Luke 18:14, Proverbs 29:23, Isaiah 2:11, 1 Peter 5:5, Romans 12:3, James 4:6, Proverbs 16:18
Up until the twentieth century, traditional cultures (and this is still true of most cultures in the world) always believed that too high a view of yourself was the root cause of all the evil in the w...
Context This week’s reading from Acts recounts the call to Paul on his second missionary journey to go to Macedonia and his encounter with Lydia in Philippi. Textual Context The structure of the B...
Context This week’s reading from Acts recounts the call to Paul on his second missionary journey to go to Macedonia and his encounter with Lydia in Philippi. Textual Context The structure of the B...
Across all barriers of land and language, wealth and poverty, knowledge and ignorance, we are one, created from the same dust, subject to the same laws, and destined for the same end. With this compas...
John 4:7-26, John 6:1-15, Galatians 4:21-31, Psalm 42:7, Psalm 121:null
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...
John 4:7-26, 1 Corinthians 2:12, 1 Peter 12:12-23, John 6:1-15, Galatians 4:21-31, Psalm 42:7, Psalm 121:null
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...
My brother, who attended a Bible College during a smart-alecky phase in his life, enjoyed shocking groups of believers by sharing his “life verse.” After listening to others quote pious phrases from P...
John 14:27, Matthew 2:2, Revelation 19:16, John 18:36-37, Revelation 17:14, Zechariah 9:9, Isaiah 9:6, Psalm 24:7-10, Colossians 1:15-20, Matthew 21:1-11, Mark 11:1-11, Luke 19:28-40, John 12:12-16
In a culture, the most important things usually go without being said. We Westerners don’t talk all the time about being individualists or about the importance of efficiency or why we prefer youth ove...
The key for successful personal relationships and ministry is to understand and accept others as having a viewpoint as worthy of consideration as our own.
It was the reception of the Holy Spirit that first offered the church hope of a social and spiritual community composed of people from “every tribe and nation” and unified by the centrality of Christ.
Ethnocentrism is the technical name for the view in which one’s own group is the center of everything and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it.
God’s vision for his people is not for the elimination of ethnicity to form a colorblind uniformity of sanctified blandness. Instead God sees the creation of a community of different cultures united b...
Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Missing the point? In the days when the tourist business was good in Israel, some entrepreneurial chap set up a tent between Jerusalem ...
Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Missing the point? In the days when the tourist business was good in Israel, some entrepreneurial chap set up a tent between Jerusalem ...
In 1988, I (Randy) moved with my wife and two sons (ages two and eight weeks) from Texas to Sulawesi, an island north of Australia and south of the Philippines. We served as missionaries to a cluster ...
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.
Mark 1:16-28, Acts 8:26-40, Acts 16:11-15, Joshua 21:32
For purposes of practicality and relatability, this series considers the Sea of Galilee to be a lake and classifies other fresh or mostly fresh water locations together under the same banner. The poin...
In their excellent book Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien share the importance of recognizing the lens through which see the world: We speak as insi...
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become fri...
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, . ...
In the fall of 2009, I was invited to go on a month-long speaking tour throughout Africa. During the trip, a CEO from South Africa named Salim took me to Soweto, a township just outside of Johannesbur...
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.
God’s grace is present in all people and cultures. As we submit ourselves to learning from other cultures, we catch glimpses of God’s grace that would be unavailable in our own culture.
The development of different cultures didn’t take God by surprise! This is what the triune God intended from the beginning. Cultural difference and diversity was always a part of God’s original plan f...
No writer has had a greater impact on my understanding of cultural identity than Dr. Beverly Tatum. …When introducing cultural identity (or racial identity, a term she uses synonymously), Tatum tells...
I once heard the missionary author Elisabeth Elliot tell of accompanying the Auca woman Dayuma from her jungle home in Ecuador to New York City. As they walked the streets, Elliot explained cars, fire...
A classic mission dilemma: The chief of a village in a remote area, whose people practice a tribal religion, becomes a believer and declares the whole village is now Christian. Most of the leading m...