Friday, August 08, 2003

Great quote from some guy over at Mike's site:

The first Christ-followers were Jews, the next Christ followers were Christians. Maybe in the future, Christ followers will not be called anything. When Gentiles first began following Jesus, it caused all sorts of problems. There were those who insisted that if you were going to follow Jesus, you had to become Jewish.

Could Acts 15 be a pivotal story for our own time?

I wonder mike...I know it's not my role to make presumptions about people's "qualification" to enter into the kingdom of God. But maybe it is better to introduce her to the person of Christ, and allow him to transform her in her Buddhist culture from the inside out, rather than ask her to denounce her culture, and inherit ours. Buddhism could really help reform the american-fast-food-way that most Christians look at the Gospel. Much of the language of decent of the Gospels, and of self death and denial seems present there. I think that would be much better than introducing her to the culture of Christianity, hoping that God meets her there. Maybe the epitome of global evangelism is Christ changing all cultures from the inside out, and those cultures coexisting and sharing with one another their own limited beauty and perspective of that mystery(the way they "know in part", and realizing it is limited); not us advocating ours as the way to meet Christ until we've dispelled the diversity in the world with our perverse sense of Manifest Destiny.

I think that if we really looked, we would find that most every other culture is open to the message of Christ far more than we are to what we could learn from theirs(insert: the buddha). We are so afraid of dilluting our faith--and I am probably most of all. But i think we've got to arrive at a place where we allow people to live out the story of God in their environment, embracing the person of Christ in their respective cultures, and wathcing him redeem what we were ready to burn as evil.

Shoot, if God can redeem Christianity, just think...=)

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