Christianity and local culture
Slate reports that this week's NYT magazine will have a cover story on missionaries in Africa:
I look forward to learning what "railroading" a culture means. I thought becoming a Christian was supposed to change one's behavior and outlook. It's possible that the Times is going to give a balanced, thoughtful treatment to the topic - but if God is intent on performing a miracle in today's world, would having the Times overcome its bias against red-state behaviors like going to church, believing in absolute truth (and attempting to persuade others of such beliefs), and so forth, be likely to be His first choice?
A cover story on American evangelical missionaries in Africa profiles the Maples family, who gave up their middle-class life in California to proselytize in the Kenyan bush. The article recaps both the tremendous success of such missionaries—about 10 percent of sub-Saharan Africans were Christian in 1900, and as many as 70 percent are today—and also the recent focus of American churches on the continent's humanitarian crises. The Mapleses, for example, break from their forebears in that they are self-consciously sensitive, hoping to Christianize the local Samburu tribe without railroading their culture.
I look forward to learning what "railroading" a culture means. I thought becoming a Christian was supposed to change one's behavior and outlook. It's possible that the Times is going to give a balanced, thoughtful treatment to the topic - but if God is intent on performing a miracle in today's world, would having the Times overcome its bias against red-state behaviors like going to church, believing in absolute truth (and attempting to persuade others of such beliefs), and so forth, be likely to be His first choice?
Posted by Andy Morriss on
Thursday January 26, 2006 at 8:34am
I remember thinking, well, it might be tough, but if you want to be a Christian, clean up your act and divorce those women!
But as I get older, I can't help but think that that was a terribly unmerciful solution. (And one, by the way, that the missionaries in the book didn't take, much to their credit, I think.)
As much as many of us (in any culture) would want to set our lives straight and make 'em look good from the outside, there are still plenty of indications dangling off of us showing the errors of our ways before entering the Church as well as after.
Sometimes mercy is shocking: John 8:1-11. Sometimes - often? always? - hearts need to be "railroaded" before actions are changed.
Mercy is shocking. And the 2 wives problem sounds like a real dilemma, with harms coming from multiple dimensions no matter what happened. But there are lots of sensitive spots where there isn't a harm to an innocent bystander to contend with. It will be interesting to see which is the problem raised by the TImes.