Listening wins the right to speak. Serving wins the right to relate. Loving wins the opportunity to share. This is the heart of things: The gospel in word and action is simply sharing Jesus with the world’s peoples.
Many Christians in Western nations are perplexed. We are not leading the global church anymore, and that feels strange. The cloud has moved. However, we still have work to do here in our part of the world. Many of us would like to do it in the ways we have always done it. However, we are hitting a wall because the old ways seem not to work anymore. So we tend to separate into crazy dichotomies like “liberal” and “conservative.” But those labels only relieve us of the burden of thinking for ourselves. They allow us to drift into a complacent denial of our faith or into a boring and angry orthodoxy. That’s not a very appealing choice for our children or for the unbelievers.
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Christians in the global south seem to be preaching the gospel. They seem to be expecting God to show up in power to transform their lives and communities. All over the world, believers have been erasing old boundaries between Christian groups and borrowing from one another whatever they need to proclaim Christ. To me, that is a much more appealing model than trying to market Jesus to skeptical people. I have often wondered, why can’t we study like Presbyterians, save souls like Baptists, honor Communion like Anglicans, pray for the sick like charismatics, build schools like Methodists, and dance like African-American Pentecostals? What holds us back except sectarian pride? Maybe the world will start taking us seriously when we start taking one another seriously!
Adapted from Faith to Faith.
Copyright © 2008 by Dan Scott. Published by Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, Oregon. Used by permission.
