Have your church’s discipleship classes ever focused on what it means to be a faithful Christian patron? Or on how to restore a household’s honor when a daughter has brought shame on the family through sexual impropriety? Or on how to shape the future destiny of your child, including whether buried umbilical cords have any influence on this?
For most, if not all of my readers, the answer would be no. But I’ll bet your church has had classes or studies on the Bible’s view of gender and sexuality, how Christians should engage in politics, and how Christians should think about retirement.
It’s no surprise that the first topics I listed haven’t featured in the classes your church has offered or in the Christian books you’ve read. They’re simply not pressing issues for the Church in the West – if they are even on the radar at all. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s merely a reflection of the particular slice of history and culture where Western Christians find themselves. But Western Christians are living in a time and culture where there’s widespread gender confusion, Christian participation and influence in elections, and individualistic retirement planning. Accordingly, our Christian resources reflect these issues.
When we move back to Central Asia this summer, my new role will be focused on creating and translating solid resources in our people group’s languages. The aim is for these resources to be both robustly biblical and deeply contextual, and in this way to serve local believers, their leaders, and the missionaries who are working among them. We now have a full or partial Bible in several of our languages, and there also are a good number of evangelistic resources both in print and online. What is lacking is content that focuses on building up the church.
In general, I’ve been chewing on two broad categories of resources: global vs. local. There are resources that every Christian in every age and culture needs. These would be universal or global resources. For example, resources in systematic or biblical theology that help Christians to understand what the Bible teaches about God, about the gospel, about the Church, and about God’s plan of redemption throughout the ages. There are also the universally-relevant areas of practical theology that help Christians apply the Bible to things like parenting, marriage, and work. These resources are, to a large extent, timeless, even if the examples and applications used might be more culture-specific.
Think of how impactful the Westminster catechism has been on global Christianity. Or, the broad appeal a book like Pilgrim’s Progress has had over the centuries and around the world. It’s been easy for Christians for four centuries to identify with Christian and his journey toward the Celestial City and the many common struggles that he faces, such as sin, doubt, complacency, despair, and death.
Every people group needs these kinds of global resources. But every people also needs local resources, resources that take aim at the unique strengths, weaknesses, and questions of a given culture. These resources greatly serve believers because their applications are so specific to the world of their target audience.
Our focus people group is very strong in hospitality. But their hospitality is done from the wrong motives – and only extended to those who are existing or possible patrons or clients. This means that local believers need resources that will explicitly point out how biblical hospitality should be done from a gospel motivation and extended toward even those who cannot repay the hospitality through some kind of future loyalty or other service. We have some great resources in the West that lay out a practical theology of hospitality. But how many of them will engage this activity through the lens of a society that relies on hospitality to build its patronage network and social safety net?
Our focus people group also oppresses women in some very dark ways. The oppression of women may be a global issue, but our local believers need resources that will argue directly against its local forms, such as female circumcision of babies, wife-beating on the marriage night to establish a husband’s authority, and honor killings as a response to sexual misconduct. Translated Western resources on biblical manhood and womanhood will cover the principles that oppose practices like these but will not address the practices themselves directly.
The need is to pursue both kinds of resources at the same time. All local churches need universal resources that teach them timeless doctrine and universal principles of Christian conduct. But all local churches also need local resources that will help them wrestle with the particular spirit of their age.
Sometimes these resources end up doing both very well. Augustine’s City of God, for example, was written to argue that it was not Christianity’s fault that Rome had been sacked by the barbarians. This was a particular question hotly debated in the late Roman world. But in doing this, Augustine went on to write about the theology of the City of God and the City of Man and how they are entangled and in conflict in all societies in this age. Augustine’s understanding of the spiritual city of God and its peculiar relationship with the City of Man still serves me very well in early 21st-century America, even though I am so far removed from Augustine’s culture and world.
I think this should be the goal of all serious Christian resources. We cannot escape culture-specific applications in the resources we create. In fact, we must get specific for the sake of our audience. But we can try to write, record, or film in such a way that the biblical exposition and reasoning we employ might also apply to audiences on the other side of the world – or in some future century. You never know how a faithful book written in past centuries might be the key to unlocking the future church’s way forward in some seemingly unrelated controversy.
God’s truth is universal, there’s nothing new under the sun, and yet every generation of believers is also unique. So, we will aim for both – universal and local. And trust that if a resource serves the church well for a decade, then that is good. And if it serves it well for 1,500 years, then that is good as well.
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