Perspectives- Bruce Koch

This session started with a screening of "Ee-taow" a pretty remarkable documentary of missions to Papua New Guinea. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSBLLuzqfBQ&feature=related (part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyOBPvZSjtE&feature=related (part 2)) Part 2 at 3:45 is what this is all about.

Bruce Koch is a co-editor of the Perspectives course and part of the staff. He took us through "Unleashing the Gospel," a lesson on how the gospel spreads across cultures and people groups, with a focus on Acts 15:19- that the early church deliberately decided that people are free to follow Christ in their own cultures.

• The Old Covenant required sacrifices every year, which still didn't relieve the conscience. The New Covenant is once for all, enabling us to freely come to God. The Old Covenant dealt with external issues (cleansing, rituals, behaviors), which is why it was hard to accept that outsiders were coming in to enjoy what they had come to know for thousands of years.
• The term "Christian" was first applied to Gentile believers as a derogatory term.
• Evangelicals should not try to "convert people" as Jews tried to convert people to their religion and culture, but see people come to know Christ and the freedom He brings.
• In Peter's encounter with Cornelius, the Roman soldier (Acts 10), Peter is the one that is converted. The Gentiles come to Christ and receive the Holy Spirit, which converts Peter's mindset to that of a multi-cultural missionary rather than an ethnocentric Messianic Jew.
• Christianity is not a religion because there are no rules. It is wrong for some to eat meat sacrificed to idols and ok for others. There are guidelines not to indulge in sin and to have to conform to some leadership, but the whole body is diverse in the way it follows Christ. It is God that purifies men's hearts, not our teaching or conformity to the practice of our religion.
• We need to be slow to judge- "do not call anything impure or unclean that I have made clean." God can change traditional cultural practices to bring Him glory.
• People do not need to become "Christians" as we use the term, which has negative connotations of loose morals and greed to many Middle-Easterners.
• It is the believer's responsibility to become like another culture to get past communication barriers, and allow an audience to remain like their cultural norms in their belief and obedience to Christ. Following Christ is not about how you dress, what songs you sing, and how you worship.

This session closed with a cross-cultural worship experience where we learned some Arabic words and prayed as Middle-Eastern Christians might. It solidified that Western worship styles are no better than those of other cultures, but that all worship in Spirit and in Truth brings God glory.