Do you have the confidence that God can save people, without ripping their cultural identity from them? What about Muslim followers of Jesus?
Back in Acts 15, the Israelites debated over the Gentiles of the need to become Jewish or not. Should the Greeks get circumcised or not? They ultimately decided that the Gentiles didn’t need to become Jewish to follow the ways of Jesus. So why do we sometimes do the same thing today? Except we say you need to become a Christian.
Perhaps it’s just the particular definitions that we have for what “becoming a Christian” means. Some people could mean that as just following the ways of Jesus. Others could mean that you must give up your cultural background, which may also be tied to your religious background, and then become a Christian.
These are some of the things I’ve been reading about in the Perspectives class I’m taking; a class about missions. It might sound more than just a little different from mainstream Christian thought and theology. I think that these ideas are on to something though.
I think we have to put ourselves in others’ shoes. Hypothetical situation: If we were the ones that weren’t following Jesus in America and missionaries came to us and said that we must renounce our American ways in favor for another culture in order to follow Jesus, how appealing would that sound? Now, I realize the argument could be made that following Jesus isn’t always easy and you have to do hard things sometimes, but again, I ask the question, do you have the confidence that God can save people without ripping their cultural identity from them? I think He can.
I think people will more readily accept Jesus if you present Jesus. Once a community has the gospel, we have to trust that God will continue to work through that community for His glory and for their good. Yes, we should make disciples and not just converts, but we also have to trust that when a missionary reaches a community and then eventually leaves to either go back home or somewhere else that God will continue to move in those new believers of Jesus.
