Tag: America and Worldview Page 4 of 9

When You’re Sharing Jesus as an Outsider

On April 13, 2019

Gil and I hadn’t been in Tanzania very long before we made our first whopper of a cultural mistake.

We had been investing deeply in the life of an Indian young woman who was with us several times a week. She had a rather harsh mother who, we felt, was giving her daughter unrealistic boundaries and unnecessary expectations. Wanting to help our friend, we approached her mother with our advice. “It’s not okay how you are treating your daughter,” we said firmly. “She is eighteen years old, so she is an adult. She can make her own decisions.”

And the mother responded humbly to our 25-year-old, American wisdom and graciously thanked us for enlightening her on how to parent her child. And we all lived happily ever after. The end.

Um, no. We alienated the mother, caused a deeper divide between her and her daughter, and learned a very hard lesson: Culture and worldview matter. In Indian culture, it is unthinkable to consider an 18-year-old unmarried girl to be either an adult or independent from her parents’ authority, no matter how harsh their expectations might be.

And so began our journey into learning how much we did not know about trying to share the love of Jesus in another culture.

Since America’s inception, Christians didn’t need to worry about this. Cross-cultural missions was out there–not right here. Okay, so maybe they thought about it when it came to first-generation immigrants. Maybe a church would offer a seminar on “How to Reach Your Muslim Neighbor.”

I’m not saying that American churches weren’t concerned about evangelism; my point is that evangelism of middle-class America was not seen as cross-cultural. Sure, there were plenty of non-Christians out there, but we could assume that they shared many of our core beliefs. We had a starting point of agreement: There’s a God, He has established right and wrong, and the Bible holds some degree of authority.

And even once most people started abandoning those beliefs, we all still shared a worldview that came from the Bible, whether we were Christians or not: There is an inherent purpose and order to the universe. We can trust our senses. Biology matters. If you’re a human, you’re a person. Marriage and family is the bedrock of a society. Moral standards are absolute, even if we might argue over specifics.

But we can no longer assume agreement about these things. Which means that even if you look the same and speak the same language and are living side by side with your middle class, white American neighbors, if you’re a Christian, you are now a cross-cultural missionary. Effective evangelism in America requires that you understand a different worldview.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to keep fighting for change at the government level–after all, since America is a government of “we the people,” we have a responsibility to work towards a government that we believe is best for society. But we’re not going to change hearts by changing laws.

And if we want to change hearts, we’ve got to understand them first. One of the first things missionaries are told at orientation is that People have a reason for what they do. On the outside, people’s actions might look really stupid or foolish to us, but dig a little deeper, and there’s a reason there. Even behind horrendous traditions such as female genital mutilation or child marriage or albino murders, there’s always logic there. So if you come into a foreign culture with guns blazing, forcefully proclaiming that these are wrong, terrible things, you will lose your audience immediately. Missionaries have learned this the hard way for centuries.

That doesn’t mean that we accept these practices as “cultural” and don’t do anything about them. But it does mean that we spend time–a lot of time–trying to understand where these ideas come from, and get deep into what motivates culture. Because real change comes from the worldview level.

As American Christians become outsiders in their own country, I can’t help but wonder if they have the same lessons to learn as cross-cultural missionaries. As I watch from a distance, I see lots of Christians getting really afraid or really angry, because they feel like they are losing their country. Maybe they are. But what American Christians need to remember is that the “Christian culture” in their country for the last two hundred years has been an anomaly in world history. It shouldn’t be an expectation.

American Christians, you might need to start living like missionaries. And among other things, this means that in order to be effective in evangelism, we’ve got to start by truly understanding the prevailing worldview in our culture. Instead of just frantically trying to put out the fires of abortion and sexuality and re-defined family, we’ve got to understand what’s motivating these cultural changes. And that’s going to require a study of worldview.

Do we know why we believe what we believe? Christians have often said, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

And the clouds parted and the sun rose in glory behind the open Bible, and all God’s people said “Amen!”

And everyone else stopped listening.

We need a different kind of conversation. Do we know the worldview behind what our neighbors believe? Do we know the worldview behind what we believe?

What is our ultimate source of Truth?

What determines reality?

What is a human? What is a person? What determines our identity?

What is the ultimate purpose in life?

What is the role of a family in a society and what makes the concept of “family” so important?

How do we draw the line between right and wrong?

Why are things so screwed up, and what needs to happen to fix them?

We should be asking these questions. Can we answer them for ourselves? Can we understand how others would answer them…and why?

Nancy Pearcey is my favorite author, and worldview is her favorite subject. But it shouldn’t be reserved for college philosophy courses–this is stuff every Christian needs to know. Every child needs to learn. If we want to be effective evangelists in our culture, then we must understand worldview. Welcome to the world of cross-cultural missions.

Start here: Finding Truth by Nancy Pearcey (right now only 99 cents!)

Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearcey

Know of some other good resources on this subject? Share them with us!

Yes, I Am Judgmental

By Amy Medina

On April 6, 2019

In Other

Let’s say that one day you meet a modern-day slave owner in your own country. He’s found a legal loophole to get away with it, and he finds no moral problem with owning slaves. He argues passionately that he is good to his slaves and that they have a much better life than they did before he owned them. He staunchly believes that they have consented to this way of life, which wouldn’t be far-fetched if they came from poor, hierarchical societies.

In fact, he gets angry with you if you dare question his right to own slaves. Who are you to judge me for my personal choices? If you don’t like slavery, that’s fine; then don’t own slaves. But don’t impose your values on me.

Not many of us would be satisfied with that argument. We wouldn’t be able stay silent about what this man was doing. We would have a moral obligation to speak up.

How judgmental of us.

Humans are hard-wired to make judgments. We can say that we are open-minded and accepting and not bigoted until we’re blue in the face, but when someone comes along who tries to justify raping a child or stealing our car or owning slaves, we suddenly become very judgmental indeed.

So can we please stop trying to pretend that we are not judgmental?

I have chosen to define my moral standards from a historical, literal interpretation of the Bible. I have some pretty significant reasons for that, which will perhaps be for another day’s discussion. But that decision means that I believe a lot of things that are quite contrary to what many in my culture believe. Yet somehow that makes me a mean-spirited, bigoted, even dangerous person. Some would say that I need to be silenced for what I believe. At the very least, I should keep my opinions to myself, and not try to impose what I believe on society.

So why wouldn’t that standard be permitted for the slave-owner? Why shouldn’t he too be allowed to make his own personal choices in how he lives his life and not be confronted by others who judge his morals?

If it seems obvious to you why it would be important to judge the slave-owner, can you therefore try to understand why it is important to me to have the freedom to speak up about biblical morality? A person’s individual choices about personhood, abortion, sexuality, gender, and family affect all of us when they start shaping our society. None of us live in a vacuum. We can’t assume that anyone’s personal choices won’t affect other people, because one person’s choices affect other people’s thinking–and that’s how cultures change, and how whole worldviews change. Your personal choices are a big deal to me, as mine should be to you.

“Being judgmental” has become a modern-day badge of shame, and it has caused many of us to be afraid to speak up about what we believe is best for society. But that’s not fair. Because those who are labeling others as judgmental are doing the exact same thing–making judgments.

There’s an important distinction to make here. Being judgmental is often equated with arrogance, and that is often true. There’s a difference between being nasty, cold, or rude with someone you disagree with, versus being kind, but still openly disagreeing. Making moral judgments shouldn’t have to assume arrogance. Christians don’t always do this right, and that’s a problem. Christians often need to do better at speaking the truth in love. But non-Christians need to realize that it’s impossible to live as a non-judgmental person.

The bigger, more important questions are these: What is the basis for your judgments? How do you decide whether something is right or wrong? Every single one of us needs to have an answer for those questions, because that’s the starting point for having an honest discussion about what is best for our society.

Yes, I’m judging you. You are judging me too. Let’s get over it and have a conversation.

*******

*This piece was originally titled, “Yes, I’m Judging You.” I changed the title to better reflect what I was trying to communicate.

After dialogue with readers, I also want to add that I recognize that not all Christians agree on the “literal and historical” meaning of Scripture. That’s okay–there is room for debate on certain issues. But Christians who agree that there is a literal and historical meaning at least gives us a starting place for discussion. We might not agree on what that meaning is, but that should just compel us to deeper study to find that meaning, not throw it out as our source of authority.

Overall, I’m not particularly happy with this piece as I think it comes across as too defensive. I’m not sure if it’s particularly helpful. Maybe I’ll just eventually delete it. 🙂

Sitting in the Dust with the Disgraced American Church

By Amy Medina

On March 24, 2019

In How Americans Think

In What’s So Amazing About Grace?, Philip Yancey tells the true story of a prostitute who rented out her two-year-old daughter to men in order to fund her drug addiction. When asked why she didn’t go to a church for help, she exclaimed: “Church! Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They’d just make me feel worse.”

Dreadfully ironic, isn’t it? On one hand, there’s the prostitute who is afraid to go to church because of the lack of grace offered her, while on the other hand, the deacon-turned-child-molester is offered a free pass in the name of “grace.”

This is a humiliating time to be an American evangelical Christian. The disgraced missions agency. The disgraced mega-church pastor. The disgraced entire denomination. I’m afraid to read the news and see what’s next. So much muck, covered up for so many years.

Every time, my internal response is horrified disgust. How can people like that call themselves Christians? And I want to do everything I can to disassociate myself with that person or that group or that church. I want to shine up my shoes and put on my kind face and show the world that not all Christians are so reprehensible. Most of us are decent, moral, good people, right? So please, won’t you like us again?

Then I wonder if that attitude is actually the elemental problem.

All my life I have struggled with the desire to be the good girl, to follow the good Christian rules of praying before meals and sticking a fish on my car and moving to deepest darkest Africa. There was this underlying current to the evangelical culture around me that if we all looked really nice and happy all the time, we would attract people to Jesus. So it makes sense that when we discovered that underneath that veneer was a lot of evil and depravity, we anxiously stuffed it under our perfectly vacuumed carpets. We felt a strong need to protect God’s reputation.

It’s ironic that God doesn’t seem to care about his reputation nearly as much as we do. We paste the smiles on, but he has no problem flinging those carpets aside for the world to see. If we won’t deal with our skeletons in the closet, then he’ll let a major news outlet do it for us. Considering the danger of hidden sin, perhaps even the media is a form of his grace.

We are so quick to condemn the Prosperity Gospel–the notion that God wants his people to be continuously healthy and increasingly wealthy–but what if there was an even more sinister Prosperity Gospel infiltrating our churches? A Gospel that says that God’s people would never abuse children, never be mentally ill, never struggle with gender or sexuality, never be narcissistic? Because we’re too good for that. Those kind of problems wouldn’t happen here.

So I’m asking myself this question: How do we, as the American Church, really, truly display God’s glory and his grace? Because looking nice and shiny and perfect on the outside has obviously not worked. One, because those on the outside see right through to the pride that under-girds that image, and two, because (duh) we actually haven’t been as nice and shiny and perfect as we thought we were.

The dictionary defines “disgraced” as having fallen from favor or a position of power or honor; discredited. But what if being disgraced is actually God’s conduit for us to fall into grace?

The answer is right there in front of our faces, and we just keep forgetting it. The gospel acknowledges both the depravity of sin and the riches of mercy. These disgraces in the American church show us how far away we are from understanding real grace. We have no reason to boast and nothing to hide; in the end we are all beggars. Ironically, not unlike the prostitute.

Barbara Duguidwrites, “One reason God allows us to fall flat on our face is so we will not be people who stand before Him taking credit for His good work. We get confused about that. If we are strong and victorious in a certain area of our lives, we start writing books about how everybody can be as good as I am on this topic. But if God lets us fall flat on our face and we’re in the dust, we realize, ‘That wasn’t me. That was God, and left to myself, I’ll be flat on my face.’”

I am a part of the American Church, so I sit here with her in the dust, my reputation tarnished, my deepest secrets laid bare, my good name dragged through the mud. My choice is simple: Will I be the Pharisee, the one who prides myself on not being anything like those terribly disgusting people, and belligerently disassociate myself from having anything to do with them? Or will I be the tax collector who beats his breast and cries, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner?”

Only one went home justified that day. (Luke 18:9-14)

When Jesus faced a condemned prostitute, he got down in the dust with her. Maybe if we recognize that we deserve to be down in the dust too, Jesus will meet us there. And maybe, just maybe, the next time that prostitute needs a place of refuge, she’ll come to us. And we can find grace together.

I Hate That There Has To Be Adoption

By Amy Medina

On September 23, 2018

In Adoption

It happened again last week. I was saying good night to one of my children, chatting nonchalantly, when questions about birth parents, seemingly out of nowhere, entered the room like Dementors. The moment became sacred as we whispered in the darkness, and inevitably turned into deep, wracking sobs through my child’s body.

I’ve been in this place before, so I wasn’t surprised, though I can never keep back my own tears when it happens. It’s not often, but it’s agony.

We’re not shy about adoption in our house; it’s woven into the fabric of our family. But most of the time, we’re just an ordinary family and I forget (and they forget, I think) that there’s these shadows that lurk behind my children. That as happy and nutty and normal as we are, our family was created out of loss. And grief.

I knew this, of course, before becoming an adoptive parent, but did I really know it? I was so fixated on the rescue and the redemption that it was easy to just skim over the grief.

It didn’t take me long to understand. When Grace (my oldest, who gave me permission to share this) was just 18 months old, she fixated on a Dora the Explorer book. It was only five pages long, and was the story of a baby bird who lost his mommy. Dora helped the bird find her, with Map and Boots, of course.

The first time we read that book, Grace was fascinated. She wanted to read it again, and then again. The third time through, my sweet little toddler burst into tears over the little bird who was separated from his mommy. Is she seriously crying over a Dora book? I thought. But yes, she was. Because when we got to the last page, when the baby bird was happily reunited with his mommy, Grace became obsessed with that last page. She showed it to me over and over and over again. She adored that last page.

She could barely talk. At the time I thought it was impossible that this incident could be related to her adoption. But as the years went on, and I grew to better understand my children and the nature of adoption, I really believe that silly little story scraped against a raw wound inside of her–even at 18 months old.

In Love Thy Body, Nancy Pearcey writes about how modern culture scorns the biological family. If the biological body no longer has an inherent purpose in gender or marriage, then it has no meaning in a family. A family is therefore not created by biology, but by a contract. But contracts can be broken when they are no longer convenient, and who steps in that gap? The state. She writes, “Statism has been a recurring theme in treatments of the family since the dawn of Western culture. To an astonishing degree, Western political and social thought has been hostile to the role of the family in proposed visions of the ideal society. Secular intellectuals from Plato to Rousseau to B. F. Skinner to Hillary Clinton have been enamored with the idea of putting the child directly under the care of the state. The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century—erected by Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Mao—all sought tight state control of education, down to the earliest years, to inculcate unquestioning acceptance of the regime’s ideology.”

But even if we don’t go into the realm of philosophy, up-close-and-personal reality shows us that as much as we try to convince ourselves otherwise, biology matters. More than one of my children have begged me through tears, Isn’t there a DNA test I could take that would show me who they are? Don’t we all get teary over adoption reunion stories? And as I read recently in the article Dear Anonymous Dad, even kids born by sperm donation aren’t satisfied until they know where they came from. Pearcey writes, “We rarely reflect consciously on how much our identity is shaped by being integrated biologically and genetically into an extended family.” That is, we don’t reflect on it unless we’re one of the ones who don’t have it.

So as an adoptive mom who is walking alongside kids who grieve what they have lost, I also grieve over the flippancy that my culture treats biology and its bonds. In an age of Tinder and no-fault divorce, more and more kids aren’t being raised by biological parents. Yes, God can redeem any situation, but let’s not pretend the brokenness isn’t there.

Of course, I still love adoption. Pearcey writes, “The bonds of biology train us to extend love beyond biology.” But I hate that there has to be adoption. I think coming to that realization has made me a better adoptive parent. Sure, I weep happy tears over the little girl who finally gets a family. It’s beautiful. It’s redemptive. It’s extraordinary. But we can’t minimize the loss and grief that got her there. As much as I am a cheerleader for adoption, I’ve learned that I also must advocate for preventing the need for it in the first place.

When Feelings Are Sovereign: Two Books About the Body

By Amy Medina

On August 13, 2018

In Book Recommendations

When I was a young girl, I had a phobia of crossing streets. I would avoid it whenever possible, even if that meant walking much farther away. When it was absolutely necessary to cross a street, I would cling to whoever I was with as if my life depended on it.

I was kind of a wimpy kid, so I just figured that this phobia reflected my general cautiousness. Most people were braver than me, I thought.

When I was about twelve, my mom casually referred to a story of how I was almost hit by a car when I was two. I was immediately interested, which surprised my mom because she thought I had remembered it. So she told me the story in detail, of how a car was speeding on a residential street and had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting me. I was fine, but my mom, the driver, and myself were all in tears.

Not long after hearing the story, I realized that my paranoia of crossing streets had disappeared completely. Understanding the cause of the phobia was all my brain needed to get rid of the fear. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it was my first experience with the effect that trauma can have on the brain.

I realize that this example of trauma is, relatively speaking, pretty insignificant. The older I am, the more I realize how unusual it was that I grew up in a stable, loving home and rather ignorant of the abuse or neglect that so many children experience.

But becoming an adoptive mom propelled me into the world of trauma and trying to understand it, which is what led me to read The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Dr. Van der Kolk delves deep into the research of how trauma (especially in childhood) fundamentally changes the brain. “[Trauma] changes not
only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.”

This fascinating book was incredibly useful to me as an adoptive mom, helping me to understand more fully what is going on in my children’s brains and what is causing some of their behavior. For example, “Children who don’t feel safe in infancy have trouble regulating their moods and emotional responses as they grow older.” Aha! Just that statement alone explains a lot about a child of mine.

This book gave me significantly more empathy towards friends who have experienced trauma. And even though I wouldn’t describe myself as a traumatized person, it helped me to understand more about my own emotions. “No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.” Yes! I’ve experienced that.

Interestingly, the author explains that the key to developing emotion regulation is in the physical body–by using the mind to be more aware of what is happening in the body when our emotions are out of control. And that by doing so, remarkably, we can actually re-wire our own brains.

It sounds to me a lot like the “renewing of your mind” in Romans 12:2. This is not a Christian book. But what I found especially interesting is that in trying to explain the mysterious connections between brain/mind/body, the author couldn’t help but using (what I would consider) spiritual vocabulary:

“[R]ather than being a passive observer, this mindful Self can help reorganize the
inner system and communicate with the parts in ways that help those parts trust that there is someone inside who
can handle things.”

“There is something very empowering about having the experience of changing your brain’s activity with your
mind.”

What is the Self? What is the Mind? It’s certainly not a biological entity. Could it be, perhaps, the immaterial Imago Dei, the part of ourselves that the Bible would call the Soul?

This concept also begs the question–if the Soul and the Body, working together, are able to re-wire–literally change the biology–of our brains in order to recover from trauma, then why then does our culture tell us that we must give in to our emotions, “follow our hearts,” in order to find personal fulfillment? Why is the key to conquering traumatic experiences lie in connecting our mind with our body, but when it comes to sexuality, personality, and gender expression, we are supposed to ignore our physical bodies?

It was these questions that I took into my next book, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality by Nancy Pearcey. And I was fascinated by how, even though The Body Keeps the Score and Love Thy Body are written on very different topics and on very different premises, they speak to each other.

Even though Nancy Pearcey never references Dr.Van der Kolk, she takes his concepts to their logical end: If we are able to use our mind and body to change our feelings, why do we consider our feelings to be sovereign in our lives–even over our own bodies?

“The body has become a morally neutral piece of matter that can be manipulated for whatever purposes the self may impose on it—like pressing a mold into clay or stamping Lincoln’s profile on a copper penny,” Pearcey writes. She explains how current cultural ideas about unborn life, sexuality, gender, and family all come down to a very low view of the physical body, which leads to an extremely fractured view of the Self….which, ironically, is exactly what trauma therapy strives to fix.

It’s interesting how willing I am to apply Van der Kolk’s research when I am feeling afraid or anxious, because I want to control unpleasant feelings. But what about happiness that is actually rooted in selfishness? What about jealousy or bitterness–emotions that are easy to relish? If I can use my body and my soul to rewire uncomfortable emotions, why not others as well–emotions that the Bible would call ‘sin?’ Pearcey writes, “We do not choose our feelings, but we do choose our behavior and identity.”

She doesn’t parse Scripture in her arguments–that’s not what this book is about. She uses biblical worldview–the over-arching, big-picture view of life presented throughout the Bible–to explain the significance of our biological bodies. “In one sense, our bodies even have primacy over our spirits. After all, the body is the only avenue we have for expressing our inner life or for knowing another person’s inner life. The body is the means by which the invisible is made visible.”

Pearcey also explains how the roots of the mind-body dualism that is so prevalent in our culture traces back to Rousseau. Worldviews all come from somewhere, and ideas have consequences. She writes, “Humans are not self-creating, self-existent, self-defining beings. We all look to outside sources to inform us about who we are and how we should live. We look for a rule or grid to help us decide which feelings and impulses are good versus those that are unhealthy or immoral and should be rechanneled.” Where is my grid coming from? Rousseau? Or the Bible?

I don’t fully understand all of this. I am not a doctor or a psychologist or a scientist. I’m just a thinker asking questions. So if you challenge me on these thoughts, I’m not sure I’ll have the answers. If this fascinates you, read these books. Seriously, read these books, and read both of them together. Then let’s have a conversation.