Learning from the Global Church: Part 1
We Need a Bigger God
Recently I was a guest on the Siburt Institutes’ Intersection webinar with Carson Reed which you can see here. Dr. Reed asked me to share with American church leaders what we can learn from the global church. In preparation for that event, I asked the MRN staff how they would answer that question. Among the 15 of us, we generated a list of more than 40 traits in 30 minutes. That was far more there than we could discuss in an hour-long webinar. However, I thought it would be worth capturing that conversation in a different format that might be more easily accessed in pieces as well as provide the space to be more comprehensive. So, this will be first of several installments on insights American Christians can learn from the global church.
Disclaimers: Just as the American church has strengths and weaknesses and is not the standard for other churches around the world, so the church around the world is a giant mix of admirable and less than laudable qualities. In addition, the global church is wonderfully diverse within and between various continents, countries, and cultures. You can’t say anything definitively true about the entire majority world church when painting with a broad brush like this. However, there are some amazing traits of believers that are far more common in churches outside the U.S. than inside the U.S. that we can admire and aspire to embrace.
When I think about the strengths I have seen consistently in the church outside the U.S., many of those traits are manifestations of one core theme: God gets bigger when you leave the secular west. Obviously, that is a figure of speech. God is the same regardless of how we view him. That said, the God the majority world worships is larger, holier, and more active in their minds and experience. The global church just has a bigger view of God than the American church. It is obvious in the language used to talk about God from the moment you land in another country. Majority world Christians thank God constantly, give him glory for all good things, and qualify every expression of blessing with “by God’s grace” or “glory to God.” (By the way, this is also more true of minority churches in the USA.)
It is clear to anyone who pays attention that most majority world believers live in a more mystical world with an active spiritual dynamic that shapes their physical world. It isn’t just more concern for demons and spiritual warfare, although that is common. It isn’t just more expectation of and experience with dreams, visions, and hearing from God, though that is common also. Rather it is a sense that humans are not the only or even close to the most powerful actors in our world. God is huge, wise beyond understanding, intimately involved in the world today, and certainly beyond critique.
In the WEIRD World (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic)1, we are the heirs of 300 years of putting God on trial. We haven’t been sure that there is a God and if there is, we have been told he is either too remote to care about us, or that this deity has set up a world that is cold and cruel. As our culture’s understanding of the physical world grew through scientific discovery, we grew large in our own eyes and God grew small or at least remote. Instead of growing in our amazement of what God created as it became more intelligible to us, we took pride in our own ability to understand and manipulate it a little. Instead of God expanding along with our understanding of the vastness of the cosmos, our cultural elites reduced God to a crutch for those unable to deal with life as we can see it through telescopes and microscopes, and the Secular West assumed that organized religion was as valuable as a horoscope.
In American churches, like most of the WEIRD world, we feel the need to defend God, as if such a being would need our defense. We live in a secular world where for many faith becomes the garnish on the side of the plate. It’s a false but partially helpful narrative that helps some people deal with life. But it’s not “real” like what we can touch and see. We shy away from making big faith claims in the West because we know that even if we believe them, they are not credible to most of the cultural powers around us.
Even in church, we spend most of our time acting and talking as if God is in the audience or in the wings instead of on stage. We feel responsible to complete God’s mission for him. We build the church, we set the strategy, we do the work. We hope God will applaud, but we don’t expect him to get up on stage with us and actually do anything. If he did, we wouldn’t know how to interpret it. It would disrupt our well-crafted worship/ministry plans.
Conversely, in the majority world, Christians expect God to show up and make things happen. They depend on God because they don’t assume they can make things happen on their own. They often don’t have the material resources, in most places, to replace prayer with strategy. They believe God acts in power and recognize there are other spiritual powers at play as well. The systemization of theology into a single coherent body of knowledge that explains everything is not a goal that humans are capable of achieving. God is not a subject to master and manipulate to human ends, like biology or physics. He is a transcendent being that we should worship with great honor because he is worthy. The global church is less inclined to try to control/contain God with their theologies.
Ironically, there is less desire to find an airtight theodicy (defense of God) in places where there is more suffering. God alone truly understands what happens in the world. Life and God are mysterious. God does not answer to us. He can heal, but he may not. He gives us life and provides all our blessings, but he owes us nothing. Therefore, all good things are reasons to praise. All hard things are reasons to lament and pray for God to act to change things or form us through the difficulty or enable us to bear up under it until he acts to set things right.
I’m confident the most important things global Christians would teach us if we would listen is this: our god it too small. The American church needs to rediscover the true God and be in awe of him and less impressed with ourselves.
In my next few blogs, I’ll expand on what this means for prayer, worship, funding, and many other aspects of the life of faith. Until then, let’s follow the lead of our brothers and sisters from other parts of the planet: expand our view of God and be silent before the Lord in awe or lift up our voices in joyous praise.