The last session we were exploring the realtionship between gospel and culture. We tried to understand what culture is (not and easy thing to do) and then had to relate what we discovered to the church. It seems that it is quite difficult to reach across cultures (though not impossible) and this can raise all kinds of issues.
Church, it seems, has its own culture and too often we have sought to impose our culture on others when what they really needed (wanted) was the gospel. A story was told of a missionary who decided to tell the story of Jesus to people he had been working with for some time only to get the reply that they already knew the story but if this story was so important to the missionary why was he telling them now, after such a long time.
The challenge for us is to tell the story of Jesus without the cultural things that may get in the way.
I find this a constant problem in my own life because my background is not middle classed (yes, I know we don’t like to talk about classes but then not talking about class is a very middle class thing to do) and yet I find myself in a middle class culture. I don’t mind – there are some parts I enjoy – but sometimes it is a struggle for me. I won’t give more details because it might upset some folk. But the point is that when we insist people adopt our culture we are restricting the way we can present the gospel.
So we need to understand that whoever we are we are part of a culture because only when we recognise our culture can we move outside of it to reach others. We must also face the fact that we will actually be far more effective at telling our stories when we tell them to people who are like we are.
Of course, this has been the benefit of the web. We have an environment where people can find others like themselves more easily, but that is a whole other area.