SirSmilez

SirSmilez' Pithy Polemic
2003-03-04 15:26:44 (UTC)

missions

In class today, while discussing the church growth
movement's explosive growth in Korea, my teacher pointed
out an inconsistency. Korea sends out thousands of
missionaries, yet the churches they found look remarkably
like Korean churches, implying that this was the fault of
the church growth model.

Creating carbon copy churches is, was, and shall be the
primary pitfall of mission work. Any time someone enters a
new culture with the intent of founding a church there,
their natural, primarily unconscious practice, will be to
found one like the one they came from. This is true today
with Korean missionaries, was true a hundred years ago with
white led missions in Africa, and was true almost 2000
years ago when Jewish Christians who converted their
gentile friends tried to force them to be circumcised and
follow the Jewish law. Creating an indigenous church, one
led by members of the culture, one whose worship reflects
that culture, is an incredibly difficult thing to do. That
has nothing to do with the failures of the church growth
movement, and everything to do with humanity's dogged,
primarily subconscious, self-centeredness.




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