The Center for Gospel Culture Blog

Bumping into Our Differences  

Richard LintsJune 03, 2010 

Why do churches that confess the same gospel look and feel so different across different cultural and social locations? Why are evangelical churches in Boston so different on one side of the Charles River from those on the other side? In part it’s because our God given identity is thoroughly embedded in those social locations. We are by nature social creatures. We cannot escape that. The peculiar shape of our social experiences leaves an indelible footprint on us. Churches have indelible footprints on them as well. Coming to accept and embrace the different footprints is not always easy. It is like blending together two very different personalities into one marriage. (Ephesians 5) Bumping into real differences is something most of us would like to avoid.
 
Part of what makes it uncomfortable is that our own cultural idols can be exposed as we bump up against differences. As we know, it is always easier to spot some one else’s idols than one’s own. Accepting our differences and being open to having our own idols exposed is at the heart of the diverse cultural locations of the church across time, across the globe or even across the Charles. Darryl Guder (The Continuing Conversion of the Church, Eerdmans, 2002) has written of the need for the “continuing conversion” of the church in its cross-cultural interactions. All cultural translations of the Gospel bear some imprint of their social location which stands in need of correction and which are only corrected as the Gospel bumps up against it from another social location. 
 
The inevitable bumping up against our differences requires that the church hold together two theological affirmations about how God works. By the power of the Spirit, our differences may enrich each other and they may also expose the latent idolatries peculiar to each context. Differences can be obstacles to overcome or they may be pieces of the puzzle that belong together. Telling the difference is a matter of pastoral wisdom. The kind of wisdom all too few of us possess in our highly partisan world.

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The Center for Gospel Culture exists to establish the centrality of the gospel as the basis for developing a gospel culture worldview in renewing every dimension of an individual's life, so that individuals would be able to think, act, and live in line with the truth of the gospel.


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