uttermost ends

Steve Saint spoke in chapel this morning. He said so many things that I have said over the past few years. But the reaction to him saying them was quite different than the reaction that I normally get. Especially different than you get if you actually behave as he suggested. Biblical concepts and behaviors sound so wonderful when you’re talking about them, but if you actually live them, they’re just so freakin’ odd.
The difference, I think, is the context into which his comments were directed. He is speaking about reaching cultures “over there”, or “down there”. I’m talking about reaching a culture that is right here. Maybe it’s kinda like singing in the shower. No one can see or hear you. But if you were to sing like that around all your friends? Unthinkable. They’d question your decorum.
But I don’t really think that’s the issue. I think the issue is that we see foreign cultures as lost, and whatever it takes to win them should be done. Domestic cultures, on the other hand, are rebellious and evil, and should be avoided at all costs. We do plenty by setting up shop and leaving the church doors open two neighborhoods removed from where they are. But in reality, if they took us up on our half-hearted invitation, we would do everything in our power to make them feel awkward enough to look somewhere else.
Even though descriptions of culturally relevant and love-based gospel living in other cultures incite agreement and excitement, I feel that they are still accompanied with thoughts that impose our own cultural snapshot onto the methods.
This morning as I teetered before waking, I thought about this in terms of the contextual look and feel and procedures of so much of what we do. I began to wonder if our lack of surprise and wariness about how it is done “there”, is because we allow for things to look and feel different in that context, or if we actually fantasize that it is exactly how we do it here, and if we were to find out otherwise, we would be surprised, shocked, appalled, suspicious, or downright intolerant. Why else would we be so tolerant of progressive, in-culture, lifestyle gospel delivery in a place we’ve never been, but be so angrily opposed to it among our own people? Why do support infiltration and embrace of foreign cultures, but remain suspicious and ostracizing of those who do it among our own?