Having been a missionary, the following experience is familiar to me. You take part in a meeting. You sit, you watch, you observe. You try to understand what's going on. You try to understand what's really going on. What does the way this meeting is organised mean? Why is this being done, and what is the significance of that? Everything seems to flow naturally, as something entirely normal and well-understood by everyone present (except you). You, unfortunately, don't get it. Don't worry: you can try again the next time.
The next time comes, and goes. And the next, and the next; and so on. Unfortunately (for you), though there are some things that you can now explain the inner, local logic of, yet much else passes you by completely and entirely. It's weird. Years pass: it's still weird, really weird. How to relate it to the intended, announced, purported purpose of the meeting? What does it have to do with Christianity? How in any way is it tied to the person, the teachings and the saving work of Jesus Christ, and the Commission that he gave us? Sorry, I don't know. I've tried, but as yet, I'm not sure anyone else really knows either. And yet.... it still makes perfect, effortless sense to the bulk of the people present, such that if you asked them to explain it, well, they couldn't either. Because it just is: this is how things are done, and everybody just knows that. We've always done it this way.
What I am referring to, of course, is that deep, so very deep, thing called culture. Where it all comes from and how it all hangs together is so clear to a cultural native, that not only is it not explained, that some of the time it just can't be explained. If you need it explaining to you, then you'll never get it.
Sometimes, on the other hand (not terribly often!), one of those wonderful moments occurs, when someone says.... "I've been thinking about this, and why do we do it? Is it really in keeping with our purpose and mission, and doesn't it in fact suggest something different to what Jesus taught us, doesn't it clash with it? Shouldn't we change this?"
When that does happen, it's hard to suppress the urge to jump out of the chair, yell "Yes, yes, yes!", burst into tears, and go and hug the person who said it, and do a few laps of the room in order to work off the adrenaline rush that came from someone saying what you'd been thinking for so long.... but you'd better not do quite this, for it would, in almost any culture, be profoundly weird.
Now, if you live in another culture for enough time, something else begins to happen. Eventually, we hope at least, some of your blinkers begin to come off. It becomes apparent that being weird isn't the exclusive preserve of one or two cultures, much less just the one you happen to be a stranger in. It turns out that in fact your own culture, and your own sub-cultures, are also profoundly weird. There are things that apparently make perfect sense to the people working and acting in them which, if they were gifted with being able to step outside of that for a moment, they'd realise (inside about 10 seconds) are so strange that we can barely begin to describe them. Whether you're British, American, African, Asian; whether you're Baptist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Anglican, etcetera, well, frankly, your culture and sub-culture are very likely quite weird, inexplicably odd, with things more or less prominent that just have no real connection to your advertised and professed identity and purpose.
The moral here isn't "and that's OK, let's all be weird in our own ways and accept it and even delight in it". There is no doubt time and place for a good dose of that. God did create, and does love variety, and it's good for us to broaden our narrow, constricted, darkened little minds not just a bit. And whilst in the church of Jesus Christ this variety should be embraced and celebrated, that doesn't mean that there aren't still parts that are not "good weird", but "bad weird". i.e. They are signs that there is something profoundly wrong. Somewhere, at quite an early stage, far back, someone set their compass wrong, and started wandering off the path, and now we're so far lost we don't even realise it. Things are happening that just should not happen, anywhere, at all, whoever we are. It's not just that we lack understanding (which of course, in any particular case we have to allow for, and must be patient as we labour to understand).
This post isn't about any particular person, people, groups or activities. There is no coded message about some specific situation. I am musing on just how common the cognitive disconnect is, once you have been following Jesus a while. So much of the way of the world around us, and of the way of us disciples who still have so much to learn, just makes no real sense given what we profess to believe, that the experience just comes more and more. It's as if, in this world, we're strangers - we don't really belong here; we're exiles and there's some other place that is home and where we fit in and where it'll all be worked out. It's as if we have to live as if this book, which makes more and more sense to me as I study it more, is the real world, and as if the creation I'm actually living in had some major event that caused things to go off-track, quite early.
Having made that explanation, though, here's one from the world of self-described evangelicalism, apparently on the more conservative end, from the few figures in it that I do recognise. I've not heard of this conference and I don't know much about the writer of this piece, but he's on to something: "The Great Evangelical Schism: Prologue". Look at that poster and read the descriptions. It's not so much that there's something obviously wrong, direct-and-up-front, or that they're trying to be weird. Nowhere does it say they're going to torture babies, or have a fancy dress party in which they all decide to impersonate goats, or to hold an evangelistic rally in which they're only allowed to use the word "Wibbly". It's more subtle than that. Somewhere, the wider movement that this is part of took some wrong turns many stages ago, which actually makes this conference look entirely natural. But if, alternatively, you were to read, say, the 1689 London Baptist Confession, or the Westminster Confession of Faith through a few times, and then read the missionary biographies of Hudson Taylor and John Paton (or their like), and then got transported into this conference, you'd surely realise that some very major changes had happened into the intervening years, that were more than simply questions of style and cultural adiaphora. It's not that I particularly know that any of those people purvey heresy. But it's just.... very weird. How did we get from there to here? What have these two reference points got to do with each-other? It's not a sign of health, whatever it is.
In general, trying to encourage people to be bold for Jesus is a good thing, a good use of our time and efforts. Far better than just consuming content from screens. And my purpose here is, as I say, not particularly to criticise the above conference. The poster/conference are the symptoms of something behind that is widespread, and are not the disease itself. As the article above says, "The “Be Bold for Jesus” conference is a touch-point into this mode of religion, where, among other factors, theology and doctrine take a quantifiable back seat to culture." Culture is weird. But when evangelical culture/sub-culture has become weird in the wrong ways, we need to work out why that is, and how to retrieve the things that make sense. We're meant to be in a place where people can look in their Bibles, and people can learn about Jesus there, and then look at us, and say "I see what it means, it's talking about being the sort of people that you are, because you're following him". If they instead say "sorry, not interested, you're way too weird", and they're not talking about our life of self-giving for Jesus but about something else that is part of our sub-culture, then, we need to ask God's help to see ourselves more clearly.
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