Global Hearted

In our last episode, we talked about the importance of being careful not to let a broad understanding of a religion dictate what we think our hosts in a frontier culture believe, but of having humility and leaning on direct experience in understanding what is really important to them. In this episode, we are going to return to a theme that you have talked about before, building bridges across the faiths.

What is it that Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus really believe? How do we find out? And how can we transfer lessons we have learned about the diversity of Christianity to other contexts?

Last episode, we discussed using a host culture's religious symbols and forms. We'll discussed the first and second principles in this episode. In this episode, we'll discuss the third principle which is if the outsiders use their own forms the original meanings of those forms will probably be lost.

This week, we are going to start in on principles that we can use to shape our engagement with frontier peoples, and this first principle flows from last episode, which is using their religious symbols and forms. We'll discuss the first and second principles in this episode.

This week, we are going to talk about some more tension that we have to hold together, specifically how to value the religious cultures of the people we seek to reach.

The Scripture reveals God, His holiness, and His responses to human sinfulness in culture in a nuanced manner. Genesis 4 portrays God as mysteriously present to humans, preserving and blessing them in spite of their resistance to him.

The gospel is like leaven that permeates human cultures with God’s presence and goodness, all the while allowing cultural diversity to remain.

Anthony discusses how Jesus’ representatives have to detach the gospel from their own cultural base and take it across social, cultural, and religious boundaries so it can enter and transform new communities and their cultures. We'll see this moving of the gospel from one community and cultural base into new communities and cultural bases brought out from the Book of Acts and the epistles.

Changing the way we talk about our faith seems scary. Are we changing the gospel if we don’t talk about it in specific ways? Does it really matter if people will misunderstand what we say? Don’t we have to be true to the Scriptures?

What do people need to know in order to follow Jesus? We tend to answer that question in one of two ways. Last episode, we talked about the first way, knowing and agreeing with specific ideas. This episode we will talk about second way: that people need to know just enough about Jesus that they want to follow him. Once they start to follow him, they will begin a lifelong journey of coming to experience and understand the riches of who Jesus is and of being alive in him.