One of the comments on my last post brings up a truism about Chrisitanity wherever it flourishes: cultural captivity will never be fully escaped, even by the church. Tim V. mentioned that while Africa's current orthodoxy is marked by a traditional (and proper) resistance to homosexuality, it is, at least where Tim lived, less stalwart about the orthodox view of marital celibacy. Ouch. That is, while the church might be unanimous that homosexuality is wrong, it is less unanimous in its belief that husbands should be monogamous. The statistics of African church growth could be embarrasingly compared to the equally dramatic rise in AIDS, suggesting that while many folks are converting to Christ, many are also sleeping around.
Should this surprise us or cause us to doubt the authenticity of the African revival of the last thirty years? No. The church, even when it is flourishing, always exists within broader cultures. And, since cultures are made up of humans, and humans are sinfully fallen, the church will likely always have sin-patterns of the same variety as their surrounding fallen cultures. Amercan churches will tend to have more sinfully materialistic members than churches in poorer countries, while Christians in, say, Asian cultures, will be more likely to over-venerate their ancestors, and male Christians of other cultures will have a higher rate of marital infidelity. While Christianity is counter-cultural in many ways since it is about the erecting of a new kingdom with new values, it takes generations (sometimes) for certain cultural sins to be purged from the believing community. The power of culture is that it slowly, surely, makes us blind to certain moral categories that, were we really objective, we'd see the Bible clearly opposes. As much as we'd like it be different, real Christians sin in culturally predictable ways.
This is worth mentioning because one of common reasons people reject the Christian gospel is that they perceive hypocrisy or lifestyle failure in Chrisitans they meet as a deal-breaker. The underlying assumption is that followers of Christ will be fairly sinless, and if they aren't, then they are either frauds or the Christian message itself is to blame. But even Christian people are not quickly or ever thoroughly freed from the false values they are surrounded by. Often it takes a Christian from the perspective of a different culture to diagonse the ways we have capitulated to our own. East Indian evangelist K.P. Yohannan reports visiting a 3,000 member church in the United States and being shocked to find only two or three in attendance at their weekly prayer-meeting. Does the prayerlessness of that church mean that that it, or that Chrisitanity, is a sham? No, it means that 3,000 self-suffficient Western Christians need to go back and read the Bible more closely where it speaks about prayer, and be glad for the kind rebuke of an Indian brother. One of the reasons that it's good to have multi-national church dialogue is that we can help each other to take off the cultural blinders that we often don't know we're wearing. As Jesus said, the wheat and the tares of his kingdom will grow up together, and only finally sorted out at his return. The Lord of his church knows that it will always be impure, until he comes to fully purify it. Until then, authentic-yet-fallen churches need to keep helping each other to be better cultural critics of their own surroundings.
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