thoughts on culture and transformation

Below is something I wrote for a forum post for school. We were talking about culture and learning and transformation. These are thoughts at the root of so many of the other things going through my mind. 

"Every culture is imperfect and, in fact, a prison that holds people in bondage, each one is at the same time the integrating point of reference by which people comprehend themselves and others.  We must understand that transforming a society does not mean moving people from their prison into ours but rather helping them to know Christ and be transformed personally and communally into people and communities of the Spirit" (Lingenfelter, Ministering Cross Culturally: 120)

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When I stop to reflect on this two things stand out. The first is that the goal is transformation. The second, that the means is knowing Christ. When I stop to think about my own transformation and how I long to see culture transformed I recognize that these things started when I, after spending 19 years (my whole life at that point) in the church, actually read the bible to see what it said it about God. Up until that point, I had just believed everything other people had told me. While it wasn't wrong (well, at least not all of it), it wasn't the kind of knowledge that brought about transformation of heart, mind, soul, and life. Now, I was actually looking to see what it said, not just to affirm or prove all the things I already thought.

 

My fear is that there are countless people who think they have been transformed in the way this quote speaks of, but, in fact have not. They have never stopped to notice how their own culture does not agree with the way God would have his followers live. How then do you help people who think they are entirely transformed actually be transformed? Even when you live with them, they still see what you are doing as a "special calling" which allows them to stay just the way they are thinking they have been transformed in this way.

 

I say this from experience. I, for many years, thought I was transformed, in the way this quote uses the word. But I wasn't. And the only way it happened to me was through making bad choices and realizing they were just as empty as the subculture I came from. But maybe that there is the key, to recognize that even the supposedly transformed subcultures are still, in fact, prisons.

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I took a class in undergrad that taught me something I’ve never forgotten. It was in regards to the Wisdom Literature of the bible. My professor taught us that these books were meant to expose the reader to the darkness of their own soul, the places where they fell short and needed to improve. For many of you, that might seem obvious. But up until that time, whenever I read these books, I always left feeling as though I had everything under control; they confirmed just how wise and wonderful I was.

 

I read this quote with that same caution. Because, no matter how hard I try, there are still ways in which my own culture, or subculture, is a prison to me, in ways that I can’t even see. In what ways have I not been transformed? How does that affect the way that I help others know Christ, as this author encourages his readers to do? 

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(And now some new thoughts) 

This is the trap that I found myself in, I think one of the ways that I ended up so low in recent weeks. Most missionaries get accused of trying to impose their home culture on to the one they are entering. I was keenly trying to avoid this downfall. So much so, that I ended up trying to put myself into another prison. A prison that didn't allow me to thrive, because it still is not the culture God sent his son to give us. I cannot exchange one prison for another and expect that to be the solution to be relevant in a culture that is not my own.