by Alan Dunn
Andrew F. Kazmierski / Shutterstock.com NEW YORK – APRIL 27: A sidewalk produce stand in China Town, New York City on April 27 2013 in New York City. Chinatown is home to the largest amount of Chinese people in the Western hemisphere.
Today, more than ever, we are exposed to varied cultures and challenged, as Christians, as to how to relate cross-culturally. We no longer have to travel overseas to experience cross-cultural challenges. Our urban centers are patchwork quilts of cultural enclaves stitched together by an increasingly vapid Americanism in which ethnic groupings retain their cultural identities. “E Pluribus Unum” no longer speaks of the unity of the original colonies as much as the multiplicity of ethnicities whose currents crisscross on the surface of our society.
Coupled with the multicultural complexion of our nation is the globalization of our lives. On the one hand, the world continues to be a dangerous place for believers.1 On the other hand, believers are more exposed to and more adept in cross-cultural situations than ever before.2 International travel, short-term missions, visiting missionaries, and our international media all serve to occasion engagement with people of different racial and cultural backgrounds than our own. As we live in our own neighborhoods and interface with the world around us, we are increasingly called in to communicate cross-culturally. In the decade ahead, we can expect a continued simultaneous comingling and “clash” of cultures.3
Whether we like it or not, we are compelled to cultivate the skills necessary to communicate cross-culturally. If ever there was one who could teach us how to communicate the gospel cross-culturally, it is Paul, the Apostle to the Nations.
Of all the things that Paul has to say about his apostolic mission, 1 Corinthians 9:19-22 is most helpful to instruct us on how to penetrate cultures with a kingdom purpose.
For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more. And to the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might win Jews; to those who are under the Law, as under the Law, though not being myself under the Law, that I might win those who are under the Law; to those who are without law, as without law, though not being without the law of God but under the law of Christ, that I might win those who are without law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak; I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some (1 Cor 9:19-22).
Paul is not so much describing how he, a citizen of Tarsus, moved through the Greco-Roman world and its various ethnic and linguistic groups, as he is telling us how he, a citizen of Christ’s kingdom (Phil 3:20), sought to penetrate those cultures and influence all kinds of people for the sake of the gospel.
Paul’s perspective on men had radically changed due to the resurrection of Jesus: from now on we recognize no man according to the flesh (2 Cor 5:14-16). We too no longer define men according to their ethnicity, economic status, nationality or any of the points of reference that otherwise categorize and stratifies men into social groupings. We see all men as either alive in Christ or dead in their sin, and therefore we come to all men, of all nations, in every place with the ministry of reconciliation, as ambassadors for Christ, entreating, begging all men to be reconciled to God (2 Cor 5:18ff).
Increasingly, at home and abroad, we are confronted with the challenge of communicating the gospel cross-culturally. We do so as spiritually resurrected men, citizens of the eschatological kingdom ruled by King Jesus who has authorized us to go and make disciples of all the nations (Mat 28:18-20).
1. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New Delhi: Penguin, 1997). Huntington’s influential book details the shift from the geopolitics of “The Cold-War” era to the formation of civilizational alignments given cohesion by common ethnicity, tradition, religion and language. He augured a continual and intensifying conflict between Western nations, Sinic/Asian nations and Islamic nations. Huntington concludes by urging Americans to “reaffirm their commitment to Western civilization… rejecting the siren calls for multiculturalism.” (307). A quarter of a century later, Europe is presently in turmoil as Angela Merkle (Chancellor of Germany), David Cameron (Prime Minister of Briton) and Nicolas Sarkozy (President of France) have all declared that “multiculturalism” vis a vis the acclimation of Islamic immigrants, is a failed project. Canada and America likewise face mounting challenges due to the varied degrees to which immigrant populations assimilate into their host culture.
2. George Van Pelt Campbell, Everything You Know Seems Wrong: Globalization and the Relativizing of Tradition (Lanham, MD: University of America, 2005). Campbell explores the impact of globalization on Evangelicalism’s ability to retain its own sense of identity.
3. Mindy Belz, “Haves vs. Have-Nots: Our Definition of Who Fits What Category Will Change in the Next Decade.” WORLD 26.1 (January 15, 2011): 54-55.