World Mission, the indigenous church and global geopolitics

From GAFCON, a quote linked to a seminar attended by Tony Payne

Christianity rejects the idea of an exclusive or superior language or culture, or for that matter a taboo or unclean culture. No culture or language can claim exclusive access; and none is so marginal or remote that it can be excluded. None is indispensable; none is unworthy. Here is an implicit Christian anthropology of culture. The claims of the gospel deny normative exclusiveness to any culture, and can be communicated in any linguistic or cultural context.

This, he explained, is what happened in the extraordinary growth of Christianity in Africa over the past 50 years. As the colonial era drew to an end, it was thought that Christianity would die in Africa along with it. The opposite happened. Colonialism in fact turned out to have been an obstacle, and its removal sparked the extraordinary explosion of Christianity in the Global South.

This has always been the missionary way, he argued. In India, in Korea, in China, in place after place—when the message reached the vernacular, it burst forth in growth. The genius of Christianity and its missionaries, is that they did for Africa and other parts of the world what Tyndale and others had once done for England—they dared to translate and communicate the gospel in the common tongue, often at great personal cost, and under the charge of political subversion.