Reimagining World Missions to Reach the West Again
Editor’s Note: How to Reach the West Again is Timothy Keller and City to City’s book on starting a new missionary encounter with Western culture. We invited ministers from around the world to respond to, extend, and engage that vision.
The traditional narrative of global missions has been churches from the Christianised (and now, ironically, post-Christian) West reaching the rest of the world. This has predominantly been a flow in one direction—Western churches sent missionaries and resources to the rest of the world as they trained and supported local church planters.
Rethinking this unidirectional narrative—and boldly reimagining global missions—may present Western churches with at least a small part of the skills, tools, and framework they need to reach the West again.
A few challenges of a post-Christian world that Tim Keller has crisply outlined in How to Reach the West Again have always existed in large parts of the unreached world. I wonder if Western churches will benefit if they see non-Christian cultures like India and China not just as mission fields, but also as learning grounds. What if they send missionaries and partner with local church planters not just to reach foreign cultures, but also to learn lessons from those encounters and bring them back home?
Without a doubt, post-Christian and non-Christian societies are vastly different from each other. Keller spells out some sharp differences between the two in his book. Still, there are similarities—especially in relation to the animosity toward the gospel that both cultures share.
I wonder if Western churches will benefit if they see non-Christian cultures like India and China not just as mission fields, but also as learning grounds.
Here is a first attempt to explore similarities between ministry in non-Christian and post-Christian cultures.
First, let’s consider the mutual animosity to Christian ideas. Obviously, as Keller points out, post-Christian and non-Christian cultures reject Christianity for very different reasons. Whatever the differences, the cultural emotion of animosity is common. Such animosity is a relatively new experience for the Western church, but this has always been the case in countries like India and China. Perhaps the former can learn a little from the latter about living and doing ministry in an environment of fierce opposition.
Second, there’s the impact of globalisation.
Over the past few years, I have watched large swathes of affluent, urban Indians become post-Christian without ever becoming Christian! This is the direct result of globalisation. Modern Hinduism is becoming remarkably similar to late-modern America. Both cultures scoff at absolutes and are happy to defend their own relativistic notions that whatever makes them feel happy must be right. Old, moralistic notions of the Hindu religion are being exchanged for relativistic and postmodern desires of self-fulfillment.
Here is a remarkable example of such behaviour.
You may have heard of the Hindu system of arranged marriages, where parents find spouses for their adult children through means such as matrimonial ads in newspapers. One Indian mom recently placed an advertisement seeking a groom for her gay son. But she expressed a strong preference that the partner be an Iyer, the caste she comes from.
How would you explain this contradiction? This family is postmodern enough to publicly embrace gay marriage, but at the same time, traditionally Hindu enough to want a spouse from the same caste!
Old, moralistic notions of the Hindu religion are being exchanged for relativistic and postmodern desires of self-fulfillment.
Third, and quite surprisingly, there are a few similarities between Western postmodernism and ancient Hinduism.
Postmodernism is not the first ever rejection of moral absolutes. Ancient Hinduism has its own version of this rejection. There is no absolute law in Hinduism—no equivalent of the Ten Commandments or the Law. The Hindu idea of Dharma, meaning duty or virtue or morality, is not precisely the same for everyone. Different people have varying obligations. What is correct for a man in a certain position and situation may not be correct for another man in another set of status and circumstances. There is no absolute. Everything is relative. Or, to use another Hindu idea, everything is maya, or an illusion.
Churches reaching English-speaking professionals, artists, and entrepreneurs in India are grappling with such challenges. I wonder if at least some level of learning from each other is possible between American and Indian churches. This, of course, would require the re-imagination of global mission and greater collaboration in all directions—and could lead to incredible developments in reaching the West once again.
About the Author
Anand Mahadevan is an author, church planter, and business journalist. His first book is Grace of God and Flaws of Men (LifeWay, 2018). He also is the lead church planter of New City Church, Mumbai, and is married to Ajitha, with whom he has two children, Varun and Varsha.