Tag: global Church

Knowing Our Ultimate Destination, How Should Children of God Live in a Modern World that Is Foreign to Us?

We are part of a great multitude from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages….

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Followers of Christ are going to end up as part of “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb… and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God….’” (Rev.7:9) Knowing how our journey ends as children of God, how should we live in this world?

Jesus introduced the kingdom of God to the world and invited the world to “enter” it. Just as the first century Jews were only a portion of the world to whom Jesus extended that invitation, we in the West and in the United States of America are only a portion of the global world Jesus invites to enter God’s kingdom.

Jesus came, not to condemn, but to save the entire world full of people. We might as well get used to the diversity now.

I think it’s easy for us in the US to miss the fact that the global church today doesn’t look like us at all. The “average” Christian in the world today is a 22-year old brown female. Only 12% of the Christians in the world live in North America (including Canada). Only 37.5% of the Christians in the world live in the “west”.

It’s a human tendency to separate from and even to demonize things that are foreign to us. It’s also a human tendency to embrace things that are familiar to us, even to our detriment. Jesus calls us to separate from the world, which is familiar to us, and to embrace God’s kingdom, which is foreign to us in our “flesh” (as Paul calls it).

Jesus calls us to reject the sin that is familiar to us in exchange for His righteousness that is foreign to us. Righteousness is not of us or from us; righteousness is of God and from God.

Thus, Christians are uniquely called to be different from the rest of the world that embraces the familiar (both things of the world, generally, and specific aspects of this worldly specifically, such as gender, race, nationality, etc.). We are called to separate from this world that is familiar to us and to embrace a world that is foreign (the spiritual realm into which we must be born again).

This model of Christian living is demonstrated by Paul and the disciples in carrying out the Great Commission. Paul said that he became all things to all people that he might win some.

Paul quoted pagan poets and philosophers in his address on Mars Hill. (Acts 17) That means he read them and understood them. Thus, he was able to quote them appropriately and use those references that people knew to point them to God. This is because Paul embraced the fact that he was in the world, though he was not of the world.

This is what is means to carry out the Great Commission – to “go into all the world” making disciples. In the case of those disciples, God “encouraged” them with local persecution to scatter to Judea and and beyond. (We don’t always embrace what is foreign and unfamiliar to us willingly!)

We have the same command and challenge in our modern world. We don’t do these things easily or willingly. it takes us way beyond our comfort levels that are defined by what we know and what is familiar to us. When we take up our crosses and follow Jesus, he takes us into foreign territory!

One example of foreign territory is the modern worldview informed by Critical Theory. CRT informs the world on issues of racial injustice. As members of a kingdom comprised of every nation, tribe and tongue, we need to be able to speak into issues of racial injustice, and not just stand aloof.

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On the Intersection of Differences and Unity in the Body of Christ

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Esau McCaulley interviewed NT Wright on his Disrupters podcast last year. NT Wright is a British New Testament scholar of some renown who became McCaulley’s mentor at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland. McCaulley made a comment after the interview that prompts my writing today. He said,

“I feel like I am a mix of a bunch of things. I have this kind of British, evangelical side, and I have this kind of African American church side, and strangely they have coalesced in ways I didn’t expect.”

N.T. Wright Forces an Overdue Conversation on the Disrupters Podcast 2-3-22

McCaulley was raised Southern Baptist in the deep south, so their relationship is intriguing to me. The conversation between Wright and McCaulley is interesting and rich. The fact that they come from unique and diverse backgrounds permeates the discussion as they explore the things that unite them.

Esau McCaulley is a New Testament scholar in his own right, due in no small part to the influence of NT Wright. He has written one book on Galatians, and he is now writing a second. McCaulley also became an Anglican priest, but his heritage and unique experience, personally and communally, as a black man in America remain central to his identity.

The close relationship between these men from very different backgrounds and from different areas of the world has me thinking about the church in the United States and the global Church. I recently heard someone comment on an unfortunate, unforeseen, and unintended consequence of the Reformation. That consequence was the fragmentation of the Church.

The post-Reformation church fragmented into dissenting groups, and some of those dissenting groups fragmented further into groups of people who spoke English, French, and other European languages. Over time, the fragmentation rippled out from Europe to the New World and beyond.

The Reformation splintered into many “protestant” groups, and that fragmentation exploded in the New World where Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists and others splintered apart from each other into various and distinct groups, and many more new denominations sprung up. The fragmentation continued along cultural, doctrinal, ethnic, ritualistic, racial, governmental, language and other lines.

Today in America we can find a mind-boggling number of separate church bodies aligned in linguistic, ethnic doctrinal, geographic, and cultural huddles of believers that keep largely to themselves based on language, ethnicity, race, heritage, doctrine, worship preference, governmental protocol, and other things.

This fragmentation is still evident in the United States, and churches in the United States have been accused of being more segregated than the rest of the country (which is still pretty segregated).

The intersectionality (to use a very loaded term) of the disparate backgrounds, experiences and heritage of Wright and McCaulley, and their ongoing relationship remind me of the need for unity in the Church. We need to come together. We need to talk.

We need each other.

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What Does the Global Church of Jesus Christ Look Like? And Why It Matters?

The church we know in the United States doesn’t look like Church worldwide.

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I read today this tweet by David Cassidy (found here):

The average Christian in the world is not male but female[1], not white but brown or black[2], third world, not first world[3], far more Pentecostal than Presbyterian[4]. The “average” Christian in the world today is a 22-year old brown female[5]. She has not been to your conference…

…she has not read CS Lewis or Christianity Today; she has not read your blog, nor mine, and does not go to Starbucks or care one bit about alternative endings to Game of Thrones or if the latest lyric from Hillsongs [sic] agrees with our confessional standards.

She is also likely the vessel God will use to prophesy to the next generation. She’s not afraid of suffering either: Over 215 million believers are persecuted with intimidation, prison, and even death for their faith in Jesus Christ across the world (Open Doors, USA)[6]

42% of the world’s population is under 25[7], half in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia[8] The median age of the global population is 28[9]. If your ‘mission’ is preservation or expansion of White Christian USA nationalism, you need to wake up & repent

South American and Central American churches are thriving and reviving. Thank God. We have to be about global mission and embrace all people everywhere with the love of God. That starts with neighbors next door but won’t stop there.

White American Nationalist Christians need to be at the feet of these global Christian communities and LEARN again the power of prayer, the presence of God’s power in the absence of political power, and the joy of the Gospel. Man, I have so much to learn!

Much of this tweet rings true to me based on what I have been reading over the past several years, but I spent some time fact-checking the various statements. The results of what I found are linked above to the references below.

I was able to verify most of the statements. The only ones I couldn’t verify are the statements about the average age of Christians worldwide and the median age of the world population, which was 28 a few years ago, but more recent numbers show a rise to 30. Studies also seem to show that the average age of religious people in the world is increasing (especially in the west), but I couldn’t find anything specific to Christianity.

Still, most of what David Cassidy says in this tweet is true and can be verified. The key points being that Christianity is not a white, European-centric or western … at least, not anymore. It wasn’t when it started, and it isn’t anymore.

Think about that for a moment…. While American Christianity still looks very white, with European origins and a paternalistic feel, the church worldwide looks very different.

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Putting the American Church into Perspective

Our perspective should be colored by God’s global and eternal purposes, not by the smaller, immediate “world” that we know.

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A recent article in Relevant Magazine online, Report: 8 in 10 Evangelicals Live in Asia, Africa and South America, was there to greet me this morning when I opened Facebook. The article title, and the concluding statement put things into perspective:

“[T]hese figures … underline an important point about the vast racial and ethnic diversity of the evangelical strain of Christianity — a diversity often neglected in American conversations about faith.”

Evangelicals make up a little over 25% of the Christians in the world, and only 14% of the Evangelicals in the world live in the United States. Let that sink in.

Let’s take another step back. Let’s gain a little perspective. Let’s look at American Evangelical Christianity for a moment from the larger perspective of the world.

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