In last Sunday’s sermon, I talked about my experience of going to Kenya and teaching indigenous United Methodist pastors. On that note, Tim Tennent shares this reflection about the “powerful corrective” that the global church can offer to Western churches. Every word rings true to my experience.
One of the advantages of sustained interaction with the global church is that our brothers and sisters can help re-introduce us to Christianity. As every year passes it becomes increasingly clear that what is “bought and sold” as the Christian faith in North America is often only a pale reflection, almost a dim memory, of the actual article. Our long sojourn with Christendom has domesticated the faith, sanding down every rough edge, making it comfortable, almost coterminous, with western pragmatism. Once you have swallowed the pill of the kind of “feel good-self help-therapeutic-market driven” Christianity which has become so persuasive you can begin to think (after sustained exposure) that this really is the real thing. We slowly begin to actually believe what is said from the pulpits of America rather than what is set forth in the text of the New Testament and proclaimed by the Apostles. This is where the global church can provide a powerful corrective…
We can discover a post-Western Christianity. We can hear and see the gospel through the eyes and ears of others. We can re-discover the gospel itself. I have spent enough time with the church around the world to realize that they, too, have problems and issues, just as the early church did. But, the point is, they are often not our problems; they do not suffer from our blind spots. The result is that they can help us to see our own situation more clearly.
I remember the first time it really dawned on me that I was actually a nominal Christian. The real tragedy is that such a possibility had never even crossed my mind. So, lift up your eyes and see afresh the mighty works of God around the world. Learn to laugh out loud whenever you hear some new proposal which has as its presupposition that North America is somehow entitled to be the vanguard of Christian faith and practice. Believe in the seemingly heretical possibility that we who were for so long called to be teachers and leaders, just might be called to a new season of listening and following.