5 Years in Taiwan: 5 Missionary Lessons Learned

(This is the first post in a 2-part series. This one is focused on missions, and the second post is more focused on personal lessons and realizations that have come with my time on the field)

A couple weeks ago marked the 5th anniversary of my arrival in Taiwan for long-term service. I was so busy I almost forgot about it altogether, and didn't do anything special to celebrate the occasion, but it's still a noteworthy date for me. Each of the 5 years here has been quite different, and come with its share of surprises, disappointments, and small successes. In this entry I'd like to share some things I've learned as a missionary over those years.

1. People in other metacultures think differently from you (in different ways than you think they do)

I spent a lot of time reading and researching the culture of Taiwan before I came to do full-time ministry here. I also had lots of short-term experience, probably quite a bit more than the average missionary coming into a culture long term. All that was only very partial preparation for understanding the different worldviews and ways of thinking that are prevalent in Taiwan, however.

What I found was that understanding a metacultural (metacultures like "Western" "Islamic" "East Asian" overly greatly diverse individual cultures to be sure, yet there are also meta-level commonalities and core values, and deeper differences from each other) level difference in thought is much more complicated than simply taking the way you would think about something and substituting a different cultural priority or core value. That's because the differences are not always parallel. People don't think as you think, just with different habits and priorities; you may run into people of greatly different cultures that you "click" with very naturally due to similarities in the way you think, and you may encounter people whose entire way of thinking seems to be a mystifying black box, with what comes out not seeming to be connected to what goes in.

My girlfriend and I have coined a useful term (useful for us, at least) in Mandarin for this idea, 想法法. (The way of your way of thinking) This differs between different personality types too, which is an added layer of complication beyond cultural differences. Using the Myers-Briggs types, for example, there are scenarios where a German or Korean ISTJ would react in very similar ways and "get" each other's way of thinking, where befriending the Korean ISTJ or a Korean ENFP early on in one's move to Korea might result in wildly different ideas about "how Korean people think."

So it's not as simple as saying "In this situation, I would be prioritizing clear communication to solve the problem but a Chinese businessman might be prioritizing indirect communication to save face." That's not wrong, but it doesn't go deep enough, because you are thinking of it as prioritizing clear communication to solve the problem, but the Chinese businessman, while probably aware of his own desire to save face, does not necessarily think of it as prioritizing indirect communication, just talking as one does in these situations. Furthermore he has his own personality, and in the complicated interaction of cultural worldviews and communication styles with individual personality and past experiences, it's hard to say which is the "head" and which is the "neck."

All that is to say, it's wise to understand cultural core values, and also wise to understand they're just one important piece of the puzzle. You want a fuller picture to navigate by, when at all possible.

2. Sometimes what we call culture fatigue is really environmental fatigue (and sometimes it's just fatigue)

More or less all long-term missionaries go through a stage called culture fatigue, which isn't the "shock" of early arrival but when those troublesome bits of the culture that are especially tiring or problematic for you or in your particular ministry context start to wear you down over time.

I've noticed, though, that the parts of "life here" that I find especially tiring are generally only partially related to the culture. For example, as I write this, New Year's Eve (Dec 31) was last night. There were some scattered fireworks and firecrackers, but the rain mostly kept things down. But if Chinese New Year's Eve this February falls on a good clear night, it will be firecracker armageddon. That one night of noise is cultural, and sleep is more or less impossible before 2 or 3AM.

But that's only the one night. Getting to sleep any night at my old apartment could be tough, because of the cars or motorcycles accelerating over the bridge near my apartment. In the U.S. there might be some rules about mufflers and things which would make a slight difference in noise levels, but not much. Essentially it's not a cultural problem at all, it's because my ministry area is near the edge of a metropolis of 7 million people. Living near a main road in a major U.S. city wouldn't be that different.

Many things we put down to culture shock are like that. It's not the culture, it's that as missionaries we have mostly chosen to live in a different environment than the ones we grew up in, or would choose to live in as adults. There are aspects of that environment that are rewarding and fascinating, and some that are inconvenient or exhausting.

Beyond that, I've noticed that when I'm exhausted, I'm in good company here. It's not as if everyone here has things good and I'm the outsider forced to struggle. Life is hard for many people, and Taipei is full of people working long hours for never-rising wages. The rampant insomnia, seasonal pollution, sometimes overcrowded metro stations, and capriciously steamy hot or clammy cold weather are all things we face together. It is true that I gave up a comparatively comfortable and less exhausting life in the States to live here and do what I do, but I knew that would be the case, and my life here is full of conveniences and comfort unknown to missionaries here decades ago, or in many other parts of the world.

So now when I'm exhausted, I don't think "I need a break from Taiwan," because it's not really about what's different about life here, and everyone else is tired too. What I really enjoy is a break in Taiwan, to do those things that made me fall in love with the place to begin with.

3. The Church may be part of the problem, but it's also the point (and the only lasting progress)

The Church is an easy target sometimes. With 2000 years of history and immeasurable impact on the world, the power and influence that accumulates in the earthly shadow cast by the kingdom of God has attracted many sinful people who did terrible things in the name of Christ, let alone the fact that believers with careers that place them in the public eye often come under heavy spiritual attack and commit grievous sins.

All this is fodder for those who want to commit the genetic fallacy and tar the Church with the sins of her individual saints (plus pretenders and wolves in sheep's clothing), as if middle-schoolers failing or cheating on their math tests should cast some kind of doubt on the legitimacy of number theory.

That being said, the Church in any locale has her problems and dysfunctions, and local churches can abound with them. Taiwanese churches have their share as well, both systemic problems sometimes accidentally introduced by missionaries doing the best they knew to do years ago, and problems in individual churches where people ought to do better, but have other priorities, just like sinful but redeemed people in any part of the world. (If I can name two examples of problems I see in churches here, one is a reliance on materials or programs from outside of Taiwan; plenty of both are available from Korean and Western churches, and little to none of it was developed in Taiwan for the needs of Taiwan. Simply translating it to Chinese doesn't make it locally effective. Another problem is that there are too many very small churches with a pastor or minister who can barely keep things going, and a congregation--often grandparents plus a few dutiful children or grandchildren--that expects all spiritual work to be done by the pastor, while most young people flock to a few large churches with better resources and an effective student ministry. Neither of these problems are anyone's "fault," but they both contribute to gridlock in effective church growth here)

When attempting to make any plan work smoothly, it's typically best to involve as few people as possible. When attempting to make any plan work smoothly when working cross-culturally with churches and church leadership, well, just don't expect that. If it didn't develop organically in the churches themselves, it probably means trying to change church culture and habits. It's not impossible, and there are wonderful success stories, but it can be tough and messy at the best of times. I've even see cultural insiders with good reputations trying to pitch ideas and completely failing because they didn't understand the culture and leadership attitude of that particular group of churches.

Due to all this, there are times when missions organizations find it easiest to work outside the domain of the local church, doing their own thing and answering to their own leadership, and interacting with churches when it's part of the strategy, or when conditions are favorable. Sometimes this happens automatically with apostolic-type church planting, in new areas where there are few or no churches to cooperate with. Perhaps too frequently, church planting is done apostolic-style because of the churches nearby.

While it's true that some churches simply aren't ready, willing, or able to cooperate effectively, we must never lose sight of the fact that the local church is the Body of Christ, incarnated in a particular area. When missionaries leave, whether to another field, retirement, or to permanently cast off the perishable, the local church, however it is, remains. One of our top priorities should be figuring out the best way to leave it healthier than we found it, yet not in ways that introduce dependency on outside resources.

4. Church planting is less about the plan (and more about the planters)

As we've tried different outreaches and activities for evangelism and to grow this little neighborhood church, two things that have become apparent is that 1) there wasn't a strong plan at the outset on how to plant the church, but also 2) that it wouldn't have mattered much because in our context, so much is based on factors we can't control. What rapidly also became apparent is that church planting is a holistic spiritual challenge that requires experience and discipline in a variety of areas. Neither my local coworker nor I had participated in a church plant before, and the past few years have been... highly instructive.

What became glaringly obvious in hindsight, after some experience, was that our team wasn't diverse enough to tackle evangelizing our neighborhood ad hoc. If you're planning an outreach aimed at families (recognizing that that mainly means moms and kids here, with the occasional dad making an appearance), you need female coworkers who can follow up with the moms that show up, and who have at least some spiritual gifting and preferably a little experience in doing so. As a youngish unmarried man, but also a foreigner here, the people I'm able to follow up with are a more selective group, and not one that typically showed up for the kinds of events and outreach strategies we used.

Temporary additions of short term workers have filled in some of the gaps in our "potential discipleship coverage", but their return home generally saw the people they attracted disperse. With a good impression of our ministry and Christians in general, to be sure, but still absent. As my Taiwanese coworker once sagely remarked, "guanxi doesn't transfer": the relationships you build with people over time can't be transferred to a coworker when it's time to leave just because you were working for a common goal.

Some basic lessons for any new community-based evangelistic ministry emerge:

1. The team should look roughly like who you're trying to reach

(Compatibility for follow-up and future discipleship should be built in, not a happy accident that requires special acts of grace to see)

2. The team should be stable, or have a stable supply of shorter term help

(And have a plan for how their period of service fits into the long term ministry goals)

3. There should be ties to the local church, however local that needs to be

(If your church is the local church, it's still a good idea to reach out to others when applicable)

4. The team should determine which things can be experimented with, and which can't be redone

(Example: Your first outreach event in a neighborhood will leave a lasting impression. People who meet you will talk to other people. Those times and events need more planning to make sure they are in line with important ministry goals, or you'll be making things tougher for yourselves at the start.)

5. We can do this (better)

When I went to seminary, I had the sort of idea that after 2000 years of perusing the same scriptures from every possible angle, what theology could be humanly known had been pretty much worked out (with, of course, various schools of thought on certain doctrines and the meaning of certain scripture passages) and we were going to learn it. What I learned instead was that while the dogmas and central doctrines of the faith have been established since the councils, there is in fact much work to be done. For example, efforts are ongoing to find period manuscripts to help decipher the hapax legomena, the words only mentioned once, to bolster our interpretations of them. The internet has provided a way for people to easily access exegetical tools and communicate biblical knowledge (enabling the promulgation of weird and apocryphal ideas to be sure, but also exposing isolated church communities to basic sound doctrine), and furthermore the task of rightly dividing the Word of God is always a new adventure, since new generations with fresh worldviews and priorities are always being born to learn of and experience God and His unchanging truth for the first time.

I had wondered if missions was not similar; if over hundreds of years of taking the gospel into different cultures, and often over a hundred years of experience in different mission boards and sending agencies, some basic effective gospel strategies and organizational wisdom had been accumulated, and the main difficulty would be the doing of it, the on-the-ground work of learning the language, building the relationships, etc.

Not so. What I found instead is that each wave/generation of missionaries comes with their own backgrounds and preconceptions, and the cultures they go to reach are sometimes changing faster even than their home cultures. (Taiwan is one example. The societal change over 3 generations here has been more like the change over 5 generations in the U.S.) What "worked so well" (I don't use quotation marks to question the truth of the statement) when some missionaries arrived seems bafflingly unfruitful when new missionaries arrive decades later, because it's a new generation witnessing to a new generation. The wine needs to be transferred to new wineskins, at times and frequencies and in ways that only wisdom, experience, and careful observation can determine well, and those things don't often line up in the joyful and stressful confusion of cross-cultural life and work. Sometimes highly motivated missionaries do great work for the kingdom, then retire, leaving a hole which cannot really be filled (and too often there was no plan or attempt to do so).

These things can't really be changed, not to mention that much kingdom fruit can only be seen when the Spirit begins to do the work we can't; so many "successful strategies" are merely a case of a mighty wind filling all sails faithfully raised, not that that particular design of sail is the one that should be used everywhere. There is a very frustrating lack of reproducibility for anyone with a business or technical background. It seems common to revert to that mentality, and seek shelter in those kinds of strategies and ministries where results can be reliably obtained through human effort.

But on the other hand, many changes in the world and society are not detrimental to the missionary task, yet missionaries have not yet, or only just, begun to make use of them. To keep up our theme of this post, here are 5 examples:

A. Use the powerful language learning tools that exist

The days of landing in a new country daunted by the prospect of a new language and enduring a stressful and possibly tearful ordeal acquiring the new language, "like drinking from a fire hose" as many vividly describe the process, in many cases can and ought to be over.

I met many exchange students from China while in seminary in Dallas (many of whom found Christ and joined churches while there, praise God). I was surprised at how good some of their English was; it wasn't just a large memorized vocabulary, but they had a strong and natural command of conversational English. I asked them how their English had gotten so good before they came to the U.S., and a few replied matter-of-factly that they'd done video chat classes with teachers in the U.S. for a while before leaving China.

So many tools are now available for widely-spoken languages that once missionaries are officially in the preparation phase for their mission, there's not really any reason not to start learning the languages then. In a new environment and culture, there are so many other challenges to face and lessons to learn that letting the full brunt of new language acquisition hit at that time is best avoided if possible. These days it can be possible.

I recognize there are two major exceptions to this: 1) When you are transferring from one field to another. Learning a language at the outset when highly motivated is one thing; adding another language on top of that one while transitioning from one busy ministry field to a less familiar one is another. 2) When you need to learn a local language, not a global one. That still doesn't stop you from video chatting with locals months before you leave, but it means fewer materials are available, and preparation for distance learning needs to be set up ahead of time.

However what I'm arguing for is more a change in attitude. Build language learning into the process of Going, and decrease its status as a barrier to people wanting to serve. I have been told that, being at least somewhat gifted with languages, I'm underestimating the stress and challenge it is for others. I understand that it's not the same for everyone, since for example as a naturally reserved introvert making new friends cross-culturally is fairly challenging for me, where it's easy for some others. But that just underlines my point; if learning languages doesn't come naturally for many people, why not make full use of the wide range of tools modern technology places at our disposal?

B. A Culture of "discipling Your replacements"

One way to reduce the impact of experienced missionaries leaving big gaps in their wake, would be if a Timothy or a bunch of them were already there when it was time for Paul to go. This is certainly no easy task, and would require a massive time and energy investment. I also know that some missionaries serve in capacities that would make this difficult. However we see both Jesus and Paul using a strategy not of "taking time away from their own ministry to disciple others", but of taking people with them to do what they do.

If a culture of discipling and mentoring (a loaded word, there's probably a better one) as an essential component of ministry was built into our missions mentality, we wouldn't view it as "taking time away from our primary ministry responsibilities" to disciple, but would always be seeking friends to minister alongside us, and discipleship would happen through that, not in spite of or apart from it. 

I believe 5 years in is not too early to be thinking about this, and it's something I want to work on in 2019. If I had to leave in 5 more years, who would step in to continue the work? Or would I simply leave, taking not only the accumulated knowledge and experience of those years with me, but leaving an empty hole in the midst of the relationships I'd invested in during those years?

What if instead I had already been inviting both newer missionaries and younger people to work alongside me for years already, who can build those relationships as I do (and perhaps faster than I do), and step in to lead those ministries when I'm not available? (And be ready to lead their own) It seems worthwhile to make this a priority to a far greater degree than I've personally seen on the field, both in and out of church.

C. Millennials are natural missionaries, but need leadership

My generation, especially its younger cohort, is continually decried as fragile and unmotivated. They have left the Church in droves, and seem to have an inexplicable lack of interest in avidly pursuing the American dream. What does motivate them, to a large degree, are causes they perceive to be worth investing one's time and energy in. It grieves me that the Church missed this. At a time when an idealistic generation was growing up with the connectivity of the internet ingrained in their psyche and a peak of post-WWII resources behind them, the Church said something along the lines of: "Sit tight, we've pretty much got this Church thing figured out smoothly. Just keep showing up for the sake of showing up and some day (very far in the future), all this can be yours."

Meanwhile the World said: "Hey, young, inexperienced idealists who want to make your mark on the world. Have you noticed how unfair the world is? Let's fight injustice together!" Secular ideology provided a cause that seemed worth fighting for. The Church at first reflexively avoided this thrown-down gauntlet, and nowadays seems to be belatedly trying to gain credibility by jumping on the social justice bandwagon. (It's like much of the Church lives in a bubble 5-10 years thick. But I digress.) But it nearly lost a generation in the process, at least for now. (Only time will tell what older millennials will decide to do)

What many Millennials seem quite willing to do at any time, is reject American dream-style materialism in favor of joining causes that seem more important, on becoming the change they want to see. That's one component of a missionary spirit, but so much of it got wasted on whatever internet cause de jour or social marxist movement took the place of the soul-transforming calling that Christ has laid upon every believer. There is no power that can make the world a better place than regenerated souls on their way to another world while focused on His kingdom. Why were we not led by mature believers into that perilously joyful adventure? Is it too late to start now? (I don't think so)

D. Try more field-based recruitment

Missionaries tend to have some pretty good stories. We can also explain exactly what we're up to and how we need help, in ways that are tough for sending organizations or churches to do secondhand. Why leave most of the work of recruiting up to them? I know different organizations have different structures and procedures, but it seems natural for those who have Gone to invite others to join them in the good work that's going on.

A culture of fields or ministry focus areas keeping in better touch with their supporting churches and reaching out to others not merely to meet support requirements, but with the faithful expectation that God will lead some people who hear to come get involved with the work, might change the picture of shrinking numbers of missionaries in many fields.

Some fields in my organization have done this with success, but it took a concentrated effort and it also takes a certain number of missionaries involved to become "self-sustaining" in that sense. I believe in the Church of the 2020's, this will be an increasingly effective strategy, as it's likely that the culture in the West will continue changing in ways that make sending agency's work (and perhaps survival) harder, not easier.

E. Make it less... dramatic (?) at the outset

I am definitely speaking as a computer engineer-turned-missionary at this point, but I feel it's important to point out that the nature of long-work missionary work has a pragmatic quality to it. Yes, we seek to be all things to all people to win some, in cultures very different from our birth cultures, and it's a work only the Spirit can do in the hearts of those we seek to reach. Yes, I was "called" to Taiwan in that traditional sense that I wouldn't say is necessary to come serve God cross-culturally but definitely makes it easier in certain ways. (On the spectrum of "anxiously figuring out if you're heading in the right direction" vs. "gritting your teeth and enduring when it's tough" it pushes things much further toward the latter)

However, while a calling from God or deep conviction that inspires us to service can both push people out of the comfortable ruts of their normal lives and provide motivation when times are tough, emphasizing it so strongly and hyping up (for lack of a more respectful term) that decision to forsake everything and go to the ends of the earth, also throws up a huge barrier, one that may have been more appropriate for ages when missions agencies were focused on weeding out the unqualified from among their many applicants, not trying hard to connect with enough willing hearts and get them on the field to keep whole mission field areas from having to close up shop from lack of missionaries to continue the good work.

My own journey to the mission field certainly involved those moments of deep conviction to make the tough decisions to get here, but it was also partly inspired by visiting Taiwan and hearing missionaries share about very accomplishable tasks and needs, getting a more concrete idea of what actually needed to be done. My thinking before visiting any missionaries abroad was that I wasn't spiritual enough (or extroverted enough) to be a missionary. After visiting Taiwan and learning more, it became more a question of "Oh, there's a lot of good work for God's kingdom that needs to be done over there. It sounds like something I could learn to do... if I dare." The daring part is where some dramatic stories of God's leading and providence come in.

The World we live in provides a variety of well-defined life path options. Maximizing the comfort of your life, achieving noteworthy success, becoming the head of a happy and prosperous family, etc. As with so many things in the Church, it would be much more effective if instead of merely pointing at what the world offers/promotes and saying "missions means sacrificing all that," we actually cast a positive vision too, of what is gained and how deeply meaningful missionary life can be.

Missionary life is almost impossibly difficult at times, but life is like that anyway, even sometimes for people who spend most of their lives trying to avoid those kinds of difficulties. What better way to spend one's transient mortal life than in full-time service to your Creator, taking light into dark places, and sharing the beautiful truths of His word and watching lives be transformed by it?

The only things you can take with you to heaven are the friends God reached through you. If that's not a rational reason to jump in and get started in kingdom work, I don't know what is.

Hurricanes and the Goodness of God

For my American readers, this hurricane season will be one that many people remember for decades after the unprecedented flooding that Hurricane Harvey brought to the Houston area. Hopefully, it will also be remembered how people came together to help each other in the midst of a tense period in our national mood, when scenes of cooperation, relief, and unselfish neighbor-love are like balm to a frenzied social soul.

Now with Irma shredding through Caribbean islands and barreling down on Florida, we seem poised to be dealt another heavy blow from weather conditions not under our control. Only time will tell the scale of the damage there. Almost certainly there will be many billions of dollars of damage, countless lives disrupted, and a few ended. For Christians, not only in America but in all the world, we do believe there is One who has power over the weather, a God without whose permission nothing can occur, blessings or tragedies alike. So why does He allow these things to occur?

No Humansplaining

It is always ill-advised and futile to attempt to give narrowly specific reasons that large-scale natural disasters occur. Was Houston being judged for its sins like many claimed or implied New Orleans was in Katrina? Were the 16,000+ killed in the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami disaster more sinful than the rest of Japan or the rest of East Asia? Were the people whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices or who were crushed by a falling tower in Siloam more guilty than the rest of Jerusalem? (Luke 13:1-5, Hint: Jesus says "No!")

In the whatever'th-wave of the feminist movement we're in now, "man-splaining" is criticized as men offering unnecessary or patronizing explanations to which they expect women to listen respectfully. Or something like that. These things tend to be flexibly defined by those who wish to claim victim status, whether they have a legitimate cause for complaint or not. (They might as well lock up all the INTPs now, we love to explain things to anyone willing to listen to that much excited detail.)

But there is another kind of mansplaining, or humansplaining, which I would love to see end, and that is when people with positions of spiritual authority start trying to explain things they don't understand because they feel people expect them to have an explanation. Like the occasional situation in Chinese culture where courtesy demands a response to tourist inquiries of how to get to a place even if the local being asked has no idea, it's not so much about knowing, as feeling that you are in a position where giving an answer is expected and so you come up with a good-sounding one.

As a missionary with a seminary degree, I am sometimes put in this position. While I am not a very worthy example, at least I do try to always say when I don't know something off the top of my head but will go research it and have a better answer later, or else that the Bible doesn't actually give us an answer, so I neither have one nor should you trust anyone who says they do. It may be less satisfying than a pithy response you can copy and paste onto a picture and pass around social media, but I don't dare put words in the Bible's mouth. (If you feel I have done so with this post, feel free to let me know)

When a pastor or prominent Christian or anyone else stands up and says that a disaster happened for positive or negative reasons--as judgment for sin, or to bring everyone together--they are choosing from various possibilities, hopefully biblical-based ones, but they have no possible way of knowing the real reason or combinations. We are not privy to an explanation from God, and be very cautious about anyone claiming that they are.

But if we can't known the specific reason, then on a more basic level, why would a good God allow disasters like Katrina, like the Tohoku Quake, like the flooding in Houston, like the crises which you didn't even know were claiming lives every day in less-reported areas of the world, to happen? And can we answer that question without "humansplaining" or adding purely speculative ideas to scripture?
I think we can, and this is my attempt to do so.

A hurricane season that will be long remembered...

Why God Lets Hurricanes Strike Major Cities

I. Because when ocean water reaches a certain temperature, and seasonal wind patterns...

We know this reason, or at least learned it in high school or saw it on the weather channel at some point. This is what people call the scientific reason, and what atheists tiresomely pretend makes God unnecessary until you bring up that this is not the Why at all, but the How. Personally I find it fascinating, how the unbelievable amount of energy representing in a raging hurricane is all the result of a positive feedback loop that can emerge from the tranquil, sun-warmed ocean when conditions are right. But that's wandering from the thrust of our topic.

As I have blogged previously, the ancient Greeks spent some time thinking about why things happen, and came up with the brilliant idea that every event had multiple causes, as seen from different perspectives.

For a simple example, a crystal goblet dropped on a stone floor shatters into scintillating shards. Why? Well, 1) because someone dropped it. But also 2) because it's crystal. If it was rubber or wood, it mostly likely would have survived the fall. Also 3) because the floor is stone. If it had been thick shag carpet, the goblet probably also would have been fine, though my allergies might not. Also 4) because in some humanly incomprehensible way, the shattered goblet fits into the vast and mysterious unfolding of all things, under God's authority and obeying His will. When we ask "why did this happen" we are usually speaking more to the that last category. What was the ultimate purpose?

I am not here suggesting the Greek causal categories are comprehensive or even correct. But their reminder to us that there is not merely one reason for things to occur is important.

So for our damaging hurricane, we could come up with a similar set of explanations. "Why did a massive hurricane strike a populated area with lethal results?":

1) Because of a set of natural phenomenon which to some extent can be traced back in chains of cause and effect to the beginning of the universe. Energy was transferred and the earth went around the sun and the ocean sloshed around for millennia and the hurricane was always going to happen at that time, unless you want to go really deep into arguments about human free will and chaos theory, and suggest the sinking of some Carthaginian trireme during the Punic Wars was just enough energy disruption to butterfly effect the hurricane into being thousands of years later. Perhaps so, but even that can be described precisely by physics, if we had access to the data.

2) Because people decided to build a city there. Actually there are lots of big coastal cities, and hurricanes have a very wide track. Sooner or later every city near the coast will be hit, it's just a matter of time. If we didn't build any major cities within 50 miles of the coast, hurricanes would rarely ever threaten them seriously.

3) Because people build communities out of materials which can be affected by storms. I live in Taiwan, where cities are dense and built mostly out of concrete and steel. Here in the capital metro area, even supertyphoons are mostly just a day of missed work or school, while eating instant noodles you bought at 7-11 before the storm got too intense to carry an umbrella, and listening to the wind howling past the windows. People who live in the mountains are at greater risk of mudslides and flash flooding, however, because of the nature of their environment. Our choice of living space and way of life does render us more or less vulnerable to nature's occasional fury, and like New Orleans, deciding to live in low-lying coastal areas is simply accepting the risk that sooner or later there will be tragedy.

4) Because God did not prevent it. I say it in this way, because when people ask the question in other way (If God is good, why does He send hurricanes) they are implying that a hurricane wasn't going to happen, and God "incited" it. But it was, as we explained above. Given scientific superpowers, we could trace the unbroken chain of cause and effect and energy transfer and weather patterns all the way back to the Creation event. This is important. God's creation is real. It is broken by sin, but it still functions according to knowable and consistent physical laws. Now the Bible certainly does speak of God causing disasters specifically as punishment for sin, but it also certainly does not say that every natural phenomenon which humans are caught up in and suffer is a punishment from God.

So we live in the kind of world where hurricanes happen, we have built cities in their path, and we haven't built those cities to be hurricane-resistant. Yet knowing all this, God doesn't stop them. Why? This brings us to the second part of what we mean when we ask why a disaster occurred:

II. Because God did not interfere in the Natural Order on this occasion

We spoke of the unbroken chain of cause and effect which proceeds forth from the creation event: God can and does interfere with this when He decides to, but this is a specific and special event, what we call a miracle. Even in the Bible, which being concerned with God's salvation plan for humanity and interactions with us mentions miracles and direct acts of God very frequently, we still read of a natural world that is God's creation and functions more or less as it was designed to, a world where the sun is a light-emitting object that God placed in the high heavens for the benefit of earth (a different kind of geocentrism -- the sun doesn't revolve around us, but it's there for us and not we for it), yet not a world where the sun is a little god in a chariot that rides around the sky every day but might choose not to do so tomorrow, or might be caught by a hungry sky wolf instead. The very existence and persistence of creation is itself a miracle, to be sure, but to speak as though every single thing that happens each moment is an arbitrary supernatural intervention risks ignoring a default reality the Bible itself assumes, the blessing of being able to take reality for granted, a core component of a scriptural worldview that all modern science is based on and to which it testifies.

So science is true and godly in the sense that it measures this physical world God established to function according to the laws of physics, neither arbitrary nor pantheistic. Yet if we believed only in this, we would be deists and not followers of Christ. As Christians we understand additionally that the One who set those parameters is present and active, and can always make the call to intervene directly, and does so both unprompted for His own reasons and in answer to our prayers.

So then under what conditions does God intervene? The Bible gives us some general categories:

1) Salvation history - God's interactions with the Patriarchs, miracles on behalf of Israel, through His prophets, in the person of Jesus Christ, etc. The Bible is mostly about this--God's special interactions with individuals and nations in His eternal plan for our redemption, and what happened in history as a result.

2) Judgment for Sin - Both the Old and New Testaments mention specific occasions not directly related to the progression of salvation history, which show God specifically acting to punish special sin. In the Old Testament we famously have Sodom and Gomorrah, but in the New Testament we also have Herod, receiving the crowds' adulation in a blasphemous way (Knowing who the LORD was, he still welcomed the crowds' praising him as divine) and being struck down for it. This is mentioned almost parenthetically as a direct punishment by God, and not as the Spirit-empowered act of any apostle, like the blindness of Elymas. We can assume if God punished both individuals and cities/nations directly, in both Old and New Testaments, for sins other than causing harm to Israel (as in the case of Egypt), then He may still do so today.

3)  As an Answer to Prayer - Whether it is the healings and exorcisms performed by the disciples, or the miraculous answers to prayer the Church has seen from its inception until today, Christians know that God is sometimes willing to intervene dramatically. Testimonies to medical "mystery" cases where tumors vanish and doctors are confused by inexplicable recoveries are so common (even discounting the made-up, "share this post for a blessing" ones) that if modern scientists were as inquisitive as their forebearers we'd have whole fields of research trying to figure out by what means these things are occurring. (expect some kind of quantum energy/power of positive thinking explanations to crop up eventually as a way to get around a Biblical explanation if they haven't already, East Asia is way ahead of the West on that front)
Another specific example pertinent to our topic today: After a particularly severe typhoon here in Taiwan a few years ago, cleanup had just begun and rescue crews were still trying to get to people trapped in the mountains, when another typhoon headed for the island. Many people prayed earnestly, and the typhoon made an abrupt u-turn and headed straight back into the Pacific Ocean where it dissipated. I've heard similar stories in other places, and can't speak to their veracity, but at least I've witnessed it happen once myself in this case.

All this has prepared us to answer the central question: If a hurricane was going to hit a city through natural processes, yet God could directly intervene if He so desired, why didn't He do so?

Let's check our categories of Divine intervention mentioned above:

1) Is the hurricane part of salvation history? By definition, no.

2) Is the hurricane judgment for sin? Possibly. As I said above, it's foolish for us humans to pronounce this without knowing the mind of God (let alone start listing out which sins we guess God is punishing or why it was these people and not other people), but with Biblical precedent we also can't rule it out. I personally don't like this explanation because a hurricane is not really a "black swan" event; they happen every year, some are always more powerful than others, and it's only a matter of time before a large city is affected.

3) Did people earnestly pray in faith for God to send the hurricane somewhere else but He answered no? That's complicated, isn't it? Who would you pray for the storm to hit instead of you? As a Christian I fully believe that if many churches gathered together and prayed for God to make the storm do a 180 degree turn and head back out into the Atlantic, He could and might do that. I've seen a similar thing happen once, as I noted above. Obviously I have no way of knowing if those prayers occurred, though I think people tend to not pray with that kind of real urgency unless there's a special emergency. Sometimes we blame God for things we never really petitioned Him to change, but both scripture and the church's experience of great acts of God suggest that there is power in many people humbly petitioning God that a single person's earnest request does not have. To investigate how that works would both take a longer blog than this, but it can be said that prayer is never a means to manipulate God; we can never discover a formula by which to get consistent affirmative answers to our various requests, the Bible only touches on the topic of which prayers are pleasing to God, while telling us that there are some requests to which we will get consistent affirmative answers (Like James 1:5). (Note: This isn't a question of sovereignty--if God has ordained a thing, He has ordained the means, for example the prayers of many, by which it shall occur.)

III. Because Suffering and Pain is the Default of our World, not the Exception

Perhaps I was the only person who hadn't figured that out, but growing up this was not clear. Life wasn't perfect, but it was alright, and events like serious sickness or car accidents or job loss or natural disasters were tragic intrusions in how life ought to be. Much of the developed world seeks to make this perspective as much a reality as possible--that through use of resources and wise decision making, the suffering of this life may be minimized for as many people as possible. This is not a biblical perspective, but it's a natural human one, that leads to evils as well as good. (Trying to minimize suffering leads to acts of mercy and the alleviation of need, but also to abortion and euthanasia)
Scripture does not describe the world exactly in this way. Rather, a peaceful life free from tragic incidents or societal chaos is a blessing from God, a manifestation of Shalom, something to be sought after not because it is "normal" but because it's what people want and how the world was initially supposed to be. We are all longing after Eden, but sin has turned our quest for it into the welfare state, or even communist regimes.

When man fell, he dragged creation down with him. we have no idea if the world had hurricanes before the fall; although people do like to take one verse and run with it, on this question at least there is biblical evidence to suggest that before Noah's flood the climate didn't allow for that kind of thing. By the time of Noah's flood, not only had the fall taken place, but mankind was so wicked that God initiated a pan-disaster that dwarfs the most furious hurricane the world has ever known. To run the risk of the "humansplaining" I mentioned above, my understanding ("I, not the Lord") is that hurricanes and many other potentially lethal weather events began in the post-flood world as an inevitable result of changed climatic factors. (There is also some biblical evidence to suggest "climate change" in terms not of global warming, which an increasingly small number of people cling to in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, but of the increasing instability of the climate is also an inevitable result of the fall, and will only get worse until the end.)

I have mentioned in a previous blog how, just as you cannot get the tin out of a bronze-alloy sword without destroying it, our post-fall world is alloyed with sin. God will remove it one day, but in doing so "the heavens will perish with fire" and the "earth shall melt like wax." He delays so that more will know Him, more will fill His tables at the feast and enter His dwellings, before the end comes and the door is closed.

Hurricanes are an inevitable phenomenon in our sin-alloyed world. God does not, except in special cases, intervene to prevent the natural consequences of sin. That is the reality of the messed-up world we inhabit. Yet through common grace, by wisdom and understanding the nature of creation (effective city planning and disaster preparation, science that understands the weather and also stronger building materials, etc), we are free to develop ways to mitigate the destructive power of natural phenomenon, and indeed we have done so to a large degree.

So pray for recovery in Houston, pray for mercy in Florida and the Caribbean, and indeed for western wildfires, violence in Syria and Yemen and Nigeria and Sudan and American inner cities and elsewhere, tensions on the Korean peninsula, and a whole host of situations. But if you are simply praying that God will make all the bad things and the hurting stop, that prayer may arise out of the heart's distress, but it does not correspond to biblical reality. The consequences of human sin will wreak havoc as they do, until the final judgment.

Then, what should we do?

God has entrusted the task of letting the world hear the gospel to us. While movements of the Spirit are bringing millions to His kingdom, they are doing so alongside and through the faithful service of brothers and sisters around the world. We are His witnesses, and that is our constant and joyful responsibility whether or not we see God specifically intervening to do miracles on His own. "He's not a tame lion," but we are no longer languishing in the endless winter of frozen Narnia--Christmas has come, and Aslan has died, defeated death, and opened the way.

Now should we sit and question God for letting nature take its course, a course we chose ourselves in Eden by deciding we had better options than trusting obedience? Not as believers. We are on this earth to proclaim Christ to a world that desperately needs hope beyond this world. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. When confronted with disaster, we have two necessary options:

1. Pray, but don't do it alone. God does listen to our requests made in faith. If He chooses to let nature take its course, that is not being mean or unjust, that is in fact exactly justice. He may rather choose to show special mercy in a specific situation, even in a miraculous way, but my experience at least is that He rarely does so when we are casual about asking. And I don't mean prayer memes on FB, but roomfuls of people on their knees.

2. Go. Help. If you are burdened by a disaster, demanding the government or somebody do something on your behalf earns you zero points. (maybe even negative points, by encouraging a culture of shifting Christian responsibility up the secular ladder) Also you can earnestly request, but are unable to demand God do anything. But you are quite capable of being the body of Christ and bringing love and joy to a broken world. If people need help, you go help them.

And some people already are, as we watched in Houston. But what if, like Paul and his race, the Church was excited and even competitive about this? What if the government complained that so many Christians were already responding that they couldn't get state and federal aid in there? (I'm not talking about interfering with professionals doing their jobs, I'm saying a) that's an excuse when there's so much that can be done, and b) Christians can get access to that training too, yeah?) What if we decided no one would outdo us in showing charitable love and being first on the scene to bring mercy and relief in times of disaster and hurting?

I guess, in that situation, the Church might even look like salt and light to a hungry and darkened world. Pray for Florida, pray for Houston, pray for God's mercy on those involved in these and other disasters nationally and globally. Then recognize that God might be prompting you to be one of those expressions of His mercy that you were praying for, and go help someone.

Why the "Pagan Origins" of Christmas... Don't Matter

Disclaimer: This post is, naturally, entirely my own perspective. I say things which some raised in a fundamentalist background may take offense to, but having been raised in a semi-fundamentalist background myself, I submit that might be a little too natural of a reflex for us. Hear me out to the end first, then I'm happy to hear any objections.

Also, for those of you who say "but Christmas is over," the 12 days of Christmas are still very much underway. We're not even to the seven shrimp a swimming yet...

1. "Folk" Religious Practice

One of my favorite professors in seminary brought up an issue which I'd noticed but not had a good name for until then, the concept of "Folk Theology." Any major religion with established doctrines and practices can have a "folk" version, which is what happens when one gets far away from those who keep things orthodox, and superstitions and traditions begin creeping in, influence from the surrounding culture which rises from background culture to mix with religious conviction, etc.

Scripture is quite clear that we have a direct relationship to God. Because of Christ's atonement, we can boldly approach the throne of grace, a staggering concept that I am still trying to wrap my mind around. When Jesus taught His disciples how to pray, He did so by speaking to the Father directly, not angels, His mother, or anyone else.

Folk theology happens when the natural ways of fallen human thinking start to mix with "theology proper," and people start doing what comes more naturally. Interposing saints or angels between oneself and God to get more "influence," would be one example, though sadly one that has become fairly established practice within large portions of the Roman Catholic Church. (I still pray that the divided church in the future may become one, as the body of Christ ought to be united)

Much of the Islamic world practices not "proper" Islam, but some version of Folk Islam, with local deities still worshipped in some form under Allah, or people wearing talismans to ward off the evil eye, etc. Many of the Islamic terror movements claim legitimacy as reformers, initially coming in to banish these non-acceptable practices and preach a more Qur'an-centric Islamic message, naturally with their own interpretation emphasizing Jihad, etc. (then start recruiting...)

Other milder examples might be putting a Jesus fish on your car, not just as an expression of belief, but because "I'm not saying it will keep me from having car wrecks, but it can't hurt," or carrying one of those angel pennies. Doing these things is not necessarily wrong, but when we start turning to any physical things, rituals, or routines for the blessing and protection that come from God alone, we are walking away from scripture, down the road of folk theology that leads eventually to heresy and superstition.

It's an easy and natural trap to fall into. It could start as people copying a respected and godly leader in their church regarding a particular practice and teaching others to do so, without a total understanding of why he chose that way or that he himself would say it's purely his preference. It could start with someone wanting a tangible expression of the blessing and protection God provides, then more and more identifying that tangible object or symbol with the blessing and protection itself.

It's not like a minefield to be avoided, it's more like rust: It's always gradually appearing, some environments are more conducive to it than others, and it can be prevented with maintenance and care, in this case by always using Scripture as our foundation. (Scripture doesn't say whether you should have a cross on the wall behind the pulpit or not, or even whether you should have a pulpit, but one can easily understand from Scriptural principles that people should not be going up and kneeling before the cross because they think they are more likely to receive God's forgiveness that way)

I saw a severe case of this problem in Mexico, where historical fusion and syncretism with local pagan religions has led to a muddled situation where Mary is worshipped as a goddess (with the moon behind her and all, just like the moon goddess she replaced), and superstition is totally rampant, with little understanding of actual scriptural doctrine in many cases. I appreciate the missionaries and local believers I have met there who labor against this infernal confusion; they need and deserve our prayers. (OMF has a good page on how something similar happened in the Philippines)

The question we need to answer in this blog is, is that what's happened to Christmas? Have we allowed superstitions, influences from pagan/pre-Christian European cultures, to mix together with a straightforward remembrance and celebration of Christ's incarnation? 

2. The Dangers of Witch-Hunting

At least this guy wasn't trying to say Santa is Satan with the letters re-arranged...

I grew up in a fairly fundamentalist evangelical setting. (Apologies to older readers; I recognize the term was not originally negative and the motives of the original movement were good, but I'm using it in the more recent sense) We didn't burn any books, but we did throw away some Disney movies, and we weren't allowed to listen to secular music, or Christian music that "sounded like" secular music (Christian pop rock danced on the margin). I confess that I did not always adhere to this rule (I wonder if my parents are reading this? Well, they didn't adhere to it 100% either, haha), but I did learn the important lesson that what we put into our minds is important. Discernment is strangely unpopular, but I'm a big fan, as you will see.

Growing up in that setting, I have experience with fundamentalism ranging from the cloistering reflex only partially influenced by a legalistic way of thinking to crazy, pharisaical demagoguery.

What I observed was this:

A culture can easily develop in which the Biblical concept of "the world" that is our field of ministry becomes eclipsed by the Biblical concept of "the world" that is this corrupt world system full of distractions and temptations, and instead of engaging it as salt and light, Christians began to withdraw from it.

Having circled the wagons (formed a outward-facing defensive perimeter protecting what's inside, if you're unfamiliar with the more colorful Old West expression), they then begin to "purge" worldly influences from their midst. This often begins as a genuine attempt to pursue godliness and remove sin, but sadly rarely stops there, becoming a sort of contest: who can find the devil where no one had noticed him before?

I can remember in my childhood, Christian magazines breathlessly explaining how non-Christians were making movies or TV shows that had values that undermined biblical principles, and that good parents should keep their children from watching those things (or to be safe, anything from the same company), lest they be unconsciously corrupted or tainted somehow.

Now, I don't blame the parents. It did sound pretty terrifying, and typically we kids agreed with our parents that if a show or movie was "bad," then we shouldn't watch it. And I think it's instinctive for a loving parent to shield their child from harmful influences if they can. In retrospect I also think it had a lot to do with movements within the Church in America of that decade, with the Moral Majority and other attempts to steer the moral climate of the nation from the top-down, away from the cliff towards which it was hurtling, since that still seemed possible at the time. (Despite the deplorable state of our culture as 2015 approaches, I am strangely optimistic; the Church has always done poorly when it dabbled in politics, but shone brightly when times are dark)

But my point is, a church, or portions of the Church, can sometimes get into a witch-hunting mindset, forgetting that from Eden onward the world has always been the world, fallen, and full of people who don't live by Biblical principles. Instead of going out to be salt and light, they become focused on avoiding and purging bad influences. This embattled mentality can turn into a kind of deep-seated fear, which leads to even more urgent searching to uncover hidden evil influences. (Soon everything is suspect, everything is guilty until proven innocent, not even explicitly conservative and evangelical sources cleave closely enough to whatever fine line is judged to be truly safe.) It's a fear which feeds on itself, and it can become like a prison that locks from the inside.

3. The Church Never Existed in a Culture-less Vacuum

Claims that the Church has been contaminated by the surrounding culture go all the way back to the Gospel writers, with some scholars accusing the Apostle John, for example, of having been too influenced by Greek philosophy. It's actually quite a common accusation that Greek thought and gnostic influences warped Christian doctrine from the very beginning of the Church. Does that mean we throw out all the early Church fathers as "tainted"? Of course not. For one, the Early Church Fathers are excellent sources for us, but we do not regard them as infallible to begin with. Two, it is they who wrestled with the heresies and hammered out doctrinal statements from which we benefit today. There is great value in studying them as wise and godly examples, not in subjecting them to an ideological litmus test. Three, "Biblical scholars" will think up every kind of possible accusation to throw at something that hasn't been tried yet. Not all of them actually believe the Bible, but they all need to write dissertations.

I love G.K.Chesterton's illustration of orthodoxy as a horse or chariot rider who can handle shocks and bumps without losing his balance precisely because he is always moving. And I think his picture is accurate.

The Church is not a delicate glass of water we strive to keep perfectly clear and undisturbed, it is the Body of Christ that reaches out to this world and lives in it, beset by strange circumstances and local confusions, always "in crisis" but never destroyed, always under attack but never defeated, always purifying itself from heresies and finding new ones popping up wherever the church spreads rapidly. It would be impossible if sustained by men, but it is sustained by God.

When the Church goes into a new culture, or develops and spreads in any culture, it can express unchanging, transcendent truths through each culture in contextually appropriate ways. This is a huge difference between a global religion like Christianity and a culture-bound one like Hinduism. Even with a massive number of adherents, due to India's population, and even with some principles of Hindu philosophy having spread around the world, very popular at various times, monkey temples and sacred cows never really caught on in a global context, and aren't going to. Those things can't really escape the culture they developed. If they exist outside of India, they do so directly in proportion to the prevalence of that culture in a specific area.

Christianity is unique among religions (it's not merely a religion, but I'm speaking in comparative terms) in being the least dependent on culture. Local religions, based on un-exportable cultural values or concepts, typically cannot ever hold out against global ones which are based on more universal principles and can thus cross cultures with varying degrees of success, and are often attractive to younger generations who have begun to lose their traditional values but recognize it as a link to a wider world, both geographically and conceptually.

But Christianity stands out clearly even among global religions..
Islam, the second-most exportable religion, is heavily influenced by Bedouin cultural values at its core, and tends to "Arabicize" cultures where it gains influence to bring them in line with Qur'anic principles. Hinduism, as mentioned above, has a very large number of adherents but I would argue it is not truly a global religion in the sense that it can traverse dissimilar cultures. Buddhism, with its roots in Hinduism, is more like a complex series of related world views, ranging from polytheistic/animist religion to atheistic philosophy, yet it is only in the philosophical realm, like Hinduism, that it has found a real following in the West. It's easy to find fans of Zen in America, but non-Asian Tibetan Buddhists are a bit sparser.

Christianity, by contrast, has an meta-cultural message (it is represented in many cultures but the message itself transcends culture and is distinct from any of the particular cultures in which it is represented). Certainly, one could claim that it has a close association with the West, but one then has to define "West." Tens of thousands of Korean missionaries certainly would not agree with you, and the Russian Orthodox church with over one hundred million members might object as well. The global Church has had a very Western feeling over the past two centuries because, for reasons of both church and secular/economic history, that's where the vast majority of missionaries had been coming from. That is changing in the 21st century, to the extent that there may come a day when the Church in Europe and even America is revitalized by African, Asian, and South America missionaries. The process has already begun. A dear sister from Ghana I met at seminary considers herself a missionary to America, to bring God's truth back to the land which blessed so many nations with the gospel but is now itself in dire need of revival.

When people repeat the oft-quoted phrase "it's not a religion, it's a relationship," though it is a bit hyperbolic (Christianity certainly is a religion, but one which is founded on a relationship to God not found or attempted in any other religion) they are getting at this truth: Christianity is a belief in God as He has revealed Himself to us through Scripture (comprising the Bible), and faith that Jesus Christ is God, as He claimed to be, and that we can have a relationship with God, through Christ, that allows us to receive a different kind of life from Him, an eternal life which is holy and can be lived in His presence both on earth and in heaven. That message may be more readily received or more easily communicated in certain cultures, but it's all on a higher level of abstraction than any particular culture. Any cultural clashes will occur in the attempted working out of these truths in reality. Then indeed, there may be clashes all the way to martyrdom, but one then finds local groups of believers rapidly follow.

And from the 1st Century AD until now, all those believers have come from a particular culture or another, and have not magically been transported out of it when they believed. They have had to express the truths of Christianity in their own culture, either by adapting existing cultural practices and ways of thinking, creating new practices and ways of thinking to express Christian truth within the context of their culture, or borrowing practices and ways of thinking from outside their own culture.

Nearly any Christian in the 21st century who has been trained to work in a cross-cultural context would agree that the first two are superior, and I agree both in the abstract and from experience. The last thing you want is for your local church to be copying foreign ways of doing things which confuse and repel locals and train them to think Christianity is therefore a foreign religion which has nothing to do with them. Sadly, this did occur in Taiwan to some extent, though often it happened despite the missionaries' best efforts to avoid it.

4. What's All This Got to Do with Christmas?

So far I've set out a few points:
1. We must be careful to avoid folk religious ways of thinking.
2. We must remember we are to be light to the world, and not fall into an embattled mentality of fear-based "witch-hunting," choosing to disqualify instead of using discernment
3. Christianity is neither culture-bound nor culture-less, but is meta-cultural, and finds its best and most authentic expression when believers live out Christian truth in ways that make sense within their own culture.

Those are important to our discussion because they all have to do with how many people perceive Christmas to be a pagan holiday.

Europe has a long history of Christianity, the "Christendom" of times gone by, where for centuries a European Church both changed Europe and was changed by it. The particular expression of Christianity in Europe looked very different in different places, of course, but in much of Europe it first clashed with, then supplanted, local pagan religions. We don't have a lot of accurate information about these (neopagan practices are almost totally made up, based on guesses of how people might have done things), but we have enough information to know that some Christmas traditions may have some roots in what were originally pagan practices. Plus, the date itself seems to coincide with various pagan festivals centered around the Winter Solstice. A quick google search will reveal all you ever wanted to know about those associations, with many facts both legitimate and worthy of consideration and hilariously wrong. But it doesn't matter.

Here's why:

The Bible, and the history of God's dealings with men that we read in it, is a beautiful expression of God's truth in reality. Reality echoes this divine truth in innumerable ways, and therefore so does human culture. Pagan religions from Egypt to Scandinavia have the story of a dying and rising god, some long before Jesus came to earth. It would be foolish at best to suggest that those stories in any way taint or diminish the story of the Resurrection. They are merely faint and confused echoes of a grand eternal truth. For some, such as the former atheist C.S.Lewis, God used them to point the way towards that truth.

More pointedly, does the fact that the cross was a brutal piece of execution equipment used by the pagan, polytheistic Romans, a symbol of the consequences of rebellion against supposedly all-powerful Rome, make the cross a pagan symbol?

I imagine (and hope) you are saying to yourself "of course not," but I encourage you to follow that logic. Why not? What transformed the cross into an acceptable symbol for the church to use, from early in its history until today, and even by which to identify itself? The answer is, what happened on it; an event that forever changed the meaning of that symbol. A symbol of suffering and shame became a symbol of hope and faith and God's love. So symbols and images can be repurposed; they can be transformed from whatever their original meaning was into something else, including something charged with gospel significance.

Of course it's not something one can do randomly; the transformational event must totally dominate the original meaning so that the symbol is now instinctively understood to refer now to this new meaning. A notable negative example: the swastika. Once a symbol of peace (still a common Buddhist symbol here in Asia), cannot now to Westerner's minds convey anything other than nazism, violent racism, and the holocaust.

Now we arrive at my point about folk religion. We know, as scripturally-educated believers, that it is not religious symbols and pictures that have power (in the spiritual sense). They are nothing in themselves; all authority on heaven and earth has been given to Christ, and He does not lend that authority to an idol of any kind. Therefore an idol is nothing, as Paul said. An empty symbol, an image of supposed authority that cannot reference any true authority. Some measure of power, yes, while darkness still remains on this earth, but even that darkness is subject to the authority of Christ, and soon will be put under His feet. (and ours, with and through Him)

Therefore, while obviously we do not and should not wish to associate ourselves with darkness, we need not fear pagan symbols as pagans do, because we know they are empty, and the darkness they point to has been defeated, even mocked, by Christ on the cross.

So we need not irrationally fear a pagan symbol as something that can hurt us somehow, give us "bad mojo," or somehow remove authority from Christ. That is a folk religious way of thinking, like people in medieval Europe who supposedly said "God bless you" when you sneezed, for fear part of your soul had escaped temporarily and you were in spiritual danger.

But this means if a Christmas tree, for example, is not now a symbol of paganism, it doesn't matter if it was one 500 years ago. The original meaning has been lost, beyond anything but guesses and conjectures, and it is now irrevocably globally identified with a celebration of Christ's birth. And that Christ's birth is celebrated on a date close to the Winter Solstice doesn't matter, because God made the winter solstice. Through Christ all things were created. It's His, not theirs.

Light cancels out darkness, not the other way around. God wins. That is the most fundamental thing I can say about this entire topic, Christmas, Easter, etc. Finding a tenuous or potential historical link back to something pagan does not cancel out that symbol, that event, that celebration. It means the light is shining in the darkness, and the darkness is not overcoming it. God is winning. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light... for unto us a child is born. The symbols of that former darkness are stripped from the enemy one at a time, and they are laid at Christ's feet. The Winter Solstice may have recently passed, but we marked it by joyfully celebrating the birth of our Lord, our Savior, and our King.
And soon it shall be Spring.

For to us a child is born,
    to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
    and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of his government and of peace
    there will be no end,
on the throne of David and over his kingdom,
    to establish it and to uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
    from this time forth and forevermore.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.
(Isaiah 9:6-7)

"Relevancy"

Beginning in the late 19th century, in the face of seemingly unanswerable attacks by post-Enlightenment scholarship, many German liberal theologians tried to save what they saw as the valuable cultural institution of Christianity by removing the supernatural portions of our Faith. They perceived their goal as that of saving the Church, but only succeeded in attempting to discard the Faith itself. In so doing they denied the power of the gospel, and were left with only the fading inertia of whatever positive moral influences it still provided in their society, and the lovely exterior covering of tradition and meaning it had accrued over time. (For my computer-literate friends, we might say they wanted to throw out most of the source files yet somehow retain a functioning GUI.)

I suspect decades down the road, American cultural Christianity (from the megachurches down) might be accused of something similar: discarding the hard truths of Scripture not to remain relevant in the face of Rationalism, but to remain relevant in an entertainment-crazed culture in which the only absolute is that the final arbiter of good and evil is society's collective opinion, which must never be contradicted or opposed.
And looking around, we do find that much of the Church in America is preoccupied in chasing the idol of false relevancy. This is sadly ironic in that one thing the Church, commanded to communicate eternal, unchanging Truth to the world, has always been particularly poor at is achieving the sort of relevancy which must constantly change with the times and trends. The church seems bent on playing catch-up with the world, either "Come see, we do that too," or "We made our own, Christian version of that," not realizing that while this attempt to stay on top of secular trends may seem cool to those who remain within the Christian bubble, it is woefully unimpressive to those who do not.

Imagining an elderly couple trying to use communication age acronyms like "lol" and "ikr" to seem relevant to their grandchildren is a good illustration. Will this impress their grandchildren? Most likely not, though they may find it amusing. And outside the family context, as a longtime youth worker I can testify to how embarrassing it is when anyone old enough to have children in school tries to adopt the latest speech styles of students "to relate to them." (Seriously, don't ever do it, we cringe in embarrassment for you.)

Few things make a person seem more actually out of touch than trying to pretend they are relevant in this particular way. Part of the reason for this is that, seemingly contrary to popular opinion, students are quite aware that older adults have useful lessons to offer them. And this is what they want, not inherently doomed attempts on the part of the speaker to pretend they are still young enough to be socially relevant. All people want to hear something which they think will be valuable for them, and the style used to convey it should be whatever can best not interfere with its delivery.

The earlier example is the same; the grandparents don't need to try to be trendy, their grandchildren (hopefully) already love and respect them. And if not, then attempting to adopt their language will only hurt the cause. Grandparents are 100% relevant, however, when they offer what only they can, the unique dynamic of love, wisdom, and affection which leaps across two generations and enriches both.

The Church is no different. We are not Steve Jobs, who walked the earth 2 years ago and is now dead. We are the Body of Christ, who walked the earth 2000 years ago and lives, and is the source of life. We've been given precious, eternal truth, and our clumsy attempts to impress the world by looking like it merely distract. The revelation of the identity of God and atoning work of Christ has overthrown empires, and permanently changed the course of human affairs. The trends of a particular decade are vanishingly flimsy and transient by comparison. (And there is a secret which seems to have eluded even those relevancy-chasing church leaders but is apparent through the example of Islam today: In our relativistic age, that which refuses to compromise is increasingly relevant by its very nature, like a rock in a stream which forces the water to flow around it.)

The Church is only relevant when we deal in what only the Church possesses, the unchanging, eternal truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which can transform a life today just as easily as it did a thousand years ago.
It is not the world's message, it is a message which the world lacks, and is dying to hear.
Life-saving truth is always relevant.