bible and theology on Assimilation

Not one person who comes through your door comes haphazardly. By sending that guest to you, God is giving you the privilege of cooperating with Him to move someone forward in their journey toward Jesu...

Most men and women fall in love with individuals of the same ethnic, social, religious, educational and economic background, those of similar physical attractiveness, a comparable intelligence, simila...

Each one of us is called to live the truth of our unrepeatable uniqueness. We are not meant to model ourselves after others, however wonderful they may be. A delightful Jewish parable makes this point...

New Testament Mountains Like the Old Testament, the New Testament has plenty of references to mountains.  There’s the Sermon on the Mount, obviously.  Jesus often went onto hills or mountains to pray...

The act of ingestion and digestion involves the incorporation of food into our own flesh. What we eat literally becomes us, and we become it. Logically, therefore, food is among the most powerful expre...

This is how adoption works—like a sacrament, that visible sign of an inner grace. It’s a thin place where we see that we are different and yet not entirely foreign to one another. We are relatives not...

So while conversion is the most important step in the journey, involving a fundamental change in our identity, life transformation is the end goal.

To reach people we must appreciate and adapt to their culture, but we must also challenge and confront it. This is based on the biblical teaching that all cultures have God's grace and natural rev...

Our natural tendency is to watch the world from behind the windows of [our] cultural home and to act as if people from other countries, ethnicities, or categories have something special about them, . ...

Christians don't simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolized into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all th...

American Christianity is becoming diverse at a rate faster than American society at large.

The term ‘adoption’ (used here in older English versions [of Romans 12:15] may have a somewhat artificial sound in our ears; but in the Roman world of the first century AD an adopted son was a son del...

Properly understood, adoption is one of the most precious, heartwarming, and practical of all our theological beliefs… [It] focuses our attention on a relational image and points us to the joy and ass...

As two pieces of wax fused together make one so he who receives Holy Communion is so united with Christ that Christ is in him and he is in Christ.

Rather than translating the culture, then, we need to try to enter the culture. When people want to study the Bible seriously, one of the steps they take is to learn the language. As I teach language ...

If we do not accept as good, God’s shaping of our person and life in our own culture, we will never be able to accept his work in the lives of others who are culturally different from us.

Adoption … is not the cause merely of a partial salvation, but bestows salvation entire…

What is of man uses manipulation to conform. What is of God uses implantation to transform.

Adoption graphically and intimately describes the family character of Pauline Christianity, and is a basic description for Paul of what it means to be a Christian.

We can love what we are, without hating what- and who we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings.

Nearly every racial minority in the US understands Euro-white culture pretty well, but we whites are far more ignorant of how the cultures of others operate.

As a missionary … it was always comforting to realize that I did not bring God along with my physical and cultural baggage to my new host country.

In Scripture, adoption meddles with genealogies, subverts oppressive empires, secures imperial inheritances, and opens new possibilities for who can be family.

Adoption was clearly not a foreign concept in the Greco-Roman world. But it’s important to note how differently Paul and his communities would have heard that word! Our contemporary concept of adoptin...

Today, the church in America seems to have traded in its mandate to be eccentric and aimed instead at an unconscious conventionality. Rural norms are too quaint, urban norms too dangerous, so the chur...

The process of spiritual formation in Christ is one of progressively replacing . . . destructive images and ideas with the images and ideas that filled the mind of Jesus himself.

Cultural transformation in a church or organization must go beyond interpersonal models of changing “one person at a time,” which dominates Western evangelical thinking. The goals of reconciliation ne...

Jesus is understood in the light of the assumptions which control our culture.  When “reason” is invoked as a parallel or supplementary authority to “Scripture” and “tradition,” what is happening is t...

Conforming to boundary markers too often substitutes for authentic transformation. The church I grew up in had its boundary markers. A prideful or resentful pastor could have kept his job, but if eve...

The body eaten is focused communally rather than individually, finding the Savior’s presence in the corporate consumption rather than in the elements taken in isolation.