We must be true to Christ. The way we share the good news may change. It always has. Perhaps we should not try to take over the world so much and let God deal with the world (1 Cor. 5:12-13). The Millennial concern for others is Christian to the core. Maybe if we focused on being "for" others and less "against" things, our witness might begin to heal.

Of course we also have to be true to what we believe Christ requires of us. We should be aware, however, that there is likely to be not a little American culture in what we think is the core. Dialog with Christians who are full of faith but not like us is the surest way to see where we have let cultural traditions creep into our kingdom core.

A large part of evangelicalism for the last hundred years has been characterized by protectionism against forces of the modern world that we did not know how to handle. There are Christians who have faith and yet have not abandoned dialog with science and scholarship. Twenty years ago Mark Noll wrote of the "scandal of the evangelical mind." He meant the tendency of many evangelicals to oppose education and hard hitting scholarly thinking.

Many of us are ready to go. The evangelical movement as we have known it may die. But the true church will go on. Revival will come. But we may not like it or recognize it. Indeed, many will no doubt think it is of the Devil.

Next Sunday: Culture 11: Webber and the "Younger Evangelicals"

The Calling of a Minister

• The Domains of Ministry
• The Calling of a Minister
• Ministerial Calling in Scripture
• Ministerial Calling in History
• God can call anyone he wants into ministry.
• A Theology of Calling

The Person of a Pastor

• Intro to the Pastor as Person
• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• Sacred Pathways
• Individual Spiritual Disciplines
• Corporate Spiritual Disciplines
• Some Formational Reading

Contexts of Ministry

• Kinds of Context
• The Making of Meaning
• How Culture Works
• The Cultures of the Bible
• The Kingdom Core
• The Church and Culture
• A Culture Map

American Church History Context

• Global Christianity
• My American Church Context

Seminary CM9: My American Church Context

This is the ninth post on the Contexts of Ministry in my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom for the previous posts in this unit, "The Person and Contexts of a Minister." I have completed one other unit in this series,The Pastor as Leader.
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1. There were a number of creative features to the initial design of the Cultural Contexts of Ministry class when Wesley Seminary was founded at Indiana Wesleyan University. One of them was to cover American history in the contexts of ministry course. In the design of the curriculum, Norm Wilson was concerned that the Global Christian History course not assume a North American focus, as if white American Christianity was the culmination or center point of Christianity.

Out of this discussion came the idea of covering American Church History in the Cultural Contexts of Ministry class. American church history would then be seen, as it should be, as one of the contexts of American ministers in the US, but not necessarily that of ministers in other parts of the world. The idea was that, when the curriculum left North America, this component would switch out the American piece for the local and regional church history of the cohort elsewhere.

So it is not a little unusual to cover American church history in a cultural contexts class. Another unique feature, the brain child of Keith Drury, was to cover this context in reverse and selectively, depending on who was in the class. So each student in the class would start with whatever church they were currently a part of and work backward. The end result was often a board that looked like an upside down tree, with each student starting as a branch at the bottom and working back up to the trunk of earlier Catholicism.

2. So for me, The Wesleyan Church came from the merger of two smaller denominations, The Pilgrim Holiness Church and (1922) the Wesleyan Methodist Church (1843). The PHC often looks back to an event in 1895 and my grandparents' branch went back to 1882, but it was largely a collection of little groups in the Midwest that came out of revivals in the late 1880s/early 1900s. These individuals were Methodists, Quakers, and so forth. The Wesleyan Methodist Church was started by a group of abolitionists who were unhappy with the way the Methodist Episcopal Church was not taking a stand against slavery.

So my parent denominations roughly come out of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which was founded in 1784 by John Wesley after the American Revolutionary War. Because of the separation between the Church of England and America, it seemed necessary to ordain ministers who were part of his Methodist movement, which grew out of the Anglican Church or the Church of England.

At this point, the church ancestry leaves the US and goes back to England. The Anglican Church came out of Roman Catholicism in 1534 during the Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church came out of the split between East and West in 1054. Before that you had common Catholic Christianity.

Part of the goal of this exercise was to help students see where they came from theologically. A non-denominational church might say, "We just follow the Bible," but of course they're wrong. All it takes is a few questions to figure out where your ideas and traditions really came from. You may be a mixture of traditions, but unless you grew up reading the Bible in a bomb shelter, there is little doubt but that much of what you think the Bible says is teaching you heard from someone else in a particular Christian tradition.

3. So most American Christians will have a strong Baptistic element to their sense of the Bible. The Baptist tradition has had the strongest influence on American Christianity of any tradition. The Baptistic influence 1) clearly emphasizes believer's baptism by immersion, soon after "conversion," 2) tends to be local church centric rather than a larger hierarchical structure, 3) tends toward the fundamentalist side, reacting against the forces of modernism and thus with a tinge of anti-intellectualism and anti-education/anti-science, 4) has a strong sense of eternal security and the inevitability of sin.

These forces are strong on a wide-variety of denominations, including my own, which supposedly comes out of the Methodist tradition. Your typical independent or non-denominational church is probably Baptistic in orientation. Although no doubt claiming to get its beliefs from the Bible alone, these American churches will strangely look a lot like the previous paragraph. Perhaps only 25.3% of Americans (in 2007) are officially Baptist, but the influence on evangelicalism (25.4% in 2014) is much more pervasive.

In the South they say there are no Lutherans, Methodists, or Presbyterians. There are only Lutheran Baptists, Methodist Baptists, and Presbyterian Baptists.

Often coupled with Baptistic elements is the Pentecostal tradition (8.9% in 2007). So you take a Baptist church and add an openness to speaking in tongues, and you have an Assemblies of God church. These groups are often put into the category of evangelicalism, which is a largely white American tradition (black churches usually do not self-identify as evangelicals, 6.5% in 2014).

Evangelicalism, following the myth of simply being Bible-believing, is often typified as being 1) Scripture-centered, 2) conversion-centered, 3) cross-centered, and 4) socially active. [1] But what this really means is 1) tending toward the fundamentalist in reaction to forces that emerged in the late 1800s/early 1900s, 2) in the train of the revivals in England and the US in the 1700s, 3) strongly influenced by John Calvin, and 4) willing to fight against modernism.

In other words, what we believe as Christians is usually connected to the Bible but extremely filtered through the history of our American context. A lack of awareness of these forces is a fundamental blindspot of the American church. It is also why there are over 30,000 American denominations. Most of them are convinced they are just reading the Bible and doing what it says... and that so many other groups are wrong.

4. So if you wanted to start a denomination, what are the ingredients? What are my choices from which to choose?

a. Church Structure: First, only a Protestant would want to start a new denomination. We protesters originated in the late Middle Ages over abuses in the Roman Catholic Church. Most of the early split-offs (Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Methodist) retained some of the episcopal structure of the RCC. So this is one of your choices. Do I want a more episcopal structure with bishops and a hierarchy (doubtful, if you're starting a new denomination)? Or do I want to go Baptistic (more likely, especially if I live in a democratic society) and let the local congregation pick their pastor? Well, at least after my prophetic rule is over.

Think you're getting back to the Bible by doing away with hierarchy? Maybe you're part of the house church movement. Nah, you're just riding the waves of American culture without knowing it. In America, I get to decide stuff, and we're currently in a "state's rights" phase of our country's history, an example of Baptistic influence affecting our politics. "Push the rule down locally."

b. Fundamentalist or ?: If you are trying to start a new denomination, there's a good chance you have been influenced by the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 1900s. This means you are very sensitive to scholarship on the Bible, on modern science, and probably have your reservations about education in general. These things were not always the case.

In the early 1800s, American Christians would not have seen a conflict between science and religion. And it was Christianity more than anything else that was behind the rise of American colleges and universities. The turning point was with the rise of German biblical scholarship in the late 1800s and the rise of evolution in science in the late 1800s/early 1900s. That is, the rise of modernism.

American Christianity has never quite been able to recover. Instead, a certain understanding of the Bible became a matter of war. No discussion is allowed on these matters. Rather they must simply be believed and all reason marshaled to support the "right" position only. The rise of the nones may in part be the result. Certainly a lot of people have lost their faith in the meantime, being told that it was either the fundamentalist dogma or leave. The strong support of Trump by evangelicals is a manifestation of this American dynamic.

I wonder if there will be an unexpected revival among the nones in the decade to come, with an unexpected new wave. If so, much of the American church would consider it perverse because it would not conform to fundamentalist expectations (cf. the emergent church). Perhaps not. Right now there is a re-surge of fundamentalism. But I wonder.

c. Conversion vs Sacrament: The revivals of Wesley's England and then across America were a natural result of the rise of individualism and democracy. In a world where the individual decides and votes, it becomes essential for the individual to choose Christ. It is no longer a decision that was decided for you by your group. You must make it your own. "God has no grandchildren, only children."

Thus we see a shift from infant baptism to believer's baptism, one of the choices you will want to make a decision on as your start your new church. But if you are starting a new church, I feel quite convinced you will go with believer's baptism.

Others seem enamored right now with sacraments. But they tend to move in the Episcopal direction, with some then making the jump to Catholicism or the Orthodox tradition. They rarely start churches. :-)

d. Experiential Orientation: So how are you going to treat spiritual gifts, especially tongues? Are you going to allow emotional expression in worship? How demonstrative will your services be? What will the worship style be? Hymns? A worship band? No instruments? Does the Spirit still give people spiritual gifts? What does it mean to receive the Holy Spirit?

e. Theological Gap-Filler: So what are the main options with regard to theological ideas? Again, I'm assuming you're Protestant in some flavor if you are starting your own denomination.

Here are some options:

• God: Are you going to focus more on God's nature as love or as just? Are you going to see him determining everything or giving extensive freedom to his creation? Does he know everything or does his knowledge unfold with our choices?
• Christ and salvation: In what way does Jesus reconcile us to God (assuming you believe he did)? How does the cross and atonement work? How is someone saved (assuming we need to be saved in some way)? Or is Christ more a model to follow? Do you have to know him in your head to be saved or is it about knowing him in your heart? Once you are "saved" are you always saved or can you lose this state? 
• Spirit and the Church: See some of the options above.
• Eschatology: Can things get better? Can the church have an impact on the world? Or are things inevitably going to decline until Christ returns? Is Christ returning? Do we die and go directly to heaven/hell or is there going to be a resurrection to a new earth? Is there going to be a Tribulation with an Antichrist? Is everyone going to be saved? Are most going to hell? Or does God just annihilate those who aren't "saved"? 
• Ethics: How does God expect us to live in this world? Can we defeat temptation and sin? How free are we? Is the Christian life primarily about following rules or is it more about being in relationship with God? Is your emphasis more law-focused or grace-focused? Should we force the society we are in to have our Christian ethic? Or are we in exile in a world without God?
• Creation: In our times Christians often take a position on the creation. Is it something we need to steward and protect as God's representatives on earth or is it largely something we need not worry about?

5. The main take-away is that no one reading this post is a Christian in a vacuum. Your Christian identity has inevitably been shaped by your historical and theological context. In other words, it has been shaped by culture every bit as much as by ideas. If we do not know these influences on us, we do not know ourselves and we are slaves to the whims of history.

Next Sunday: Culture 10: The Growth of the Nones

[1] David Bebbington, The Dominance of Evangelicalism

The Calling of a Minister

• The Domains of Ministry
• The Calling of a Minister
• Ministerial Calling in Scripture
• Ministerial Calling in History
• God can call anyone he wants into ministry.
• A Theology of Calling

The Person of a Pastor

• Intro to the Pastor as Person
• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• Sacred Pathways
• Individual Spiritual Disciplines
• Corporate Spiritual Disciplines
• Some Formational Reading

Contexts of Ministry

• Kinds of Context
• The Making of Meaning
• How Culture Works
• The Cultures of the Bible
• The Kingdom Core
• The Church and Culture
• A Culture Map
• Global Christianity

Seminary CM8: Global Christianity

This is the eighth post on the Contexts of Ministry in my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom for the previous posts in this unit, "The Person and Contexts of a Minister." I have completed one other unit in this series,The Pastor as Leader.
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1. When we founded Wesley Seminary in 2009, one of the books students read in the second class at that time, Cultural Contexts of Ministry, was Philip Jenkins' The Next Christendom. The purpose of this reading was to give students a sense of the shifting demographics of Christianity in the world. In particular, it was to give these ministers a strong sense of the shift of Christianity from what used to be called the "first world," the so called "Western" world, to what we might now call the "two-thirds" world.

Perhaps we should not assume that the background of our current situation is known to any degree among ministers in training. Beginning in the late 1400s, Europe began colonizing the rest of the world, looking for gold and other items of value that they might then sell back in Europe. The "New World" was discovered by Europe as Christopher Columbus sought to find a shorter route to the East Indies.

Some of the precious goods that were imported from Africa were slaves. The slave trade begins and black as a race is born. Before that point, you had distinct African people groups. Now, Europeans come to dub all Africans as black and, thus by contrast, dominant Europeans become "white," another new category.

2. Spain will conquer what becomes known as Latin America, from present day Mexico down to the tip of South America. The Portuguese will take what is now Brazil. The French, Spanish, British, and Dutch will fight over North America until first the British prevail. Then the French will eventually sell out. Finally the new States will push Mexico to its current boundaries.

In Sub-Saharan Africa the French, the Dutch, and the British will parcel up the land. After World War I, the British will watch over the Middle East, as they had already what is now India and Pakistan. The French, Spanish, and British will dabble in Asia, with the British taking the continent of Australia, the French being in Vietnam, and the Spanish in the Philippines.

3. In the twentieth century, these European powers, these "colonial powers" will slowly withdraw from these lands. They have left their traces in the languages that remain. All of Latin America speaks primarily Spanish or Portuguese. English is a predominant language in India and its surrounding countries. Various countries in Africa speak either French or English.

The relationship these European colonizers took to the peoples of these lands was that of master to subservient, superior to inferior. This colonization brought missionaries to these lands as well. Many of them will become Christian lands at least in name. These missionaries had little or no training. No doubt they came largely unable to distinguish the cultural aspects of their faith from its kingdom core. No doubt many if not most of them came with the same sense of superiority than the political colonizers brought with them.

So these missionaries also served to colonize these lands with Western culture, this term itself a sort of construct for the culture of Europe. They came with "benevolent" intent but probably did not, for the most part, view the indigenous peoples as equals in the sight of God. For most of them, these peoples were "poor," "unfortunate" types. Even in the United States in the days before and after the Civil War, few of those in the North actually viewed the slaves as equal individuals created in the image of God. They might "help" those poor folk but most were not looking to make them equal.

4. The language of these days found itself in a time when the industrialized world was called the "first world." Then these largely unindustrialized, colonized lands, including pretty much all of the southern hemisphere, were called the "third" world (cf. Bandung conference of 1955, p.69). The shift to refer to these lands as the "two-thirds world" shows the dawning awareness that the vast majority of the world is not Europe, North America, or Russia.

In the 1970s, my own church, The Wesleyan Church, made a move that I thought at the time was the right move to make morally. Rather than have the rest of the Wesleyan church world be subservient to North America in our general conference, why not empower them to have their own general conferences? Then all of these general conferences would come as equals to the table in a Wesleyan World Fellowship.

The first such conference to break away from North America was the Caribbean, then the Philippines. Canada began the process of breaking away this past year (2016) and Australia has been at least partially separate for five years, I believe. These last two seem to indicate that the principle is sound and in good faith. I will not try to parse the moral complexities of the sense that other general conferences should be financially self-supporting and that this should be the goal of all domains outside North America.

If the motives of The Wesleyan Church (TWC) were mostly pure in making this distinction, the situation is now much more complex in relation to a church like the United Methodists. The UM church never made the kind of separation that TWC made in the 70s. When TWC made the distinction, there seemed to be a genuine sense of empowerment and enabling.

But the situation has changed, as Jenkins' book indicates. Christianity is rising in the two-thirds world much more quickly than in North America. The "global south," as it is sometimes referred to, will eventually have more voting power in the UM church than the North American church. Already in the Episcopal fellowship, Anglicans from Africa are increasingly marginalizing American Episcopal congregations that support the ordination and appointment of practicing gay ministers.

The UM church has been facing the same struggle this decade. If I read the situation correctly, the bishops of the UM church in general seem to support the ordination of practicing gay ministers. The majority of US congregations probably favor unity over schism over this issue. A sizable minority of US ministers view this issue as a "make or break" one. That is to say, if the church in the end ordains and appoints practicing gay ministers, then they will break away from the church.

Until this most recent general conference (2016), I had assumed that a split would involve the conservatives leaving. But the rise of the two-thirds world within the UM church suggests that, if a split delays long enough, the conservatives will eventually have the majority and it would be those in favor of practicing gay ministers who would more likely be forced to leave.

An attempt to separate global Methodism administratively from the North American church, much as the Wesleyans did in the 70s, failed this past UM general conference.

5. So what insights might we gain from Jenkins' book? Let me give quotes and comments from the book that have stood out to me:

Demographics

• "In 2050, 72 percent of Christians will live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and a sizable share of the remainder will have roots in one or more of those continents" (xi).
• "Over the last century, the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably away from Europe, southward, to Africa and Latin America, and eastward, toward Asia" (1).
• "By 2050 only about one-fifth of the world's 3.2 billion Christians will be non-Hispanic whites" (3).
• "Far from Islam being the world's largest religion by 2020... Christianity should still have a substantial lead and will maintain its position for the foreseeable future" (6).
• "Members of a Southern-dominated church are likely to be among the poorer people on the planet" (7).
• "There is no single Southern Christianity" (8).
• "Liberal Protestantism has never represented a mainstream of Christianity, or even a majority, and as time goes on, the relative significance of that tradition will decline even further" (11).
• "Conservative theological or moral stances often accompany quite progressive or radical economic views" (19)
• Christianity in the global south often has a strongly charismatic flavor and sometimes focuses on the potential economic prosperity of believers.
• "Almost one Christian in five worldwide is neither Protestant, nor Catholic, nor Anglican, nor Orthodox" (76). Note--he is not including Pentecostal under Protestant.
• The number of Chinese Christians is currently 65-70 million, about 5% of the population (88).
• India has more Christians than most European nations (91).
• "By 2050, six of the world's twenty most populous nations will be on the African continent" (107)
• By 2050, eight nations could each have a hundred million Christians or more... only the United States is from what is presently considered the advanced industrial world. 
• These countries are USA (estimated to have 350 million Christians in 2050), Brazil (234 million), Philippines (162), Ethiopia (160), Congo (150), Mexico (130), Nigeria (127), Uganda (106), China (85), Russia (70), Germany (52). See p.113.
• "The number of African Christians in 2050 will be almost twice as large as the total figure for all the Christians who were alive anywhere on the planet back in 1900" (113).
• "Most of the global population growth in the coming decades will be urban" (116).
• Most of the growth in Christianity that will take place in the United States and Europe in the coming decades will be a function of global Christianity. That is to say, it will not be among "white" American Christians. 
• "Perhaps three-quarters of Arab Americans are in fact Christian" (133).

At this point I might mention that Jenkins is not asking whether or not these are truly Christians. That is to say, he is counting what we might call nominal Christians. For example, he would count a Mormon as a Christian in his statistics. Who is truly a Christian is of course a matter for God to decide (also see next post).

It may be uncomfortable for American Christians to come to grips with the approaching loss of power within the trajectory of Christendom. The election of Trump was arguably just one sign, at least in part, of one section of white America having difficulty coming to grips with a dominance slowly and inevitably slipping away (think Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin). This struggle will likely continue for the next few decades in the US until we reach some kind of racial equilibrium.

Another observation is that these shifts are not necessarily about truth. The seemingly inevitable cycle of "liberal" Christianity's demise says nothing of whether it is right or wrong on this or that point. In the same way, the coming dominance of two-thirds world Christianity only speaks of numbers and power, not of correctness. One of the observations Jenkins makes repeatedly is that many of the theologies emerging from Africa and South America are not entirely "orthodox" in the historic sense (e.g., "African Independent Churches" or AICs--66-68).

So North American Christian conservatives are happy to have the southern hemisphere support them on a number of theological struggles, but they may be uncomfortable with the progressive social stances that may also come in force. For example, "liberation theology" has had a significant foothold in Latin America, which advocates at the very least economic liberation and at times political revolution. These socialist and at times communist flavored values will be as distasteful to American conservatives as the southern position is appealing on the ordination of practicing gay ministers.

One take-away I have is that the current shift in dominance is likely to make all of us from the former hegemony uncomfortable.

6. The Situation Past and Present

• "The whole idea of 'Western Christianity' distorts the true pattern of the religion's development over time" (22).
• The church of Ethiopia today claims some 25 million members, after lengthy conflicts with Muslims and Marxists, roughly the number of all the Methodist related denominations in North America (26).
• Had the Mongul invaders, with a Christian queen, have defeated the Turks in Palestine in the 1260s, much of the Middle East might be Christian today (34).
• Christians have until recently had a significant presence in the Middle East despite Muslim dominance. Ironically, a large percentage of Palestinians have historically been Christian (as opposed to Jews). There has been a significant minority of Syrian Christians in Syria and Chaldean Christians in Iraq. Coptic Christians have been a significant presence in Egypt. 
• British and American actions in the Middle East over the last century have inadvertently resulted in forces that have brought persecution and diaspora to these groups. In Palestine, for example, American Christians have strongly supported the Israeli dominance over the Palestinians, even though far more Palestinians have been Christian.
• During the colonial era, Westerners tried to impose their own ideas of Christianity as it should be to the world. Gradually, indigenous peoples moved beyond the colonial matrix. Finally they adapt and incorporate native ways and form wholly new churches (70). This of course is what happened when Christianity came to northern Europe as well.

A central take-away from these insights is the way evangelical Christians have often blindly participated in political forces that have, unintentionally, had harmful repercussions to Christians in the Middle East. America's blind support of Israel has hurt Christianity among Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqis. The blind assumption that all Arabs or Middle Easterners are Muslim has only made things more difficult for Arab and Middle Eastern Christians, whose Christianity is far more ancient than American Christianity.

Another potentially sobering possibility is that what we consider orthodoxy may have elements of European (as opposed to the pre-Constantinian Christian) culture. A theological construct of which I am very fond--consensus Christianity--is vulnerable to the charge that the consensus of which we speak significantly involves the culture of the European Middle Ages. Are there elements that are similar to when holiness missionaries to Native Americans had them wear buns and skirts, while stopping all forms of dancing?

7. Looking to the Future
Some final quotes:

• "As Christianity becomes increasingly Southern, it cannot fail to absorb the habits and thought-worlds of the regions in which it is strongest" (140). It has always done this, and that is okay. "London's St. Paul's Cathedral almost certainly stands on the site of an ancient pagan structure" (138).
• "Hispanic theology is acutely concerned with issues of liberation, suffering, and social justice, while matters of race are also paramount" (144).
• "A black or brown Mary would be a powerfully appropriate symbol for the emerging Southern Christendom" (147).
• "The practice of healing is one of the strongest themes unifying the newer Southern churches, both mainstream and independent, and perhaps their strongest selling point for their congregations" (157).
• Many Southern churches appropriate the OT more directly and literally than the West has come to do (this was also true of frontier churches in the US in the 1800s, as we see in traditions about the Sabbath, circumcision, tithing, and verses relating to appearance).
• Churches are fundamentalist and charismatic by nature (169).
• "The greatest change from present assumptions is likely to involve the Enlightenment-derived assumption that religion should be segregated into a separate sphere of life, distinct from everyday reality" (171).
• Politics and religion tend to align in the two-thirds world. Of course this happens in the US as well.
• "Religious loyalties are at the root of many of the world's ongoing civil wars" (201).
• Catholicism is not so much waning in the southern hemisphere as changing. For example, charismatic and Pentecostal elements are on the rise.
• Immigrant churches are on the rise in the US and Europe, and two-thirds world countries are increasingly sending missionaries to Western lands. 
• By 2050, it seems likely that "whites" will make up less than half of Americans. Over half may be Hispanic, a quarter black. Asians not quite a quarter.

Jenkins is a sociologist of religion. He is not saying what should happen, only what he thinks has and is going to happen. What this means is that we who are in the church need to engage a dialog with "the other" as equal participants. This must not be a dialog of a supposedly "superior" Western Christian "schooling" the "inferior" global Christian. It should be a dialectic. Each side raises concerns and makes points. A synthesis will emerge over time. I believe this is also the most profitable way to move forward whenever any two or or more groups are in tension or conflict.

The alignment of political party with religion is something that European Christianity and indeed world Christianity has born the scars. History has emphatically shown the need to align Christianity with principles rather than political party. When Christians persecute Christians, something is wrong. Similarly, we can debate whether the strong alignment of American evangelical Christianity with the Republican party is in the end a healthy situation for American Christianity in general.

8. For the moment, he notes that Christianity is alive and well among the poor and persecuted (275), and the truly persecuted do not live in the white portions of North America.

No doubt the future will throw some wrenches in these prognostications. As G. K. Chesterton once said, future humanity listens respectfully to prophets and prognosticators, then goes on to do something different after they are nicely buried. Jenkins is convinced that the shift of Christianity to the southern hemisphere is taking place. He is less willing to commit to what that will end up looking like.

The currents of history are always alterable, especially through violence. For all we know, God could let the world destroy itself before the next election.

Next Sunday: Culture 9: The Rise of the Nones

The Calling of a Minister

• The Domains of Ministry
• The Calling of a Minister
• Ministerial Calling in Scripture
• Ministerial Calling in History
• God can call anyone he wants into ministry.
• A Theology of Calling

The Person of a Pastor

• Intro to the Pastor as Person
• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• Sacred Pathways
• Individual Spiritual Disciplines
• Corporate Spiritual Disciplines
• Some Formational Reading

Contexts of Ministry

• Kinds of Context
• The Making of Meaning
• How Culture Works
• The Cultures of the Bible
• The Kingdom Core
• The Church and Culture
• A Culture Map

Seminary CM7: A Culture Map

This is the seventh post on the Contexts of Ministry in my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom for the previous posts in this unit, "The Person and Contexts of a Minister." I have completed one other unit in this series, The Pastor as Leader.
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1. In this post I largely want to summarize the ideas of a book by Erin Meyer called The Culture Map. Although the book was written for businesses, it gives some helpful models by which to categorize and understand various cultures around the world.

There have been some in the past who have reacted negatively to terms like "cultural relativity" and "contextualization." Some of this reaction is based in an "all or nothing" mentality. The fact that some aspects of Christian faith are contextual does not mean that all are. That is to say, relativity on some things does not mean relativity on all things!

Romans 14 makes the point. In this chapter, Paul is basically saying that different Christians have different convictions on some issues, and that is okay as long as they hold their convictions with faith. In other words, Paul is saying that--on some issues--right and wrong is relative to the convictions of the individual. Obviously this is not true of murder or adultery!

The same goes with culture. There is no culture were is it okay to murder innocent people from a Christian perspective. The kingdom core of an earlier post applies to all cultures.

But there are also aspects of morality that play out differently in different places. In fact, all morality has to play out in a cultural context because, as we have seen, all humans live in culture. So the gospel always involved contextualization. It is sheer ignorance that some American Christians of the past have unthinkingly assumed that their Christianity was not incarnated in culture just like everyone else's.

"When you are in and of a culture--as fish are in and of water--it is often difficult or even impossible to see that culture" (25).

On the 8 scales that follow, there is no right or wrong. There is just different from my culture.

2. Communicating--High vs. Low Context
The United States is the most "low context" culture on the planet currently. This means that we assume those with whom we are speaking have no context against which to understand our meaning. "Say what you mean and mean what you say." "Tell us what you're going to say. Say it. Then tell us what you've said."

Accordingly, all other cultures in the world are more indirect in their information. You have to read between the lines. In Japanese culture, this is called "reading the air." There will be an assumption that you mean more than you say and a Japanese person will expect you to be able to read between the lines, so to speak. In China there is intentional beating around the bush. In French there is the "underneath understanding."

I find the description "explicit versus implicit communication" a clearer way of expressing this dynamic of different cultures.

3. Evaluating--Direct Negative Feedback vs. Indirect Negative Feedback
Interestingly, how explicit a culture is about information does not correlate exactly with how you give negative feedback. French culture, for example, is not very explicit in general when communicating, except when it comes to negative feedback (see also #8 below). The French, German, Dutch, Russian, etc. are very direct when it comes to sharing negative feedback.

However, United States culture is much more hesitant to give negative feedback bluntly. When it reaches that point, a person tends to be in serious trouble. A French person may not realize how serious the situation is, because negative feedback is readily given in French culture, while positive feedback is rarely given. By contrast, it is customary to say something nice in the United States before giving negative feedback.

4. Persuading--Principles First vs. Applications First
Those from the US tend to be practical and pragmatic--we are perhaps the most pragmatic culture in the whole world. We are most convinced by "how" arguments and inductive arguments. By contrast, many parts of the world (France, Russia, Germany) are "why" cultures in which you give the principles and the background first, then deduce from there.

This section was interesting for me in terms of the academy. For example, Wesley Seminary was founded to be an inductive, problem based learning, pragmatic style learning culture. But professors are almost always trained to be principles first, "why" thinkers. Let's just say the original vision is not likely to last.

If you want to convince someone from Germany, you have to give them the philosophical basis before going for the throat. But in US business, we want you to "cut to the chase." We want to know the bottom line. I've wondered if this gives us an advantage in war.

Meyer puts Asian cultures in a different category she calls "holistic" thinking. This approach sees the interconnectedness of everything. This approach needs the big picture before understanding the specifics.

I experienced some inner conflict in some of these sections because of intra-American debates that reflect these cultural differences. Analytical versus phenomenological approaches to philosophy map to the difference between British and continental cultures. In American theology, there are the presuppositionalists of the Reformed tradition and the Charles Finney types that tend to be more "American" in their approach to evangelism.

I take sides on these issues, but this book is suggesting we are in part talking cultural conflict here.

5. Leading--Egalitarian vs. Hierarchical
Some cultures clearly pay more attention to hierarchy than others. For example, can you skip lines on the organizational chart? Can a janitor have lunch with the president? Do you contact the person on the same level as you?

Again, I've seen some of these issues in the university where I work. Some bosses I've had have been very open to skipping people on the org chart. If you need information from a certain person, you contact that person directly.

Others have been insistent on following the chain of command. If you need information from x but you are on the same level as y, you contact y and he or she contacts x for you. It would seem that there is no absolute answer here but it is a matter of culture and personality.

It does seem to me--a matter of some inner conflict as I worked through this book--that some models accomplish certain goals better (and I realize my American task orientation is at work here). I thus had values in conflict as I read. On the one hand, I want to affirm that there generally aren't right and wrong cultures. Yet it seems that certain cultural approaches are more effective in certain areas than others.

6. Deciding--Consensual vs. Top-Down
Interestingly, even though some cultures like the Dutch or Scandinavian are very egalitarian--the boss is one of the gang, referred to by first name, rides a bike to work like everyone else--how decisions are made can be a quite different thing. While US businesses tend to be more egalitarian, for example, bosses tend to make decisions.

In Germany, by contrast, the team makes the decisions and consensus is important. In the US, the boss may make an unpopular decision, but everyone knows she is the boss. That's what bosses do. This is experienced as very heavy-handed in other cultures. By contrast, while Japanese culture is very hierarchical, decisions tend to be made by consensus.

So hierarchy and decision-making do not always map directly to each other, although they often do.

[More inner conflict. I prefer to be a consensus leader, but recognize that sometimes a leader has to make a decision or at least should. Otherwise you can languish on forever in indecision, which can do more damage than simply making a decision and moving on.]

Another element is how easily a decision is changed once it is made. This relates to the principles-first versus applications-first distinction. In Germany, once a decision is made it is made. But in the US, if new information surfaces, the decision can be altered. Meyer distinguishes between "big D" decision making and "small d" decision making.

Again, this gets at some of my pet-peeves even in US organizational culture. The principles-first approach seems to me philosophically inferior and, in our current climate, just as likely to run your organization out of business in changing times. It certainly seems likely to lose you a war.

7. Trusting--Task-Based vs. Relationship Based
This is the distinction between "peach" and "coconut" cultures. Americans tend to share a lot of information with complete strangers until you get to a certain point, the peach seed. We tend to be task-based in our business relationships. This relates to the principles-first versus applications-first issue.

Other cultures are more like a coconut. A gruff exterior means nothing. It takes relational work to get beneath the shell. Once you are there, however, there is deep relationship. If you want to make a business deal, you had better build a relationship. Spending time together eating is not a waste of time but an essential part of the process in these cultures.

8. Disagreeing--Confrontational vs. Avoids Confrontation
If I were writing this book, I might have put this section right after the one on negative feedback. Some cultures are very aggressive when it comes to confrontation, but it does not mean what it means in US culture. Two French individuals may be very negative and confrontational toward each other and yet hold hands walking out of the room.

For the US, however, this level of confrontation tends to break relationships. In Asian culture, there is also a strong need to "save face" in public. In the US, we confront individuals in private.

9. Scheduling--Linear-Time vs. Flexible Time
Many of us will know the stereotypes of hot versus cold cultures and how time in some cultures is much less of a thing than it is in others. In US military and business culture, "on time is late." But when my sister was a missionary to the Philippines, we used to talk about "by and by" time. "We'll get there when we get there."

There's a tendency to put a moral judgment on such things. "Being on time is a sign of virtue." But this is not true in many cultures.

10. A very interesting book. Very eye-opening, yet also difficult. It seems to me that there are some betters and worse to achieving certain goals in certain contexts (that is my American task-orientation speaking) yet I also want to affirm that these are not moral evaluations. Different cultures are just different.

What I had attributed to personality differences in an organization now face the complication of possibly being cultural level differences.

Next Sunday: Culture 8: Two-Thirds World Christianity

The Calling of a Minister

• The Domains of Ministry
• The Calling of a Minister
• Ministerial Calling in Scripture
• Ministerial Calling in History
• God can call anyone he wants into ministry.
• A Theology of Calling

The Person of a Pastor

• Intro to the Pastor as Person
• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• Sacred Pathways
• Individual Spiritual Disciplines
• Corporate Spiritual Disciplines
• Some Formational Reading

Contexts of Ministry

• Kinds of Context
• The Making of Meaning
• How Culture Works
• The Cultures of the Bible
• The Kingdom Core
• The Church and Culture

Seminary CM6: The Church and Culture

This is the sixth post on the Contexts of Ministry in my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom for the previous posts in this unit, "The Person and Contexts of a Minister." I have completed one other unit in this series, The Pastor as Leader.
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1. In 1951, H. Richard Niebuhr published what soon became a classic work of theology and mission, Christ and Culture. In this book, Niebuhr suggested that the various ways in which Christianity interacts with culture can be captured in five basic approaches.

1. Christ against culture
The first is Christianity in opposition to the surrounding culture. Those with this approach typically try to withdraw from culture as much as possible. Culture is seen as antithetical to Christianity.

2. Christ of culture
A second approach virtually assimilates Christianity to the culture. The values of the culture become the values of Christianity. This approach blurs into whatever the surrounding culture is and does not have a clear or distinctive Christian identity.

The other three approaches are mixtures of the first two and are together categorized by Niebuhr as "Christ above culture."

3. Christ and culture 
Niebuhr calls this one a synthesis of Christ and culture, so we might call it Christ and culture. It tries to combine Christ and culture in some way that considers them both valid in various ways. I have often thought of the American impulse to "civil religion" as an example of this sort of synthesis--baseball, hot dogs, and Jesus waving an American flag.

4. Christ and culture in paradox
The opposite impulse toward a synthesis is to keep Christ and culture separate without trying to synthesize them. Perhaps one is Christian in church but Christless the rest of the week. We are both sinner and saint at the same time.

5. Christ the transformer of culture
For Niebuhr, this is a "conversionist" approach. We accept in culture whatever we can accept and then work to transform the rest to conform to Christianity.

2. Understandably, these categories--and Niebuhr's implementation of them, have been substantially critiqued over the last fifty years. For example, it is impossible for someone to remove him or herself from culture. All human existence is enculturated, "incarnated," as it were. The question of withdrawal is one of degree of removal and the question of assimilation is one of degree of assimilation.

So the Amish are not completely removed from the surrounding culture. In many respects, they have simply locked themselves into a past time when they were more acculturated. That is to say, they tried to stop changing with where culture was at in a previous point in history, at which time they were far more acculturated than they are now. Some holiness groups have followed a similar path, locking themselves into the dress standards of an earlier era in the early to mid-1900s. At that time, however, they were more acculturated in their clothing.

In this respect, Christianity at any time and place is always on some level a synthesis of the kingdom core with the surrounding culture.

3. A second observation is that different times and places call for different stances toward the world around us. "For everything there is a season" (Eccl. 3:1). You could argue that we are always in exile because the world stands under the power of Sin and thus we are always "strangers and exiles on the earth" (Heb. 11:13). Similarly, you could argue that we are always meant to be a force for good in the world, both in spreading the good news (Matt. 28:19) and in just plain doing good (Gal. 6:10).

But the degree to which we engage or withdraw will differ from time to time and place to place. There is a time to mostly blend in (1 Peter times) and there may be a time to conquer the land (Joshua times). In this respect, there is probably not a single stance that the church will take toward culture in every time and place.

4. Let me suggest some of the different stances toward culture that Christians may be called to take at various places and times.

1. Cultural Take-Over
There certainly have been times and places where Christians have taken over the culture or at least tried. [1] In ancient Israel, Joshua was commanded to take over the land of Canaan, and throughout the monarchy, Israel was in control of its land. After Constantine and Theodosius in the 300s AD, Christianity became the dominant force in the Roman Empire, and Christianity dominated the culture of Europe from then till the present.

In Geneva, Switzerland, John Calvin made his understanding of Christianity the law of the city. Similarly, in Puritan, New England, the Puritan understanding of right and wrong was the law of the land. Many fundamentalist Christians in the United States are zealous to see American law mirror various elements of their moral understanding.

There's an important caution here. Since true Christians are strangers and aliens on the earth, since narrow is the way and only a minority finds it (Matt. 7:14), it seems unlikely that the true people of God were never coterminous with Israel, Geneva, New England, or American fundamentalism today. That is to say, only a minority of Israelites were truly the people of God. Only some of those in Geneva and New England were true Christians. And we must reckon with the likelihood that most of those who have called themselves Christians in America probably are not. The rise of the "nones" today may in part simply be a peeling away of those who were never true believers in the first place.

Most of those who to take over a culture probably do not really represent God. When any religion takes over a culture, oppression is usually close behind. Whether it be sharia law in Muslim contexts or fundamentalist law in America, these impulses largely amount to power-hungry human beings using religion as a tool to control others.

God does not rule the world in this way at this time. When people reject him currently, he "lets them go" (Rom. 1:24, 26). The very fact that most in the world are not Christians proves that God does not rule this world with an iron fist at this time. Those Muslim extremists who use terrorism to exact destruction on the world are missing a fundamental fact--if God was as they think he is, he would not need their help. If God wanted to take over the world, he would. The fact that he lets evil continue shows that his way is not at this time to force the world to follow him. The same observation follows for fundamentalists whose agenda is to make US law mirror their understanding of the Bible.

On the other hand, when we see others being oppressed or others are in danger, this can be a time to step into culture and intervene. When the abolitionist movement tried to put an end to slavery, that was arguably an appropriate time for Christians to work for change. When Christians work to end abortion, this is arguably an example of Christians acting to protect others from harm. Even in these cases, though, there are different ways Christians can go about working for change.

2. Extreme Assimilation
You could argue that complete assimilation to the culture ceases to be Christian at all. "Liberalism" is sometimes painted into this category because "conservatism" and fundamentalism resist cultural change. But you might just as well say that conservatism mistakes the culture of the past for Christianity, that it is just as much an assimilation but to the culture of the past rather than the culture of the future.

In truth, liberalism and conservatism often both are emphasizing core Christian values--they are just emphasizing different ones. Those who emphasized the fundamentals in the early 1900s were emphasizing Christian values, namely, those of orthodox belief. But those who preached the social gospel--helping those in need--were also emphasizing a Christian value.

So it is today. Republican Christians tend to emphasize God's justice, God's stance for life, and for a biblical sense of family. Democratic Christians tend to emphasize God's love and his concern for the needy and marginalized. Both at least think that they are standing true to the essence of Scripture.

I would argue that it is actually the "Christ and culture in paradox" perspective that reflects the real assimilation danger. This is when a person says Christian things on Sunday, but it has no impact on his or her life during the week. This person may say the right things in church, may even see themselves as a defender of ideas. But when it comes to the kingdom core, it isn't present in their lives.

3. Principled Assimilation
1 Peter represents a different kind of assimilation situation. 1 Peter was written at a time of Christian suffering. Rome is pictured as "Babylon," that foreign power that once destroyed Jerusalem (5:13). The suffering was so bad that Peter talks of the judgment having begun with the house of God (4:17). The key verse of the letter instructs its "strangers and exiles" to live good lives among the nations in this time of suffering (2:11-12).

Accordingly, 1 Peter is a kind of defensive strategy. [2] It instructs slaves to endure unjust masters. It instructs wives of unbelieving husbands to be good first century wives. That is to say, Peter instructs Christians to assimilate to the culture of the first century without compromising their faith.

There is no sense of changing the culture to the kingdom ideal. That simply wasn't in the cards. Rather they assimilate in a principled way.

4. Separation ("In but not of")
The situation was not that dire when Paul wrote his letters. Nor were matters at a flash point when Jesus was ministering in Galilee. Yet Paul and Jesus had no agenda to take over the secular powers of their context either. Both of them modeled what we might call an "in the world but not of the world" approach.

Paul saw matters of the church and matters of the world as two separate worlds but he only really belonged to one of them. His citizenship was in heaven (Phil. 3:20) even though he was a Roman citizen. It was his job as an apostle to exercise authority on his churches, even to participate in judgment, but it was God's job to judge the world at this point in time (e.g., 1 Cor. 5:12-13).

Paul thus does not try to stop sexual immorality in the world. He does not try to get the Romans to enact laws against divorce or homosexual practice. But he insists on stopping sexual immorality within the church.

Jesus similarly divides the earth into two kingdoms. "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" (Mark 12:17). Jesus is not legitimating the Roman empire. He is simply pointing out that its parallel world has nothing to do with the kingdom. It is a different world. Followers live in both worlds but really only belong to one of them.

5. Withdrawal
Some of course take the separation in identity of #4 and take it to a physical withdrawal. The Shakers, the Oneida colony, other Christian groups have removed themselves physically from the surrounding culture.

In the Bible, Israel itself is an example of this withdrawal, in a way. This is what the conquering of the land was about. This is what the food laws were probably about. Not eating pork was not probably about hygiene, but about distinguishing Israel from the Philistines and their gods.

It seems that this option is rarely open for believers, although there may be a place and time for it. If we are to be witnesses to Christ in the world, it is hard to see how this option fulfills that task very well.

6. Influence
At all times and places, Christians are thus witnesses. We should not often try to take over the culture. We should never assimilate ourselves into oblivion. We are never "of the world" even though we are in it. We should not often completely withdraw.

But we should always be witnesses. We should always be trying to lead others into the kingdom of God. We should always stand against oppression. We should always be a positive influence on the cultures we are in, whether they are hostile to us or threaten to allure us with their comfort.

Next Sunday: Culture 7: Our Global Context

[1] My category here is an extreme version of Niebuhr's conversionist "Christ transformer of culture."

[2] Scot McKnight, 1 Peter. NIV Application Commentary.

The Calling of a Minister

• The Domains of Ministry
• The Calling of a Minister
• Ministerial Calling in Scripture
• Ministerial Calling in History
• God can call anyone he wants into ministry.
• A Theology of Calling

The Person of a Pastor

• Intro to the Pastor as Person
• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• Sacred Pathways
• Individual Spiritual Disciplines
• Corporate Spiritual Disciplines
• Some Formational Reading

Contexts of Ministry

• Kinds of Context
• The Making of Meaning
• How Culture Works
• The Cultures of the Bible
• The Kingdom Core

Seminary CM5: The Kingdom Core

This is the fifth post on the Contexts of Ministry in my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom for the previous posts in this unit, "The Person and Contexts of a Minister." I have completed one other unit in this series, The Pastor as Leader.
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1. Cultures differ significantly from each other and the biblical cultures differed significantly from us. Is there not some "kingdom core" that transcends culture? Is there not some timeless truth and practice that applies in all times and all places?

We cannot reiterate enough the fact that all human thought is ensconced in culture and that all biblical thought was incarnated in culture. What we are really talking about here are truths and practices that apply to all cultures rather than ones that transcend culture. We are asking about omni-cultural truths and practices.

Perhaps more importantly, we are asking about standards by which we can judge elements of culture. The danger here is that we so very often cannot distinguish our culture from this kingdom core. It seems beyond question that a large amount of what Christian missionaries from the United States have exported to the world over the last couple centuries has had as much of American culture in it as it has the gospel. No doubt we can attribute some contemporary mission failure to an inability to discern cultural elements in the way the mission was conducted.

2. So what is the kingdom core? It is perhaps easiest to address ethics and practices first, rather than beliefs. The reason is that the New Testament is so clear on what the fundamental Christian ethic is. From Jesus to Paul to John to James, the New Testament is unanimous in its sense that loving God and loving our neighbor/enemy is the kingdom ethic. [1] It is not its core. It is the whole of the ethic.

Any appropriation of the Bible that conflicts with the love of God and the love of neighbor is a misappropriation of Scripture!

Love is a universal human value. All cultures have some sense of what love is. It is thus an omni-cultural ethic. To be sure, different cultures understand it slightly differently. What is considered unloving can differ somewhat from culture to culture. American culture right now probably has a very weak sense of love, one that befits our world of vast convenience and ease. We thus probably under-appreciate the harder aspects of love that are intrinsic to cultures and sub-cultures where life is much more difficult.

Another warning applies to the impulse to use the concept of loving God as a way to wiggle out of loving our enemy or neighbor. Someone might say, "I cannot show love to my enemy at this point because my love of God trumps it here." This is a trick of Satan. Love of God never requires us to act hatefully toward our enemy, although a misinterpretation of the Bible might.

Love has to do with bringing good to others. It has to do with action rather than feeling. I can love someone that I do not like. Justice does not conflict with love. Justice can be redemptive toward an individual. And justice can be protective of a group of people. Finally, justice can be protective of the order of things. In none of these cases is justice unloving.

The love of God is about giving him priority in all things and in letting nothing in our life get in the way of loyalty to him. However, God is not threatened by the disobedience of his creation. In the mystery of his will he has created the world with the possibility of such disobedience. He thus does not always shut down opposition to him immediately, nor does he command us to do so. Nevertheless, the love of others suggests that we will help them find God and will protect others if we can.

3. So the "law of love" is at the essence of the kingdom core--what our attitudes and actions should be. How that love plays itself out will differ somewhat from time to time, culture to culture, sub-culture to sub-culture. For example, it is hard for me to imagine that the law of love can play out very well in American culture in a way that insists men must rule over women. In my world, love insists that husband and wife be of equal value and authority in the home.

Yet it was not universally so in the world of the New Testament. The household codes of Colossians and Ephesians, the instructions of 1 Peter to a persecuted church, these were accommodations to first century culture. The kingdom core suggests that if we find ourselves in a world where we can more fully implement Galatians 3:28, we should.

Yet there are many cultures around the world where the household codes seem to fit the cultural context neatly. Husband-headship in those contexts does not conflict with the love of neighbor. Accordingly, Christians in each time and place must "work out your salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil. 2:12). Those of us from different cultures will often not be able to see what love exactly looks like for them.

4. What of beliefs? Certainly Scripture is a sacrament of transformation for all cultures. No matter where we live, God will help his people see what they need to see in Scripture.

There is however a core, a commonly held set of beliefs derived from Scripture that Christians have agreed on for millennia. These are especially found in the core creeds of Christendom.

• God exists and is active in the world (cf. Heb. 11:6).
• Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus in fact is God (e.g., John 1:1). 
• Jesus is the only mediator between God and humanity (1 Tim. 2:5). Humanity stands under the power of Sin and under the prospect of judgment (Rom. 3:23), but through Christ, God has provided a way of salvation from final judgment (Rom. 6:23; 10:9).
• There is thus eternal life to be gained through Christ (John 3:16).
• Those who have the Spirit of God within them constitute the people of God (1 Cor. 3:16).
• Scripture is the canon, a divinely appointed meeting place for God to inform and by which to form us (2 Tim. 3:16). The Bible is the primary source of our story and our symbols as Christians.

5. The way these beliefs play themselves out in various cultures may differ a little. The symbols that speak the most strongly may differ. Indeed, these things differ from denomination to denomination in my own culture. The impulse to say, "This is the core," is almost always more restrictive than it is for God.

It is ultimately the charge of Christians in a particular culture or sub-culture to determine how the gospel might play out. The importance is that those decisions are made full of faith. And of course, we can be wrong!

Next Sunday: Culture 6: The Church and Culture

[1] Cf. Matt. 22:34-40; 5:43-48; Rom. 13:8-10; Gal. 5:14; 1 John 4:7-8; Jas 2:8.

The Calling of a Minister

• The Domains of Ministry
• The Calling of a Minister
• Ministerial Calling in Scripture
• Ministerial Calling in History
• God can call anyone he wants into ministry.
• A Theology of Calling

The Person of a Pastor

• Intro to the Pastor as Person
• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• Sacred Pathways
• Individual Spiritual Disciplines
• Corporate Spiritual Disciplines
• Some Formational Reading

Contexts of Ministry

• Kinds of Context
• The Making of Meaning
• How Culture Works
• The Cultures of the Bible

Seminary CM4: The Cultures of the Bible

This is the fourth post on the Contexts of Ministry in my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom for the previous posts in this unit, "The Person and Contexts of a Minister." I have completed one other unit in this series, The Pastor as Leader.
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1. Last week we looked at how culture works. There is probably a tendency among Christians to think of the Bible as somehow removed from culture, as if its words all stand in some timeless bubble outside of the time-bound nature of culture. However, this is not the case.

For one, we humans cannot escape culture. If the Bible were somehow removed from culture, it would be removed from us. God does not bring us up to his level when he reveals truth to us. Rather, he meets us where we are. This is the principle of incarnation. God is in the business of taking on human flesh. He becomes us. Jesus is the Word of God par excellence, God become flesh (John 1:14).

Every word of the Bible is incarnated revelation. Every word of the Bible is truth in culture. Those who think the Bible stands outside of culture inevitably think that they know the true meaning of the Bible. So since they are in culture, they are unknowingly implying that their culture has finally arrived. They are implying that they are on God's level, and all the other cultures up to this point have fallen short.

Beyond this reasoning, it is simply the case that the books of the Bible fit overwhelmingly well against the backdrop of the societies and cultures when they were written. The socio-cultural dimension of the Bible is the piece of the puzzle most overlooked in interpretation, as we have a tendency to interpret its words in ways that make sense to us. And the ways that make sense to us are inevitably the ways of our culture.

2. We presented a framework that can be used to analyze culture in the previous entry. It amounted to 1) your identity, 2) your relationship to others within and outside your groups, 3) the significance of the surrounding world. These understandings are reflected in 1) stories, 2) practices, 3) symbols, and 4) ideas.

As far as identity goes, there is no question but that the identity of Israel in the Old Testament and the default identity of those in the early church was collectivist in nature. In Genesis, we have the clans of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Abraham is said to have migrated from Ur. Genesis ends with the clan in Egypt, from which they migrate in Exodus, finally infiltrating Canaan in Joshua.

A clear indication of collectivism is the fact that the sins of the fathers made guilty their children. "I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me" (Exod. 20:5). When Achan sins in Joshua 7, his entire family is put to death to atone for it. Psalm 44:7 suggests that Israel was destroyed not because of its own sins but because of the sins of its fathers (cf. 2 Kings 23:26-27).

A move toward individualism is apparent in Ezekiel 18:4 where it will now be the person that sins that gets punished. No longer will it be, "Our fathers ate sour grapes but it is our teeth that hurt." Yet even in the New Testament, there is still debate about whether some physical problems could be the result of a parent's sin (cf. John 9:1).

3. Certain practices set the tribes of Israel apart from the surrounding peoples. Like the Egyptians, they circumcised their male children. Unlike the Egyptians, they were shepherds. The prohibition against pork was probably another distinction between Israelites and the surrounding peoples of the early Iron Age.

In the early Iron Age, Israel took on a king. Before that point, they were an amphictyony, a loose collection of related tribes. Benjamin, Judah, Ephraim--these were the primary identity markers.

4. The New Testament church began as a Jewish sect. Throughout the New Testament, all the New Testament authors understood themselves to be part of Israel. Gentile converts to Judaism saw themselves as becoming "Gentile Jews" of a sort, as it were.

Bruce Malina has suggested that ancient Mediterranean identity was a matter of gender, genealogy, and geography. [1] We are thus not surprised to find some gender differentiation in the later books of the New Testament. The geography of Christian identity was clearly linked to Judea.

However, the early Christian movement held within it the seeds of a new race. Because Christian identity cut across visible and inherited identity, Christianity held within it the seeds of individualism. Similarly, Galatians 3:28 holds within it the seeds to unravel genealogy as an identity marker. Christians become part of a new clan, a new extended family. Baptism is a ritual of incorporation into a new identity with new brothers and sisters.

5. The culture of the Old Testament was the culture of the Ancient Near East (ANE). In the oldest layers of the Old Testament, we can hear the traces of child sacrifice. The Akedah of Genesis 22 is a striking deconstruction of that practice, as God prevents Abraham from sacrificing Isaac.

The ANE was of course a polytheistic context, as all the surrounding worlds of the Bible. Abraham's ancestors were clearly polytheists (Josh. 24:2). At least from the days of Moses on, the tribes of Israel were increasingly henotheistic, worshiping Yahweh as their patron deity. [2] Nevertheless, well into the monarchy the prophets still struggled to stamp out the worship of other Canaanite deities like Ba'al or Asherah. An eighth century inscription found in a cave in eastern Sinai refers to "Yahweh and his Asherah."

Under King Josiah (reigned 640-609BC), a concerted effort was made to centralize the worship of Yahweh in Jerusalem. However, since Jerusalem was destroyed in 586BC, this centralization was short lived. However, it would be the norm of the post-exilic period.

6. The nature of ancient sacrifice is debated. Its most basic function would seem to be reciprocity, a time of fellowship with the god and with those participating in the sacrificial meal. So atonement was not the sole function of sacrifice, perhaps not even the primary function. The life-giving power of the blood is the key to atonement (cf. Lev. 17:11). In the Day of Atonement ritual, the uncleanness of Israel is transferred to a goat that is let go into the desert.

Uncleanness is a category often difficult for Westerners to grasp, as is holiness. We are a culture largely devoid of sacred space. [3] Mary Douglas' famous dictum that "dirt is matter out of place" suggested that ancient Israel had a clear sense of "kinds" of things, categories of things. Violations of these categories made things unclean. Clean birds, sea creatures, and creatures fit within these boxes, while unclean ones did not.

Holiness is similarly a matter of belonging to the god in question or touching his or her space. Space that is holy is space that pertains to the god. The fundamental meaning of sanctification and holiness in the Bible is thus belonging to God, being set apart as his. Anything that is in this "space" is holy and thus requires special treatment and consideration. The idea of purity is thus derivative of the connection with God.

3. Recent decades have seen a rich set of sources to help us understand the cultural background of the New Testament world. [4] Here are just a few of the key categories:

• As a collectivist culture, the New Testament world was an honor-shame world, not an individualist world. Words like glory, honor, shame, blessing, cursing are all in this domain.
• Family was the most basic unit of culture. Families were extended in nature, not nuclear.
• The evil eye of envy or jealousy was a key concept. Envying others was akin to placing a curse of sorts upon them.
• Reciprocity and patron-client relationships were a cornerstone of the culture. Giving expected return, a never ending cycle of friendship. Grace in the New Testament should be understood in these terms.
• Economics functioned with a sense of limited good. There was only so much to go around and thus the accumulation of wealth at a certain level was akin to stealing.

Understanding these sorts of dynamics is key to understanding the original meaning of the Bible. Since most pastors preach from modern cultural assumptions, we can assume that a good deal of the interpretation made from pulpit and pew is fundamentally skewed, at least as it relates to the original meaning. (I believe we also have to assume that God makes texts come alive within our cultural assumptions if we are to believe that direct speaking takes place to us today.)

For example, attempts to find financial guidelines in Scripture for today are only as helpful as the common sense of the interpreter. Since the ancient world was agrarian and functioned on the notion of limited good, any attempt to find biblical principles on money is bound to be skewed in one way or another with regard to the original meaning of these texts. However, the Spirit may meet those interpreters where they are, giving insights that are true, just not what the biblical texts actually meant.

Next Sunday: Culture 5: The Church and Culture

[1] Bruce Malina and Jerome Neyrey, Portraits of Paul: An Archaeology of Ancient Personality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996).

[2] Henotheism accepts the existence of multiple gods, but considers only one God as appropriate for worship. "You will have no other gods before me" (Exod. 20:3).

[3] A pioneering work here is Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966).

[4] I have put the picture of the pioneering work above. Bruce Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology, 3rd ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001).

The Calling of a Minister

• The Domains of Ministry
• The Calling of a Minister
• Ministerial Calling in Scripture
• Ministerial Calling in History
• God can call anyone he wants into ministry.
• A Theology of Calling

The Person of a Pastor

• Intro to the Pastor as Person
• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• Sacred Pathways
• Individual Spiritual Disciplines
• Corporate Spiritual Disciplines
• Some Formational Reading

Contexts of Ministry

• Kinds of Context
• The Making of Meaning
• How Culture Works