| Of all God's creation, the most fascinating, flexible and indestructible wonder is the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is his most precious possession and the highest pinnacle of all God's plans for human society. It is to be nothing less than a new redeemed society of men and women who are able to reveal and reflect his love for all mankind. The genius of the church, as God planned it, is to be completely adaptable and therefore totally relevant to every society on earth, from the most sophisticated to the simplest, from the inscrutable Eastern cultures to the most extravert Western societies. Earnest European and American missionaries have gone all over the world in a well-intentioned attempt to spread the gospel and the church of the Lord Jesus. Despite some heroic efforts, it has to be admitted that they have made rather a mess of the job, carrying with them so many of their own cultural idiosyncrasies and prejudices. They have imported fads, fashions and philosophies that may be acceptable in their own countries but are quite inappropriate in a far-removed culture. The problem of understanding how the church can be reborn in another society is not getting any easier, as the majority of Christian church planters still come from Western societies, bringing with them ever more sophisticated baggage from their own particular aberration of what the basic church was meant to be. Even the newly emerging sending countries such as Korea have their particular problems. An Ever-Widening Gulf The gulf is continually widening between the wealthy and technologically advanced end of the church, with all its professional staff and the ever-burgeoning budgets, and the other extreme of Christ's body. There, nobody is paid anything, and the only resources likely to be available are the gifts God promised to give to his church. This huge and growing cultural chasm is nowhere more evident than where Christian missionaries seek to find a model of the church appropriate and therefore attractive to the hundreds of people groups who are nomadic, or still think of themselves as nomads. Peoples who long to lay claim to a particular piece of land operate by a totally different value system than do nomads, who survive by utilizing what is described as the resource of spatial mobility. The fact that this is so little understood by Western missionaries is an indication of how far removed they are from the worldview and value systems of nomads. Even within the same third world country, the divergence between the thinking of settled farmers and that of pastoral nomads is so great that they rarely trust one another and often end up fighting each other. When that cultural gap is extended to stretch from the huge urban ecclesiastical monstrosities in the wealthy world to the most economically and socially marginalized nomadic societies, it is not surprising that Western missionaries have difficulty bridging the gap. The Church in Its Simplest Form In developing an intelligent understanding of how to bridge that gap, a helpful starting point is to return to the basic essentials of what the church is in its simplest, most stripped-down form. We can then begin to think how it might best be adapted to a different culture, and the more distant that culture is, socially and economically, the more different the church is likely to be. The church in its simplest form is a society of people who have been redeemed and transformed from within by the power of God. They will have been reconciled to him and to each other, and endowed with a variety of spiritual gifts needed for the normal growth of any church, regardless of education or even biblical erudition. Education and even literacy are secondary. In the pre-literate state of the church, God appears able and willing to give special gifts and revelations until his word is available in an appropriate form, not always in writing. (Conversely, the gifts that are essential for the proper growth and operation of a healthy church can often be buried or deformed by professionalism which is based on academic qualifications. This is not to say that such qualifications are bound to spoil the healthy growth of a church. It is the tendency to place trust in them and not on the gifts which appears to cause the problem. Where there are no academically or theologically qualified people, God seems to delight in demonstrating how effectively he can build his church, even in non-literate societies.) The Worldview of Nomadic Peoples The worldview of nomadic societies, especially those which depend on pastoralism, is usually extremely focused on God. Nomads often have a high view of God, usually seeing him as a monotheistic Sky God who sends the rain on which their survival depends if the people pray to him and act properly according to their customs. Their view of God is usually less animistic than that of rural farmers, for nomads do not usually worship objects on earth such as rocks, trees, or rivers. Most pastoral nomads have ceremonies, or certain individuals whose primary purpose is to pray to the God in the heavens, in order to win his blessings of rain, grass, milk and health for them and their animals. Many have a belief in a good God who sends these blessings, but he is often thought to be remote. So there is usually some bad god (or gods) who needs to be appeased to keep evil away. If it is appreciated that, almost without exception, nomadic peoples have this strong belief in a powerful, benign God in the heavens, then presentation of Christianity becomes much easier. You can begin with the worldview of that society and look for the keys within that culture that God has built into it to make himself relevant. To be relevant to nomads the church must also extricate itself from the usual sedentary model of a building. This is the greatest obstacle to overcome in countries where Protestant and Catholic missionaries have competed to build the biggest churches. The best commentary on this misguided model comes from a Somali camel herder who said, "When you can put your church on the back of a camel, then I will think that Christianity is meant for us Somalis. I am a Muslim because we can pray anywhere, five times a day, everyday. We only see you Christians praying once a week, inside a special building, when one man stands in front and talks to God while everybody else hangs their heads and looks to be falling asleep." Such is a nomad Muslim's view of Christianity. The church is also most relevant to nomadic societies where relationships are more important than real estate. Whatever else nomadic people may lack, they are usually socially rich, with strong family and clan ties. Abandoned or abused children are rarely seen and old people are respected and cared for within their families. Unless other influences have been introduced, such as Islamic practices, women can have a relatively high social position, as many nomadic societies are quite egalitarian. The question arises: Whose society is primitive? This social strength within nomadic societies needs to become the foundation of the church for nomads. Missionaries ought not to press for individual conversions, but to pray for transformed families which can begin to form the new redeemed society within that society. The church for nomads should not introduce unnecessary foreign religious practices, which will only alienate the new believers from their normal communities. It may even be wise to discourage the first individuals who respond to the gospel from calling themselves a church until there is a sufficient number of people, preferably whole families, that will allow the replication of all the normal social functions of the pre-Christian society. It is advisable therefore to determine early what is this minimum number that will be most conducive for healthy church growth and to work and pray towards that goal.
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