Way of Life Village » Christian culture

Redefining small groups - part 2

Meredith — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 13:00:25 +0000

Here is the second of a mini-series on growing people through small groups in East Hollywood. (To read part one click here.) These reflections hopefully provide you a window into what it is like to join God in “growing faith where life happens” among the different cultures of LA’s working poor immigrants. (more…)

Redefining small groups - part 1

Meredith — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:00:21 +0000

Here is the first part of a mini-series on growing people through small groups in East Hollywood. These reflections hopefully will give you a good glimpse into what it’s like as we join God in “growing faith where life happens” among the different cultures of LA’s working poor immigrants. (more…)

Are you a Christian?

Phil — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 14:00:36 +0000

I’m finding it is dangerous to say yes to this question. People already have their impressions of what being a “Christian” means, and frankly, they’re not good impressions. Here’s an idea I got from more than a few Jesus-followers: When someone asks you, “Are you a Christian?” instead of saying, yes and letting them determine for themselves what you are (and what Jesus is) all about, you have the spiritual freedom to respond differently. When asked are you a Christian, ask that person, “What do you think it means to be a Christian?” Then, if they tell you it means something awful you don’t have to keep the label. For example, if they tell you Christians are a bunch of simple-minded, judgmental haters who can’t keep their marriages together, who treat women as sub-humans, who isolate themselves from the world and are unwilling to experience and learn from other cultures, who don’t understand health care issues, who don’t make as much of a difference in the world as compassionate atheists and homosexuals, etc., then you can emphatically respond, “No, I’m not a Christian!” and leave it at that. (For anyone wondering, yes, these perceptions of Christians are held by a large and growing number of people in America and the rest of the world today.) Our hope is that our lives will speak more than any attempts at self-labeling. And if/when people really want to know, they will ask, “Then what are you?” Then you can tell them on your own terms what you’re about (and what you think Jesus is all about). I think this is a small but very important thing we can do to help make Jesus attractive in view of the bad rep Christianity has acquired for itself.

Gospel vs. Christian culture podcasts

Phil — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 14:00:20 +0000

Ed, Katie, Meri and I are listening to a series of podcasts and videocasts by David Watson, a missionary whose work is written about in David Garrison’s book, Church Planting Movements: How God Is Redeeming A Lost World. (I met David Watson last month in Dallas when I attended a Missions Resource Network-hosted workshop that he presented to Church of Christ missionaries and church leaders.) While the focus of Watson’s talks is on training ordinary Jesus-followers to start church planting movements, almost all of his podcasts deal in some way with helping people draw a distinction between the gospel of Jesus Christ and the “Christian cultures” we have created. (A very important distinction to make even - or especially - in America!)

Watson’s stuff is biblically-based, full of real-life stories from the mission field, and yet practical and down to earth for the “average Joe”. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself stretched and inspired!

If you grew up in the U.S. and are passionate about joining God in ”redeeming a lost world” (starting in another country or your own), I strongly encourage you to listen to these podcasts and watch the videocasts. You can check them out here. (more…)

De-culturalizing the message

Phil — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 21:56:13 +0000

To U.S.-born Christians visiting their own country’s immigrant-saturated urban centers, I say, “Behold, foreign mission fields.”

Since we are living and serving cross-culturally among immigrants from multiple countries, we are treating this church planting ministry in East Hollywood, CA as we would a foreign missionary adventure. What does this mean?

To help me talk about this, I’m using some terminology I picked up from missionary David Watson a few weeks ago…

It is the missionaries’ task to de-culturalize the gospel when sharing the message with peoples of other cultures – that is, we do our best to remove our own cultural biases from the message, thereby reducing the gospel to its irreducible minimum. We would be fooling ourselves if we said we could achieve this with perfection (but then there is no aspect of our ministry we are doing with perfection). I believe that just the fact that we are faithfully attempting to distinguish the gospel from our own cultural ways of living it out will convey an important lesson to the new believers.

Then it is up to the new believers (not the missionaries), empowered by God’s indwelling Spirit, to determine how best to contextualize the gospel – that is, they will decipher how to faithfully live out the message in their own cultural contexts. Missionaries can guide this process of contextualizing the gospel but never short-circuit it by taking it into their own hands!

Motives self-check

Phil — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 14:00:00 +0000

I really want to be a missionary for missionary reasons. I realize this may sound obvious. But in the past I think church planters, especially those from the “house church movement” in the U.S., have acquired a reputation as know-it-all gripers (they were bitter about their traditional church experiences), rebels (they were unwilling to submit to authority) or fad-chasers (they were more concerned about doing things their way, that is in hip and cool ways, than finding God’s missing ones).

Well, I speak for my whole team when I say, we are not bitter about the churches we came from, and we are neither hip nor cool! When it gets down to it, I think we’re just another group of church nerds with big hearts. That’s not to say that our motives for starting new churches are entirely unselfish (whose are?). It’s just that, for us, starting new churches is not a means of “getting away” from bad church (or at least that shouldn’t be the primary driving force for a church planter). Rather it is a way of getting to people who will never come to Christ through the traditional church cultures we’ve created.

Their churches, not ours

Phil — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:00:50 +0000

In Los Angeles we are finding that an alarming number of our established churches may be geographically close but they are culturally too distant to attract many of our neighbors into our buildings and retain them as members. So we are stepping outside our churched culture to live among the ones who will never be reached by our established churches. Rather than trying to attract them to our churches to sing our hymns and follow Christ in ways that make sense to us culturally, we are trying to attract others to Jesus …and in the process our role is to coach new believers to form their churches, compose their songs, and follow the Risen Lord in ways that make sense in their cultures.