Treasure Old and New, Part 1

“Therefore, every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.” - Jesus (Mt 13:52)

“We want our church to become more African and more professional. We want the freedom to read the Bible with African eyes and do things in a way that fits our culture instead of just copy everything the missionaries brought from their culture. But we also want to learn from the best models of leadership and administration available today with a more educated people in our churches.” – eldership in South Africa

By this point, it is cliché to say that the global church and the American church are in times of transition. That was true before COVID-19. The pandemic only accelerated the pace of change.

On both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the church is asking hard questions and sorting through the implications of the shift in the center of gravity of the Christian faith.

As I mentioned in my introductory blog entry on August 11, the majority of the church is now outside the historic strongholds of the western world. Seventy percent of followers of Jesus live in the majority world (previously called by the less-than-respectful terms “3rd world” or “developing world’).

The church is experiencing a global resurgence, but it is not being led by Americans in most places. We have important roles to play and we need to do them well, but our role is changing. American voices are still valued and desired in many places, but we are no longer seen as the authorities. Rather, we are being asked to serve as conversation partners among mature believers with different insights and skills to contribute, which is a healthy development.

Christians around the world are increasingly reading their Bibles from their own cultural backgrounds with their own questions and asking God to lead them without seeking the approval of the western church. We need to encourage this change of dynamics and seek to learn from our global brothers and sisters.

Even in the U.S., the church is doing well among the growing immigrant communities and people of color but is in decline among the shrinking majority white population. There is a lot of fear in the majority church about our losses. That fear is leading to questioning, defensiveness, polarization, and panic. Some are retrenching. Others are experimenting.

In the tense middle between what was and what will be, we are battling over the past and over the future. We can’t agree on who we were or who we should be. It’s scary and often it’s not pretty.

Some want to hold onto the good of the past and are suspicious of change. They have good reasons to feel as they do. Too often “progress” destroys a lot of good in an effort to fix what has remained broken. Others claim we must change deeply now if we hope for a good future. They are rightly suspicious of claims regarding how good the past was and dismiss much of it as revisionist nostalgia. They too have valid points that need to be heard.

In all the polarization, we hear few calm voices working for understanding, mutual respect, and peace across the divides. We need more non-anxious spaces for healthy conversations that listen to diverse voices without accusation but in the confidence that God’s church is secure, and his purpose will triumph even if we resist it for a time.

Into this conversation comes Jesus, reminding us that wise teachers know how to access treasures both old and new. The mature teacher appreciates God’s work in the past and trusts that God is still leading his people as we seek his direction to live out the ancient story in new contexts. While contexts change, the gospel doesn’t. Still, how we see and live out the gospel requires constant review. What we consider to be gospel often gets muddled with culture.

I remember being at a large conference in southern Africa about eight years ago. There were thousands of people there from at least seven African nations. There were at most six “white” people present at any given time. We were easy to spot. Yet, when the plenary sessions took place, everyone sang songs in English written in the USA and England--most over 100 years old. Everyone stood or sat perfectly still. It struck me as very odd and out of place. But then in between sessions, informal choruses gathered in the common areas outside and sang worship songs in their native languages and moved with the music in ways normal to African cultures. It was far more powerful and authentic.

Guess which form of worship is more appealing to African people? Why is that not the standard? Why was there not more of that in the formal worship times? Partly it was because English was the one language they had in common. Yet Africans are accustomed to worshiping in multiple languages. It was primarily because western missionaries confused scripture and culture when they took the gospel to Africa. It’s a problem everywhere.

In my next post, I’ll suggest some ways we can create non-anxious spaces for creative dialogue by recovering the gospel as good news of God’s actions in history instead of just ideas we affirm or patterns we repeat. But even before we unpack all that, we can turn down the heated rhetoric, embrace humility, and listen to each other with respect if we will just remember that our security is not in being right, but in being made righteous by the one who is right.

Our faith is not in our faith, nor the way we express our faith, but in the object of our faith. The wise teacher knows how to bring out treasures both old and new.