March 4, 2025 • 39 mins
- Christopher Wright's The Mission of God
- Amos Yong’s Beyond the Impasse
- Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion & Embrace
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Did I just fix everything?
(00:02):
Can you believe that I've fixed everything?
Check, check, check.
That'll be crazy.
After three seasons of suffering for no reason.
It's all crisp and junk.
Crispy.
Crisp.
Crisp.
Crisp.
Welcome to TikTok Theology, a podcast that tackles the major trending topics on social media that concern the Christian faith.
(00:27):
I'm Meagan.
And I'm Steven.
We know you can't form a theology in three minutes or less, but those videos can identify current issues.
TikTok will give us the prompt and then we'll do a deep dive.
Thanks for joining us in this exploration.
Season four. Season four.
We're here.
We're here.
Hi friends, welcome back to TikTok Theology, season four, episode one.
(00:52):
We're back again, Steven.
We're back.
We're doing it once more.
Once more and then maybe again.
And then again.
And again after that probably.
And then even more so.
Not three, not four, not five.
Just kidding.
That's a LeBron James reference.
You don't know that?
No.
Basketball's not my sport.
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
Apologies to everyone.
It's too bad.
It's too bad.
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Today we are chatting about the global spirit at work.
And that sounds like kind of like a really up there kind of title that's like, ooh, it's like floating and whatever.
Very theological.
Yeah.
But fret not, we'll get practical in this house.
I promise.
But this episode, our heart is really to kind of frame the rest of this season.
We're making a lot of focus and conversation around global issues, especially after just
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hopping out of a season that was very political for us in the US.
We got through that.
And now we're kind of barely, but we did and we've made it.
And so now we're really excited to kind of dive into more global issues, more multi-cultural
focuses and stuff, so we're super excited for the way that this season hopefully is going
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to go, especially in all the conversations in social media as they do, chatting about,
you know, Christianity as it manifests around the world and people's understanding of Christianity
culturally and globally and stuff like that.
So we have some misconceptions, I think, about Christianity that come up a lot in general,
especially for us in the States and especially around election season when people start talking
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about religion a lot.
There's this weird belief that Christianity is just a Western religion and that it's like
a white man's religion and all these things.
Especially evangelicalism, the term, evangelicalism.
Like, man, that's a global phenomenon.
Correct.
Like, Christianity did not start in Europe.
This did not come to be in any Western space.
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In fact, the average Christian in the world today is a brown woman.
That's not even a, like, it's not a white man.
It's not what we, like, would necessarily, people claim Christianity is about.
And I think that this speaks a lot towards, like, post-colonial issues of power, which is
something that we'll be hopping into quite a bit over the course of the season with different topics.
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I mean, we're going to be touching on stuff like global missions without colonization,
multi-cultural church, talking about the refugee crisis, profiling Jesus and understanding who
Jesus was, a historical figure, and stuff like that where you're reading the signs of the end times.
Wars, global wars.
Yeah, global wars.
Like, we're going to be touching on a lot of topics that have a lot of global implications
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and global impact.
Yeah.
So we thought it'd be really important to kind of, before we hop into all of those really
important discussions, to kind of frame why Christianity has a say in all of those things
and why Christianity is a global religion.
It's not just for Westerners.
Also, in this episode, we're really talking about the global spirit at work, because we
want to talk about the Holy Spirit.
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Right.
Some Pentecostal theologians, Amos Young, who's going to be a guest on this season, which is awesome,
Yes.
We're so excited.
has made a really important point that the spirit offers new, powerful inroads to missional
engagement on the whole world.
Right.
So we're going to get into that.
But first, let's define globalism, globalization, what we're even talking about here.
So first the term globalism, it's talking about a world which is characterized by networks
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of connections that span multi continental distances.
Globalism is simply that we are like, it's a global reality.
That's what's going on.
Now, globalization is the process of integration among people, companies and governments worldwide.
So globalization is a process.
Globalism is the condition.
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As we become more technologically advanced, we see better what's happening globally.
Right.
And this is why in TikTok and social media in general, this broaches global issues all
the time.
Correct.
Like we got no business talking about what's happening in other sovereign nations, but
we do.
But we do and we see it.
And we see it.
And it's very accessible.
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TikTok is a company that's made in China.
Yeah.
So like it's a global company.
Right.
Right.
So there's a lot of things that are happening.
Look, we're working on an economic global scale.
Like we're the richest economy in the world.
It matters to every other country in the world.
And what happens around the world matters to us.
So this is a huge thing.
So everybody cares about our elections and everybody cares about these kinds of stuff.
And they even try to influence them, which is obnoxious, but that's how obnoxious, but
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true.
Governments are increasingly dealing on a global scale too.
We're currently more aware of other countries and cultures and what's going on everywhere.
We're more aware of a transmission of religious and cultural ideas, not only because America
is a melting pot.
So we have them in our own land, but also we're acutely aware.
We can see what's going on in every part of the world.
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This was back in the day, you would hear romanticized stories of other lands.
Like way back in the day when they didn't have anything televised, you would be like,
oh, this is what happens here.
This is what happens here.
You just kind of read them out of books.
Your imagination goes wild or whatever.
But we can in real time right now go on the internet and see live feeds from any part
of the world.
Correct.
Like we can see live feeds or recent recordings of any kind of worship service.
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We can see all sorts of stuff like that.
Like there's no difference or distinction.
And we are way more aware about what's going on in wars and foreign affairs because they're
televised.
Ever since Vietnam, wars have been televised.
And also to think about it, like people have not seen them in positive lights from Vietnam
on.
Oh, 100%.
No one's like, perfect, let's all go to war.
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Right.
But before that, you could hear like whatever the victors would say and have a romanticized
view of stuff and basically not be able to check it or double check or whatever.
And now we can all see things firsthand, well, through mediated through the television,
but like we can see things happening, right?
We can see footage of it.
So the world is also like way more populist than it ever has been.
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And we know this, but like, let's put this in some context.
So at around 8000 BC, the population of the world was approximately 5 million people on
the entire planet.
Which there are more people in LA.
Yeah.
The city of Los Angeles than the entire world.
By the first century, which is Jesus' day, there was 200 million people on the earth.
That's less than America.
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The population of the United States, yeah.
Yeah.
And then entire world.
And that's what Jesus was dealing with.
When we think about like everything that's going on, there's so many more, 200 million.
There was a bunch of change that occurred with the Industrial Revolution, with the modernization
of medicine and all sorts of stuff like that.
So but it took all the way till 1800 for the world population to reach 1 billion people.
And then the second billion came only 130 years later, 1930.
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And then it got super rapid after that.
The third billion came 30 years later, 1959.
The fourth billion, 15 years later, 1974.
The fifth billion came 13 years later, 1987.
Okay.
But by the way, I was born in 85.
So when I was born, there was less than 5 billion people on earth.
Yeah.
Now there's what, almost 8?
There's 8, yeah.
That's crazy.
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Yeah, Lord.
In 1970, there were half as many people on earth as there are today.
We hit 8 billion in 2024.
We're supposed to hit 9 billion in 2040.
It's crazy.
And we'll hit our 10 billion by 2062.
That's crazy.
That is, yeah, that's wild.
We're so much more aware of what's going on.
We have this global village that keeps us all connected.
There's interconnectedness that has fundamentally shaped the way our world views are approached.
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And so think about like how we think of things differently, how millennials and Gen Z and now
Jen Alpha coming up, think of things differently than like boomers and before.
With boomers, it kind of started all of this like super globalization with TV and stuff
like that.
But before that, that wasn't there.
It's way different.
Matters of pluralism arise just because we can see other religions having peaceful lives,
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beautiful traditions.
We see them having like good lives.
It's like in our imagination, if you're like, you're the Christian or you're just crazy
Neanderthal heathen thing that likes to kill people, then you're like, ah, you should be
a Christian.
But then we're actually looking at Muslim and Hindu cultures and Jewish cultures and
Buddhists and all that kind of stuff.
And we're like, well, there's a lot of beauty in their religion.
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There's a lot of beauty in what they do and how they live and they live peaceably for
the most part.
This creates matters of pluralism though.
So now we're like, okay, so why isn't their view valid?
And ultimately this hinges on Christ, right?
Other people from other religions never died on the cross, only Jesus did.
And this is going to be like that foundational claim.
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We said it last season in the Inclusivism episode.
That's something that is a foundational claim, right?
But think about like so many people are functioning so well around the world.
Can they all be dead wrong or are we just being Western at least, right?
And then you have like how religiously diverse we are.
There's over two billion Christians, which is 31%.
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There's almost, there's 1.6 billion Muslims and it's growing.
By 2030, there's supposed to be like as many Muslims as there are Christians.
Christians aren't supposed to decline.
We're supposed to be around 31%.
But Muslims are supposed to come up to that too.
So they're both supposed to be around 31%.
There's 1.1 billion, no religious affiliation, 1 billion Hindus, 487 million Buddhists.
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Like there's just so much plurality around the world.
That's the issue.
That's what we're dealing with when we talk about Christianity.
When we talk about how to be a witness in this world, this is the world.
It's not our little bubble, our little American bubble, you know, Southern California little
bubble, you know what I'm saying?
(10:30):
That might expand a little bit to Mexico, maybe to Canada, Arizona, like just surrounding
countries or something like that.
Like might be expanded a little bit, but like no, the world is actually way huge, right?
So that's how we're going to talk about it.
It's good.
When we start talking about Christianity, I think one, you already mentioned how Christianity
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didn't start in the West.
In fact, Megan, let the people know what continent is Israel in?
Asia.
Asia.
Not Europe.
Not Europe.
Not Africa.
Not Africa.
It's in Asia.
So that makes you think the whole Bible takes place in Asia and Northern Africa, right?
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In Southern Europe when they travel to, you know, Rome and stuff like that.
Right, of course.
It's a transcontinental dialogue.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
It goes between them, but Israel is not in Europe.
I think we forget this stuff so frequently.
Oh, for sure.
The Middle East isn't usually seen as part of Asia.
No, no.
When people think of Asia, they usually think of East Asia.
Yeah, like China and Japan.
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Yeah, East Asia.
Yeah.
Maybe South Asia, they might think of India and stuff like that, but this is just strictly
like factually speaking, not a Western country.
No.
You know what I mean?
So think about where the early churches were, where the main hubs were.
Alexandria, that's in Africa.
In Egypt, obviously Africa, right?
Then you had everything around Jerusalem in the Middle East, which is Asia, and then
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you had Rome, Corinth, you know, like the other things like that.
So it's all around the Mediterranean, and they're all, but it's meant to, I think, intentionally
be transcontinental.
Right.
Christianity came about when the Roman Empire built roads everywhere.
You know, some people say that Thomas traveled all the way to India to bring the gospel.
We don't know if this is a fact, it's kind of according to the Christian tradition, but
(12:19):
at minimum, the earliest churches in India were from like the second or third century.
That's like for sure.
And that's way before Christian missionaries went to India.
So that means Christianity was in India before Christian missionaries came to missionize
it, right?
It was part of the foundational spread of Christianity at the beginning.
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Christianity has been in Africa way before it was in North America.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
That part.
And then another major issue is not just the origins of it, but also, like, we're Pentecostals,
our story is Pentecost.
That's like Acts 1 and 2.
That's our friggin' jam, right?
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Our bread and butter, baby.
That's our bread and butter.
But Pentecost was a local, you know, it happened there, but it's also a global event for all
Christians of all times, right?
Which we could see from the fact that part of that was the speaking in other languages.
The moment that the fire from heaven fell upon the disciples and the apostles and stuff,
it literally, like, one of the very first things they did was literally speak in other
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tongues.
So that other people could hear the gospel and then go and spread it.
And even that's what we hear immediately in the Great Commission, which at Ascension,
Jesus is like, okay, you've experienced me, love that.
I'm gonna leave y'all with the Holy Spirit, so you still have that.
But also, go and spread the word to Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth.
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From Jesus himself, from the mouth of Jesus, it was like, don't keep this just here.
This needs to be spread.
Like the good news, the gospel, all of it needs to be spread.
And that's why we have all of the disciples and the apostles, like Paul, going everywhere,
going every which way, all over the place.
All of the different letters that Paul wrote to different churches across, you know, here,
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there and everywhere, and all of the places that he went, and all the places that he was
arrested, and all the places where the disciples were martyred, like, they were going on site.
And it was fun.
I think it's actually really beautiful, like how the minute Jesus disappeared, they were
like, all right, the end times, time to get everybody in.
So they were like, from the moment Jesus ascended, they were like, all right, it's time to start
spreading the gospel.
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Like it's time to start hitting the road.
That was always the intention.
Yeah, but from Pentecost, like the Spirit, like the tongues of fire appearing there filled
the Spirit, speaking other languages, and like crowds gathered.
And like what in scripturally, it's like 3000s and we're added to their number that day.
3000 were added.
Yeah.
And so it's like from that moment, it was like, okay, like different languages, like
let's spread, let's spread the word, like let's make sure that as many people can understand
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this as humanly possible, right?
And Peter like stood and declared the partial fulfillment of Joel, Joel two's prophecy,
which was concerning the day of the Lord right in this space.
And so over 3000 people being baptized and welcomed, which all of that, alluding to like
Joel's prophecy and like literally a fulfillment of all of that.
And like Pentecost being the culmination of Christ's earthly ministry and the birth of
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the church.
So the birth of the church was literally a globe, like happened locally, but was meant
to be something that went beyond the borders and became a global call.
And not just that, like Pentecostals will believe that the universal spirit poured out
on all flesh.
That kind of language of all flesh, it wasn't just like a single Israeli flesh.
Yeah.
And then you see Paul's stuff about, you know, man and woman, Jew and Gentile.
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And that's what so many of Paul's letters are about the radical inclusion of the Gentiles.
But like not just that, like like Pentecostals like to think of it as not temporally bound
either, right?
That the spirit of God was poured out on all of us on all of, like we are now able to be
subsumed into life with the spirit.
Right.
And it's the same spirit of Pentecost.
Right.
And the spirit can overflow in us.
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There's a spirit baptism.
Other traditions might call it something different.
But yo, if you're pressing into the Holy Spirit and let him empower you and fulfill you, that's
essentially what it is.
That's the point.
Yeah.
Pentecostals have a lot more to say about that, but that's essentially the point, right?
And so there's a few things that happen.
One, there's obviously priority was given to the outport spirit and like, look, Jesus
poured his spirit out on all of us.
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That's the whole point.
He's commissioning the church.
And then as we enter into the church, we enter this commission.
We have the spirit poured out on us.
And an emphasis is also on this distribution of gifts to everybody.
It's egalitarian to men, women, young, old, everybody, right?
Every old buddy.
And it has this eschatological imprint, which you were talking about just now.
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It's like, Hey, it's coming.
So let's go.
Let's go everywhere.
Right.
Yeah.
This is God, you know, empowering his people for the kingdom to go everywhere.
Christ inaugurated it.
And then the church is supposed to carry it out to the whole world.
And you know what's funny and what's interesting?
Christopher Wright, a really great Old Testament scholar, really does kind of biblical scholarship
in general.
He wrote his book called the mission of God, which I love.
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He basically was making the point that like, that was always God's plan for the gospel
to go to the whole world.
Yeah.
And in fact, Israel, the chosen people of God, were supposed to have this message go
to the whole world.
Israel was strategically placed between major civilizations in the before.
So like you had like kingdoms like Assyria or Syria or whatever was, you know, depending
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on the time.
And then you had Egypt and like, you had major commerce and stuff like that.
The temple was right in the middle of that.
Like so people passed through it and stuff like that.
And so you're supposed, they were supposed to be a light of the world, right?
It was supposed to be a city on the hill.
That area of the Levant was like being in like the perfect spot where everybody kind
of interconnected and did business and so crossed and traveled and all that.
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Absolutely.
So as they knew of, of what the world was.
And so they were supposed to be this light that everybody was supposed to be able to
see God and meet God and, and then bring it over.
Christopher Wright says that like the biblical narrative shows that, that the Jews sort of
kind of made it about atonement and made it about their own sin and stuff like that.
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And, and they kind of like missed out on the mission of what God has actually called him
to do.
And so now the church has been commissioned.
The difference is like now, instead of everybody going to the temple or going to this spot,
the church is actually sent out and spreading out.
So that's called from a centripetal to a centrifugal mission.
So but the same thing, the point of the whole world was supposed to experience God is the
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same mission.
Same call, same mission.
Yeah.
Same mission.
And so the church has now taken this call out, but like you even talk about like Paul,
when he talks about this spirit being poured out in all flesh, he talks about it again
in Romans too.
He talks about this, that God's love being poured out into our hearts.
He says, and hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts
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through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Romans 5, 5.
So the spirit of life, the spirit of love that's poured into our lives, essentially we can
think of it as the Holy Spirit universalizing what Jesus did on the cross.
So basically Jesus died on the cross in a specific place, in a specific time.
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And what the spirit does is it makes it for all times in all spaces.
It universalizes the special moment of the cross for all of us.
So that's pretty powerful.
So theologically, biblically, sociologically, everything.
This was always meant to be a global.
It was always meant to be global.
And not to mention the church is way bigger around the world than it is in the West.
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Like way bigger.
I just looked it up, but if we talk about the West as being Europe, North America, Latin
America, Australia and New Zealand.
So this includes Latin America.
We include that.
That's about 800 million to a billion Christians.
But the biggest estimates is that there's 2.3 billion Christians on the earth.
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So like including Latin America, which most people wouldn't even call Western.
Yeah, I wouldn't consider that.
They'll call them global South.
So Christians in the West is around 35, 45% of the global Christian population.
And that's including Latin America.
So if you take them out, I mean, you're like 20%, 25% maybe.
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Christians that are global Christianity is made up of Western Christians.
That's pretty crazy.
Crazy.
Literally, statistically, can't be a Western religion.
No.
And I think that's like a major thing.
So obviously we take place in a Western region and a lot of our audience is Western.
We just need to come to this fact.
Let it be known that Christianity is not what we have thought it was.
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It is mostly in the global South.
No, truly.
So this leads to kind of one of this next main issues here.
What would be key for global engagement today?
Is it any different than it has been in the past?
Because we're going to see in this season, like a lot of people have problems with Christian
missions.
They think that they were colonizing.
(21:06):
Colonizing, yeah.
Like they didn't make people Christians.
They made them European Christians or American Christians.
You know what I'm saying?
They Westernized them as they were trying to bring them the faith tradition.
Now this story goes a lot more.
For example, let's say there's accounts of this too.
You've heard of accounts.
Let's say there was this indigenous region in Africa and there was an American missionary
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that went there and taught people, a few people get saved through them, but they try to do
a very Western, West-centric kind of faith or whatever.
But they give them the Bible and the Bible is now in their own language and stuff like
that.
Well, whenever those missionaries leave or something like that, those Christians that
are there are now talking to their own people in their own way.
It might not even be in this kind of West-centric way that the missionaries were trying to do.
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What ends up happening is you end up having an indigenous faith tradition, even if colonial
mindseted Christians brought it into first place.
You know what I mean?
When we think about this, we think about, okay, so it wasn't really these Western Christians
that brought the gospel.
We can't think of it that way.
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In fact, we shouldn't think of missionary work as our work.
We should think of it as the spirit's work.
Amos Young talks about this.
We're going to have him on next week.
This is kind of one of his main points that he makes.
If it's the spirit's work, we also need to think about the fact that the spirit's already
at work in those places.
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You know what I mean?
One problem, and this is something that Young talks about in his book Beyond the Impasse
when he's talking about this, is, okay, if you come to a nation and you come to the message
of Jesus Christ crucified, which is the gospel, of course, but that's your starting point.
The people might not have reference, or they might not even have even the language reference
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to even get to that.
They might be so alien to what they're thinking about that you kind of are at an impasse.
Either you say yes or no to this.
But what he was saying is, but the spirit, we all believe, if the Holy Spirit is everywhere,
the spirit is already working in their hearts.
The spirit is already doing stuff to receive this message of Christ.
But if we tap into what the Holy Spirit is doing in all these places, then we can know
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how to minister.
We can see what language to use.
We're not changing the gospel at all.
Only Jesus dies first.
It'll be more an effective vessel in bringing in.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So you can think of the spirit as kind of working as a pervenient grace.
Now, you know that pervenient grace to John Wesley doctrine?
(23:36):
The satirial.
That's a whole other area.
So it's basically, historically, it's usually attributed to Christ's action on the cross.
Jesus died for us, but he made us available so that way we can choose him.
But we've got to think about the spirit's role in this.
So not only did the spirit lead us to Christ, but also allows us to respond to Christ.
So there's two things that the spirit is doing pervenently for us.
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Pervenient means becoming beforehand.
So if people are not Christian, if they are blinded to the faith or whatever, what pervenient
grace says is that the spirit will show you.
If we're all blindfolded and walking towards a cliff, pervenient grace is God stepping in
front of us and being like, hey, I'm here and there's a cliff right there.
(24:19):
So you need to turn around.
And this is a grace that comes before, a grace that is given to us even before salvation.
That's why it's called pervenient grace.
And so two ways that this grace happens is the spirit, one, leads us to Christ, shows
us, reveals little semblances of Christ in our lives and does this all over the world,
beckons us back to Christ.
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And then two, the spirit enables us to actually make the decision for Christ.
And so both of those things are pervenient.
And the thing is, the Holy Spirit is doing that everywhere.
So that's kind of where we're at.
So if we think about this as like a framing place, we can think of, all right, well, we
(25:01):
can do missions and we must do missions, but we really need to recognize number one, this
is God's mission in the first place.
It's the mission of the Holy Spirit.
And we need to tap into what the spirit is already doing, not try to force our own agenda
or our own colonial mindset.
But if we believe and truly and genuinely that Christianity is meant to be global, we have
(25:22):
to believe that he is already working globally.
And we don't need us to necessarily go in and start colonizing and doing all accessilliness,
destroying other people's cultures and all that so that they can quote unquote come to
know Jesus.
It helps us shape the way that we view the world and the way that we view Christians across
(25:43):
the world and that they're not just like it helps get removed, us them thing that we tend
to do with like us civilized folk in the West and then everybody else.
It's like it eliminates that because that is not the heart of God and that's not the
heart of missions and that should was never meant to be how we were called to spread the
gospel, which is why the early church knew that.
(26:06):
And it's time that we tap back in to the things that were being done too far.
You're too far.
So another theologian I really like Miroslav Wolf, he's the man, good public theologian.
And he wrote this book that I think is one of the best books I've ever read and it's
called Exclusion and Embrace, How They Recommend It to Anybody.
(26:27):
And he talks about reconciliation a lot.
That's kind of like the main point of it.
And he talks about reconciling between other people and like we mentioned this a little
bit when we talked about the last season when we talked about racial reconciliation.
But reconciliation isn't just like thinking that, oh, there's justice now.
No, it's talking about embrace.
It's talking about like you're my brother, you're my sister, like we're in a family,
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right?
That's what reconciliation is.
And he creates basically this theology of embrace.
That's a social theology and it sees the oppressed and marginalized as being liberated as being
embraced by the other, not like still seen as the other.
So basically what he says is mere liberation is not enough.
(27:11):
And this is actually one of the points against liberation theology.
So liberation theology is this theology is really crucial.
It talks about like, we need to recognize what the plight of the poor is and we need
to help them seek liberation even in this worldly matters like political liberation
(27:31):
and whatnot.
But very interesting, Donald Miller, this theologian recounts an Argentine liberation theologian
that said liberation theology opted for the poor and the poor opted for Pentecostalism.
And so if you think about it, Pentecostalism is global.
It's all over the place.
And one of the reasons is because it offers a theology of the spirit empowering us by
(27:53):
the Holy Spirit.
That's how we believe about spiritual gifts and all that kind of stuff and to do ministry
all over the world.
But this creates this new sense of social mobility that like you're empowered by spirit, no matter
where you're from.
And so that's a really, really pertinent and important image.
That's why most of the world global Christianity is by and large charismatic and Pentecostal
Christianity.
Correct.
(28:13):
Maybe for dominations, maybe non-denominational, but they're probably this kind of charismatic
faith tradition.
So what Wolf is typing into, he says, mere liberation is not enough.
Right.
Because you think about like being liberated from an oppressive regime or something, which
is like what post colonialism seeks to liberate oppressed people.
If you achieve that, all that's going to happen is someone else is going to move into this
(28:37):
role of power and the new cycle of oppression is going to go.
Right.
That was God's warning against the king.
Yeah, against the king.
And that's exactly what happened by the reign of Solomon.
Right.
And it took like two people.
Yeah.
And you're like, oh no.
There it is.
It's already a mess.
Samuel tried to tell him.
He did.
Bless his heart.
(28:58):
And he's like, good policies can move us towards a good and more just society for sure.
But we must recognize that all of that, all these human efforts towards reconciliation
are always non-final.
So like we can't be talking about the United States as the city on a hill.
That's blasphemous.
The church is a city on a hill.
We are, right?
(29:19):
And we're global.
We're all over the world, regardless of our government, regardless of what country we're
in.
Because these things are non-final.
Christian embrace resists this colonizing impulse of forced uniformity.
It entails freeing the other person from oppression, but then also giving them space to be themselves.
Like you aren't going to be American if you're a Christian.
(29:43):
You're going to be like Christ, period.
And so, so often we see social issues come to a head with Christianity because Christianity
claims that Jesus should be your main identity.
It should be like your identity, period, right?
You should find your identity in Christ.
And so that's one of the problems with LGBTQ matters is sometimes they find their identity
in their own sexuality before Christ.
(30:05):
That's what happens with a lot of racial matters when somebody takes their own race as their
identity before Christ or anything else like that.
Our identity is fundamentally in Christ.
It is not our national things.
It's not like any of the other constructs that we create.
As we lead people towards freeing themselves from oppression, it really is the Holy Spirit
that's making them empowered to leave any kind of oppressed mindset, but sometimes even
(30:27):
give them the courage to leave an oppressive system.
Right?
Yeah.
And that's very important.
But you still have the space to be themselves.
However, and this is a big, huge point that Miroslav Wolf makes that is so crucial for
what we're talking about here.
He says, we can bring people in, bring your customs and bring your culture, but leave
your tribal deities at the door.
(30:49):
That's the difference.
You can't worship whatever you're trying to worship.
You worship Jesus, but that doesn't mean you're not going to be who you are and where you're
from.
You're just going to be who you are and where you're from as a follower of Christ.
As a follower of Jesus, yeah.
As it relates and reflects your identity in Jesus.
So casting off these tribal deities means directing our worship only to God.
(31:09):
But here's the thing.
Tribal deity is anything that is idolized, not just another religion's gods.
It's easier to see the other religion's gods.
It's harder for us to see us worshiping ourselves or money or sexuality or status.
Well, even we have the rich young ruler who's literally like selling it all.
He couldn't leave his tribal deity.
And he couldn't leave his money.
He couldn't do it.
(31:29):
Nope.
Is there any explanation of him having a previous God?
No.
What he could not do.
He believed in Jesus and he wanted to follow him, but we couldn't do...
Is leave his tribal deity at the door.
Exactly.
Leave the comfortability and the thing that idolized which at the end of the day was his
money.
Right.
And if you're coming into this and you're like, oh, well, I didn't come from like a
(31:49):
other religious background.
I'm not trying to bring any of my quote unquote gods with me.
So I'm better than you.
What about your money?
No.
What about your status?
Right.
Anything could be idolized.
What about your sexuality?
Right.
That's the big issue.
That's an unpopular statement, I think.
Right.
You know, in this day and age, when we talk about LGBTQ matters, what about your sexuality?
Is it secondary?
(32:10):
Yeah.
Does Christ come first?
Right.
If Christ comes first, whatever it is in your sexuality, that's going to be worked out through
Christ.
Right.
And that's what's most important.
Right?
But if you're working out your Christianity through your sexuality, you've got it backwards.
Correct.
Right?
Anyways, embracing the other means accepting them and celebrating them in their difference,
(32:31):
but leading them to worship only God.
Right.
So find Jesus as an African, as an Asian, as a South American, as whatever it is, find
Jesus as your cultural identity, but find Jesus and then worship Jesus alone.
Right.
That's kind of the point, right?
Agreed.
(32:51):
So, Megan, how would we respond to these three points?
So how should the church respond to these three points?
So these are the three kind of main points that we just tackled here.
One, the church is global.
Two, the spirit is at work everywhere.
And three, the spirit can give us new inroads for mission.
How should the church respond to these?
(33:12):
I mean, especially from our experience as American Christians and churches in the West,
is I feel like it's really easy to do the whole us-them thing, where it's like us who
are, and I think even to this day, people have that view of like, and if it's not, sometimes
I feel like probably the most similar comparison would be people talking about third world
(33:33):
countries.
And then us in the US being a first world country or whatever, like, I feel like I hear
this kind of language a lot, not the same as colonizing language, but in the sense of
the us-them.
They're still thems.
Yes.
We've got it figured out.
We're all wealthy or whatever, and we are civilized and yada yada.
But then there's other places that are third world that they still consider less than.
(33:56):
And so I think that...
So status.
Yeah.
So I wouldn't say it's even like, we're not necessarily trying to colonize them anymore,
but it's more of like, we deem them lower because they're not as established, they're
less wealthy.
Which is so interesting because when Paul says, in Christ there is no slave nor free,
he's literally washing the lines of status away.
Correct.
But that's the part that we don't like.
We're recreating status.
(34:17):
Yeah, that's the part we don't like to listen to very much about that, about Galatians 3,
28.
But so I think that us, especially as churches in the West, like what we have to remember
is that one, we're not more called or anointed or better than any other country that worships
Jesus.
(34:37):
Right?
Like none of our Christian brothers and sisters in the Middle East or in Latin America or
in Africa, they're not less than.
Not individually or neither the country.
Or collectively.
No, the country in general, the church capital C or each individual Christian, like you're
not less than us.
And just because we have religious freedom in the States doesn't mean that we are better
Christians or that we've got it more figured out.
(34:59):
In fact, sometimes...
Sometimes we don't.
We can argue that we have it worse figured out.
Yeah, it starts marrying nationalism and becomes a whole other issue.
So I think that we have to really remove ourselves, especially as Americans, that we're not the
center of the world.
Like the culture and the globe doesn't start and stop with what we experience as Americans
or what we experience in the West.
And so if we stop for the love of all that's good and holy, like only viewing missions or
(35:24):
Christianity or expressions of faith from just a Western perspective being the only
way that we can do it and actually view and believe that the church is global and has
various expressions, even if those expressions look different than yours, I actually think
that that would soften our hearts and remove the whole us them mentality that creates the
divisiveness even where we're viewing our own brothers and sisters in Christ in an us
(35:47):
them mentality because they're not as... their status isn't as solid as we are.
And so I think that if we, you know, and then under through understanding that the spirit
is global and believing we have to believe that the very spirit that works in our churches
is the very same spirit who is actively at work in other countries, maybe it looks different,
maybe it's a different way, or maybe you just don't see it because you're not looking and
(36:10):
not paying attention to the revival that's happening in different countries across the
world.
Like I would challenge all of us to like really...
There's amazing things happening.
See, yeah, to really like look and see what the Lord is doing in other countries and
be inspired by like the faith of different believers in different countries and from
different cultures because I actually think if we would look at it as something that stirs
up our own faith, stirs up our own excitement, stirs up our own like passion for spreading
(36:34):
the gospel again, I think that we can all get back on the same page of wanting the same
thing of the gospel to continue to go global and looking for missions, opportunities to
be these inroads of where culture and Christianity meet and then can be expressed in the way
that each person is capable, like has been made to express, but without there being this
(36:57):
over contextualizing or colonization situation.
And also having a global awareness of the church can actually like help you realize
that there's real persecution happening all over the world.
And so when we start thinking we're persecuted because we call it a holiday tree instead
of a Christmas tree.
Lord, you don't know what a persecution is.
It's like how about the church in the state church in China that was shut down for no
(37:23):
reason without warning and then people were imprisoned?
I had some students, international students, they were telling me that's exactly what happened
to their pastor, imprisoned for two years without warning.
And he was doing a state sanctioned church that was following all the rules that there
were, what there were a lot of saying stuff like that.
That's why so many churches in China are underground house churches and they could get in so much
(37:46):
trouble if they ever got caught.
And this is just like, that's just China.
So think about like some other...
There's churches in closed countries.
We know FMI workers who you can't even say their names out loud or like present anything
about them because if they reveal their identity they could be in actual risk and danger for
their lives.
Like we don't know that low.
There's some serious danger.
My heart goes out for this.
As you know, I was a missionary kid.
(38:07):
I grew up when my dad was a missionary in the field.
I was born in Germany and he was doing missions in Romania and when I was 85 I was born.
And so until 89 Romania was communist.
And so my dad had to smuggle Bibles into Romania in this special van that had hidden compartments.
And if he would have got caught his hands could get cut off.
(38:28):
That's how serious it was.
And that's what Christians are doing all over the world today with courage, fearlessly,
doing things because they feel like God is calling them to do this, to exist in this
way.
And we're sitting here complaining about some tomfoolery.
You know what I mean?
Let's recognize globally what's going on.
(38:49):
Let's be there with our brothers and sisters all over the world.
Let's rejoice in their joy.
And man, if we have this kind of an outlook, that'll change everything for us.
I think that's going to be a lot of what you're going to hear us say over the course of this
season is viewing the church globally, having a global vision, having a global vision for
the church, for Christianity, for the spirit, all of it.
(39:11):
And I think that by the end of this season, hopefully, we will all come out of it with
a much more robust understanding of what the Lord is doing globally and that it's not just
God is personal to us, of course, in personal relationship, but he's not just our God.
He is a God of culture and ethnicity and all of us across the globe.
(39:32):
And so I'm really excited for the conversations that we get to have about this.
I'm really looking forward to being able to talk globally and talk about what the Lord's
doing.
Digging into all these topics.
And man, we've got some awesome guests coming up.
So man, I just can't wait for you guys to experience.
Yeah.
It's going to be good.
Indeed.
(39:52):
This episode, like always, is sponsored by the School of Theology and Ministry at Life
Pacific University.
We'll see you next time.
See ya.
Did I just fix everything?
(00:02):
Can you believe that I've fixed everything?
Check, check, check.
That'll be crazy.
After three seasons of suffering for no reason.
It's all crisp and junk.
Crispy.
Crisp.
Crisp.
Crisp.
Welcome to TikTok Theology, a podcast that tackles the major trending topics on social media that concern the Christian faith.
(00:27):
I'm Meagan.
And I'm Steven.
We know you can't form a theology in three minutes or less, but those videos can identify current issues.
TikTok will give us the prompt and then we'll do a deep dive.
Thanks for joining us in this exploration.
Season four. Season four.
We're here.
We're here.
Hi friends, welcome back to TikTok Theology, season four, episode one.
(00:52):
We're back again, Steven.
We're back.
We're doing it once more.
Once more and then maybe again.
And then again.
And again after that probably.
And then even more so.
Not three, not four, not five.
Just kidding.
That's a LeBron James reference.
You don't know that?
No.
Basketball's not my sport.
I'm so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
Apologies to everyone.
It's too bad.
It's too bad.
(01:13):
Today we are chatting about the global spirit at work.
And that sounds like kind of like a really up there kind of title that's like, ooh, it's like floating and whatever.
Very theological.
Yeah.
But fret not, we'll get practical in this house.
I promise.
But this episode, our heart is really to kind of frame the rest of this season.
We're making a lot of focus and conversation around global issues, especially after just
(01:37):
hopping out of a season that was very political for us in the US.
We got through that.
And now we're kind of barely, but we did and we've made it.
And so now we're really excited to kind of dive into more global issues, more multi-cultural
focuses and stuff, so we're super excited for the way that this season hopefully is going
(01:58):
to go, especially in all the conversations in social media as they do, chatting about,
you know, Christianity as it manifests around the world and people's understanding of Christianity
culturally and globally and stuff like that.
So we have some misconceptions, I think, about Christianity that come up a lot in general,
especially for us in the States and especially around election season when people start talking
(02:19):
about religion a lot.
There's this weird belief that Christianity is just a Western religion and that it's like
a white man's religion and all these things.
Especially evangelicalism, the term, evangelicalism.
Like, man, that's a global phenomenon.
Correct.
Like, Christianity did not start in Europe.
This did not come to be in any Western space.
(02:42):
In fact, the average Christian in the world today is a brown woman.
That's not even a, like, it's not a white man.
It's not what we, like, would necessarily, people claim Christianity is about.
And I think that this speaks a lot towards, like, post-colonial issues of power, which is
something that we'll be hopping into quite a bit over the course of the season with different topics.
(03:05):
I mean, we're going to be touching on stuff like global missions without colonization,
multi-cultural church, talking about the refugee crisis, profiling Jesus and understanding who
Jesus was, a historical figure, and stuff like that where you're reading the signs of the end times.
Wars, global wars.
Yeah, global wars.
Like, we're going to be touching on a lot of topics that have a lot of global implications
(03:26):
and global impact.
Yeah.
So we thought it'd be really important to kind of, before we hop into all of those really
important discussions, to kind of frame why Christianity has a say in all of those things
and why Christianity is a global religion.
It's not just for Westerners.
Also, in this episode, we're really talking about the global spirit at work, because we
want to talk about the Holy Spirit.
(03:47):
Right.
Some Pentecostal theologians, Amos Young, who's going to be a guest on this season, which is awesome,
Yes.
We're so excited.
has made a really important point that the spirit offers new, powerful inroads to missional
engagement on the whole world.
Right.
So we're going to get into that.
But first, let's define globalism, globalization, what we're even talking about here.
So first the term globalism, it's talking about a world which is characterized by networks
(04:12):
of connections that span multi continental distances.
Globalism is simply that we are like, it's a global reality.
That's what's going on.
Now, globalization is the process of integration among people, companies and governments worldwide.
So globalization is a process.
Globalism is the condition.
(04:33):
As we become more technologically advanced, we see better what's happening globally.
Right.
And this is why in TikTok and social media in general, this broaches global issues all
the time.
Correct.
Like we got no business talking about what's happening in other sovereign nations, but
we do.
But we do and we see it.
And we see it.
And it's very accessible.
(04:53):
TikTok is a company that's made in China.
Yeah.
So like it's a global company.
Right.
Right.
So there's a lot of things that are happening.
Look, we're working on an economic global scale.
Like we're the richest economy in the world.
It matters to every other country in the world.
And what happens around the world matters to us.
So this is a huge thing.
So everybody cares about our elections and everybody cares about these kinds of stuff.
And they even try to influence them, which is obnoxious, but that's how obnoxious, but
(05:16):
true.
Governments are increasingly dealing on a global scale too.
We're currently more aware of other countries and cultures and what's going on everywhere.
We're more aware of a transmission of religious and cultural ideas, not only because America
is a melting pot.
So we have them in our own land, but also we're acutely aware.
We can see what's going on in every part of the world.
(05:38):
This was back in the day, you would hear romanticized stories of other lands.
Like way back in the day when they didn't have anything televised, you would be like,
oh, this is what happens here.
This is what happens here.
You just kind of read them out of books.
Your imagination goes wild or whatever.
But we can in real time right now go on the internet and see live feeds from any part
of the world.
Correct.
Like we can see live feeds or recent recordings of any kind of worship service.
(06:03):
We can see all sorts of stuff like that.
Like there's no difference or distinction.
And we are way more aware about what's going on in wars and foreign affairs because they're
televised.
Ever since Vietnam, wars have been televised.
And also to think about it, like people have not seen them in positive lights from Vietnam
on.
Oh, 100%.
No one's like, perfect, let's all go to war.
(06:23):
Right.
But before that, you could hear like whatever the victors would say and have a romanticized
view of stuff and basically not be able to check it or double check or whatever.
And now we can all see things firsthand, well, through mediated through the television,
but like we can see things happening, right?
We can see footage of it.
So the world is also like way more populist than it ever has been.
(06:45):
And we know this, but like, let's put this in some context.
So at around 8000 BC, the population of the world was approximately 5 million people on
the entire planet.
Which there are more people in LA.
Yeah.
The city of Los Angeles than the entire world.
By the first century, which is Jesus' day, there was 200 million people on the earth.
That's less than America.
(07:07):
The population of the United States, yeah.
Yeah.
And then entire world.
And that's what Jesus was dealing with.
When we think about like everything that's going on, there's so many more, 200 million.
There was a bunch of change that occurred with the Industrial Revolution, with the modernization
of medicine and all sorts of stuff like that.
So but it took all the way till 1800 for the world population to reach 1 billion people.
And then the second billion came only 130 years later, 1930.
(07:30):
And then it got super rapid after that.
The third billion came 30 years later, 1959.
The fourth billion, 15 years later, 1974.
The fifth billion came 13 years later, 1987.
Okay.
But by the way, I was born in 85.
So when I was born, there was less than 5 billion people on earth.
Yeah.
Now there's what, almost 8?
There's 8, yeah.
That's crazy.
(07:51):
Yeah, Lord.
In 1970, there were half as many people on earth as there are today.
We hit 8 billion in 2024.
We're supposed to hit 9 billion in 2040.
It's crazy.
And we'll hit our 10 billion by 2062.
That's crazy.
That is, yeah, that's wild.
We're so much more aware of what's going on.
We have this global village that keeps us all connected.
There's interconnectedness that has fundamentally shaped the way our world views are approached.
(08:16):
And so think about like how we think of things differently, how millennials and Gen Z and now
Jen Alpha coming up, think of things differently than like boomers and before.
With boomers, it kind of started all of this like super globalization with TV and stuff
like that.
But before that, that wasn't there.
It's way different.
Matters of pluralism arise just because we can see other religions having peaceful lives,
(08:43):
beautiful traditions.
We see them having like good lives.
It's like in our imagination, if you're like, you're the Christian or you're just crazy
Neanderthal heathen thing that likes to kill people, then you're like, ah, you should be
a Christian.
But then we're actually looking at Muslim and Hindu cultures and Jewish cultures and
Buddhists and all that kind of stuff.
And we're like, well, there's a lot of beauty in their religion.
(09:04):
There's a lot of beauty in what they do and how they live and they live peaceably for
the most part.
This creates matters of pluralism though.
So now we're like, okay, so why isn't their view valid?
And ultimately this hinges on Christ, right?
Other people from other religions never died on the cross, only Jesus did.
And this is going to be like that foundational claim.
(09:25):
We said it last season in the Inclusivism episode.
That's something that is a foundational claim, right?
But think about like so many people are functioning so well around the world.
Can they all be dead wrong or are we just being Western at least, right?
And then you have like how religiously diverse we are.
There's over two billion Christians, which is 31%.
(09:48):
There's almost, there's 1.6 billion Muslims and it's growing.
By 2030, there's supposed to be like as many Muslims as there are Christians.
Christians aren't supposed to decline.
We're supposed to be around 31%.
But Muslims are supposed to come up to that too.
So they're both supposed to be around 31%.
There's 1.1 billion, no religious affiliation, 1 billion Hindus, 487 million Buddhists.
(10:09):
Like there's just so much plurality around the world.
That's the issue.
That's what we're dealing with when we talk about Christianity.
When we talk about how to be a witness in this world, this is the world.
It's not our little bubble, our little American bubble, you know, Southern California little
bubble, you know what I'm saying?
(10:30):
That might expand a little bit to Mexico, maybe to Canada, Arizona, like just surrounding
countries or something like that.
Like might be expanded a little bit, but like no, the world is actually way huge, right?
So that's how we're going to talk about it.
It's good.
When we start talking about Christianity, I think one, you already mentioned how Christianity
(10:53):
didn't start in the West.
In fact, Megan, let the people know what continent is Israel in?
Asia.
Asia.
Not Europe.
Not Europe.
Not Africa.
Not Africa.
It's in Asia.
So that makes you think the whole Bible takes place in Asia and Northern Africa, right?
(11:14):
In Southern Europe when they travel to, you know, Rome and stuff like that.
Right, of course.
It's a transcontinental dialogue.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
It goes between them, but Israel is not in Europe.
I think we forget this stuff so frequently.
Oh, for sure.
The Middle East isn't usually seen as part of Asia.
No, no.
When people think of Asia, they usually think of East Asia.
Yeah, like China and Japan.
(11:34):
Yeah, East Asia.
Yeah.
Maybe South Asia, they might think of India and stuff like that, but this is just strictly
like factually speaking, not a Western country.
No.
You know what I mean?
So think about where the early churches were, where the main hubs were.
Alexandria, that's in Africa.
In Egypt, obviously Africa, right?
Then you had everything around Jerusalem in the Middle East, which is Asia, and then
(11:57):
you had Rome, Corinth, you know, like the other things like that.
So it's all around the Mediterranean, and they're all, but it's meant to, I think, intentionally
be transcontinental.
Right.
Christianity came about when the Roman Empire built roads everywhere.
You know, some people say that Thomas traveled all the way to India to bring the gospel.
We don't know if this is a fact, it's kind of according to the Christian tradition, but
(12:19):
at minimum, the earliest churches in India were from like the second or third century.
That's like for sure.
And that's way before Christian missionaries went to India.
So that means Christianity was in India before Christian missionaries came to missionize
it, right?
It was part of the foundational spread of Christianity at the beginning.
(12:40):
Christianity has been in Africa way before it was in North America.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
That part.
And then another major issue is not just the origins of it, but also, like, we're Pentecostals,
our story is Pentecost.
That's like Acts 1 and 2.
That's our friggin' jam, right?
(13:00):
Our bread and butter, baby.
That's our bread and butter.
But Pentecost was a local, you know, it happened there, but it's also a global event for all
Christians of all times, right?
Which we could see from the fact that part of that was the speaking in other languages.
The moment that the fire from heaven fell upon the disciples and the apostles and stuff,
it literally, like, one of the very first things they did was literally speak in other
(13:24):
tongues.
So that other people could hear the gospel and then go and spread it.
And even that's what we hear immediately in the Great Commission, which at Ascension,
Jesus is like, okay, you've experienced me, love that.
I'm gonna leave y'all with the Holy Spirit, so you still have that.
But also, go and spread the word to Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth.
(13:47):
From Jesus himself, from the mouth of Jesus, it was like, don't keep this just here.
This needs to be spread.
Like the good news, the gospel, all of it needs to be spread.
And that's why we have all of the disciples and the apostles, like Paul, going everywhere,
going every which way, all over the place.
All of the different letters that Paul wrote to different churches across, you know, here,
(14:11):
there and everywhere, and all of the places that he went, and all the places that he was
arrested, and all the places where the disciples were martyred, like, they were going on site.
And it was fun.
I think it's actually really beautiful, like how the minute Jesus disappeared, they were
like, all right, the end times, time to get everybody in.
So they were like, from the moment Jesus ascended, they were like, all right, it's time to start
spreading the gospel.
(14:32):
Like it's time to start hitting the road.
That was always the intention.
Yeah, but from Pentecost, like the Spirit, like the tongues of fire appearing there filled
the Spirit, speaking other languages, and like crowds gathered.
And like what in scripturally, it's like 3000s and we're added to their number that day.
3000 were added.
Yeah.
And so it's like from that moment, it was like, okay, like different languages, like
let's spread, let's spread the word, like let's make sure that as many people can understand
(14:56):
this as humanly possible, right?
And Peter like stood and declared the partial fulfillment of Joel, Joel two's prophecy,
which was concerning the day of the Lord right in this space.
And so over 3000 people being baptized and welcomed, which all of that, alluding to like
Joel's prophecy and like literally a fulfillment of all of that.
And like Pentecost being the culmination of Christ's earthly ministry and the birth of
(15:17):
the church.
So the birth of the church was literally a globe, like happened locally, but was meant
to be something that went beyond the borders and became a global call.
And not just that, like Pentecostals will believe that the universal spirit poured out
on all flesh.
That kind of language of all flesh, it wasn't just like a single Israeli flesh.
Yeah.
And then you see Paul's stuff about, you know, man and woman, Jew and Gentile.
(15:39):
And that's what so many of Paul's letters are about the radical inclusion of the Gentiles.
But like not just that, like like Pentecostals like to think of it as not temporally bound
either, right?
That the spirit of God was poured out on all of us on all of, like we are now able to be
subsumed into life with the spirit.
Right.
And it's the same spirit of Pentecost.
Right.
And the spirit can overflow in us.
(16:00):
There's a spirit baptism.
Other traditions might call it something different.
But yo, if you're pressing into the Holy Spirit and let him empower you and fulfill you, that's
essentially what it is.
That's the point.
Yeah.
Pentecostals have a lot more to say about that, but that's essentially the point, right?
And so there's a few things that happen.
One, there's obviously priority was given to the outport spirit and like, look, Jesus
poured his spirit out on all of us.
(16:22):
That's the whole point.
He's commissioning the church.
And then as we enter into the church, we enter this commission.
We have the spirit poured out on us.
And an emphasis is also on this distribution of gifts to everybody.
It's egalitarian to men, women, young, old, everybody, right?
Every old buddy.
And it has this eschatological imprint, which you were talking about just now.
(16:43):
It's like, Hey, it's coming.
So let's go.
Let's go everywhere.
Right.
Yeah.
This is God, you know, empowering his people for the kingdom to go everywhere.
Christ inaugurated it.
And then the church is supposed to carry it out to the whole world.
And you know what's funny and what's interesting?
Christopher Wright, a really great Old Testament scholar, really does kind of biblical scholarship
in general.
He wrote his book called the mission of God, which I love.
(17:04):
He basically was making the point that like, that was always God's plan for the gospel
to go to the whole world.
Yeah.
And in fact, Israel, the chosen people of God, were supposed to have this message go
to the whole world.
Israel was strategically placed between major civilizations in the before.
So like you had like kingdoms like Assyria or Syria or whatever was, you know, depending
(17:25):
on the time.
And then you had Egypt and like, you had major commerce and stuff like that.
The temple was right in the middle of that.
Like so people passed through it and stuff like that.
And so you're supposed, they were supposed to be a light of the world, right?
It was supposed to be a city on the hill.
That area of the Levant was like being in like the perfect spot where everybody kind
of interconnected and did business and so crossed and traveled and all that.
(17:48):
Absolutely.
So as they knew of, of what the world was.
And so they were supposed to be this light that everybody was supposed to be able to
see God and meet God and, and then bring it over.
Christopher Wright says that like the biblical narrative shows that, that the Jews sort of
kind of made it about atonement and made it about their own sin and stuff like that.
(18:09):
And, and they kind of like missed out on the mission of what God has actually called him
to do.
And so now the church has been commissioned.
The difference is like now, instead of everybody going to the temple or going to this spot,
the church is actually sent out and spreading out.
So that's called from a centripetal to a centrifugal mission.
So but the same thing, the point of the whole world was supposed to experience God is the
(18:33):
same mission.
Same call, same mission.
Yeah.
Same mission.
And so the church has now taken this call out, but like you even talk about like Paul,
when he talks about this spirit being poured out in all flesh, he talks about it again
in Romans too.
He talks about this, that God's love being poured out into our hearts.
He says, and hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts
(18:54):
through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Romans 5, 5.
So the spirit of life, the spirit of love that's poured into our lives, essentially we can
think of it as the Holy Spirit universalizing what Jesus did on the cross.
So basically Jesus died on the cross in a specific place, in a specific time.
(19:15):
And what the spirit does is it makes it for all times in all spaces.
It universalizes the special moment of the cross for all of us.
So that's pretty powerful.
So theologically, biblically, sociologically, everything.
This was always meant to be a global.
It was always meant to be global.
And not to mention the church is way bigger around the world than it is in the West.
(19:38):
Like way bigger.
I just looked it up, but if we talk about the West as being Europe, North America, Latin
America, Australia and New Zealand.
So this includes Latin America.
We include that.
That's about 800 million to a billion Christians.
But the biggest estimates is that there's 2.3 billion Christians on the earth.
(20:00):
So like including Latin America, which most people wouldn't even call Western.
Yeah, I wouldn't consider that.
They'll call them global South.
So Christians in the West is around 35, 45% of the global Christian population.
And that's including Latin America.
So if you take them out, I mean, you're like 20%, 25% maybe.
(20:20):
Christians that are global Christianity is made up of Western Christians.
That's pretty crazy.
Crazy.
Literally, statistically, can't be a Western religion.
No.
And I think that's like a major thing.
So obviously we take place in a Western region and a lot of our audience is Western.
We just need to come to this fact.
Let it be known that Christianity is not what we have thought it was.
(20:45):
It is mostly in the global South.
No, truly.
So this leads to kind of one of this next main issues here.
What would be key for global engagement today?
Is it any different than it has been in the past?
Because we're going to see in this season, like a lot of people have problems with Christian
missions.
They think that they were colonizing.
(21:06):
Colonizing, yeah.
Like they didn't make people Christians.
They made them European Christians or American Christians.
You know what I'm saying?
They Westernized them as they were trying to bring them the faith tradition.
Now this story goes a lot more.
For example, let's say there's accounts of this too.
You've heard of accounts.
Let's say there was this indigenous region in Africa and there was an American missionary
(21:28):
that went there and taught people, a few people get saved through them, but they try to do
a very Western, West-centric kind of faith or whatever.
But they give them the Bible and the Bible is now in their own language and stuff like
that.
Well, whenever those missionaries leave or something like that, those Christians that
are there are now talking to their own people in their own way.
It might not even be in this kind of West-centric way that the missionaries were trying to do.
(21:49):
What ends up happening is you end up having an indigenous faith tradition, even if colonial
mindseted Christians brought it into first place.
You know what I mean?
When we think about this, we think about, okay, so it wasn't really these Western Christians
that brought the gospel.
We can't think of it that way.
(22:10):
In fact, we shouldn't think of missionary work as our work.
We should think of it as the spirit's work.
Amos Young talks about this.
We're going to have him on next week.
This is kind of one of his main points that he makes.
If it's the spirit's work, we also need to think about the fact that the spirit's already
at work in those places.
(22:30):
You know what I mean?
One problem, and this is something that Young talks about in his book Beyond the Impasse
when he's talking about this, is, okay, if you come to a nation and you come to the message
of Jesus Christ crucified, which is the gospel, of course, but that's your starting point.
The people might not have reference, or they might not even have even the language reference
(22:52):
to even get to that.
They might be so alien to what they're thinking about that you kind of are at an impasse.
Either you say yes or no to this.
But what he was saying is, but the spirit, we all believe, if the Holy Spirit is everywhere,
the spirit is already working in their hearts.
The spirit is already doing stuff to receive this message of Christ.
But if we tap into what the Holy Spirit is doing in all these places, then we can know
(23:16):
how to minister.
We can see what language to use.
We're not changing the gospel at all.
Only Jesus dies first.
It'll be more an effective vessel in bringing in.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So you can think of the spirit as kind of working as a pervenient grace.
Now, you know that pervenient grace to John Wesley doctrine?
(23:36):
The satirial.
That's a whole other area.
So it's basically, historically, it's usually attributed to Christ's action on the cross.
Jesus died for us, but he made us available so that way we can choose him.
But we've got to think about the spirit's role in this.
So not only did the spirit lead us to Christ, but also allows us to respond to Christ.
So there's two things that the spirit is doing pervenently for us.
(23:57):
Pervenient means becoming beforehand.
So if people are not Christian, if they are blinded to the faith or whatever, what pervenient
grace says is that the spirit will show you.
If we're all blindfolded and walking towards a cliff, pervenient grace is God stepping in
front of us and being like, hey, I'm here and there's a cliff right there.
(24:19):
So you need to turn around.
And this is a grace that comes before, a grace that is given to us even before salvation.
That's why it's called pervenient grace.
And so two ways that this grace happens is the spirit, one, leads us to Christ, shows
us, reveals little semblances of Christ in our lives and does this all over the world,
beckons us back to Christ.
(24:40):
And then two, the spirit enables us to actually make the decision for Christ.
And so both of those things are pervenient.
And the thing is, the Holy Spirit is doing that everywhere.
So that's kind of where we're at.
So if we think about this as like a framing place, we can think of, all right, well, we
(25:01):
can do missions and we must do missions, but we really need to recognize number one, this
is God's mission in the first place.
It's the mission of the Holy Spirit.
And we need to tap into what the spirit is already doing, not try to force our own agenda
or our own colonial mindset.
But if we believe and truly and genuinely that Christianity is meant to be global, we have
(25:22):
to believe that he is already working globally.
And we don't need us to necessarily go in and start colonizing and doing all accessilliness,
destroying other people's cultures and all that so that they can quote unquote come to
know Jesus.
It helps us shape the way that we view the world and the way that we view Christians across
(25:43):
the world and that they're not just like it helps get removed, us them thing that we tend
to do with like us civilized folk in the West and then everybody else.
It's like it eliminates that because that is not the heart of God and that's not the
heart of missions and that should was never meant to be how we were called to spread the
gospel, which is why the early church knew that.
(26:06):
And it's time that we tap back in to the things that were being done too far.
You're too far.
So another theologian I really like Miroslav Wolf, he's the man, good public theologian.
And he wrote this book that I think is one of the best books I've ever read and it's
called Exclusion and Embrace, How They Recommend It to Anybody.
(26:27):
And he talks about reconciliation a lot.
That's kind of like the main point of it.
And he talks about reconciling between other people and like we mentioned this a little
bit when we talked about the last season when we talked about racial reconciliation.
But reconciliation isn't just like thinking that, oh, there's justice now.
No, it's talking about embrace.
It's talking about like you're my brother, you're my sister, like we're in a family,
(26:50):
right?
That's what reconciliation is.
And he creates basically this theology of embrace.
That's a social theology and it sees the oppressed and marginalized as being liberated as being
embraced by the other, not like still seen as the other.
So basically what he says is mere liberation is not enough.
(27:11):
And this is actually one of the points against liberation theology.
So liberation theology is this theology is really crucial.
It talks about like, we need to recognize what the plight of the poor is and we need
to help them seek liberation even in this worldly matters like political liberation
(27:31):
and whatnot.
But very interesting, Donald Miller, this theologian recounts an Argentine liberation theologian
that said liberation theology opted for the poor and the poor opted for Pentecostalism.
And so if you think about it, Pentecostalism is global.
It's all over the place.
And one of the reasons is because it offers a theology of the spirit empowering us by
(27:53):
the Holy Spirit.
That's how we believe about spiritual gifts and all that kind of stuff and to do ministry
all over the world.
But this creates this new sense of social mobility that like you're empowered by spirit, no matter
where you're from.
And so that's a really, really pertinent and important image.
That's why most of the world global Christianity is by and large charismatic and Pentecostal
Christianity.
Correct.
(28:13):
Maybe for dominations, maybe non-denominational, but they're probably this kind of charismatic
faith tradition.
So what Wolf is typing into, he says, mere liberation is not enough.
Right.
Because you think about like being liberated from an oppressive regime or something, which
is like what post colonialism seeks to liberate oppressed people.
If you achieve that, all that's going to happen is someone else is going to move into this
(28:37):
role of power and the new cycle of oppression is going to go.
Right.
That was God's warning against the king.
Yeah, against the king.
And that's exactly what happened by the reign of Solomon.
Right.
And it took like two people.
Yeah.
And you're like, oh no.
There it is.
It's already a mess.
Samuel tried to tell him.
He did.
Bless his heart.
(28:58):
And he's like, good policies can move us towards a good and more just society for sure.
But we must recognize that all of that, all these human efforts towards reconciliation
are always non-final.
So like we can't be talking about the United States as the city on a hill.
That's blasphemous.
The church is a city on a hill.
We are, right?
(29:19):
And we're global.
We're all over the world, regardless of our government, regardless of what country we're
in.
Because these things are non-final.
Christian embrace resists this colonizing impulse of forced uniformity.
It entails freeing the other person from oppression, but then also giving them space to be themselves.
Like you aren't going to be American if you're a Christian.
(29:43):
You're going to be like Christ, period.
And so, so often we see social issues come to a head with Christianity because Christianity
claims that Jesus should be your main identity.
It should be like your identity, period, right?
You should find your identity in Christ.
And so that's one of the problems with LGBTQ matters is sometimes they find their identity
in their own sexuality before Christ.
(30:05):
That's what happens with a lot of racial matters when somebody takes their own race as their
identity before Christ or anything else like that.
Our identity is fundamentally in Christ.
It is not our national things.
It's not like any of the other constructs that we create.
As we lead people towards freeing themselves from oppression, it really is the Holy Spirit
that's making them empowered to leave any kind of oppressed mindset, but sometimes even
(30:27):
give them the courage to leave an oppressive system.
Right?
Yeah.
And that's very important.
But you still have the space to be themselves.
However, and this is a big, huge point that Miroslav Wolf makes that is so crucial for
what we're talking about here.
He says, we can bring people in, bring your customs and bring your culture, but leave
your tribal deities at the door.
(30:49):
That's the difference.
You can't worship whatever you're trying to worship.
You worship Jesus, but that doesn't mean you're not going to be who you are and where you're
from.
You're just going to be who you are and where you're from as a follower of Christ.
As a follower of Jesus, yeah.
As it relates and reflects your identity in Jesus.
So casting off these tribal deities means directing our worship only to God.
(31:09):
But here's the thing.
Tribal deity is anything that is idolized, not just another religion's gods.
It's easier to see the other religion's gods.
It's harder for us to see us worshiping ourselves or money or sexuality or status.
Well, even we have the rich young ruler who's literally like selling it all.
He couldn't leave his tribal deity.
And he couldn't leave his money.
He couldn't do it.
(31:29):
Nope.
Is there any explanation of him having a previous God?
No.
What he could not do.
He believed in Jesus and he wanted to follow him, but we couldn't do...
Is leave his tribal deity at the door.
Exactly.
Leave the comfortability and the thing that idolized which at the end of the day was his
money.
Right.
And if you're coming into this and you're like, oh, well, I didn't come from like a
(31:49):
other religious background.
I'm not trying to bring any of my quote unquote gods with me.
So I'm better than you.
What about your money?
No.
What about your status?
Right.
Anything could be idolized.
What about your sexuality?
Right.
That's the big issue.
That's an unpopular statement, I think.
Right.
You know, in this day and age, when we talk about LGBTQ matters, what about your sexuality?
Is it secondary?
(32:10):
Yeah.
Does Christ come first?
Right.
If Christ comes first, whatever it is in your sexuality, that's going to be worked out through
Christ.
Right.
And that's what's most important.
Right?
But if you're working out your Christianity through your sexuality, you've got it backwards.
Correct.
Right?
Anyways, embracing the other means accepting them and celebrating them in their difference,
(32:31):
but leading them to worship only God.
Right.
So find Jesus as an African, as an Asian, as a South American, as whatever it is, find
Jesus as your cultural identity, but find Jesus and then worship Jesus alone.
Right.
That's kind of the point, right?
Agreed.
(32:51):
So, Megan, how would we respond to these three points?
So how should the church respond to these three points?
So these are the three kind of main points that we just tackled here.
One, the church is global.
Two, the spirit is at work everywhere.
And three, the spirit can give us new inroads for mission.
How should the church respond to these?
(33:12):
I mean, especially from our experience as American Christians and churches in the West,
is I feel like it's really easy to do the whole us-them thing, where it's like us who
are, and I think even to this day, people have that view of like, and if it's not, sometimes
I feel like probably the most similar comparison would be people talking about third world
(33:33):
countries.
And then us in the US being a first world country or whatever, like, I feel like I hear
this kind of language a lot, not the same as colonizing language, but in the sense of
the us-them.
They're still thems.
Yes.
We've got it figured out.
We're all wealthy or whatever, and we are civilized and yada yada.
But then there's other places that are third world that they still consider less than.
(33:56):
And so I think that...
So status.
Yeah.
So I wouldn't say it's even like, we're not necessarily trying to colonize them anymore,
but it's more of like, we deem them lower because they're not as established, they're
less wealthy.
Which is so interesting because when Paul says, in Christ there is no slave nor free,
he's literally washing the lines of status away.
Correct.
But that's the part that we don't like.
We're recreating status.
(34:17):
Yeah, that's the part we don't like to listen to very much about that, about Galatians 3,
28.
But so I think that us, especially as churches in the West, like what we have to remember
is that one, we're not more called or anointed or better than any other country that worships
Jesus.
(34:37):
Right?
Like none of our Christian brothers and sisters in the Middle East or in Latin America or
in Africa, they're not less than.
Not individually or neither the country.
Or collectively.
No, the country in general, the church capital C or each individual Christian, like you're
not less than us.
And just because we have religious freedom in the States doesn't mean that we are better
Christians or that we've got it more figured out.
(34:59):
In fact, sometimes...
Sometimes we don't.
We can argue that we have it worse figured out.
Yeah, it starts marrying nationalism and becomes a whole other issue.
So I think that we have to really remove ourselves, especially as Americans, that we're not the
center of the world.
Like the culture and the globe doesn't start and stop with what we experience as Americans
or what we experience in the West.
And so if we stop for the love of all that's good and holy, like only viewing missions or
(35:24):
Christianity or expressions of faith from just a Western perspective being the only
way that we can do it and actually view and believe that the church is global and has
various expressions, even if those expressions look different than yours, I actually think
that that would soften our hearts and remove the whole us them mentality that creates the
divisiveness even where we're viewing our own brothers and sisters in Christ in an us
(35:47):
them mentality because they're not as... their status isn't as solid as we are.
And so I think that if we, you know, and then under through understanding that the spirit
is global and believing we have to believe that the very spirit that works in our churches
is the very same spirit who is actively at work in other countries, maybe it looks different,
maybe it's a different way, or maybe you just don't see it because you're not looking and
(36:10):
not paying attention to the revival that's happening in different countries across the
world.
Like I would challenge all of us to like really...
There's amazing things happening.
See, yeah, to really like look and see what the Lord is doing in other countries and
be inspired by like the faith of different believers in different countries and from
different cultures because I actually think if we would look at it as something that stirs
up our own faith, stirs up our own excitement, stirs up our own like passion for spreading
(36:34):
the gospel again, I think that we can all get back on the same page of wanting the same
thing of the gospel to continue to go global and looking for missions, opportunities to
be these inroads of where culture and Christianity meet and then can be expressed in the way
that each person is capable, like has been made to express, but without there being this
(36:57):
over contextualizing or colonization situation.
And also having a global awareness of the church can actually like help you realize
that there's real persecution happening all over the world.
And so when we start thinking we're persecuted because we call it a holiday tree instead
of a Christmas tree.
Lord, you don't know what a persecution is.
It's like how about the church in the state church in China that was shut down for no
(37:23):
reason without warning and then people were imprisoned?
I had some students, international students, they were telling me that's exactly what happened
to their pastor, imprisoned for two years without warning.
And he was doing a state sanctioned church that was following all the rules that there
were, what there were a lot of saying stuff like that.
That's why so many churches in China are underground house churches and they could get in so much
(37:46):
trouble if they ever got caught.
And this is just like, that's just China.
So think about like some other...
There's churches in closed countries.
We know FMI workers who you can't even say their names out loud or like present anything
about them because if they reveal their identity they could be in actual risk and danger for
their lives.
Like we don't know that low.
There's some serious danger.
My heart goes out for this.
As you know, I was a missionary kid.
(38:07):
I grew up when my dad was a missionary in the field.
I was born in Germany and he was doing missions in Romania and when I was 85 I was born.
And so until 89 Romania was communist.
And so my dad had to smuggle Bibles into Romania in this special van that had hidden compartments.
And if he would have got caught his hands could get cut off.
(38:28):
That's how serious it was.
And that's what Christians are doing all over the world today with courage, fearlessly,
doing things because they feel like God is calling them to do this, to exist in this
way.
And we're sitting here complaining about some tomfoolery.
You know what I mean?
Let's recognize globally what's going on.
(38:49):
Let's be there with our brothers and sisters all over the world.
Let's rejoice in their joy.
And man, if we have this kind of an outlook, that'll change everything for us.
I think that's going to be a lot of what you're going to hear us say over the course of this
season is viewing the church globally, having a global vision, having a global vision for
the church, for Christianity, for the spirit, all of it.
(39:11):
And I think that by the end of this season, hopefully, we will all come out of it with
a much more robust understanding of what the Lord is doing globally and that it's not just
God is personal to us, of course, in personal relationship, but he's not just our God.
He is a God of culture and ethnicity and all of us across the globe.
(39:32):
And so I'm really excited for the conversations that we get to have about this.
I'm really looking forward to being able to talk globally and talk about what the Lord's
doing.
Digging into all these topics.
And man, we've got some awesome guests coming up.
So man, I just can't wait for you guys to experience.
Yeah.
It's going to be good.
Indeed.
(39:52):
This episode, like always, is sponsored by the School of Theology and Ministry at Life
Pacific University.
We'll see you next time.
See ya.
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