The future of the church belongs to third culture kids
Skye Jethani, senior editor of Leadership Journal, writes at the Out of Ur blog about the future of the global church, drawing on reflections from a recent experience with a team of diverse and multicultural Christian missionaries in Spain. He shares this observation:
As demographics shift and populations continue to mix, it won’t be enough for us to master the leadership dynamics of our small community. We will need the skills to move between and among diverse groups and draw them together--often utilizing very different leadership values in the process. Kids with diverse cultural backgrounds who do not find such accommodation threatening, even second-nature, are going to be better equipped for this task. But many American churches, and the homogeneous unit principle they’ve been built upon, will not be the incubators for this kind of leadership...
If the dominant Anglo-American church doesn’t starting opening it’s ears, minds, conferences, books, magazines, and blogs to more global voices, it will quickly find itself unprepared for life in the post-American church world. But allowing diverse and divergent voices into the conversation is not only challenging, it’s messy. That is why we also need to begin cultivating church leadership environments that are not predicated upon uniformity and efficiency.
What to I mean by that? Most of what I’ve read/heard about church leadership says we should fight tenaciously to maintain clear purpose, vision, and values within our organization. And recruiting other leaders who conform to these is vital. Allow too many people inside who hold divergent ideas and you’ll derail the organization. But this mindset assumes that efficiency is the ultimate value to which all others must surrender. The best organizations, this view teaches, run like well-oiled machines with high capacity and high output. But in many cultures efficiency is not the highest good. And third culture leaders understand that in many cases clinical efficiency simply is not possible when seeking to lead diverse populations.
As one who grew up between cultures as a third culture kid, I obviously resonate with these thoughts. But Jethani's observations apply to all of us, and those who didn't grow up in a foreign context aren't excluded or irrelevant. It just means we all have a lot un-learning, re-learning and adapting to do.
The ethics of faith-based aid
An aid/development blog I read called A View From The Cave recently featured a video from a series called Beyond Good Intentions. The series takes a look at various issues within development, including disaster relief, the role of the aid worker, research methods, micro-lending, etc. -- all focused on the question of effectiveness: Is what we're doing really working?
The video I came across on the blog was focused on faith-based aid. It features interviews with missionaries in Mozambique who live among very poor people. Using my own very unscientific methods, I'm not sure these missionaries are in any sense representative, but I think the questions raised and the answers given do provide some good food for thought, especially for those like me -- and maybe you -- who believe that faith and development do belong together.
Is what we're doing really working?
Are we really doing what we say we're doing?
Might our actions have unintended consequences?
Can we do better?
Making Jesus in our image, or the other way around?
I just finished reading Adam Taylor’s Mobilizing Hope: Faith-Inspired Activism for a Post-Civil Rights Generation. As the subtitle suggests, Taylor draws heavily on insights from Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement in this book written for the current generation of those inspired by their faith to engage in social action. It’s less a how-to guide than a set of personal perspectives by this relatively young but highly experienced Christian activist.
InterVarsity Press has a series of brief video interviews with Taylor discussing different parts of his book on YouTube. Here he talks about why he decided to write this book:
I’m not going to post a proper review of the book (check out some good reviews and discussion over at Patheos), but I thought I’d share a synopsis of one important chapter, which made me think of one of Anne Lamott’s great lines: “You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
Chapter 3 is titled “Following a Holistic Jesus” and before Taylor articulates what he considers “holistic” he lays out six common ways we tend to create Jesus in our own image, based on our limiting preferences and biases:
The bling bling Jesus: this is the name-it-claim-it, health-and-wealth gospel Jesus whose greatest desire is to make each of us materially rich and comfortable.
The apocalyptic Jesus: this is the Jesus who is going to destroy the earth really soon (an event, incidentally, that's currently scheduled for May 21st).
The privatized Jesus: this Jesus specializes in offering fire insurance, and wants to enlist us as his salespeople. 
The Che Jesus: this Jesus joins the morally superior poor in their struggle for revolution, recognizing that the greedy rich can’t be converted; only defeated.
The apolitical Jesus: this Jesus prefers to keep Christians from involvement in the divisive and corrupting world of politics, or at least reserving these activities for optional individual involvement.
The Constantinian Jesus: this Jesus sees no problem mixing church and state, and in fact wants his people to restore their country as an exceptional theocracy, an all-American "city on a hill."
These six types are obviously provocative in each of their different ways, but I think you’d agree that we see various mutations of them around us all the time. Our own images may fall more or less within one or more of them as well. Taylor contrasts these six with “the holistic Jesus” of Scripture who leads us into responsible social action -- something each of the distorted, incomplete Jesuses fail to do. So, a few questions seem important to consider:
What do you think of these six "false Jesuses"? Has Taylor missed any ways we make Jesus in our image rather than seeking to be conformed to the image of God? And what does “responsible social action” look like, anyway?
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