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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 168 168 New Contexts for Mission what the missionary had written: “Pray for us here on the front lines as we battle the Enemy.” Pausing, the African leader then said, “This proves that the missionaries were collaborating with [our opponents]!” What the African leader did not understand is that when Christians talk about a battle they do not mean against “flesh and blood, but against . . . the spiritual forces of evil” (Ephesians 6:12). However, because a paragraph in a missionary newsletter was misunderstood, two American missionaries were imprisoned in that country for a year and many churches were shut down. With the passage of time, that nation has repudiated the ideology of its former president, allowed closed churches to reopen, and invited Christian missionaries to return. Though that unfortunate episode is fading from people’s memories, the lesson that words can be misunderstood with tragic results needs to be remembered. To be sure, Islam has its own militant-sounding vocabulary, but the point is not to win a debate over whose terminology is more militaristic. Christians seeking to gain a sympathetic hearing for the gospel must understand how certain terms may be misunderstood. In most cultural contexts, using the biblical themes of love, blessing, reconciliation, submission, suffering, and forgiveness will be far more profitable than confrontational-sounding words and phrases. In Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well recorded in John 4, the Lord masterfully demonstrated how to deal with confrontational speech and move past it. The Jews and Samaritans despised each other. The Jews called the Samaritans “dogs” and some even believed that the Samaritans were possessed by the devil (John 8:48). The rift between the two cultural groups was so deep that most first-century Jews would walk miles out of their way to avoid traveling through Samaria. With that cultural context as a background, John wrote that Jesus “had” to go through Samaria (4:4). As Jesus and His disciples approached a town on their journey northward they stopped at a well where Jesus spoke to a Samaritan woman, asking her for a drink of water. In spite of the shocked woman’s attempt to reestablish the wall of hostility—“Jews do not associate with Samaritans” (v. 9)—Jesus leads her to a point of receptivity and she winds up saying, “Sir, give me this water” (v. 15). Ultimately, because of the woman’s testimony, many from that Samaritan town accepted Jesus as the Messiah. This story is more than a revelation of Jesus’ modus operandi. It can be a model for the Church’s mission outreach. Between the time the woman went to town and came back, Jesus said something to which mission mobilizers have pointed as a biblical mandate for mission, “Open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest” (v. 35). Some biblical commentators have suggested that as Jesus spoke those words, He was gesturing toward Samaritans arriving from town, thus pointing out to His disciples that their ministry needed
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 169 New Contexts for Mission 169 169 to include people that were not Jewish. The disarming methods Jesus used on that occasion and others are relevant to building a strategy for Christians to become agents of reconciliation among the earth’s diverse population groups. Christian Worship Adaptations for the Muslim World 1. Facility for washing prior to service is provided 2. Worshipers remove shoes and sit on the floor 3. Bibles are placed on folding stands like those used for the Qur’an 4. Prayer is offered with uplifted hands and eyes closed 5. Chanting of attributes of God, the Lord’s Prayer, and personal testimonies is encouraged 6. Worshipers embrace in Muslim fashion 7. No particular emphasis is placed on Sunday 8. “Followers of Isa” is used instead of “Christians” 9. Churches are organized along the lines of the loose-knit structure of the mosque 8 —Phil Parshall Missionaries have experimented with a variety of ways of evangelizing and discipling in the Muslim world. Recidivism, or falling away, is a huge problem in trying to evangelize people in Islamic societies. Islam is a very all-encompassing religion. Thus when a Muslim comes to faith in Christ, he faces the question of how much of his culture he will walk away from. For example, can a Muslim convert continue such things as praying five times a day and keeping month-long fasts? Is it possible to talk of Christian mosques in the same way that Jewish believers talk of messianic synagogues? Some would point to 2 Kings 5 where Elisha simply responds “Go in peace” when the new convert, Naaman, speaks of continuing to go to the temple of Rimmon. To help in discussing strategies for the Muslim world, missionaries have come up with a C1 to C6 scale to differentiate six models of Christ-centered communities used in Islamic areas. These range from the C1 traditional churches using outsider language to C4 contextualized communities that follow many Islamic practices (avoiding pork, keeping fasts, following local forms of Islamic dress) and on to C6 communities of believers who feel they need to be extremely secretive about their worship of Christ. Religious Fundamentalism In this third millennium after Christ, Christians are looking for ways to communicate the love and compassion of the triune God to those of other religious backgrounds. An example of this is the Rethinking Forum, which focuses
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