Categories
Africa Mission Observations

Cities, Culture, Identity and Mission

I remember a university lecturer in Abidjan telling me that when left the city of Abidjan, he felt as though he was leaving Côte d’Ivoire all together. For him, the cosmopolitan city with its sky scrapers and supermarkets, not the rural majority, was the real Ivory Coast. For my translator colleagues and I, the opposite […]

Categories
Do Not Use

What Does The Bible Mean?

Tonight I am going to be lecturing on ‘How Do Other Cultures Read the Bible: Insights from the Worldwide Church’. Come along if you are in the High Wycombe area.  One of the points of my lecture is that people from different cultures come to the Bible with different backgrounds, asking different questions and with […]

Categories
Mission

Unreached People Groups

I mentioned yesterday that Simon Cozens is someone who is willing to confront issues. In his latest blog post he takes an excellent look at one of the key themes in much modern missionary writing: Unreached People Groups. It’s a hard hitting paper, but one that everyone interested in mission should read. People group theory […]

Categories
Bible & Mission

Western Dominance in World Mission: Time for a Change?

From the Global Connections Website: The forum held on the 25 May 2011 at CMF as part of the Thinking Mission series was intended to look at the issues of   continued Western dominance in mission – was this the case and if so what could be done about it? The genesis of the question had […]

Categories
Church: World

Christianity and Culture: A Few Thoughts

Two events defined the founding of the Christian Church in the book of Acts. The first was the miracle at Pentecost in Acts 2 which demonstrated that the Gospel could be understood and appropriated in any language. The second was the way in which the early believers broke out of their Jewish background at Antioch […]

Categories
Observations

What Does Christianity Look Like?

Every now and then, I read a comment by someone saying that Christianity should not adapt to cultures or some such. As far as I am aware, the people who say this sort of thing don’t wander around in robes, speaking Aramaic or Koine Greek, holding evangelistic meetings in the local synagogues or exactly following […]

Categories
Observations

What do Colours Mean?

There is a wonderful chart giving an overview of what different colours mean to different cultures here. It is absolutely fascinating to see the way in which things that we might have thought to be universal are, in fact, culturally determined.

Categories
Politics

Christianity is Not British

That reliable rodent, the Church mouse has just come up with an amazing story from the British National Party. Nick Griffin the party leader has often claimed that Christianity is indigenous to Britain, unlike Islam, Hinduism and the rest. Of course, Christianity is actually indigenous to the Middle East, though it adapts to any culture. […]

Categories
Politics

Advice for Americans in The UK

Tim Chester has just posted a terrific piece of advice for Americans working in the UK. It is all good stuff, but this section on attitudes to the US president is particularly insightful. It is important for both sides to realise that UK Christians judge American Presidents and prospective Presidents on foreign policy because that […]

Categories
Africa

From Burkina and Ivory Coast

I’ve come across a couple of good pieces from West Africa today.  Jayne Chuter has just returned from a Wycliffe Engage Trip to Burkina Faso and has written a fascinating account. Well I am back safe and sound in England now. We had a remarkably smooth and unproblematic month, thanks to all your prayers: nobody […]