Pews – Pulpits – Piano – PowerPoint
I could of been in any rural SBC church in the US.
Welcome – 3 songs – Offering – Song – Sermon – Invitation – Song
This is what Michael experienced yesterday while visiting a church in Taiwan. For years we in the West have exported so many aspects of how we do church and faith….so many times they are things not grounded in scripture but are more of our preferences. This got me thinking….what of our traditions have we transplanted where I am?
Today our team spent 2 hours defining what church is….minus it’s US flesh…and we had a difficult time doing so. The church here is young….among 3.5 million in our PG there are 4 known churches. There are some others in the larger cities of the country and they already look Western. There are only around 20 churches but they already have a hierarchy of control and decisions must go through an approval process to be acted upon.
I also heard of a group of churches that doesn’t allow you to join if you smoke. Now imagine….you leave Islam behind. You follow after Christ, you lose your family, possibly your job, you receive threats, even death threats and you finally find a church…only to find out that even though you’ve done all of this you can’t join because you smoke. Undoubtedly they heard this from someone and thought…this is the way we do church. Welcome to the church….smoking or non-smoking?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Great observation. The biggest lesson I’ve learned since being in the mission field is how much each of us (American or not) bring our culture into Christianity. One church near us counts 17 different nationalities represented and, though the church is lead by nationals of this field, each of the 17 groups have varying ideas about how church should be done, all unique to their cultures. I wrote about it in “When The World Comes to Your Field”.
What it’s forced me to consider is this: what aspects of church are Biblically informed, and what’s “supposed” to be in the service that I have assumed should be there due to tradition? I’m still working it all out.
I saw this all of the time in Japan. Essentially Christian missionaries in Japan (I’m sure a long time ago) simply translated everything to Japanese and had them do American church. All of the songs are our songs and the preaching style is our preaching style. This may not be totally the case in every single part of the country, but I have visited at least five churches in the country and they were essentially American churches.
I don’t know what a Japanese church would look like it it were Japanese, but I’m convinced that the outreach in Japan would be stronger if it were.
That has always bothered me. That might be one of the reasons church-ianity seems irrelevant to a lot of folks. Why do we not let the localities of where we plant churches shape them. Give it some context to it’s surroundings.
It’s so hard to get away from pre-conceived notions. Having the unchurched who have just placed their faith in Christ study the Scriptures for what church should look like will make it culturally relevant and faithful to the Bible. Probably going to lose some PowerPoint in some of these cases and possibly a bit more….