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Acts 26:15-18 Then I asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ the Lord replied. 16 ‘Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen of me and what I will show you. 17 I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them 18 to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’ |
I am fascinated by the process implied in certain elements of what we might describe as Paul’s missionary calling. Paul was struck blind on the road to Damascus and experienced an encounter with the risen Christ. In this amazing encounter, the blind man is told that he will be both a servant and witness of Jesus. He is actually appointed as a servant, and perhaps no greater servant can be found in the pages of the New Testament. This young man, who was busy climbing the ladders of privilege and prestige in the circles of the Pharisees was suddenly dashed to the ground, told to rise and appointed as a servant and witness of Jesus and the Gospel. There is something we can learn here about the calling to ministry in general and to cross-cultural ministry in particular: we are called to an attitude of servitude and this attitude can not be separated from the calling to witness.
In the process of missionary training, the hardest task put to the institution or the trainer is to help students acquire helpful attitudes for effective service, and shed destructive attitudes like ethnocentrism, subtle prejudices and any sense of superiority. If the sense of servitude accompanied our sense of commitment to a calling or ministry, we might make great strides towards dislodging some very destructive attitudes in the ministry. I’ve always worried that our concept of incarnational ministry must never be one of descending. We will never achieve a true incarnational ministry if we see ourselves as moving from a position of superiority to a place of lower position, status, development or cultural achievement.
We need to experience liberty before service. One important factor in working out our calling to cross-cultural service is the issue of liberation or deliverance from relationships that bind us. Jesus told the apostle that he would be rescued from his people and from the Gentiles (vs. 17). Was this merely a reference to what awaited him in Damascus? Is this a promise for protection, like Paul experienced on the Road to Jerusalem when his enemies plotted to take his life? Is this a reference to what he could anticipate awaiting trial before Caesar? I think not. Perhaps, I push a point too far, but there is an element in one’s calling that requires that we be set free from our relationships. We can cross cultures successfully until we break free from our own cultural chains. On the other hand, we also need to ensure that we are not bound to the people we serve.
There are two extremes in cultural adjustments. One extreme is the missionary who never really leaves home. His sojourn in the new culture is one of alienation with the occasional foray into the native culture from which he has separated and protected himself. The other extreme is the “gone native” approach where the individual vainly attempts to live a life alienated from his own previous culture. This person only sees the glories and benefits of the new adopted culture and despises her own culture rejecting her roots and values. Neither extreme is healthy. What we need is to live a life of liberty from both our culture of origin and the sojourn culture of adoption.
Once we have experienced this liberty and rescue from the two cultures that bind us, we can move on. Our eyes are opened – figuratively – but more importantly we are in a position to help open the eyes of others. How strange the apostle must have felt? Here he was struck blind, holding a conversation with a man he thought was dead, who was telling him that he would open the eyes of the gentiles. Amazing irony!
It is a dangerous thing to try to open someone else’s eyes if we are not in a position of cultural neutrality. We need to experience the first step of rescue from our own culture before we attempt to open the eyes of someone from another culture. Otherwise, we open their eyes to something other than the Lord and the pure Gospel of light. In a similar way, if we are bound by the culture to which we are called we might not be able to open the eyes of our hosts, or we might open their eyes to something other than the Gospel of light. In any case, our host culture must have their eyes open.
With eyes wide open, conversion can occur. The shift from the kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of Light is the goal, from the power of Satan to the power of God. They receive forgiveness of sins and are sanctified by faith in Jesus the Christ.
