Power and Identity in the Global Church:: Six Contemporary Cases

By Brian M. Howell

Power and Identity in the Global Church: Six Contemporary Cases applies contemporary sociological, theological, and New Testament insights to better understand how God’s people can, do, and should interact in the field, thereby laying the groundwork for better multicultural approaches to mission partnership. The authors—six evangelical anthropologists and theologians—also show that faithfulness in mission requires increased attention to local identities, cultural themes, and concerns, including the desire to grow spiritually through direct engagement with God’s word. In this context, failure to attend to power imbalances can stunt spiritual and leadership growth. Attending to those imbalances should make Christian churches more truly brothers and sisters in Christ, equal members of the one global body of which Christ alone is the head.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Carey Library
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781645085300

Book preview

Cover: Power Identity in the Global Church: Six Contemporary Cases by Brian M. Howell and Edwin ZehnerTitle: Power Identity in the Global Church: Six Contemporary Cases by Brian M. Howell and Edwin ZehnerTitle: Power Identity in the Global Church: Six Contemporary Cases by Brian M. Howell and Edwin Zehner

Power and Identity in the Global Church: Six Contemporary Cases

Copyright © 2009 by Brian M. Howell and Edwin Zehner All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording—without prior written permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise indicated all biblical quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version © 1973, 1978, 1984 by the International Bible Society. Used by permission of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd. All rights reserved.

Naomi Bradley, editorial manager

Johanna Deming, assistant editor

Hugh Pindur, graphic designer

Cover Photo: Churchgoers, Mbozi, Tanzania, s.d. – Courtesy Moravian Archives, Herrnhut, LBS 006675

Published by William Carey Library, an imprint of William Carey Publishing

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ISBN: 978-1-64508-530-0 / Digital eBook Release 2023

__________________________________________________________________

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Power and identity in the global church : six contemporary cases / Brian M.

Howell and Edwin Zehner, editors.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-87808-513-2

ISBN-10: 0-87808-513-0

1. Christianity and culture--Case studies. 2. Identification (Religion)--Case studies.

I. Howell, Brian M. II. Zehner, Edwin.

BR115.C8P675 2008

261.089’009--dc22

2008040430

CONTENTS

Contributors

Preface

Brian M. Howell

1Contextualizing Context—Exploring Christian Identity in the Global Church through Six Contemporary Cases

Brian M. Howell

2Paul in Japan:

A Fresh Reading of Romans and Galatians

J. Nelson Jennings

3Contextualization from the Ground:

Longuda Lutherans in Nigeria

Todd Vanden Berg

4Local Language and Global Faith:

Choosing Church Language in the Philippines

Brian M. Howell

5Identity Matters:

Christianity and Ethnic Identity in the Peninsular Basque Country

Steven J. Ybarrola

6Contextualization and Ethnicity:

Millenarian Discource Among the Bayano Kuna in Panama

Eric J. Moeller

7Beyond Anti-syncretism:

Gospel, Context and Authority in the New Testament and in Thai Conversions to Christianity

Edwin Zehner

Afterword: Concluding Missiological Reflection

Robert J. Priest

Bibliography

Endnotes

Index

CONTRIBUTORS

Brian M. Howell (B.A., Wesleyan University; M.A., Fuller Theological Seminary; M.A./Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. He is the author of Christianity in the Local Context: Southern Baptists in the Philippines (Palgrave, 2008), in addition to several journal articles and book chapters on global Christianity, and Philippine Christianity in particular. His current research on Short-Term Missions and Christian ethnography has appeared in Anthropological Theory, The Journal of Communication and Religion, Christian Scholar’s Review, and The Bulletin of Missionary Research.

J. Nelson Jennings (B.A., Vanderbilt University; M.Div., Covenant Seminary; Ph.D., University of Edinburgh (Scotland) is Professor of World Mission at Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis. Dr. Jennings served in Japan from 1986 until 1999 with the PCA’s Mission to the World, in church-planting and pastoral ministry. In 1996 he became assistant professor of international Christian studies at Tokyo Christian University. He is currently president of Presbyterian Mission International (PMI—www.pmiweb.org) and editor of Missiology: An International Review (www.asmweb.org/missiology.htm). He is the author of God the Real Superpower: Rethinking Our Role in Missions, Theology in Japan, and the co-author, with Hisakazu Inagaki, of Philosophical Theology and East-West Dialogue.

Eric J. Moeller (M.A., M.Div., M.A./Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Assistant Professor of Pastoral Ministry and Missions at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His work on the Kuna of Panama has been presented at various meetings, including the Evangelical Missiological Society. In addition to his work with the Kuna, he has also studied Hispanic theology and practice in the United States.

Robert J. Priest (B.A., Columbia International University; M.A., University of Chicago; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of Mission and Intercultural Studies and Director of the Doctor of Philosophy in Intercultural Studies Program at Trinity Evangelical Divinity. Born to career missionaries, he was raised in Bolivia and eventually returned to South America, conducting nearly two years of anthropological field research among the Aguaruna of Peru, focusing both on traditional religion and on conversion to Christianity. He has been published in various journals and has contributed chapters in a number of books.

Todd Vanden Berg (B.A., Calvin College; M.A./Ph.D., State University of New York, Buffalo) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Dr. Vanden Berg has done fieldwork with the Longuda of Adamawa State Nigeria. This research was supported by the Deur Endowment of the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Calvin College as well as a Calvin College Research Fellowship. Related to this fieldwork he has published on the topics of involuntary resettlement as well as on issues of witchcraft beliefs of Longuda Lutheran Christians. He is the author of Culture, Christianity, and Witchcraft in a West African Context (In The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World. Eds. Lamin Sanneh, and Joel Carpeter. Oxford University Press, 2005) along with a Reformed defense of Christians in anthropology published in Christian Scholar’s Review.

Steven J. Ybarrola (B.A., Bethel College; M.A., Brown University; Ph.D., Brown University) is Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism at Asbury Theological Seminary. Dr. Ybarrola has served as a missionary with Operation Mobilization and has ongoing research in the peninsular Basque country. He is currently completing work on the manuscript Enemies & Allies, Strangers & Friends: Identity and Ideology in the Peninsular Basque Country to be published by the University of Nevada Press.

Edwin Zehner (B.A., Houghton College; M.A./Ph.D., Cornell University) has taught anthropology at Houghton College, Wheaton College, and Central College, and for several years headed the publishing program of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University. In the 1980s he spent four years living and working among Christians in Thailand. His Ph.D. dissertation drew in part on that experience as it analyzed stories of Thai converts to Christianity. He is the author of Short-Term Missions: Toward a More Field-Oriented Model (Missiology, October 2006) and Orthodox Hybridities: Anti-Syncretism and Localization in the Evangelical Christianity of Thailand (Anthropological Quarterly, Summer 2005). In the spring of 2008 he was a visiting fellow of the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University.

PREFACE

Brian M. Howell

This book grew rather organically out of a conference of the Evangelical Missiological Society in 2003. All the authors (save Vanden Berg) were presenters on different panels who happened to come around a common theme. The papers seemed to make a nicely coherent point about the need to attend to matters of ethnic change, political context and power within the missionary enterprise, particularly in terms of contextualization. The essays contribute helpful insights to the missionary enterprise and an understanding of global Christianity in general.

It was tempting to move the Afterword to this spot. This brief reflection, graciously provided by the organizer of the original EMS conference and one of the nation’s pre-eminent mission anthropologists, Robert Priest, helps to clarify contributions these essays might make to the larger project of missiology. His summation insightfully brings out a history and context to the discussion that is, we believe, enormously helpful. (If so inclined, readers might just want to flip to the back right now, read Priest’s Afterword, and then start the Introduction.) However, the discussion is meant to be a bit larger than the missiological context he knows so intimately, so we have left the Afterword where it makes the most sense—after our words—to remain the final thought, but not necessarily shaping the larger framework of the book.

That larger framework is laid out in the Introduction by Brian Howell. This Introduction began its life as a project for the Faith and Learning Seminar at Wheaton College. Through the opportunity provided by release time (as well as the requirement that prior to tenure all faculty members produce an essay integrating their disciplines with Christian theology), this essay became the opportunity to think about the larger issues of context, culture, contextualization and identity raised in the subsequent chapters. It was only later that it was adapted as the Introduction here, but the time and encouragement to work on these issues, along with the delightful engagement with colleagues Roger Lundin and Kathryn Long, made an important contribution to the final result.

We are grateful for the support of our families in all that we do, but it is often keenly felt as we carve out precious time to work on publishing projects. For that patience and understanding we are grateful.

We are very appreciative of the support of William Carey Library Publishers. In particular, we thank the editor there, Naomi Bradley, for her patience and work on our behalf. We thank the anonymous reviewer who provided encouragement on the manuscript and several helpful suggestions. Thanks to Michael Fox for his work on the bibliography. Joel Carpenter also provided helpful input on the project. We regret that we were not able to respond more substantively to some of this extremely helpful critique. We hope that in spite of the flaws that remain, this volume finds its way into the hands of students of mission, missionaries themselves and Christians around the world interested in sorting out the complicated issues of identity, ethnicity, power and context as they play out in our Christian lives everywhere. If we can enlarge the discussion and provide more resources for Kingdom work, we will have counted this effort a resounding success.

What does it mean to practice local Christianity? What is local culture? Can we speak of inauthentic and authentic culture at all?

1

CONTEXTUALIZING CONTEXT— EXPLORING CHRISTIAN IDENTITY IN THE GLOBAL CHURCH THROUGH SIX CONTEMPORARY CASES

Brian M. Howell

While conducting field research in the northern Philippines in 1998, my family and I stayed in a small dorm apartment at the Philippine Baptist Theological Seminary. At the same time, a number of graduate students from various Asian countries throughout the region were on campus pursuing their doctoral degrees in theology through the branch campus of the Asia-Baptist Graduate Theological School. One of the students was a pastor from Korea who was working on a thesis about the contextualization of Christianity among the Igorots or upland ethnic minority groups (also known as mountain people) from the many homeland areas of the northern mountain region.¹

This missionary/student had taken on a research project in which he would determine how the mountain people (i.e., Ibaloi and Kankanae living in the city of Baguio and surrounding areas) could, or should, best practice Christianity. He told me how the Christians of these various ethnic groups had a very inauthentic form of Christianity that was, in his words, totally Western. They needed to use their own music and develop liturgy that used traditional dances, instruments and languages. He even went so far as to suggest that they should not be wearing Western-style clothing, suits and the like, and go back to traditional clothing such as the bahag, or g-string. He explained, My dissertation [topic] is to show them how they [can] have a real ‘mountain Christianity’ and work out Christianity for their context.

The irony of a Korean pastor telling ethnic minority people of the Philippines how to practice an Eastern religion as it has been translated through Western theologians and missionaries was striking for several reasons. In the first place, it would probably surprise some secular anthropologists and scholars of religion to know that a conservative Korean pastor was criticizing these evangelical Christian Filipinos for being culturally inauthentic (i.e., too Western) and encouraging them to discard so-called borrowed religious practices. Moreover, it exemplified some of the complexity to the contemporary spread and development of Protestant Christianity in places like the Philippines where competing visions of Filipino culture and denominationally and historically varied form of Christianity are being worked out. Finally, it made even more dramatic the reality that while conservative Christian academics and intellectuals from Korea, the United States, the Philippines and, indeed, around the world, were calling on local Christians to be more culturally particular and to practice locally distinct forms of the faith (even while they defended doctrinal orthodoxy as transcultural and universal), the Christians themselves often continued to practice, and in many cases defend, what could only be described as a thoroughly Western form of the religion.

For Christians seeking to understand contemporary global Christianity, this scenario brings up a number of questions, old and new. The old questions go back to some of the beginnings of the missionary movement: What is the responsibility of the missionary in directing cultural change? How should Christianity be communicated in new contexts? What is the relationship between Christianity and culture? The new questions come about in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world: What does it mean to practice local Christianity? What is local culture? Can we speak of inauthentic and authentic culture at all?

These questions deserve more than a slim volume of six case studies, but we hope this might provide some fresh ways of examining the issues. The essays here provide ethnographically and historically specific examples of Christians in various places working out their Christianity in living communities, reshaping and (re)defining their political, ethnic and religious identities. Each author is a social scientist with strong interests in the theological issues of the communities (with the exception of Nelson Jennings, who is a theologian with strong interests in the cultural and social aspects of his case). None of these chapters seeks to reduce the case in question to social factors, yet each is working through the intersection of Christianity with political, economic, cultural and social identity. In this way, some of the issues of politics and identity appear in all these analyses of localization, inculturation and contextualization.

Our purposes in writing here are not primarily prescriptive, providing models or methods for Christians seeking practical advice on how missionary work should proceed. There are many excellent volumes directed towards missionary practitioners that provide direct and practical information regarding missionary methods.² In fact, the cases here do not deal with missionaries much at all. Certainly missionaries maintain a significant presence around the world and continue to engage in influential work, particularly in the areas of Christian education, institution building and development. But as the example of the Korean missionary/student suggest, the old-time image of the Victorian colonial missionary, or even the earnest, if naïve, American trudging boldly to the unreached lands in order to introduce remote people to Christianity (and the modern world), is an anachronistic image at best. Even more than the changing nature of missions and missionaries, Christianity is now spreading by means of the local congregations already established throughout the world. There are few places without some form of Christian community, and it is these communities that are quickly assuming responsibility for spreading the gospel around the world (Jenkins 2002; Robbins 2004b).

These chapters provide examples of these communities as a way to suggest how the rigorous application of anthropological categories might better inform an understanding of global Christianity in local forms. Some of the examples in this volume (i.e., Moeller) are far from anything approaching orthodox Christianity, let alone evangelicalism, while others represent versions of the faith many would call Americanized or Westernized Evangelicalism (e.g., the Chinese-Filipinos of Howell’s paper). All, however, should lead us to think through how ethnic and religious identity shape the context and culture of people (and not simply the other way around), even as those people work out their Christian faith.

THE GOSPEL IN CONTEXT

Those who emphasize the importance of (re)interpreting Christianity for new cultural settings do not simply point to the missionary movement of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; they begin with the apostles, particularly Peter and Paul (see Whiteman 1997:2). Peter, Jesus’ disciple and a leading teacher in the early church, came to grips with the different manifestations of the faith for the Jews and the Gentiles through a vision, instructing him to adapt his Jewish dietary rules to be more like the Gentiles among whom he worked (Acts 10:10-17). For his part, Paul used the religious language and notions of the learned Greek community as a way to communicate the gospel message (Acts 17). Instances of both changing particular behavior to conform to a new context and adapting the message to use or intersect with local ideas are held forth as biblical examples of what has come to be known as contextualization. Contextualization, as a term and concept, really came into its own in the 1970s, along with other notions such as inculturation, when missionaries and church leaders from the non-Western world began to draw quite explicitly on growing ethnographic knowledge and non-Western theology to challenge older mission models that took little account of cultural, historical and social difference.³

Once a missionary scholar or Christian anthropologist can get a Christian worker to accept the idea that communicating the gospel must be sensitive to the particular idioms, language(s), and meanings people bring to that understanding (i.e., the importance of contextualization) it might seem that path is clear. Although it often remains problematic to get these missionaries and other Christian workers to accept the importance of contextualization (Kraft 2005b; Whiteman 1997), at least getting through that step should open the way to translating the gospel with more meaning and significance. However, the central notion of contextualization, i.e. context, may be more problematic than it seems. In common U.S. English, to speak of the context is generally to refer to a social or even physical location; a class context would mean everyone identified with the particular socioeconomic class in question; a local context would mean people who live in a given area. As the following chapters suggest, however, context is adapting and adaptable, rather than a place in an unchanging or discrete sense. As such, identifying a context is not simply naming a place, group or identity, but is an activity laden with power and purpose that has theological and social dimensions.

First, context is constructed as a feature of identity. To claim the label of Filipino, for example, is to imagine a place (the Philippines) and cultural forms (language, customs, family, and so forth) by which that identity is defined. Moving to a new identity—Christian—then becomes a matter of constructing a notion of a new context, a Christian one, where the previous identities may or may not intersect. For most U.S. Christians, the overlap of particular identities—American, Christian, member of the global church—is so seamless that it may be difficult to see the possibilities for conflict. Of course, for other Christians (Old Order Amish, for example), the notion of the United States as their cultural context is quite different and does provide occasion to think about the ways the context is imagined.

The same dynamics are at work in the global church. For the Longuda Christians of Vanden Berg’s chapter, the context of the church has come together with the context of the Longuda homeland through a history of interaction, such that they can claim the identity of Christian (Lutheran) Longuda (i.e., being in the context of the church, and Longudaland, and Nigeria) without dissonance. For the Basques of Ybarrola’s case, however, bringing together an identity of Protestant or evangelical Christian with the notion of Basque identity creates political, social and cultural conflict that is not easily resolved. The context of Basque identity has, in its current iteration, been drawn by some to exclude any religious identity beyond traditional Catholicism as well as in conflict with the idea of Spain. The challenge for the Basque evangelical, Ybarrola suggests, is refashioning the Basque context to encompass non-Catholic expressions of Christianity and, perhaps, even new notions of national identity.

The trick for these believers, as well as the student of mission, culture and theology, is recognizing this emergent and dynamic notion of context and identity (including Christian identity) without losing sight of the gospel as a transcendent reality towards which all Christians are oriented. Christian theologians and mission scholars take great pains in disavowing those theological methods that would put context on a par, or even as superseding, the authority of Scripture in matters of faith and practice (Bevans 1992:52–54; Hiebert 1985:84–85). The care to not let historically specific concerns or other issues of context or culture contradict an interpretation of Scripture is a nonnegotiable point. However, all these concerns still beg the question: What is context? Is it merely a collection of traits and behaviors linked together as culture? Is it simply the setting of a culture, much as diamond sits on a ring? Are the notions of culture and context synonymous? In this introduction, I lay the groundwork for the cases that follow by first, examining the notion of contextualization as often lacking an examination of critical concepts, namely culture, context and the gospel. From there, I examine both the culture concept and the notion of context/place as they have developed in the discipline where they feature most prominently, cultural anthropology. Finally, I draw in the missiological implications of this conceptual framework. With the exception of Jennings and Ybarrola, the authors here are not former or current missionaries, so we present this work primarily as an analytical contribution to our understanding of global Christianity. We certainly intend this to be helpful for those Christian leaders—foreign missionaries and local leaders—who are doing the hard work of developing Christian communities, but we recognize that this is only the first step towards rethinking what contextualization might mean moving into the twenty-first century.

Contextualization in Context

In most discussions of contextualization, whether theological or missiological, to contextualize is to relate the gospel to culture. In this way, culture and context are pretty much synonymous. This may seem unproblematic, but consider how culture has been conceived: in reviewing the work of Charles Kraft (1979; 1997; 2005a) and Paul Hiebert (1985; 1994; 1995; 1996), a linguist and anthropologist respectively, who have influentially advocated contextual approaches to mission theology and method, theologians Stanley Grenz and John Franke (2001:154–8) note how each place emphasis on the missionary as the conveyor of a pure gospel in a particular cultural setting. The goal of both the missionary and the new Christian is to figure out how the gospel might be faithfully lived out in the new cultural setting. Thus, for Kraft and Hiebert, two scholars who have devoted much of their scholarly work to exhorting the church to take seriously the role of culture in creating theology, the tension comes in working with culture as an important part of faithful Christian life while guarding against any