Ever wondered if the church has got stuck in a subculture? Jim Gustafson draws on 25 years' Christian work in Thailand to reflect on evangelism, grace and culture. Photos: Mike Webb
I remember a devout Buddhist lady who taught Buddhism all her life, and then she became a Christian.
She had been trying to understand and live by the Buddhist toma - the word of the Buddha - for years. Then we started studying Romans together and she would say over and over again, every time we met: ‘Jim, we’re talking about the living toma! I’ve lived all my life with the toma and I’ve never found him. I’ve been trying and trying to do it and I never knew whether I’d made it or not. But now I have Jesus right here - the living toma is fulfilled within my heart.’
The gospel touches people and opens people. God has his hands out to everyone in the world constantly, no matter who they are, and he never pulls his hands back. And the question is, how do you help people to extend their hands and let him grab onto them? That’s what we are trying to do and it really does work.
One day as I sat beside the road with this old lady, four monks came by who were going to Bangkok on a pilgrimage. And because she used to be a Buddhist sage they said, ‘Mother, would you give us some money to go to Bangkok?’ Everyone in Thailand helps the priests go to Bangkok.
She looked at me and she said, ‘What do we do?’ I replied, ‘What do you think we should do?’ She said, ‘I think we should take up an offering and give it to them.’ So we did. But she gave the money to them in the name of Jesus and in Jesus’ love. That’s fantastic! She blew my mind and the minds of those priests because they knew that she was a Christian - but they knew also she respected and loved them as members of the community.
That was evangelism at the gut level of those people’s lives - and that community was affected by her till she died and went to heaven. She had impact on people’s lives because she had come alive by the living word. She was never pulled out of her culture. She wasn’t concerned about comparing, only about living out the gospel of God’s grace as he had touched her.
Grace works
Grace is not weak, grace is powerful. Grace doesn’t let things float, it corrects and changes things. The law takes the easy way out: says that’s it, and never starts over and never finds a way to solve problems. Grace always solves problems.
We had four guys working together here at the rice mill. One night one of these guys was caught stealing a big bag of additives for the rice flour, which was worth a fortune. The guard caught him and then the management team came down and discussed with him for three hours why he had done what he’d done.
He didn’t know what to do. He denied it for the first hour - up one side and down the other. Then he finally admitted he did it, and when he saw they weren’t going to boot him out he asked them why. They said, ‘Because we want to help you, and we want you to correct whatever it is that’s bugging you, because obviously something’s going on.’
He admitted that he had problems in his life and that he was strapped for money. They responded to that, said that they wanted to work with him, to help him to be able to manage his money better. When he realised they weren’t going to fire him he said, ‘I’m going to tell you there were three other guys who were in this with me,’ - and you never do that in Thailand. So he brought the three other guys in and the management team said the same thing to them.
A week later I was at a worship service on our farm and in came twelve people. They’d been working on the farm as hired labourers, but they were non-Christians: ‘We want to become Christians,’ they said. When we asked them why, we found out that they’d heard how we’d treated the guy in the flour mill and they wanted to know Jesus because they had never seen anybody treated that way before. That’s working by grace.
Plugged in
I think the church in general in the West has a real failing to work in culture. We need to be plugged back into the culture and allow God’s grace and his power and those values from God to come in and hit the culture with all the power they’ve got. And the only way to do that is to be plugged back into it.
The critical question is, how does Jesus speak to my culture? I guess the first question is, what is my culture? I know Americans who are in such a subcultural hole they don’t even know their culture outside the church door! Focus on your culture - understand it!
The second thing is, how do you speak to your culture? How do you break out of the web and have non-Christian friends to begin with and then spend time with them? How do you accept non-Christian friends? So many times we are so judgmental. We see all the faults, all the problems with non-Christians, and the rights with ourselves. It’s like the biblical parable: take the log out of your own eye so that you can see the mote in the eye of your brother. Somehow we’ve got to get the log out so that we can begin to see.
I think the gospel of Christ is far more acceptable and acceptance-oriented than Christianity today is. Christianity today has been so buffeted that it has established itself on the defensive. You don’t have to defend a thing - let God defend it. Just live it and love it! That’s hard to do.
I guess what I’ve learned over a period of 25 years is that I don’t have to control God. He’s capable of doing everything himself. All I’ve got to learn is to free him up and let him do what he wants to do. We’ve got him so tied down in Western culture that he can’t even breathe sometimes! So somehow to free him up and follow him and learn from him - that’s really great!
Jim Gustafson is President of the Issaan Development Foundation in north east
Thailand and Vice President of the Thailand Covenant Church.
If you’ve been challenged by some of the ideas in this article, why not make an agreement with God to re-examine your own understanding of the gospel, grace and culture. Think about ways that you and your church could allow more of God’s grace into your lives and corporate practices.