“In order to share the good news you first have to understand the bad news.”I must confess I had been sitting in this missions seminar wondering, “Why am I here?” Arriving late, I had stepped on a number of toes and stumbled over people’s conference bags on my way to an empty seat in the middle of the auditorium. No way to leave inconspicuously.
Then, all of a sudden, it got interesting. At first I thought the speaker was meandering, but as I got my mind in step with his, I caught a glimpse of his destination.
In order to share the good news you first have to understand the bad news.
This was exactly what I had been wrestling with for Entrust.
The good news doesn’t change, but the “bad news” in a slum in Calcutta is quite different than the bad news in an American suburb. In my own preaching and teaching ministry in the U.S., I always tried to define the contrasting backdrop of American culture to understand how to explain a particular biblical truth so people could understand. Obedience is usually a choice between embracing the world’s values and embracing Christ’s. But worldly values differ greatly from culture to culture, context to context.
There is no one-size-fits-all way to train church leaders around the world. It takes a very different sort of leader to lead a church in an American suburb than it does in, say, a slum in Calcutta. That would seem to be obvious, but so much training overseas is more American than Indian or African or whatever the context. When you hear about Christians in Africa massacring Christians from a different tribe, you wonder, “How can that be?” Quite simply, if anyone embraces the “good news” without understanding how the “good news” changes the culturally-ingrained “bad news” they grew up with – in this case, age-old ethnic hatred – then they haven’t fully grasped and been transformed by the “Good News.” That is why Jesus, in the Great Commission, stressed the aspect of “teaching them to obey all I have commanded you.”
How about you? Have you spent much time understanding the “bad news” of your own culture, sometimes so deeply ingrained you don’t even realize what it is? That is the essence of the warning Paul gives us: “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.” (Col. 2:8)
In order to share the good news you first have to understand the bad news.
David G. Goodman
