MESSAGE BEARER MEMO

By Evan Burns

[Evan Burns is a recent graduate of Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College graduate school.  He and his wife are Message Bearers and are preparing to move in July to bear the Message of Christ among the least reached.]

These monthly memos are to provide encouragement, exhortation, and spiritual nourishment in the lives of those who have signed the Message Bearer Creed as you prepare to serve the Lord globally, and are influencing your peers with this vision.

RADICAL REACTIONS

Part I

In the next few months, we will be exploring a biblical/missiological foundation for the call of Christ to take up our crosses and follow Him in suffering and even martyrdom.

            Resistance….  Backlash…. Rebellion….  Bloodshed….  These are all descriptors of what has been broadcasted all over the world regarding the Middle East in the last few years.  Today radical Muslims are regularly slaughtering Americans, both soldiers and missionaries alike.  These grisly reports can leave us gasping for answers to our heartfelt questions:  What parts of the world are hostile?  What is the cause of all this?  Why America?  Why Christians?  What are the implications for modern missions?  Why would God allow this to happen to missionaries who are just trying to help?  What does the Bible say about the purpose of suffering and its relation to missions?  What is the price of reaching the resistant?  How do we overcome this resistance?  This extremist backlash, however, is not exclusively among Islamic states.  It can be found among all the major religious groups:  Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism.  The persistence of Islamic extremism remains in areas like Afghanistan, Iran, Indonesia, and Niger.  Hindu extremism resides in Kashmir and Nepal—the only Hindu kingdom.  Buddhist radicals thrive in the Buddhist heartlands such as Tibet, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka.  And then there is always the Jewish hostility towards Christians in Israel, but Jewish extremism is rare. 

            At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the increase of capitalism around the world has created vast opportunities for modern and technological progress among all countries, wealthy and poor alike.  However, capitalism has provoked a violent reaction in some areas among anything connected with modernity and Western progress.  Unfortunately, Christianity is commonly associated with the modern world and consequently is blamed for the worlds’ moral and social illnesses, including the anything from the deterioration of the family to pornography and gambling addictions. 

 RAISING QUESTIONS ABOUT THE RESISTANT: 

What is meant by “resistant?”  The resistant are those who have received an adequate opportunity to hear the gospel but over time have not positively responded.  They are not merely “unreached people.”  Unreached in missiological terms does not mean that they are unengaged by mission efforts, but “rather there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize the group to its margins.”[1]  Many openly, violently reject all missionary attempts.

What are the reasons for both resistance and even failure to target a people?  There tends to be a monocultural view among missionaries of what churches should be like can often repel those of the target culture.  Communication has been flawed, and the culture has not been respected and adaptation has not been made.  “The church has failed in some cases by locking the Bible in to a single language as the Roman Catholics did in keeping to Latin instead of the vernacular.”[2]  The currently renowned homogenous principle says that “people everywhere like to become Christians without crossing barriers of race, language, and class.”[3]  Much resistance is due to forcing one culture to abandon its identity and join another in coming to Christ.  Instead, each culture should be both permitted and encouraged to respond to the gospel and form a church movement while remaining fully a part of the same culture. 

ENCOUNTERING RESISTANCE:

            Message and contextualization.  Often, Christian apologists think that it is essential to just explain the Christian message more clearly and then eliminate misunderstandings of the message (e.g., the Trinity for Muslims).  Then our unreached friends will understand and believe.  On the contrary, one will find that clearing up misunderstandings is far more complicated than intellectually oriented assumptions.  “It is not merely the explanation of the message that is needed but the setting of the message within a context, a conceptual and emotive universe, so that it makes sense inside of that world.”[4]  This issue of message and context has two dimensions.  It is not only the context of the hearer, but the message’s own context as well, which needs careful attention and holistic understanding.  Until we step into the target culture and communicate from their mindset, their red flags will go up and resistance will surely follow.  For instance, in a Muslim’s mind Christian missionaries represent the social and moral evils of the West.  To be Western is to be Christian and vice versa.  Thus, the missionary has a load of negative stereotypes to overcome before a Muslim will consider him credible.  Until these obstacles are overcome, there will certainly be resistance. 

Our cultural/religious presuppositions.  It is critical to note that it is simplistic to assume that our particular understanding of the gospel is the true gospel message in its own context.  So, we face the risk of merely preaching to others that aspect of the gospel that converted us.  All branches of Christianity seem to emphasize a unique facet of the gospel that they claim as essential over others.  Roman Catholics, high church Anglicans, and many Protestants emphasize different facets as the definition of gospel.  The Reformed church may emphasize the soteriological works of Christ, while Anglicans may emphasize the incarnation.  They are all “true as facets of the gospel, but none can be equated with the gospel.  A fuller understanding of the full range of themes found in the New Testament proclamation of the gospel will help to preserve us from the danger of equating any single facet with the whole.”[5]  By contextualizing the message, it must cross cultural barriers in such a way that not only is it authentically the true gospel, but also in such a way as to have the integrity with the new context.

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Evan Burns