Perspectives- Tat Stewart

Tat Stewart was raised the son of missionary parents in Iran and speaks perfect Farsi. He was pushed out of the country in the Iranian Revolution and came to the US to study. He has since planted churches in the Muslim world and now broadcasts sermons from Colorado to Iran. Tat addressed the topic of Pioneer Church Planting, which focuses on two issues: encouraging a church movement to express the cultural identity of a single people group and handling the radically different cultural complexions of churches that grow in frontier mission situations. The following points combine Tat's practical advice and experience with takeaways from the week's readings:

• Though we naturally color our message with our culture and experience, the gospel can cause cultural extraction, and this is not always the missionary's fault. Look at how Christ was extracted from His home.
• Christianity was not brought to Iran from westerners, but by Persians. In fact, Iranian Christians took the gospel to China.
• In the Middle East, all dreams have significance. Many people that Tat prayed for had dreams that led them to Christ.
• Muslims often don't believe our words because they have been lied to many times. Debates rarely produce fruit. They generally judge truth by experience.
• Tat built Bible studies in new believers homes in Iran, making sure that whole families were there, and asked tough questions and pointed them to scripture.
• America lives in the future, always thinking ahead, but Iran lives in the present, focusing on what is happening with people. This can make ministry and team building in Iran very frustrating to Westerners.
• Muslim literally means "submitter to God," so some missionaries take that name and allow Muslim converts to retain almost all cultural habits and religious forms. This walks the line of enabling syncretism and contextualizing, and is a controversial means of sharing the gospel.
• By being too careful to ensure true beliefs and right practices, church planters can create a bubble viewed as foreign to a local people. By being too careless, church planters can allow surface level changes that do not address core beliefs.
• John Travis (a pseudonym for a church planter in the Muslim world) presents seven concepts that new believers need to hold to avoid syncretism: Jesus alone is savior, follow Christ in community with other believers, study the Bible, renounce and be delivered from occultism, religious customs are not performed to earn merit, religious beliefs are examined in light of scripture, and show evidence of new birth and growth in grace.
• In cross-cultural church planting there will be syncretism, extraction, and misunderstood contextualization, but we need to go anyway and recognize that God will use us. We can also be sure that if we stand for the Cross there will be suffering.

Tat brought two Iranian friends that became Christians through his ministry and they expanded and confirmed Tat's comments about Muslim and Iranian culture. Tat also shared an encouraging story of how God works outside of our efforts. A man said out loud to Jesus, "I don't believe in you, but if you are God, prove it." He had a dream that night where he was suspended in the air right in front of Jesus crucified and could see his sweat and blood and feel his breath on his face as Christ said, "I did this for you. Believe me." Not all doubting prayers bear the same fruit, but God cares deeply about all people and does remarkable things to bring them home.

Perspectives- Michele Rickett

Michele Rickett founded Sisters in Service (http://www.sistersinservice.org/) to lift women and children out of poverty in the least-reached places in the world. They do this by building relationships with Christian leaders and empowering them to change their communities through education, spiritual development, and creation of economic opportunities. Michele addressed the topic of Christian Community Development, providing a glimpse of the needs throughout the world and some of the efforts to help. It's impossible to capture the emotion and stories she shared in writing, but here are a few bullet points of the information she passed on:

• In the US we see relative poverty (people without homes struggle to get by), but in the developing world we see absolute poverty (people are unable to meet basic needs).
• The world is filled with conflict, poverty, oppression, thirst, hunger, disease, and illiteracy. How should we respond? By entering into the suffering and doing what we can to help. We can also remember that one day, when the gospel is provided to all, this will all end.
• Hope integrates us and motivates us. Look at Jesus' compassion, commission, and example for hope.
• God's kingdom of righteousness and goodness will come. He will build His church, and He wants us to be a part of it.
• There are four main approaches to human need: economic development (macroeconomically focused, criticized as ineffective), political liberation (good, but not the hope we need), relief (important, but not long-term), and transformational development (long-term focus on empowering people).
• God is evident in transformational development as people and initiatives are empowered, divine intervention is apparent, and transformational genuine love is shared.
• Poverty is often caused by broken relationships, misused power, and fear.
• Four things need to be restored to empower people to escape poverty: hope for a better life, dignity to break oppression, authority to step out of a situation, and identity as a child of God.
• Six integral mission factors were discussed: becoming agents of change, gaining a vision of change (imagining what God can do), assessing available resources, using proclamation and deeds (tell why you do what you do), prayer (different weapons are needed for this battle), and time (it takes 5 minutes to save a life and may take 5 years to transform it).

As a transformational development practitioner, Michele had many first-hand examples of how God is working miracles to break through traps of poverty. To learn more, she recommended Tim Chester's book, "Justice, Mercy, and Humility." The most important point of this lesson was that we need to think holistically in our service efforts. Poverty can take many forms, and we have tremendous resources to share. The choice of whether to share is ours.

Perspectives- Scott Buresh

Dr. Scott Buresh, a professor of anthropology at Towson University, spent 18 months in Aceh in Muslim boarding schools, living as the local culture does. He taught on the topic of "Building Bridges of Love," which addressed cultural issues, tying lessons from Jewish tradition in the Bible into modern day evangelization models. First, Scott led us in a meditative reading, Lectio Divina, where he first read a passage, then read it again and asked us to listen for key words or phrases that God may be pointing us towards, then again and asked us to seek an application in it, then again while simply letting the words wash over us. Here are some key points that I took away from Scott's teaching:

• The #1 value in the US in independence, though we should plan to live as communities of disciples, since individually we are all very poor representations of Christ.
• Jesus was able to do what He did because He relied on His Father, not because He was God.
• If we would teach what Jesus taught in the way Jesus taught, we would experience the same response. Jesus was perfect, but He was still rejected.
• Jesus was fully immersed in Jewish culture, and was fully dependent on His culture to learn language, Aramaic and Hebrew in this case. He was a real carpenter in a small town. He went from the throne of glory to this, for the sake of people. How much less do we need to give up to reach others?
• Jesus taught, "Repent (reconsider what is reality) for the Kingdom of God (God's presence, His rule, His power) has come near (immediately available)."
• Jesus taught in daily interactions while travelling, in the temple, out in the open, and He taught through stories, making ideas relevant to an audience.
• It is important to serve humbly and with integrity when entering a different culture. Taking a single true identity as a servant that genuinely cares about the community will go farther than misrepresentations that seem to bring one closer to a culture. It is also imperative to keep this identity at home and abroad.

Scott closed with stories of those that have taught what Jesus taught in the way Jesus taught. The early church saw martyrs dying with joy and peace because they had tapped into the Kingdom. The Celts missed persecutions suffered elsewhere and left the Ireland they knew to teach and transform the uncivilized countryside. Hudson Taylor recognized cultural differences in China and took theirs on, serving as a teacher. Frank Laubach took a fresh approach of teaching people in the South Pacific how to read, by requiring that each student teach someone else what they just learned before he would teach them the next lesson. Each of these required some sacrifice and full devotion to God, but each transformed the world for others and for God's glory. It's worth it.

Perspectives- David Shenk

2/3 of the world are oral learners. Yet many missions efforts focus on disseminating information rather than relating stories that can be heard, learned, and repeated. A result of such cross-cultural miscommunication is found in a phrase that Hong Kong street vendors use to mean "you're crazy, knock it off," which is literally translated as "stop talking Jesus to me." This week, David Shenk addressed the topic of "How Shall They Hear," covering cultural understanding and communications issues. Shenk was born in Tanzania of missionary parents and has spent much of his life understanding Muslim culture and writing books on bridging cultural gaps. Here are a few key points he addressed:

• Lloyd Kwast put forth that there are four layers of culture: Behavior (what is the normal way of doing things), Values (what is good or best), Beliefs (what is true), and Worldview (what is the meaning of life and death and what is forgiveness for my shortcomings).
• Every culture has a worldview that influences other layers, though technological improvements (e.g. cars into Fatalist culture) and cultural imports (e.g. Hollywood into Confucianism) create dissonance. If you seek to change behavior without addressing worldview, you get meaningless surface level changes.
• Cultural constructs are often divinized; people create gods that reflect themselves, shortcomings and all. This means that repentance is unnecessary. When a worldview changes to reflect the truth of the gospel, repentance is instantly required.
• Don't assume that people want what you perceive as their greatest need; ask them and it may be that God is their greatest need.
• The gospel affirms yet transforms culture, by empowering people to confront evil.
• There is a metanarrative (great story) in every culture that explains the worldview. For instance, the Darwinist metanarrative explains that we come from a primordial goo out of which the strongest have survived and humans are the apex of life. This feeds violent repression as people strive to survive by being stronger than others.
• The first priority in bringing Christ to a people group is translating the gospel into a meaninful communication that reflects the culture. This should be written, but there should also be a metanarrative communicated in a way that people relate to.

David Shenk closed by digging into how the Islamic worldview overlaps with the Christian worldview and discussing his interactions with Muslims (he co-authored a book with a Sheikh discussing beliefs in a mutually respectful manner). It is important to remember that while it is imperative to contextualize the message, Christian witnesses do not convict people to believe. Even Jesus did not convict people to believe. It is our job to spread the word, and the Holy Spirit will convict people of the truth.