“Patrick understood the people…there is no shortcut to understanding the people” – George G. Hunter III
St. Patrick’s character and personality are largely lost in the unwritten words by or about him from his own time. But whoever he actually was, certain details about his ministry in Ireland in the fifth century have led him to represent an alternative approach to mission in the church. One that I believe we are desperate for. In his book, The Celtic Way of Evangelism, George Hunter pieces together a largely positive view of this popular saint and suggests that the way he engaged a culture different from his own can serve as a corrective to the way we think about evangelism today.
For the vast majority of Christian history in the West, let’s say from the third century until today, the church’s understanding of mission and evangelism has been infected by an assumption that I believe is anti-christ. That assumption says, in effect, “if someone is to be a part of my faith family, they must also share my culture.” I see the fruit of this mentality everywhere. It’s one of the primary reasons Christian churches in America are some of the most racially segregated places in our society. It serves as a foundation for the otherwise nonsensical hatred that exists between many white evangelicals in America and their brothers and sisters in Christ of color who tend to vote differently than they do or immigrants (who are largely Christian) who are crossing our southern border.
What this assumption misses is that I might learn and move toward wholeness myself through a listening and humble relationship as I come to understand the one who is unlike me. And that in coming to understand someone who doesn’t share my culture, I might come to know how God is already at work, particularly in ways that are beyond my limited experience and position, particularly in ways that are key to my own wholeness.
Hunter’s research has led him to believe that the major difference between Patrick’s starting point of evangelism and mission was that he “understood the people” he was sent to. It seems that most of the christian view of mission and evangelism has lost the holy pursuit of understanding the one who is not like me. We are more interested in winning a culture war against them or converting them to our position than in understanding them. And understanding people is not something we can fast-forward through or do without entering transformation ourselves. It takes major commitment to listen and question deeply held assumptions, it takes a posture of curiosity and humility, and it takes the choice to be uncomfortable. Above all it takes the courage to enter the world and culture of the one who is not like me where I am invited to instead of demanding that they enter mine (this, by the way, is what true mission means).
I am committed to exploring a form of evangelism and mission as a Christain that starts with the assumption that the person who is not like me bears God’s image in ways I need to pay attention to and learn from. That God has already been working through the many unique and strange-to-me aspects of someone else’s culture just as God might work through mine. And that if I can understand and come to appreciate my neighbor in their differences, if I can identify and celebrate the movement of God in, around, and through them, and if I can step into that movement with generosity and trust, I can become a participant in God’s work of wholeness and healing in my own life and in theirs.