VULNERABLE MISSION

THE KING’S ENGLISH IN A TAMIL TONGUE
another one of those issues that was central a few generations ago in the Church of
Christ, but today is considered rather backward and outdated. Today, very few American
Church of Christ members under the age of 40 argue theirs is the only group with
a heavenly passport. But in India, this teaching is still common, even assumed. I know
from personal experience because I questioned it once . . . and should not have.
CONCLUSION
To return to Andrew Walls, and his experiences in Sierra Leone, he described the amazing
situation he was observing as “a symbiosis, very carefully fused.” He recognized
the indigenous forms of faith as being Christian, of course, but with a profoundly African
bent. He discusses how when he first arrived to Africa, he was depressed by what
he saw. 60 Christianity there was uncontrolled, unrestrained, and in many ways foreign
to his conservatively tamed Methodist background. However, after ruminating on the
implications of a truly African revival taking place, Walls experienced a “very definite
movement from depression to hope.” 61 During Walls’s ministry in Sierra Leone, the days
of European control over African politics were grinding to a halt—Sierra Leone itself
gained independence from Britain in 1961. The Christian faith that the missionaries
had brought, however, would remain. It was almost as if Britain handed the baton of
faith to Africa. Britain is largely secular now while Africa is home to 500 million Christians
and growing. Christianity is now the largest religion on the continent of Africa—a
statistic unimaginable a century ago.
The Church of Christ in India, however, has not turned into the fused symbiosis that
Walls witnessed in Africa. Rather, the time capsule would be a more fitting analogy.
And major challenges loom because of this theological and cultural stagnation. Members
remain deeply loyal to the form of Christianity brought to them decades earlier by
stalwart missionaries. This hybrid identity is fraught with ambivalence, resulting in a
form of social dislocation. Members become increasingly isolated—they appear insular
and sectarian in their own culture, yet remain somehow different and distant from the
Churches of Christ in the West. To borrow a concept from prominent sociologist Peter
Berger, these Christians become “homeless minds”—unable to call either culture home,
yet marginally affiliated with both.
It appears to me that the Indian Churches of Christ with which I am associated have
made a decision. They have chosen the faith of the zealous evangelists who first came to
them half a century ago. And it appears that faithfulness to the traditions of those missionaries
has become necessary for ecclesial survival. Challenging the faith of the missionaries
could prove disruptive on a number of levels. For instance, it could destabilize
conviction in a setting where religious commitments must be sheltered from the religious
cacophony in the surrounding culture. The case of the KJV illustrates why loyalty to the
old paths must be maintained. If confidence in the Bible can be eroded, then the solid
faith that was built on a “back to the Bible” worldview could become crippled. More-
weir0112.pdf. The article, entitled “Max Lucado’s Storytelling,” emphasizes in disgust that Lucado “believes
that there really are Baptists, Methodists, and Catholics in those other rooms.” It should be pointed out that
this joke has been applied to many religious groups with exclusivist understandings of salvation.
60 Stafford, 2.
61 Ibid.
105