THE CHURCHS’ SOFT-CORE PAGANISM

By Lee Duigon:

A colleague of mine who is involved in missionary work says there’s a new fashion in the mission field. Missionaries now are telling potential converts that they can become Christians and still live entirely within the bounds of their culture. It’s a good deal: they get personal salvation, but they don’t have to change their way of life. Missionaries in Muslim countries have found it’s much safer to be a Christian if everybody thinks you’re still a Muslim. In some of those places, it’s a capital offense to convert to Christianity.

So today’s missionaries seek to create an “insider movement”—that is, the new Christians remain “inside” their native culture, whatever it may be. If it were only a matter of personal safety, who would blame them?

But Christ commands us to teach His doctrine and make disciples everywhere (Matthew 28:19-20), to be salt and light to the pagan culture all around us (Matthew 5:13-14)—indeed, to change that culture into a Christian culture by being the one lump of yeast that leavens the whole loaf (Matthew 13:33). Instead, the missionaries teach the new Christians that they can just keep on keeping on: all they have to do is pop into church now and then to get a dose of Christianity.

They get saved. But the culture that’s around them doesn’t.

That’s what the new missionaries learn in seminary.

In other words, the missionaries are handing out the same kind of shy, pietistic, selfish, feeble, limp-wristed, slack-jawed “Christianity” as is being dispensed by all too many of our churches here at home.

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