Worldview Lessons

I got the following article in my weekly Relevant Leader email. I thought it had good lessons that we as young adults could learn, so I'm posting it here.

(By the way, not only did I learn some of these same principles during my time in Venezuela, but I also learned them elsewhere in life as well. So you don't have to go overseas in order to learn the three lessons below!)

Many Christians in America tend to trip up on the issue of worldview. Many have little awareness of what worldview is, how it works, what the major worldviews are or how the biblical worldview differs from other alternatives. In most cases this is true whether the Christians in question consider themselves to be radical, liberal, revisionist, moderate, conservative or fundamentalist! It seems that the only people who do have a good grasp of worldview issues are missionaries or others involved in cross-cultural business or church planting. Which brings me to my passage to India. I've been in India twice, each time for about three months. While there I learned some important worldview lessons. Worldview Lesson #1 I had just landed in Bombay (now Mumbai) and was out and about seeing the sights. On my second day I went to a mosque on a tiny island that sits in the middle of the bay. While I was on the island, a fellow there befriended me and offered to show me around. I took him up on his offer. He showed me around all right, and when I was distracted, he stole my camera and case. Obviously, this really bummed me out. How could I have been so stupid? Then I started talking to some people and discovered I wasn't the first one. Others' stories of how they had been conned or had stuff stolen became a fascinating window into a whole new way of thinking. Having grown up in suburbia, I was not streetwise, especially to foreign big cities. It was my time to get educated. Lesson learned: The Indian Christians comforted me through this and taught me that you can be both guarded and open at the same time. This real-world, school-of-hard-knocks experience taught me something about discernment into human nature, about the difference between perception and reality and about learning from others' experiences. Worldview Lesson #2 The Christians I met in India showed me how Christians can relate to a vastly complex and pluralistic culture. In India, underneath the "formal" non-biblical religions lurks animism—the belief in many gods and spirits who must be appeased or pleased to make life livable. On top of that you've got Hinduism (actually a complex of religions), Islam (which itself has radically different expressions), Buddhism, Jainism and Sikkhism, Zoroastrianism (the Parsees) and Maoist secularism. My Indian Christian friends taught me that no matter what denomination or branch of Christian faith a person might come from—they are "Christians," period. They aren't to be thought of as pagans, unbelievers, infidels, aliens, enemies or traitors. Lesson learned: In India, Christians of whatever stripe have more in common with each other than with the other religions being practiced all around them. Indian Christians see things this way partly as a result of being a small and persecuted religious minority in a nation that is dominated by a not-always-tolerant majority religion. But their unique setting and experience enables Indian Christians to understand an essential New Testament principle that is harder for Christians in the West to grasp: spiritual unity in Christ (see John 17:20-21). Worldview Lesson #3 My Indian Christian friends taught me that theologies need to be corrected by cross-cultural insights, otherwise they become culturally blinded and insulated. God intended Christian faith, to the ends of the earth, to be incredibly diverse, reaching into every culture, transforming it to the glory of God and preserving the best of each culture. Christians have much to learn from other cultures. God is the creator of the vast diversity—and wants the best for all cultures. Christian theology in the West needs to be corrected by Eastern Christian theology, and vice versa. Christian theology dominated by countries in the Northern Hemisphere need to hear from Christians in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa. No Christian group has the absolute final word about what Christian faith is—only God does. But we can rejoice in the white-hot core of Christian faith that all Christians have affirmed through the ages.

Bayard Taylor is the author of Blah, Blah, Blah: Making Sense of the World's Spiritual Chatter (Bethany House).