deepbrew

Lately a lot of us (me, my friends, other Mennonites) have been talking about the conservative Mennonite / Anabaptist culture, and how that culture hinders us when we try to reach those outside the culture, and how we wish we could separate what is biblical from what is merely cultural. It’s easy to think that we are the only group that struggles with a culture that seems to separate us from those we want to reach with the gospel. But listen to this analysis of the typical American evangelical missionary.

“…who does the American evangelical look like? Does he or she resemble Jesus in his focus, values, and mission? Our analysis has concluded that Jesus is not the spiritual father of our Evangelical culture. Our Evangelical world is more about our peculiar culture values and what we like and dislike rather than a reflection of Jesus. If we take a hard, objective look at the Gospels, we will see a great deal of similarity between our Evangelical values and the values of the Pharisees rather than the values of Jesus.

The third issue is the logical outcome of the first two: we have a very bad case of cultural blindness. I don’t meant that we cannot distinguish cultural differences, but that we are blind to the differences between what we are as cultural Christians and what the Bible clearly articulates we should be.” (Fran Patt, Mission Frontiers, July-August 2006, p. 9)

Take the word Evangelical in the first paragraph and replace it with Anabaptist and it reads very nicely. This illustrates a tendency a lot of us, and people everywhere, have—we think our problems are unique to ourselves or to our group, and we don’t realize how common and how human our problems actually are.