How should missionaries consider the culture to which they are going? Should missionaries and evangelists adopt cultural practices and norms in order to be more relevant in it's witness? What parts of culture are neutral, and even good, and can be adopted for the missionary enterprise? While these aspects of culture exist, we must not assume all aspects of a culture can be adopted. We must also discern what is contrary to scripture and must be transformed to bring people into conformity with the word of God.

Our Lord's last command is our first priority. In the church, in the family, in the city, to the ends of the earth. Join us in October for White Under Harvest. So there are lots of controversial issues when it comes to the spreading of the gospel and fulfilling the Great Commission. One of them is contextualization.

How much like the culture do we need to spread the gospel? Could you give us some of your thoughts about the best thinking and the worst thinking on that subject? Well, there's one thinking that instead of being biblically sensitive, they're culturally sensitive, and they've exalted culture over the Scriptures. And it's just one more example of humanism and the way it manifests itself in the world today. And it is prevalent, and it is the result of bad theology, it's the result of not seeing the Scriptures as sufficient.

And I think one of the best examples of adapting to culture in a proper manner would be someone like Hudson Taylor. And a lot of people who I think commit great error in cultural sensitivity and contextualization, They use Hudson Taylor as their example and I think Hudson Taylor would be very angry with them. Because Hudson Taylor adapted himself to their culture, he did not adapt his message. Now he would Explain it in a way that it could be understood, but he did not change the gospel. He did not cause the gospel or the precepts of the Christian life.

He did not cause them to bow their knee to the culture that was there. You know, I like to say it this way. First of all, the people who seem to have the biggest problem with this are the Western missionaries. When I talk about, when I talk to the indigenous missionaries, they almost laugh. They go, look, if it's in our culture and it's not biblical, why do we want it?

Why do we care? Toss it out. It's not that big a deal. Now, there are, of course, insensitive Westerners who will go over and violate protocol and things like that, But there's no need to change the gospel. If you try to take the scandal out of the gospel, you have killed the gospel.

And you've also eliminated the power of the gospel. So I think that the first thing we need to realize is that cultural sensitivity means looking at a culture and adapting those things that do not violate Scripture, that are neutral things such as maybe in Hudson Taylor's case, clothing, you know, his willingness to identify with the people, adapt to their lifestyle, eat what they eat, follow their protocols and things where that didn't contradict Scripture. So that's good. Another thing that I like to talk about is this. I'll have people say, well, we shouldn't force Western culture on people.

And I go, I totally agree. I wouldn't want to teach anybody that they should run around naked, paint themselves blue, and eat one another. And they go, well, what do you mean? I said, what do you think Western culture is? What was Western culture prior to the advent of Christianity?

Now it was Vikings, it was Druids, it was violence, it was horrible, It literally was horrifying. What happened? Monks, who I do not believe were that biblical, but full of evangelical zeal at least, and with a notion of Christ, turned our people from worshiping twigs to worshiping the Creator. Turned our people from beating their wives to loving their wives. And then when we have the Reformation, look what happens.

Now, I am against taking something in Western culture that has nothing to do with the Scripture and placing it upon another culture. But the fact of the matter is, Christianity came into Europe and transformed Europe. Christianity should go into Indonesia and transform Indonesia. It should transform South America. And here's the really neat thing, is the indigenous peoples really don't have a problem with that.

It's the hypersensitive Americans. Or some indigenous person that's been trained in that hypersensitivity here in America. I remember speaking to an Agwadunna tribesman years ago, and it was so telling what he told me. Almost in tears. And he said this about the anthropologists and the people who say that their culture ought to be just maintained.

He looked at me and in very broken Spanish he said basically this, they just want us to be zoo animals. And I said, what do you mean? He goes, they want us to still live in huts. Do you live in a hut, Brother Paul? They want our children to still run around naked.

Paul, do your children run around naked, eaten up by insects? They want us to carve our canoes with axes. Is that the way you get around, Brother Paul? Why is it that progress is good for your people and bad for mine? Now, doesn't that pretty much set the argument straight, doesn't it?

It's like he's going, no, We want penicillin. We want our children to read. We like clothes. We don't want vampire vats feeding on the lips and noses and ears of our children. We would like...

You see what I'm saying? It seems like we want to keep all these cultures. It's just the spirit of the age is all it is. And we did not learn this from the Scriptures. We learned this from all that's going on in our own culture today.

This is more Western culture than anything. And we need to avoid it at all costs. Just the gospel, just the gospel. And that gospel goes in, it will transform. But then, let me ask you something.

Does the Bible teach anything about family? It does. Does it teach about relationships and work? It does. Does it teach about our thought life, the condition of our heart, how we spend our money, everything else?

It does. And it's almost like we want to give them, we want to find out what their culture is already like, then give them a gospel that's just like their culture, which is not really the gospel, and if it's just like their culture, how can it change their culture? Or we want to leave them with this superficial gospel and then let them go their own way. But see, isn't that what American evangelicalism does? You go into most churches, most places, and they say, I believe the gospel.

You know, I read that track, I prayed the prayer, I did that. But then when you start asking them, how has the gospel affected your marriage? A lot of times even people who are serious about Christianity and marriage, when you find out they've studied some Christian psychology that's not really biblical and based their whole marriage on love languages or something, and then you look at their children, well how are your children raised differently according to Scripture, and you begin to find that what we're actually doing is just reproducing in the nations what we already have. This superficial little gospel that changes absolutely nothing. Right.

Yeah, We want to transport that kind of a gospel because we don't want the gospel to transform our culture. We don't want it to change our marriages, our modesty, our money, anything like that. And So we have to try to leave cultures intact rather than to give them a vision of the Kingdom of Heaven so that they can have that kingdom rather than the world's kingdom. This is the first time, I believe, in the history of evangelicalism that we've gone back and adapted the policies that so polluted what is known as Catholicism. And that is, it seems as though Catholicism would go into an area, find out what the religion was like, the culture was like, everything else, even the holidays, the celebrations, and they would adopt that in order that the culture would be more open to supposedly the Gospel that the church had.

The problem is eventually the church doesn't have a Gospel. It just is giving them the same culture. And evangelicalism, we see it today in America, and in church growth, and all these types of things. It's how can we make the church as similar as possible to culture so it won't be difficult for culture to cross the line. That's not the power of the gospel.

Our relevancy is not in being like culture, it's in being different than culture. And so there you have it. That's why we have such little power. The only contextualization that's really worth anything is the contextualization of the kingdom of heaven. And that's where all the blessing is.

And here's something, we're not talking about... I know your heart, you know mine, I think, in the sense we're not talking about legalism, we're not talking about all kinds of rules and principles and jamming that down someone's... We're talking about the Spirit of God transforms a life, but he's also given us the Scripture so that we know what that transformation looks like And we have something to go towards as it portrays to us in the Scriptures, who is this person of Christ? And I think that also the average Christian who loves the Lord is very naive in that they really don't Understand a lot of the things that contextualization is doing on the mission field I mean there are people who are trying to translate the New Testament in a way that it's not offensive to a Muslim or to Leave out terminology that would are a title for example We're not going to say that Jesus is the Son of God because it's offensive? Well, you've just killed the gospel, so now you're teaching another Jesus.

You're teaching a Muslim Jesus to the Muslim instead of the Christian, or biblical Jesus to the Muslim. And it's happening everywhere, And we need to be aware of it. You