#233 | Why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Church with Stephen Pardue

Why should we pay attention to the majority world church and what God is doing in this amazing global body? Well, it's because it's what God is doing. It's because it's God's design from the start, right?

To bring the nations to himself, to redeem to himself a people of every tribe, tongue and nation.

And for those people to work together in the task of discerning the depth of the gospel, the riches of Christ, and worshiping him in the fullness of what the human person can achieve.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollos Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming and I am your host. And today in our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations.

You know, when you hear the words, we've never done it that way before, those are really the seven last words your church will ever say. I mean, those are the words that inevitably show that you're a dying church.

I remember when I had those words.

Said to me when we started interacting with different cultures in our community. You see, our church was stagnant, it was struggling, but we decided to reach out to our neighborhood.

We found that our neighborhood had a lot of different cultures that were there. And I knew that God was working in the church around the world.

And I figured God brought the nations to us to be reached or to help revive the church. Either way, we win. So let's go about trying to communicate, trying to find common ground with these people who are from around the world.

If they come from Christian backgrounds, well, we win because we're made stronger. And if they're from non Christian backgrounds, well, we also win because we have to figure out how to communicate the gospel to them effectively.

It's not the short game, it's a long game, but it pays off.

And it became such a moniker at our church to say awkward is awesome because what I wanted to really communicate to our people was that in order to embrace this cross cultural dynamic, to see the reality of the gospel being worked out in everyday lives, it meant crossing borders and that meant weird conversations, awkward pauses, not understanding what other people are saying, but learning how to work through that and showing love, that was the most important thing. Now I know you might be saying, what does this have to do with me? Well, no matter where you live, our culture is becoming much more diverse.

It just is. Even in my street, I've got folks from Guyana, China, Russia. If I go to my backyard, I see a woman with a hijab talking to her children in Arabic.

I see another family from Africa, and I can hear one man conversing with his life in Ukrainian. Different cultures are everywhere, but I find that the church in the west becomes pretty preoccupied with just reaching a certain kind of person.

And I think it's doing itself a disservice because it's when we find ourselves not only reconciled to God, but to one another, where we see the reality of Christ's presence being worked out in our everyday lives. But we need to know how to do this well, which is why I've invited today's guest onto the show, and that is Stephen Perdue.

Stephen has written a book called why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Church. And that's what we're going to be talking about today.

Evangelical theology, especially here, needs the global church, and so do you, because it makes your view of God bigger. It helps you understand his mission to the world and how you can be a part of it.

And it helps you also just grow to see how God's love extends to everyone all around and how powerful it is that it encompasses and brings in people from totally different backgrounds than your own. So without further ado, this is my conversation with Steven Pardue. Happy listening.

There's a lot of talk going on in the world today. We know that the church in the United States has been in a decline.

In fact, we've seen that across the west, but globally, the church is increasing rapidly. What are we to make of all this? And what can we learn from the global church? Well, that's why I invited today's guest onto the show.

Today we have Stephen Pardue.

He directs the THM PhD in Theological Studies and Church History at the Asia Graduate School of Theology and teaches theology at the International Graduate School of Leadership in Manila, the Philippines. He is the co editor of 10 books, including Majority World Theology and Asian Christian Theology.

He and his wife Terri have four children and belong to Union Church of Manila. And today we'll be talking about his newest book, why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Church. Steve, welcome to Apollos Watered.

Thank you so much. It's a delight to be with you.

Are you ready for the Fast five?

I'm ready.

Okay, here we go. This is an easy one. What is your favorite thing about living in the Philippines?

Oh, that's not an easy one. I mean, there are a lot of things. I mean, so this is home for me. I have lived here for most of my life since I was a baby.

So, I mean, ask someone what their favorite thing about home is. Probably. This sounds like a cliche, but it's people relationships that I have here, Many of them lifelong or spanning many years.

Yeah, I really feel grateful that actually the Filipino church was where I grew in my faith and got discipled. And, yeah, it's fun.

Okay, now, you've traveled, though, back and forth to the United States. But you said the Philippines is really your home. That's where you've been at your entire life.

But when you do go to the United States, what is the one snack that you miss from the Philippines that you can't get in the United States or any other country?

Great question. So, actually, something called a cracker nut. That's what they call them here. There's a particular brand called nagaraya.

It's like a peanut that's deep fried. I think you can get something like this in Mexico. And then they have different flavors that they add to them. So I love those.

And they're not that easy to find in the U.S. probably not.

Speaking of foods, several years ago, I had the privilege of being a part of a Filipino Bible study in the suburbs of Chicago.

Oh, cool.

And that was my first experience working with Filipinos. Delightful people. Something that, honestly, to my shame, I thought, man, they have a book in the Bible named after them.

That's how little I knew about the Filipino people.

It's a common mistake. Yeah, yeah.

It's silly, but it actually, it was my first time ever encountering someone in that regard, and they received me so well, gave me the food, taught me about the culture. I love to just kind of learn at their feet.

But one of those kind of tests of faith for me was, of course, for many of those who are Western nation, there are certain foods that we have a hard time with. Just like with people in the Philippines have certain foods from the west that they have a hard time with.

But the word that we struggled with was balut.

Balut.

Balut.

So.

So for those that aren't familiar with what we're talking about right now, can you tell us what balut is, and is it something that you regularly consume?

Yeah. So the answer is no. I don't know anyone actually who regularly consumes this. So balut is a duck egg, but it has been fertilized.

So you're eating kind of a baby duck in an egg.

No. You are.

I'm happy it's heavily salted.

I think if you know a lot of Filipinos, you'll know, like, a lot of Them don't love it also, but it does tend to be a food that you eat late at night when you can't see what you're eating and you're not that focused on. But some people really do love it. I mean, it's a real thing. There are people who love it, but it's not for me.

I was wondering if they were having me eat that even though they themselves weren't eating it, just to see if I would do it as a trick, you know, I just wondered. And they laughed the entire time as I was eating it, taking pictures. It was so much fun.

It is a rite of passage for foreigners, I think, to have a ballute. So you were on the right track.

Good.

That's good.

That's good.

Here we go. Well, here's the next question then. If your life was a book title, what would it be and why?

Probably something humorous, because I don't want to take myself too seriously. Where do I belong? Could be one. Are you my country?

Are you my country?

Yeah. I mean, I'm a person who, like I said, this is really home. I obviously have a very. Not a Filipino sounding name or look to me.

I also really appreciate a lot about American culture that I've inherited from my parents and gained through living there for a decade or so. Yeah. One of the consequences of that lifestyle is I don't really ever fully belong anywhere.

But that actually points us to our unrootedness as Christian pilgrims, I think. But it can be hard sometimes.

Do you call yourself a tck? Just as an aside?

Yeah. I mean, among people who use that lingo, I would. Yeah, yeah. I would definitely identify that way. I know for most people, third culture, kid.

It sounds like a very jargony word, but I would point out, I think what's interesting is there are more and more people like me today.

Right.

It used to be that that was only you if you, like, were an immigrant maybe, or like your parents were in business or diplomacy. And it was kind of unusual.

Now it's like given globalization and how many people kind of move and traverse different identities and marry across cultures. There are a lot of people like me, which I appreciate. Yeah.

Something that you identify with. I remember a young woman that we had who had been born in Egypt and grew up in Jordan.

And here she was in the suburbs of Chicago and she started coming to our church and she goes, I like it because it feels like home. I mean, she had been a missionary kid.

She was Caucasian, so she's like, I don't feel at Home in the white church, just because that's not what I'm used to, and here I do. So I understand that there's something to say about that. All right, here's the fifth question.

If you could be an airline, what airline would you be and why?

Oh, wow, this is so creative. So not my favorite airline, but what airline would I be? I would aspire to be an airline like Cathay Pacific, which is actually my favorite airline.

This is out of Hong Kong, and I think it's hospitable, friendly. We've flew them with our kids when we could find cheap tickets.

We're going back between the Philippines and the US and yeah, we just always felt like it worked well and it was, you know, warm and kind. So not what most people associate with airlines in the US Especially. And that's the kind of person I would hope to be efficient and hospitable.

Oh, there you go. I love that. That's a really great description. I think it's fascinating when people try to describe these different things.

You learn so much about a person in the middle of this, but, you know, you've already talked a bit about your background. Let's dive into that a little bit more.

Sure. You said you grew up in the.

Philippines, so why did you grow up in the Philippines? When did you come to faith? And what made you want to go into, really theology. That's what you're talking about, global theology.

So tell us a bit about that.

Yeah, so my parents are both like, I think, seventh generation Texans and Houstonians. They grew up in that part of the country and very rooted there, nominally Christian families.

And in the 70s, actually partly influenced by the Jesus people movement and some other things that were happening in Christian circles at that time.

They both kind of had an evangelical conversion and a call to missions separately and then found each other and headed down the pipeline as part of a big missions boom that was happening in the 80s. And they were sent to the southern Philippines. The Philippines has about 7,000 islands. The second largest, I think. That's right.

Yeah, is Mindanao, which is the island we were on. And we were way at the bottom of that down where we have a small Muslim minority in the Philippines.

And they're concentrated primarily right around where we were, but also lots of nominal Roman Catholic people or people of no faith or animistic faith or things like that. And they were sent there by their agency to go plant churches. And so that was. I was a baby and we headed out when I was two months old.

And that was home from you know, as far as I could remember. So I grew up in a really cool neighborhood. Most of my friends were Muslims, and we worked with Filipino partners to plant two churches in that city.

And it was a really exciting time in the Filipino church, I think it was when the evangelical movement really was taking root and lives were being changed, transformed. And so in the middle of that, it was not hard to become a Christian. You know, as a kid, the church was an exciting place for me.

Definitely sometimes boring as a young person, but I found that to be like a welcoming, exciting place. And that was where my faith was really first formed.

Spent some time in the US kind of on back and forth things as missionaries do, and especially back then.

And that was also formative to my faith, kind of interacting with some American churches, some of which were healthy, some of which were not that healthy. And that was also illuminating.

But in all of that, I felt drawn to, you know, what's the best way to invest my time, my energy, and it's to know God, to understand Him. My dad introduced me to the book knowing God by J.I. packer when I was in eighth grade, which was a bit early, but it really.

I mean, I'm sure I missed like, you know, 80% of it, but it really actually hooked me on the task of theology. And I just got interested in it. Went to college in the US and stumbled into a Greek class with a fantastic Greek teacher named Scott Haifman.

He's a New Testament scholar, Paul Scholar, but he was teaching introductory Greek and just caught me. And so I decided that was my way in to kind of study theology. Studied the Bible a lot in the original languages. Loved that.

Wanted to do more kind of synthetic things. So I started getting into theology, which allows you to kind of look at the Bible, but also, let's say, culture or church history, things like that.

And I met a few other mentors.

Dan Trier at Wheaton really also gave me a vision for a theology that's deeply rooted in scripture, but also engaging culture and things like that, and just fell in love with that.

So ended up doing a PhD and the day after I graduated, we flew back to Manila, where in the meantime, we'd been engaging in discernment process, and we felt the Lord calling us here. My wife also. I met my wife in high school here, so she's also, like me, a missionary kid who now is living in. In the Philippines as well. So. Yeah.

How many languages do you speak?

Do you.

I mean, do you speak Tagalog?

I'm pretty sure I speak Tagalog. Fine. I grew up speaking Cebuano. That's the language of the southern Philippines and eastern Philippines. And I. I mean, I'm Okay, I can understand it.

I'm not fluent in it anymore at all. I was an introverted kid, and that didn't help. For language learning, you want to be really extroverted and unembarrassed to make mistakes.

And then I've studied the normal ones in grad school. Greek, Hebrew, Latin, German. But I don't speak any of those.

I love how you said that. Just the normal ones, as if that's what everybody takes. I could barely get through Spanish.

You're like, I took German and I mean, oh, my gosh, new language. Guys, I have. I have. A guy was coming to my church. He was from Congo, and he was a refugee. And as we.

We'd have people come to the church and we thought he spoke three or four languages, but every time we would have someone come in and people wouldn't understand him, and he would walk over and then speak to them in that language, and we'd start counting him up. The guy spoke nine languages, and he didn't even know he spoke five. Nine languages.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I. I have huge, huge respect for my colleagues and students who are often oper.

English is maybe their fifth, sixth, and they're operating at such a high level, it's impressive. So I would say I'm below average, at least in my world, linguistically. So, yeah, it's humbling.

I'm below average in my world linguistically, and I only speak one language, so I don't know what that means. Anyway, let's get into your book. Let's talk about it. Why Evangelical Theology Needs the Global Church. I mean, the title kind of says it all.

But why did you write this book?

Yeah, the story goes like this. While I was finishing graduate school, I was doing my PhD at Wheaton.

I started teaching undergrads toward the end of that time, kind of in a Basic Christian Thought class that gave some of us doctoral students the chance to do that.

And as I was interacting with these enthusiastic young people, I was sharing with them about how the majority world church is really where the theological action is and where it's going to be for the next 30, 40 years. And as enthusiastic young people do, they actually believe me. And so they would say, well, okay, show me what to read. What do I do?

Not Missiology, but actually reflections on Christian doctrine and faith. Thinking about how majority world cultures inform that, I worked with Jean Green and kko.

We set up a collaboration to start putting out some books that actually would create the resources we were looking for in the classroom. So we helped create this series called the Majority World Theology Series, and it was tons of fun.

We put out a book a year for about six years, and then later that got wrapped up into one big volume called Majority World Theology. And it was really wonderful. I learned a ton through that. We had conferences and dialogues.

I mean, just an incredible opportunity to kind of witness this theological dialogue and a lot of it for the first time between these various places. But I found that a piece was missing.

So as I was interacting with North American leaders, seminary teachers or pastors or even lay people, as well as people in my own students here in Asia who are from all around Asia and are doing seminary training, often I would give them those resources and they would say, well, why do I need this? What is important about this? And often the thinking goes something like this, theology is about God. God doesn't change. God isn't bound by culture.

The Bible is our permanent source of authority. What we figured out a hundred years ago, no matter what the composition of the church is, it should still apply. Sort of like science. Right.

Newton's law doesn't shift whether you're in Africa or Asia or Massachusetts doesn't matter. And so I realized, okay, I need to explain a little bit more about why this is helpful and even why it's not scary, why.

Why it should not be threatening to us, which often it was perceived as a threat to kind of bring relativism or kind of a postmodernism into the church's theological library. And so, yeah, I felt very clearly that wasn't the case, that actually this is deeply biblical, deeply Christian way to think about theology.

But I needed to explain that. And so I wrote the book.

Not an easy task. I mean, that's not an easy undertaking, as you have wrestled with this.

And you said you were interacting with those in the North American church, and people had a harder time with that because they have a really hard time seeing that, just as you've already talked about.

Yeah.

But let's. Let's kind of break it down for some of our people who may not be in this type of discussion, because they are.

They're thinking along those lines that you just mentioned.

Yeah.

I actually did a survey on our YouTube channel, and I asked people, are there many different theologies, or is there Just one theology. And it was fascinating because it goes to everybody out there.

Right, yeah, of course.

People said there's just one. And it's like, well, no, there's not. There's all these different kinds of theologies that come. And I think people misunderstand that.

Let's talk about why or talk about the global church.

We've talked about how, and I mentioned this in the introduction, the church in North America or in the West, Western world is experiencing a rap, the decline as of right now. Now, that doesn't mean that God can't revive. That doesn't mean that he's not clearing away or any of those things pruning.

But we do know that the majority world church is exploding. Why is it so important for those in Western contexts, I mean, just around the world, to hear from one another, not just the Western world.

But why is it so important for us to hear from one another when it talks about the task of theology?

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. And I mean, that's right to the heart of the book. So maybe the first thing I could say is maybe I'll give you two reasons not to engage here. Right?

Okay. So one reason that people will sometimes engage here is out of political correctness or whatever you want to call this, sort of a sense of.

And actually I would encounter this often in North America, especially in the US and you know, basically, if you, if you got them kind of over dinner, comfortable, and they were honestly talking and they would say, you know, I know I should be interested in this, the majority world church and what its theology is, but I really am not. And I don't. It doesn't feel like it matters to me, but I'm going to, I'm going to engage in it, take my medicine, essentially. Right. That's one.

One way. And, and you know, I actually, I have some respect for that. I think it's actually good to be honest. Yeah, be honest.

And also we all need diversity of thought in our diet. And you know, I do this, I read news articles that make me mad intentionally because I know I need to hear the other perspective. Right.

And so that can be healthy, but it's not the best way. It's not the best reason. It's not going to keep you coming back, let's put it that way.

The second one is maybe there's a pragmatic approach that says if you're a publisher or something like that, you're saying, look, we're running out of Christians to sell books to in North America, we're going to have to sell books to Africans and Asians and Latin Americans if we're going to survive. And again, not a terrible reason. That's fine.

I actually would make that argument to some of our friends in the publishing world in the west, whether it's books or, you know, podcasts, YouTube, things like that, like, you're gonna have to go where the people are. But again, I don't think that's really the heart of it.

And so to get to the heart of it, why should we pay attention to the majority world church and what God is doing in the, in this amazing global body? Well, it's because it's what God is doing.

It's because it's God's design from the start, right, to bring the nations to Himself, to redeem to Himself a people of every tribe, tongue and nation, and for those people to work together in the task of discerning the depth of the gospel, the riches of Christ, and worshiping him in the fullness of what the human person can achieve. And this is exactly what you see in Revelation 7. Redeemed humanity. Guess what?

Their culture, their language, their nation that stays in redeemed humanity.

And that tells us God is trying from the start not to get us all into sort of one melting pot where we can all leave our culture behind, but actually into a place where the church, his creature, composed of these many tribes and tongues, is collaborating, working together to know him and love him, worship him, proclaim him, which is awesome.

It really expands our view of God is what it does.

I, I found that when I interact with different cultures, they see something about the person of God through their cultural lens that while it's there, it's not been as impressed upon to me.

So when I expand on it, it actually makes my, my understanding or view of God bigger than I realized because we really do have those cultural blind spots. I remember chatting with Jackson Lewitt.

Now it's Brad Vaughn, as he kind of talked about, and he talks about the extension of our mirrors, like on our truck. It just helps us to get a fully orbed view. But we do know, and in reading your book, I saw this, there are still objections to this.

And in some respect, much of what you're talking about is trying to address some of those objections that have inevitably come up as the global church is colliding with Western evangelicalism that says theology is fixed, as you said, along law, rather than understanding that there is an ebb and flow and, and there's in some respect a bit of an art form, because culture is always forming. Let's, let's park on that for a moment.

Yeah.

How does culture influence our view of God?

Yeah, well, I mean, the simplest way to say it is that you can't say of a sentence about God or the Gospel without engaging in culture and you can't even think it. Right. So think the simplest, maybe theological claim you can make. Jesus Christ is Lord. Right. That is sort of the fundamental Christian claim. Right.

And, and it's true that Christians across all time, across all cultures, affirm that truth. It's constitutive of the Christian identity, and yet every bit of that has some cultural freight and differences. Right.

So when you say Lord, for example, what do we mean by that? Right. That's actually not a word we use a lot.

Let's say in American vernacular, if you translate the word Lord into other languages, it's going to have different shades of, in terms of, what does it mean in terms of authority, deity, etc. Or take another phrase like Jesus is my healer. I think again, all Christians would affirm that in some sense.

And yet across different cultural places, that's going to have very different dynamics. Is Jesus a healer? More like an American modern doctor, or like a therapist, or like a kind of shaman, but Jesus instead.

And so all of the sort of tools we have to work with are bound by our culture. Now, when I say that, that always sounds to people like a threat, like it's like bad news. You're all stuck in your cultural prison.

And that isn't the case. Right? We can translate, we can communicate across cultures. And actually the reason we can do that is that God does it first.

When he decides to speak all the way back to Abram, let's say, or Moses or any of the prophets, he decides to use a local language, a local tongue. And that's not a perfect vehicle. He doesn't sort of find the best language in the ancient Near East, Right.

He just picks one and out of his goodwill, that's what it is. And for all the sort of foibles of the Hebrew language, he still can reveal himself fully and clearly there.

And of course, we see this most clearly in the incarnation. But in the incarnation, God takes on human identity in a very like local way. Right?

You think about Jesus had a local accent, local family, and he's willing to take that risk so that he can communicate and commune with us.

And we have to be willing to take that risk as we do theology as well, even though it might feel a little bit scary or it might contain Risks, we have to go along with that process. That's the process God has designed for us.

Let's get practical then. As you mentioned that I'm thinking about you as a kid.

You're growing up in the Philippines and you're growing up in a community where there's a lot of Muslims. And we know that, I mean, there are those who are Muslim all around us. God is doing a movement within Islam that we're very grateful for.

But as we're talking about contextualization, let's say that you meet a Muslim, it might be a co worker, it might be a fellow student that you meet in university. It could be any of these different things. It could be the neighbor across street that just moves in.

Yeah, you're talking about God, their conception of God. They use the word. Of course, we've had this discussion, we've seen it all within the media. Allah, do we use that word?

These are some of the questions that contextualization is wrestling with. Right. Is this a good example?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's a fine example.

And yeah, it's the kind of thing that a missionary faces all the time, like constantly, especially I would say, in first generation missions movements, you have to sort that out. And there's incredible debate about how to do that. Well, the God name question is one of the classic ones.

So like in China, for example, there is a long running debate about which Chinese word to use for God. Among Christians today even, there's different translations of the Bible that use different words.

And you know, the one thing it makes you realize is there was never a perfect word for God in English either.

We landed on one and then we explained as much as we could why this word doesn't mean what you might have thought it meant, but it actually is, you know, the God revealed in Scripture. And in a way we're all doing that.

Every pastor is doing that wherever they are, is trying to help their people sort of understand, yes, God is powerful, but not powerful in the way that you have a distorted view of power in your local culture, for example. So yeah, I mean, that's a good example. It sort of could multiply a thousand, a million times.

And what's interesting, I guess is just to say that, number one, when you work in multiple cultures, you start to just see that more.

And number two, when you have Christians from multiple cultures, they have different blind spots and recognize different aspects, let's say, of God's transcendence, identity attributes because of sort of the tools or the hooks that they have in Their cultural context.

You have mentioned in the book, you talk about culture, which we've been talking about how culture shapes what we view and see. But that's not the end all, and that's not the determining factor of how we communicate truth.

We know as evangelical Christians, we go back to the word of God, which is our authority. You spend a great deal of time in the book writing that it is our magisterial authority. Why is it so important?

I mean, it should be self explanatory, but just for the sake of argument, why is it so important to help us all keep that at the center when we're talking especially about contextual theology?

Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

This is actually one of the legitimate concerns I would say, that many evangelicals have about what I would call kind of first and second wave contextual theologies. These generally came out of first Roman Catholicism, then mainline Protestantism in the 70s and 80s.

In both of those traditions, they have a different view of Scripture than we do. And as a result, they were able to, or I mean, they decided to kind of give culture a really heavy hand in shaping theological conversations.

And the resulting kind of theologies, actually, they don't work super well as Christian theologies. They end up being something else because precisely because they. They were not rooted really in Scripture in the way that we want our theology to be.

And so my argument in the book is evangelicals have looked at that and they've said, contextual theology, that's not for us. That's their thing. And this sort of reminds me of how evangelicals used to engage tradition or the early church.

They would be like, that's the Roman Catholics thing. We don't do that. And then over time, we came to see, like, oh, actually this is super helpful.

You know, reading Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa, like, really helps us actually deal with a lot of the problems in our own movement today. But we don't read Athanasius the same way that someone maybe in the Roman Catholic Church does. We read it as, this is a helpful authority.

But ultimately, Scripture is my rule. I argue that we need to engage culture the same way.

Rather than saying, yeah, keep it out, no thanks, we need to engage it more along the lines of, this is a helpful tool in our toolbox. But we remain tethered to the word of God. And the reason for that is we want to hear from God. That's the evangelical impulse.

We want to hear from God. We don't want to hear ourselves. We don't want to just mirror back, echo whatever Our culture is. We are desperate.

I think we are people at our best who are desperate to hear from.

The Lord as we're talking about that we are desperate.

We do want to hear from God, and yet we know that many of those who are in my certain geographical location, as you mentioned, you're in the Philippines, so you're in a totally different cultural context. I'm in a North American Western context, and right now I'm specifically in the Deep South.

So that has its own understanding of things and its own cultural viewpoints and understanding of different pieces. And then your denomination, your generation, all of these different things play a part in the.

The secret sauce of dealing with culture and creating culture as though we interact with people across the globe more and more as we see globalization occurring, immigration, people moving, just. It's. It's just happening all the time. What used to happen when people traveled overseas now just happens across the street and in the schools.

It's just happening everywhere.

Right.

One of the reasons, though, what I've noticed as I've interacted with those who are monocultural, who come from a North American context and exclusively learn theology in a North American context, have a very difficult time crossing certain lines. I remember having a discussion with Kevin Vanhuser, and you cite him a lot in the book.

Yeah.

Outstanding theologian. And we were talking about Andrew Walls, the great mission historian, and he had taught with him at the University of Edinburgh.

Yeah, right.

And we were having a discussion about global Christianity. And he paused and said, it's very difficult to do global Christianity. I said, why? He said, because the categories are so different for some people.

They're like, what do you mean the categories are so different? I don't understand what you mean by that.

Can you help us understand why we have a hard time crossing these cultural barriers and why these categories are so different and as we do theology.

Yeah, yeah. That's a great question.

So, I mean, one way I would answer that is a few years ago, I was working with a Filipino colleague, senior scholar here, named Tim Henair. We were working on this book, Asian Christian Theology, together.

And our goal was really to provide evangelical seminaries in Asia a textbook resource that would take more into account the Asian context and do it from an evangelical perspective.

So one of the interesting things you'll find if you travel around Asia, go to seminaries, most of them are using some of the same textbooks that you would read at any Western seminary. That's just sort of the way it is. There aren't other resources. So as we're thinking about how do we want to build this out?

What would the table of contents look like? And what we landed on was kind of a two part table of contents.

And in the first part, we focused on some of the classic topics of systematic theology, right?

God, church, Christ, Spirit, eschatology, you know, and the authors we assign, we asked them, like, reflect on that topic though, from a distinctive perspective, talk about how, let's say the Chinese context helps you see new things in scripture about eschatology. And so things like that, really helpful. But we said that's not really enough because we don't want to just sort of use that imprint.

Now those categories, a lot of them are like, every Christian in the world wants to talk about several of those things, but they also in Asia want to talk about other things. They want to talk about what does Christianity have to say about my cultural identity? And that's a theological question.

You're not going to find it in a, in a textbook. They want to talk about how should I engage with the spirit world, or to what degree should I engage with the spirit world? What's my posture?

What's my engagement with this local religious context. Again, those are not sort of sections in a major systematic theology in the West. And so it is tricky.

And there's also the reality that we're trying in Asia and Africa and Latin America also. We don't want to just start fresh. We want to build from the best of what the Christian tradition has developed over the years.

So there is a sort of a process of discerning how to reshape the theological vision. I think we're kind of in the middle of that now, and it's exciting.

And in the next couple of decades I'm hopeful that we'll see some of that kind of solidifying and then it'll change again because culture shifts and the need to address it with the unchanging truths of the gospel will also shift.

I remember talking about Asian Christian theology. I've not read that, but I remember getting Wahyun's book Mangoes are Bananas.

Yeah, yeah.

And it was on an Asian contextual theology. And I remember reading the book and I went, this is not an Asian contextual theology. This is just theology to me.

And I know that he was writing specifically to a context, but I found it very freeing because I suddenly not only could see through his eyes and understand many of the different cultures that were represented in that theology that he's talking about, because it's again, it's not a monolith. You've Got several different Asian cultures that are speaking to that.

But I also started seeing parts of the scripture that I didn't see before that helped my understanding of the Scripture. And again, I can't reiterate or emphasize enough how important this is for our vision of God. This isn't just an academic exercise.

No, this is not it at all. As you said before, it's to help in our communication with the Lord.

When you see God's vision for the world and how big God is and how God has made every culture, it just makes you stand in awe and worship an even greater way. And also, I think it causes you to take on a little bit of epistemic humility, if you will, to realize that you're not the center of the universe.

The United States is not the center of the universe. And this is why I think that your book is so important. Now, you have five different theses in here.

Yeah.

And I wanted to kind of just talk about these, because you really unfold the book in these six chapters with these five different theses. And the first one is.

And we've kind of talked it a little bit around some of these subjects, but I want to bring each one of these up and kind of get you to talk a little bit about it.

Yeah.

First one was evangelical contextual theologies.

And again, I'm trying to figure out how to give a simple definition, because I know some people are still struggling with the idea of what is contextual. Contextualization. Can you just give us a quick definition of contextualization?

Yeah.

So I would distinguish actually between contextualization, which is trying to translate some aspect of the Christian faith from one culture into another.

Contextual theology, I would characterize as a sort of the constructive process of describing God and all things in relation to him, intentionally thinking about how culture informs that process. That's what makes it contextual theology, in a sense. All theology is contextual.

Everyone is going from a context, but not everyone is paying attention to that. So that's how I would clarify.

So can I jump in there? Because, again, I want to help our people out to see that we are doing contextual theology.

When we talk about the creeds, for example, all of those are their attempt to create a contextual theology to address the issues of that time.

And like today, for example, you can hear people say, in a Western context, well, Jesus never said homosexuality was wrong, and he never said it had to be just between a man and a woman. Well, no, this is now us answering this question is us creating a contextual Theology, Right?

Yes, yes.

Okay.

So I want.

I want people to understand that this is not just, again, an academic thing for across cultures. This is every day where we live.

Absolutely, yes.

Everywhere we live. And this is where I think the global church is so essential.

And this is why I think your book is so important, is it helps us to have a fully orbed understanding. And it's again, never completed because we're continually. Culture is continually shifting.

We're continuing to see how Christ works in that culture, but without us learning from other cultures and us offering a part in the conversation, it's a both and that polycentric idea, then we're really missing out. Sorry, I don't mean to steal your thunder. This is just such a passionate thing for me.

Yeah, no, this is great.

Let me finish the first theses. I stopped in the morning.

Evangelical contextual theologies must look to Scripture as their magisterial authority, even as they increase their appreciation for crucial ministerial role of culture for the theological task. What does that mean?

So let me break that down. Super.

Simply appreciate the role that culture plays in helping us worship, speak about God, while also keeping Scripture as our primary authority for how we worship and speak about God.

So the Scripture speaks for us. It shapes as we're interacting with culture. It continually is reshaping. That's the authority we go back to.

Yes, yes. Okay.

Just making sure. I'm trying to put this into layman's terms.

I know, being in this, I appreciate it.

I mean, you've done a masterful job in this. You really have. And I hate to even add anything to it. I don't feel like I'm doing that. I'm just for those who are not in this area, in this arena.

They think it's not for them, but it is. It really is.

It is. Absolutely. It is. Yes.

So here's your second thesis. Evangelical contextual theologies must acknowledge culture as a material theological good, a gift from God, designed for the benefit of the church.

Go.

Yeah. All right. So one way to think about this is it doesn't really matter.

Let's say there are things about us that don't matter to our theological reflection. So hair color, eye color. Right. Those are not sort of material theological goods that help us.

You know, you don't want to focus on those things as a way to try to get better theology.

But culture actually is, and I argue in that chapter that that starts in Scripture, God decides to make culture a centerpiece of how he's going to reveal himself, how he's going to create A new people. And he reveals that it's not just one culture he's trying to create. He's trying to redeem every culture.

That's a huge starting point for us then, as we think about how to engage with culture in theology.

Can you describe a bit just culture in general? You do that in the book, but help us along. Because even as I think about it, I'm like, I know what you mean.

But I do know, having talked with other people, because I talk about culture all the time.

In fact, I remember having a friend of mine who was a missionary to Germany and we're in my kitchen talking about culture and his three year old daughter walked through the room and she just said, culture, culture, culture, culture. That's all I ever hear is culture. And I, and I laughed because, you know, you hear Christ in culture.

We want to talk about ministering to cultures, but yet there is that idea of high culture or culture thinking, people thinking of art in terms like that. But that's not what we mean here. Let's talk about the definition and how we're trying to use this term culture.

Yeah, no, that's great. And one thing to just highlight at the very start there that your comment helps set up is culture can mean a lot of different things.

Sometimes it does mean the results of culture. We used to talk about opera is culture, or literature is culture.

It's really shifted in meaning over the last 150 years because of the way we understand culture. Now, the definition I like the best is from a theologian named Bill Dearness.

And he describes culture as that changing set of communal practices and assumptions that serve as a repertoire of people's actions and by which they express their identity. So in other words, everyone is walking around. It's not static. It's not like you're this one thing, right?

It's actually that you have a bunch of different things that are swirling around and you draw from those things to express yourself, to go about your life. And that helps explain also why people usually, especially today, are actually operating in multiple cultures.

Especially if you live in a city or something like that, you have different parts of yourself, they call it code switching. Like you're going to use that part here and that part here.

Maybe you're a person who grew up in a rural area, but you live in a city and you actually now operate, you're a little bit bicultural, right? So that maybe helps give you an idea of maybe a more complex and more subtle definition of culture.

And I'll just point out this is not Actually, the same concept of culture that we're familiar with when we talk about Christ and culture, the, you know, Niebuhr, you know, really very influential model that is actually more about our interaction with the organs of culture, like government policy making, schools, things like that. That was what he was interested in the 50s, because that was the issue at the time.

Right.

Today, the Christ and culture debate actually needs to be reframed. It's a different thing.

Yeah, you mentioned that in the book, which we could have got into with Craig Carter and several different people in their.

Yeah.

Their takes on it. For those that don't know what we're talking about, that's okay. It's not completely relevant to the discussion. I mean, it is because I referenced it.

I'm glad that you addressed it. But we're getting into this idea of our culture because we do have culture. It's the way we do things. It's why we do what we do. What's. Okay.

Yeah.

I've told people I was teaching a Sunday school class and I said, culture is like this. I said, you're at a wedding and the mother of the groom walks in wearing a white dress. And I said, what do all the women do?

And they go, oh, you know, these women start shaking their heads. And I'm like, well, she violated a rule in that culture. That means she's insulting.

Right.

It's. It's what you do and what you don't do. This is why if anybody watched the. When George W.

Bush was president and he was speaking, I can't remember what country it was, but a guy took off his sandal and threw it at him.

Yes. Yeah.

That was a huge insult in that culture. So culture is the way we do stuff. I like your description is. Is in that. And culture plays a role in how we go about what we do.

Yeah.

One of the things, though, that I thought was very interesting for you, you're talking about it being a material theological good, and it's a gift from God. It's not something to be avoided. It's something that God wants to redeem. God wants to work in.

But you also mentioned the church, and I was very impressed and drawn to your understanding of the church and how the church kind of acts as a grid to see this.

But in your third thesis, evangelical contextual theology should look to the Christian doctrine of the church in order to coordinate the once for all of the gospel and the remarkably diverse expressions of the faith that emerge in the real world. Explain that.

Yeah. Yeah.

So all of this conversation revolves around how do we maintain the, the singularity and the unique identity of, of the triune God, who again is beyond culture, and of the gospel, which is a story that is not beyond culture. It's embedded in culture, but it's transmittable through every culture.

How do we keep that, that oneness and still account for the reality that in the Christian church from the start we've really embraced a lot of diversity and how do we keep those things together?

So one way to do that is to talk about, for example, like the incarnation and to say that just like the infinite, God becomes finite in Christ and in the person of Jesus, we also are a thousand or a million incarnations in a sense, in these various cultures. I argue in the book that's actually not the most helpful doctrine or analogy to kind of root this discussion in.

It creates a lot of problems, you know, one of which is kind of a messiah complex for missionaries or people going across cultures.

The Bible actually gives us a template for this and it's to describe this thing, the church, where in this creature of God, which the church is here is where the once for all of the gospel has an imprint. Right. That's the church's whole story and identity is that Jesus loved us. This I know, for the Bible tells us so.

And yet it's also the place, it's the location or the organism within which God has designed all cultures to come together and have this kind of participatory experience of him and of this once for all gospel. So that's it in terms of some sort of more deep theological things that I want to argue that really helps set us up.

Better to think about what is good contextual theology and what's bad contextual theology. And we don't need to get into the details of that.

But I think for the everyday person, the way to think about this is if you want to experience global theology, it should be through a church in some way. Right, Whatever that means. Maybe your local church, maybe your local church partnering with another church.

That's the best way to do this kind of thing.

Having done that and pastored a church that was like that, that's where we learned a ton. It was in those interpersonal relationships that you find that out. It's no longer a theory.

Yeah, I remember when we had a Muslim coming into the service the first time and that changed everything.

All of the arguments went away, all of the pettiness, all of the power struggles, because suddenly here was a person that we wanted to reach, that we knew very few people Had. I mean, God started that work with September 11th.

So you're seeing this movement happen where God is moving people from around the world and this great diaspora that you see and we're encountering people. And this is where I think the John 17 comes in that you mentioned, where Jesus prays in his high priestly prayer.

I pray they may be one, as we are one. And that itself is an evangelistic sign. This is again, the importance of the body, that it's not just an online thing. It's not just you and Jesus.

There is.

The church itself is a sign and symbol, an outpost of the kingdom to show people the reality of what his plan is and how it's at working in the world. So it's not just about the people that make you feel good, not the people that you all look and sound like. But this is what this is about, right?

This is what you're describing for us.

Yeah, yeah. You know, we have a lot of multicultural institutions in our world today, but we still have nothing like the church.

The church is where people, not just from multiple nations or whatever can get together, but people who have fundamental disagreements about lots of big things.

The Holy Spirit does a work that brings us together and in, that allows us to sharpen each other, grow our vision of the gospel, deepen our understanding of faith. We should all be wanting that. I love that. Yeah.

Let's look at thesis 4.

Evangelical contextual theology should seek to discern the plenitude of riches of Christ through the cultivation authentic Christian witness in every culture, while seeking the unity of the Spirit by rejecting local theologies that failed to engage the worldwide church. That's a long. That's one sentence. That's a long sentence.

That sentence should have been shorter.

Explain that to us that aren't up in this world.

Yeah, let me explain that. So essentially this is moving on from the next one. So if you think that the church is the.

The place to do contextual theology, then the question is, what is it that we're doing?

What I want to argue we're doing here is we are plumbing the depths of the riches of Christ, which is exactly what the New Testament calls us to, and we're doing it in fellowship with each other. And that means really, I guess it kind of pulls us in two directions, or it creates a tension for us.

In one sense, we want every culture to really own the gospel.

We want every culture to find that the gospel belongs to them, that it is not a foreign thing imported in or forced upon them, and that actually the gospel has the power to bring the best out of their culture, to perfect it, to make it into what it should have been without the fall. So that's one task. That's sort of the missionary task of the church.

At the same time, we want every church to feel that they belong to all these other cultures. And so this is why you can't push for purely local theology.

If you want to be biblical, you have to push always for, let's deepen our understanding locally, but let's also make sure that we are in fellowship with people from other cultures and maybe especially the ones that kind of tend to make us mad or make us worried, because that's how the church is supposed to work. So it's not. I think there's often a mistake in contextual theology of kind of getting very, very local.

And if you do that, I think you're departing from the spirit of Christian witness, which is, let's deepen locally, but let's keep that unity and let's work together. So that's the tension.

You have said so much just in that part there.

This is where it really flies in the face of where our contemporary, isolated kind of culture is at, where we want to be safe, we want to interact with people that look and sound like us. As you already talked about, I mean, you've mentioned it indirectly.

I was having a chat the other day, and we were talking about generative AI and with. With someone who's kind of in that. That arena. And he. He'd been a NASA physicist.

I mean, there's a brilliant, brilliant man, and we're talking about AI and just the fracturing of trust. He said, the thing about AI is, he goes, you're going to look in about a hundred years, let's say you wanted to get a book on Oz, Guinness.

And he's written like 37 books. Yeah, but there are 500 out there that purport to be written by him.

And you don't know which ones actually were written by generative AI or which ones there. And I said, well, what does that mean? What are the ramifications?

And he said, what you're going to see is it's a fracturing of trust because people don't know who to trust, and therefore they're going to have to trust those who are closest to them rather than those that are out in the world. So that's going to change how we do things. But this is where the hard work comes in. And this is where I think in the Western culture.

And again, and I don't want to just say in the West, I think where.

Where the accoutrements that have defined Western culture help us fall short, especially as the Internet continues to privatize us, it socially isolates us and we're away from one another. And so what we. We think, though, is that the faith is just for me and my own kind of self help, my own personal walk. But it's not.

This is the hard work of actually engaging someone in an interpersonal relationship. And it's not easy.

And I remember I would end the services at our church and I would say, talk to someone from a different cultural background than yourself. It's going to be awkward, but awkward is awesome. The whole church would finish it. They would finish it. Awkward is awesome. Awkward is awesome.

And I wanted to get that into their minds.

But today what we've done is just, especially in the west, it's come in, get my spiritual fix, go out, and relationships have become disposable and people don't want to be uncomfortable.

Yeah, yeah.

What you're telling us and you're showing us is that this is actually part of the plan of God. If we're to really know Jesus, or as Paul even talked about, I want to share in his sufferings.

I have to suffer myself to be able to do so, to understand the person in the nature of God and what his plan is for the world. We have to be able to engage relationally with people that are different from us. Right?

Yep. Yeah, yeah.

No, and the thing I think about is Ephesians 4, where there's this vision of the church as sort of growing up into its full self and maturity.

Right.

Full maturity as the body of Christ is to kind of. And it uses the language even like every joint, which is fascinating. Right.

Get every joint equipped, meaning that means you have to have things that are different working together. And so this is repeatedly, you know, the vision of the church laid out not just in Paul, but throughout the whole New Testament.

And it's, you know, it's just sort of, if you want to be a Christian, if you want to follow Jesus, this is what it is. You can't do that as just you and Jesus on your own or just me and Jesus in my culture. That also is a mistake.

Well, transformation takes place in Community. We found that out now that we need that community. And the more that diverse that community is, which is how God has designed it.

We see that in the Book of Acts at Pentecost. These are all the different people.

And every time I read Acts, and you and I both know this, whenever you find commentaries, it's either talking about the Holy Spirit, how it's. How it continues, goes on to go on, or even the apostles. And.

But so often what I see in the Book of Acts is its interaction with cultures, different cultures and its expression. Even the Jerusalem Council, when they come together and they're like, okay, what.

What is going to be required as we're interacting and sharing the faith.

Yes. Back and forth. Yep, yep.

Forgive me, Steve. I don't think I've ever talked so much on one of these episodes. I am so pent up.

This is great. I'm loving it.

I love this. I love this. I love this. All right, well, let's get into your next thesis here, where we get into it.

Yeah, sure.

So evangelical contextual theologies should engage the great tradition of the Church, finding that they're a partner that prevents slavish obedience to all things present, and that tempers theological novelty in favor of considered overtures toward unity. So this is. Sorry, I know.

Everything you just said there. You said, it's so theologically beautiful for those that are listening. And you're wondering, why is Travis. Has he been drinking?

No, I have not been drinking. I am just thrilled with the spirit of God right now because this is my happy place. I'm in my happy place. All right, keep going, Steve.

So, yeah, I mean, the basic idea here is again, these theses are trying to lay out if we're going to do contextual theology, that is evangelical, meaning faithful to the gospel, useful to the church, what's it going to look like? And this thesis is saying it can't be just one form of catholicity.

So catholicity is the fancy version of saying the church from everywhere working together to understand God. That's thesis four. And thesis five is saying it's not just everywhere today, it's everywhere, the other side of catholicity.

And this is not something invented by us. Of course, the word catholicity might be right. It's not. Sorry, my connection is unstable.

But it's actually the design of God once again, that all the saints together, over time sort of deepen and deepen and deepen our knowledge of who God is and what it is to be faithful to him. Now, very practically, a lot of times, contextual theology is very 20th century or 21st century.

It's sometimes even actively, intentionally rejecting the past to say, like, look, that's the Western tradition. We need to get rid of that, move into just local kind of movements today. And I argue that's a mistake.

In fact, the majority world church, the great tradition belongs to them too.

And actually the people like Kwame Bediaco have helped us see that understanding the early church and the dynamics there actually really help us understand, let's say the African church or the Asian church today. Because when the gospel is crossing cultures in new ways, this is Andrew Walls.

We always learn new things and we always engage new tensions that we didn't engage before. And so when that was happening in the third century, we can learn a lot from there about how to engage well with that cross cultural process today.

So that's the big idea.

I love that. Sorry, this whole thing is just so exciting to me.

Yeah. Oh, it's great to meet someone who's also as excited about it as I am. Yeah.

Well, I mean, we've talked about so many of these different things today. I know your time is limited. This, this has been a really good conversation. I feel like we can continue this on. And I hope we can.

Yeah, I really hope we can. But what is one, including water bottle. We talk about being Apollo's water. We want to water faith.

What is a, a truth that they can sip on as a result of our conversation today?

I guess I would just say start engaging in a real person relationship with a Christian who is not from your culture. If you aren't already, start. And if you are already, maybe try to deepen and be intentional about that conversation.

I think for most people, as you said, this is awkward at first, but it really will pay dividends in terms of correcting your blind spots, deepening your faith, and be thinking, be intentional about, hey, how can I understand the gospel better in conversation with my brother or my sister from these other places? And don't force it either. You don't need to find some exotic thing about their faith. In fact, that can be harmful too.

Just enjoy and deepen that relationship or encourage your local church to deepen that relationship with a church around the globe or across the street that is culturally different from you. And I think you're going to find it helpful.

Awesome. Well, Steve, I want to thank you for coming on the show. One last thing. What can people do or how can people learn more about what you're doing?

Yeah. So I strongly recommend, of course, I would love for everyone to Read the book, take a look at it.

It's a little hard maybe for the non theologically trained, but I think it's readable. But I also would really encourage you to just go look up the website of Langham Literature. Langham L A N G H A M.

This is a ministry founded by John Stott and it has been just a gold mine of kind of connecting global readers with voices from the majority world church. So go to their website, check out what's there and I just, I think, you know, taking it beyond a personal relationship.

If you want to deepen your knowledge, I really strongly recommend just checking them out. They're a great channel of kind of great new material.

Awesome. I actually want to check that out. I didn't even know that resource existed, so I want to check that out myself.

It's amazing. It's one of the best stories in Christian publishing I think right now.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Steve, thanks for coming on Apollos Water and we hope to have you back.

Yeah, I appreciate so much the great time and look forward to continuing the conversation.

Henry Blackaby once wrote, find out where.

God is working and join him there.

I love that advice.

Look what God is doing.

See where he's working. And he is working in the global.

Church and he's brought the global church here. He's bringing the nations into your neighborhood and wants to bring them into your church.

Will you join him in that? As I said at the onset, it's.

Going to be awkward to get into these conversations, to build these kind of relationships. And I know not everyone is wired that that way. And you will be surprised to learn this, but I'm not even wired that way. I'm an introvert by nature.

So for me to be able to do that, I get all this anxiety and tension. But I've learned to embrace the awkward because awkward is awesome. The question that I have for you is will you join what God is doing where you are?

And if you want to join him, then Stephen's book is for you.

As we heard in the conversation, we're all doing contextual theology and trying to.

Figure out how to to live for.

God where we are in our world. The question is though, are we doing it well? And Steven's book helps with that.

If you want to do it well and if you want to fulfill the mission that God has for you, then I want to give you an opportunity because we're going live with our first class for the Apollos Academy starting Tuesday, April 22. The class is entitled God's Greatness your mission. You're going to discover what God's mission is for you at this moment in time.

It's going to be insightful, fun and you're going to be better equipped to fulfill God's mission where you are.

It should go over about a five week period and it's sure to enlighten you, instruct you, encourage you and equip you to fulfill the mission of God where you are. So you can just sign up in your show note. I want to thank you for listening.

Today and I want to thank our.

Apollo's water team for helping to water your world.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered. Stay watered, everybody.