Why God is a Good Missionary

Do you do Yoga? You know it comes from eastern pantheism, don’t you? Is it acceptable for Christians to practice it?

Is it okay for Christians to do meditation? Not according to some. I’ve been rebuked for encouraging believers in Jesus to practice meditation and other expressions of contemplative spirituality because it looks like something the Hindus and Buddhists do. Never mind that is it in scripture. These practices sound like heresy to some rationalistic westerners.

What about Easter bunnies or egg hunts? Don’t they have pagan origins? What do rabbits and eggs have to do with the resurrection? Has anyone even thought about the connection between Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and ancestor worship? This sounds dangerous to me.

There are no Christmas trees in the Bible. How can we put up with this holdover from the Druids or wherever else it originated? The Bible doesn’t tell us when Jesus was born, but we celebrate it around the winter solstice because there was already a festival in the pagan world at that time and the church wanted to redeem it. Does that make it wrong?

Like it or not, the church has often taken in things from local cultures, replaced the meanings, and brought them into the practice of the Christian faith to focus existing habits on Jesus. We could look at all these things as corruptions of the faith. But are they? Must we expunge from our lives anything that might have some root in non-Christian culture? I’m not sure we want to live with all the implications of that because there is no such thing as a cultureless Christianity. Wherever the gospel goes, it takes on the look and dress of the culture it inhabits, just like Jesus did when he came.

I think we need to follow the apostle Paul’s lead when he dealt with cultural issues like ancient temples and their accompanying meat markets. What we accept or reject mostly comes down to the meanings people attach to what they are doing. Almost all the religious practices in the Old Testament and the New Testament have some pagan roots or at least cultural roots that preceded their being adopted by God’s people. I believe this shows God’s wisdom and is a model for how we do our work of proclaiming Christ in the world.

First, let me ask you what all of these things have in common: temples, priests, animal sacrifices, circumcision, clean and unclean designations, baptism, and holy meals? The answer is that all of them were common practices in the culture around early Israel or the early church. God’s revelation through Moses and the prophets or Jesus and the apostles took elements from local culture, made adaptations with new meanings, and then used them to support the faith life of God’s people. Granted, what happened in the temple of God was very different from those of surrounding nations. In Israel, there was no image of God, no appeasing of an arbitrarily offended deity, and no sexualized religion or worship of the reproductive cycle. In fact, the priestly garments and the wall separating men and women in worship were designed to keep the pervasive sexuality and cult prostitution common in the ancient near east from happening in Yahweh’s temple. Still, temples and priests were a common thing before Moses.

Almost all nations along the eastern Mediterranean Sea circumcised (the Philistines who immigrated from the West were an exception). However, most nations did this as a rite of passage at the end of adolescence to indicate that a boy had earned a place in the community as a man by going through an ordeal. In Israel, circumcision was performed on a baby as a sign of faith in God to grant Israel their life, identity, and future. It was not something earned, but a gift and a promise. Still, for all its modification, circumcision was borrowed from the larger culture.

While I could go on with details on temple worship, priestly practices, Passover, and the New Testament practices of baptism and Lord’s supper (both rooted in cultural traditions in Israel), you get the point. God did not generally create rituals of faith from whole cloth. Rather, being a good missionary, God took things from the cultures he wanted to reach that made sense to those people, changed the practice to remove elements that were offensive to him (like human sacrifice or prostitution), and gave them new meanings. In short, God is a good missionary. He knows how to contextualize his message in a culture.

We generally understand, to some extent, when believers in other countries do this same thing even if it makes us uncomfortable. But when churches in our neighborhood act like missionaries and work with elements from the existing cultures around us to communicate the truth of God’s love in Jesus, some of us act like they have denied the faith. We don’t realize that the way we worship or organize our life as church was largely borrowed from the dominant culture at the time our branch of the church rose into its dominant form. This is why Roman Catholic churches still use medieval clothing and other ritual elements and why evangelical worship still feels a lot like a prairie revival service. We just assume there is only one way to do church because we’ve lost touch with the missional rationale behind the way we grew up doing things in our own tradition.

Think about it. In scripture, there is no mention of church buildings, songbooks (or projected lyrics), written music, worship leaders or praise teams (even in skinny jeans), specially created Lord’s tables or utensils for the Lord’s supper, ushers, pews, podiums, sitting in rows, ministerial staffs, hour-long worship services, etc. All these things are our traditions built over time as the gospel took shape in western culture. They aren’t wrong, but they aren’t necessary either. They can disappear or change dramatically without anything essential being lost.

Here is the point: if we are going to be God’s instrument to bring good news to the world, we need to imitate God by allowing the message and person of Jesus to take on forms that make sense to the people we are trying to reach. There is no cultureless Christianity. Can we sell out to culture? Of course. But selling out to Jesus means that we take culture seriously and focus more on what will effectively and faithfully communicate Christ to our culture than clinging to what we like because it has become our comfortable church culture.