On Christian mission and trying to hold too many ideas together

I wonder if, in the west, we have been taught and trained to hold too many things in tension. We “balance” work and home life, career and family, and our abstract ethics along with what we know we can actually “get away with” in society. Our marriages are often described as 50/50 give-and-take partnerships. When the balance isn’t struck, the relationship falls apart. Our ideas are held up by a web of ropes and pulleys working against each other. We like to phrase reality as a dialectic between faith and science, law and gospel, conscious and sub-conscious, and we usually imagine ourselves to be somewhere between poor and rich, regardless of our actual wealth. Forces are always pulling us in many directions and we let them. The person who streaks off in one direction is considered all kinds of crazy. In contrast, the wise man is the broadly experienced and specially trained elder who has learned to navigate this sea of forces and hold himself together, despite all the cognitive dissonance.

But again, this is what life is like in the modern west. Primitive cultures are more straight forward. There is less noise in their philosophy. This is difficult to describe and I don’t think I can articulate it well in this post but I will try to give just a few examples.

I recently chatted with a man who spent four years in Indonesia leading a team of coal miners. He had to quickly learn their language and get these uneducated and untrained tribal men to operate bulldozers and other heavy equipment. They learned fast and were hard workers but abstract thought was not their forte. He recounted several interesting stories about how he had to learn to give them ridiculously explicit directions and not assume even the smallest detail.

I got the same impression watching an interesting documentary (in Spanish) on the Karo tribe in southern Ethiopia. They raise thousands of goats, cultivate sorghum by the river bank, and live in little thatch huts. Nobody reads or goes to school or leaves the village. Children help with the herds as soon as they learn to walk. We may think their way of life is completely backwards, but it doesn’t look to me like any of them were dumb. They know what they are doing and it’s simple. They aren’t pulled in a hundred different directions by everything they read at school, learned at church, had shouted at them on the news, were told at work, were told by their friends, heard their professor say, heard their new boyfriends say, etc. Everyone in their tight and relatively isolated culture is speaking the same word – day in and day out.

When people in these cultures come to know the gospel of Jesus, their conversions are remarkable. It literally changes EVERYTHING. Conversion experiences are dramatic and their religious fervor stays dramatic. They aren’t used to holding a hundred ideas and personas in tension and then learning to slowly incorporate their new-found faith into the mix. Instead, things go “boom!” and the difference is often apparent in all contexts.

And this changes what ministry and leadership looks like too. In the modern west, to even be considered to pastor a modest church congregation, you need to have a Master of Divinity or equivalent degree. That goes for all Catholic priests and all but the most low-church protestant groups. That means 12 years of school, 4 years of college, and then another 3 years on top of that, usually with a substantial amount of work in Greek and Hebrew. Then, FINALLY, you can have an entry level job preaching the gospel. That’s 19 years minimum. The situation is similar for missionaries. Why do you need all this education? To get your “world view” fully formed and held together amidst all the noise.

In contrast are the indigenous leaders that were encouraged and set up by groups like the Sudan Interior Mission in the early half of the twentieth century. They would baptize some new converts, teach them some really basic things from the bible for a few months, and then quickly send them on to preach at the next village. At one point in Rowland Bingham’s memoir, he describes how he visited a mission church that was flourishing in Nigeria. While he was there they took up an offering and raised about $60 (probably about 10x that by inflation today). What did he decide to do with the extra money? Pick four local guys and send them about 800 miles east to southern Sudan to start a new church there. Only two years before that, those men barely knew how to read. Now they were being sent out and would likely (by most accounts) go on to actually do a better job than most highly-education foreigners could do. They were just so gung-ho about Jesus in a way that WE have trained minds to never be about anything. We are weighed down by our riches.