Message Magazine Online - Vol. 53, No. 03, Winter 2005

In This Issue

• Think Outside the Box
  By Donna Messenger
• Missions Outside the Box
  By Michael G. Loftis, President
• Opening the Box
  By Bill Commons
• Three-Door Evangelism
  By John and Jean Peterson, Brazil
• Reaching CANS - Creative Access Nations
  By the ABWE Executive Administrator Muslim Ministries
• The Effectiveness of Sports
  By Bruce W. McDonald, International Director of Sports
• Greetings from Camp
  By Leon Duell, Russia
• Creation Science Evangelism: Reaching Students and Educators with the Gospel
  By Jerry and Donna Layton, Philippines
• The Greenhouse that is Growing a Church
  By Rick Ferrari, Ukraine
• The World at My Yard Sale
  By Ann DenUyl, USA
• Indy International
  By Joanna Stuckey, USA MK
• Disaster Church Planting
  By Annie Langston, Thailand
• We Were Strangers
  By Jim Ruff
• Giving Outside the Box
  By Don Davis & Spencer Jackson
• The Missionary Family
  By Russell E. Ebersole, Jr.
  

Opening the Box

By Bill Commons, International Vice-President for Strategic Initiative and Research

Conservative evangelicals value tradition. We like things done a certain way, and we get nervous when methods change. There is a right way to “do church.” Don’t mess with the liturgy, a.k.a. “order of service.” New music? No way! Are our familiar “boxes” (methods) Scriptural or cultural? Give me chapter and verse for the “right way” of conducting worship.

Likewise with missions. Most of our seminary training assumes “home culture” patterns, and churches want to support only “church planters” who plant according to American understanding of how it is done. But do traditional North American approaches work in Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Animist, Secular/Communist or postmodern cultural settings?

I was trained in seminary to preach. But when we went to the field, Buddhists weren’t interested. When we entered a traditional Chinese community in the inner city, nobody came to hear my well-crafted messages.

In college and grad school, I was also trained in visitation evangelism. But in my adopted culture I learned the hard way that it was offensive to knock on the door as a stranger. I scared everybody away. In four years of door-to-door evangelism, nobody let me in to present the gospel.

In evangelism training in local churches back home, I learned to distribute literature as a means of witness. But on the field, the gospel tracts used words so foreign to Buddhist Chinese readers that they just threw them away. The streets were littered with discarded tracts, identified with the (very) foreign missionary’s name.

Four years of faithful efforts in traditional USA-style evangelism was fruitless in my adopted culture at that time. I was trapped in the cultural “box” of foreign, American expectations.

Only when this discouraged missionary rediscovered the dynamics of hands-on compassion from our Lord’s ministry in the Gospels as a universal paradigm of effective ministry, combined with new understandings of culturally effective outreach, was a church-planting methodology developed that produced multiple believers and reproductive churches. That fruit remained, and multiplied in succeeding years under indigenous leadership.

Contemporary international ambassadors for Christ must open the box—loosening themselves from the cultural norms of American ideology and expectations.  Leaving behind their foreignness, they can blend into the local culture in pursuit of outreach ministries that are both biblically and culturally authentic.

Oh yes, eventually we learned how to use visitation, tracts, and evangelistic preaching in culturally appropriate ways, to plant and grow churches that continue to reproduce! We had to learn the hard way, how to OPEN THE BOX.