Intercultural Discipleship (Encountering Mission)

Learning from Global Approaches to Spiritual Formation

Moon, W. Jay, Moreau, A. Scott

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781493411481
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

This addition to an acclaimed series brings cutting-edge research to bear on a topic of perennial interest: making disciples. The book looks at disciple-making from multiple cultures to help readers discover contextual approaches that are culturally relevant and biblically faithful. It emphasizes methods that are especially effective with contemporary converts and includes practical examples from around the world. Each chapter includes sidebars, discussion questions, an activity for discipling, and a case study. An appendix contains further suggestions and exercises for instructors.

1
How Did We Get in This Spiritual Rut?

Gandiok yeng kan kaw banga. (One giant alone cannot catch a lizard.)

—Builsa proverb

Stuck in the Mud

The truck slows to a grinding halt. It finally dawns on me that the thirsty African soil has soaked up the heavy rains during the church service. The tan dirt road has turned into a deep brown mud pit. Gradually, the truck stops as the tires form two deep ruts in the mud.

“No problem. I have four-wheel drive,” I say out loud, perhaps to reassure myself. I have since learned that a truck’s four wheels are no match for muddy roads seeking a victim.

“Whiiiiiiiiiiiir,” whine the tires as they spin in place. Trying to back out now, the tires, desperate for any type of traction, grasp only mud that is slung out the back.

Stuck.

No way forward. No way backward.

Everyone jumps out of the truck, including the half-dozen people in the back. Now they are pushing and pulling the truck as I try to rock the tires back and forth. This only seems to make matters worse, as the tires become wedged even deeper into the mud, which is not going to give up its prey so easily. In the tug-of-war between the tires and the mud, the mud is clearly the victor.

Eventually, some men arrive with arms full of logs and sticks.

“When you rock forward, we will put the logs into the tire ruts. That way, the tires will have something to grab on to when you rock back. This will work—we have done it before,” they explain. Like a patient in the emergency room, I am more desperate for help than a prolonged explanation. I will try anything.

With a surge on the gas pedal and the straining of human muscle against the metal truck body, the truck tires crunch over the logs as they are released from the clutches of the reluctant mud. Free at last . . . with the help of others.

Breathing a sigh of relief, everyone hops back in the truck.

We try a different way home.

SIDEBAR 1.1

From Decisions to Baptisms to Church Commitment

Several church leaders have openly decried the lack of discipleship in the church to transform individuals and communities. While many “decisions for Christ” are made, few of these decisions result in further discipleship. For example, Waylon Moore notes, “In the United States, pastors have indicated that up to fifty percent of those making decisions in their churches are not baptized afterward” (1981, 42). Charles Crabtree fears that the numbers are even worse than that. He admits, “We cannot say with integrity that the Assemblies of God [in the US] retained more than 10 percent of those who made a decision for Christ as Savior. . . . The lack of retention of new converts in the Assemblies of God is a spiritual tragedy” (2008).

This discipleship concern is not limited to the West alone. As Moore notes, “In South America some pastors have said that eight out of ten of those who make a decision for Christ in an evangelistic meeting never come back to the church. The same thing is happening in Africa and Asia” (1981, 42). Allen Swanson’s research in Taiwan indicates that it took a staggering fifty to sixty evangelistic decisions to result in one lasting convert who remained in the church (1989, 54)! The International Consultation on Discipleship meeting in Eastbourne, England, reports, “Our zeal to go wider has not been matched by a commitment to go deeper” (Weber 2003, 182).

Reflection and Discussion

1. Consider your experience with people making decisions for Christ at evangelistic rallies or events. What percentage do you estimate continue for baptism and church involvement?
2. For those who do get baptized and continue in the church, what do you think made the difference?
3. Why do you think that this lack of discipleship is so widespread?

Coming Home

Like me and my companions in this story, disciplers are looking for a way home. Well-intended Christians are getting stuck in their spiritual growth. Instead of moving on to Christian maturity and transformation, they are stagnating and cannot seem to move forward, like tires spinning in place, forming deeper ruts. Disciplers are searching for discipleship patterns that will free them from the tight grip of the surrounding culture that conforms them. They are also trying to find ways for faith to interact with the local culture in order to be relevant at work, at home, and among friends. By practicing the same methods, over and again, disciplers seem to be wedged even deeper in the mud. Stuck.

This is not simply a problem for one particular culture. Leaders from around the world have expressed concerns about the lack of discipleship in the church. Western and majority world churches are facing a similar dilemma. While people may respond to Christ for salvation, they are not deepening their faith and maturing as disciples of Jesus.

Since Jesus’s Great Commission (Matt. 28:16–20) contains the central command to make disciples of all the nations, churches largely agree that discipleship should be a priority for the mission of the church. Unfortunately, they would also usually agree on another point: their track record for discipleship is not so good. They have fallen into the two ruts of being conformed to the local culture, on one hand, or separating their faith from large areas of life, on the other. Surely the church could do a better job of finding logs to dislodge the spinning tires. Can churches from other cultures and other time periods provide some needed guidance in this important process of discipleship?

The American church is dying, not from lack of effective evangelism, nor from lack of resources, but from lack of effective discipleship.

Michael Ramsden (in “Decade of Discipleship” 2017)

Removing the Straitjacket

There is great value in stepping out of your own culture for a period of time in order to gain a fresh perspective, as anyone who has lived deeply in another culture can attest. In order to get a wider perspective on the process of discipleship, I take an intercultural approach in this book. Viewing how discipleship is done in other cultures, we gain fresh perspectives that can be helpful in our own cultural contexts. Culture has been described as a “comfortable straitjacket,” since every culture highlights certain options for how things should be done correctly and filters out others. An intercultural perspective makes us aware of some of the options for discipleship that other cultures have filtered out and disregarded. As we will see, many of these options have been around since the beginning of the church (during another time of rapid church growth), but they have been overlooked in recent years. An intercultural approach combines the strengths of various cultures over various time periods in order to overcome the limitations of individual cultures and generations.

Intercultural discipleship is similar to the combination of gasoline and a match. When lessons from various cultures are combined, powerful results emerge! When isolated from one another, they are powerless. Monocultural discipleship approaches likewise miss the potential power in discipleship, since it isolates cultures from one another. An intercultural approach, however, learns from other cultures, resulting in powerful transformation.

The Builsa proverb advises us, “Gandiok yeng kan kaw banga” (One giant alone cannot catch a lizard). No matter how powerful an individual person is, he or she is unable to single-handedly catch this small animal—a task that two children can easily accomplish. Likewise, churches in individual cultures need the help of other cultural perspectives in order to fulfill the Great Commission and make disciples of all nations. Instead of trying to be a more powerful giant (and not accomplishing the task), we need to look for discipleship practices from other cultures.

Widening the Community

This intercultural approach will show how discipleship is a communal process that addresses intimate issues involving the whole individual and the community. I will also highlight the value of oral literature (particularly symbols, rituals, proverbs, stories, music, dance, and drama). While these genres are often overlooked in cultures that prefer print learning, intercultural disciplers recognize that they have been tested over centuries and are laden with discipleship potential. Like logs grown from local trees, these genres can assist disciplers in dislodging us from spiritual ruts.

When a person makes a confession of faith and is never taken through a formal discipleship process, there is little hope of seeing genuine spiritual transformation.

Howard Hendricks (in “Decade of Discipleship” 2017)

A multigenerational perspective reveals how previous generations have successfully approached discipleship. Snapshots from earlier stages of church growth demonstrate practical applications of cultural genres for discipleship. History agrees with the men who shoved logs under the spinning tires: “This will work—we have done it before.”

Along with using an intercultural and multigenerational approach, I compare and contrast other religions in this book. This process reveals how religions around the world use sacred myths, symbols, and rituals to form worldviews and transform disciples, and it can be appropriated for Christian discipleship. To guard against the two ruts of syncretism (culture is not sufficiently critiqued by Scripture, thereby blending two faith systems) and isolation (culture is rejected or ignored, thereby separating faith from large sectors of life), the process of contextual discipleship should promote biblically faithful and culturally appropriate discipleship.

Instead of limiting us to one culture in one time period, discipleship approaches from various cultures and time periods present new options to transform the worldviews of maturing followers of Jesus. This brings hope for disciples of the future.

How Did We Get Here?

While I am hopeful that the intercultural discipleship approaches I describe will transform the disciples of the future, we first need to look to the past in order to understand how we arrived at this point today. We will see that our monocultural approaches slip a comfortable straitjacket on young disciples without their knowing it.

Table 1.1 summarizes some of the assumptions that individual cultures highlight for discipleship. Monocultural discipleship approaches emphasize one side to the neglect of the other. Without knowing it, the worldview assumptions of individual cultures limit how discipleship is usually carried out.

Table 1.1

Comparison of Cultural Assumptions That Affect Discipleship

Western Culture	Majority World Culture
Print learning preference	Oral learning preference
Individual identity	Collective identity
Justice (guilt) orientation	Honor (shame) orientation
Cognitive focus	Emotive focus
Material/scientific reality	Spirit-power reality
Redemption theology	Creation theology
Assembly-line production	Handcrafted production

While the cultural assumptions listed in table 1.1 are helpful during times of cultural stability, they serve as straitjackets that prevent us from trying out other options. This is particularly important during times of rapid cultural change, when other options are needed to cope with the new questions and issues being faced. The intercultural discipleship approach I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. How Did We Get in This Spiritual Rut?
• 2. Issues That Get Us Stuck
• 3. What Is Intercultural Discipleship?
• 4. Symbols Speak When Words Can’t
• 5. Rituals Drive Meaning Deep into the Bone
• 6. Contextualization Process—Tailored Pants Fit Just Right
• 7. Stories Portray It, Not Just Say It
• 8. Proverbs Are Worth a Thousand Words
• 9. Music, Dance, and Drama—We Become What We Hum
• 10. Holistic Discipleship Connects Word and Deed
• 11. Discipleship for Postmoderns
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Ceremony for the Installation of a Teacher
• Appendix B: Activities for Teaching
• Reference List
• Index
• Back Cover