Almost Exactly Backwards

What the suffering church has kept that the comfortable church has misplaced

There is a habit of mind in the Western church that is so common we no longer notice it. When we hear of Christians in Lagos or Chennai, Tehran or São Paulo, we file the report under a single heading: missions. We imagine ourselves as the senders and them as the receivers, ourselves as the teachers and them as the taught. It is a flattering arrangement, and it is almost exactly backwards.

The numbers alone should unsettle us. The center of gravity of world Christianity has moved south and east. The typical Christian in the world today is not a comfortable Westerner with a study full of commentaries; she is far more likely to be a woman in sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, worshiping in a tradition that has cost her something. If we want to know what the church looks like in the twenty-first century, we are increasingly looking at her, not at us.

What has she kept that we have lost? Three things, at least.

First, she has kept the supernatural. The Western church, formed by centuries of disenchantment, often reads the New Testament as if the demons and healings and answered prayers were a kind of first-century packaging we are free to discard. Our brothers and sisters in the global South read the same texts and recognize their own world. They pray as if God acts, because they have seen him act. This is not credulity. It is a refusal to edit the Bible down to the size of our assumptions.

Second, she has kept the cost. Where faith is expensive, it is rarely casual. The believer who may lose her job, her family, or her life for confessing Christ does not treat discipleship as a lifestyle accessory. She has understood something Jesus said plainly and we have learned to mute: that following him is a matter of taking up a cross. We do not need to romanticize persecution to learn from those who have been refined by it.

Third, she has kept the community. Much of our Western Christianity has quietly contracted into an arrangement between an individual and God, with the church as an optional supplement. In much of the world, to be a Christian is to belong to a body before it is to hold an opinion. The faith is carried in households, in shared meals, in the costly habits of a people who need one another to survive.

None of this is an argument for despising the gifts the Western church has been given. Our libraries, our long traditions of careful exegesis, our hard-won doctrinal clarity — these are real, and the global church often says so gratefully. The point is not to trade places in the hierarchy of condescension. The point is that there is no hierarchy. There is one body, and the parts that suffer have something to teach the parts that are comfortable.

So here is a small discipline I want to commend. The next time you read about a church somewhere in the world in the news, in a book, in a friend’s account of a trip, resist the reflex to file it under missions. Let it land instead as a dispatch from a fellow member of a body to which you also belong. Ask not only what they need from us, but what they have already received that we have misplaced.

The body has always been larger than a location or address. And perhaps the grace hidden in this moment is that what we long called the mission field may yet become, for a weary Western church, a quiet means of grace, if only we have the humility to receive it.

— Sunny