Dealing patiently with unbeleivers

[Pergamum]

When preaching the Gospel to outright pagans in a tribal context how patiently should we deal with people regarding the WOW! visible sins, such as outlandish body piercings, war instruments, topless women and polygamous families inside the church?

Should we preach the Gospel and let people make their own decisions about these "lesser" issues as they arose, or should we be the ones to take the initiative and address these external conditions ourselves. And if so, what sort of rules should we lay on them?

This is an issue of primary and secondary things. But the secondary things are quite hard to ignore. Would it do more harm than good to intriduce many rules before laying Gospel groundwork? Or should we win victories wherever we can asap, even smaller external victories?

 

[CalvinandHodges]

Greetings:

These people are ignorant. It seems to me that if you try to amend their lives without calling them to repentance, then you are preaching a social gospel. Once they hear the good news of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ, then they will be amendable to correction in other areas.

God give you wisdom,

-CH

 

[Anton Bruckner]

Do what Paul did? Reread the Pastoral Epistles and especially 1 and 2 corinthians.

The Gospel must be powerfully preached and disciplined must be administered in the church when sin rares its ugly head. There is no such thing as "cultural norms" when it comes to sin. Maybe eating a good chicken curry is all well and dandy, but women going around topless thereby inciting lusts etc is a gross violation of scripture.

 

[JonathanHunt]

Wow! What a question! Where on earth do you start?

I suppose we cannot expect those who are unsaved to conform to a more godly sense of modesty, dress, etc unless or until they are the Lord's or until the societal norm demands it. On the bare chest issue, these folks may have practiced this for hundreds of years, and to them it may not be considered immodest at all - they may have other things they consider immodest, in conduct or speech, that we might find rather quaint and amusing.

Of course we know it to be true that in large measure we preach Christ first and the rest follows on, but...

I would find it very hard to minister among people who were semi-nude - how do you avoid sin in those circumstances? I think we should certainly indicate that we consider certain practices to be immodest or immoral, and we should not condone or glorify them. Perhaps in explaining WHY certain things are wrong we have new opportunities for witness.

I think as far as rules go you can only impose them in your own home, or in whatever place is designated as the place the church meets, if that is not the home anyway. I don't see there is anything wrong with requiring that weapons be left at the door and bodies be reasonably covered. If people want to come and hear the gospel then surely they are more likely to accede to this.

I can't get away from my original thought, though, which is how do you avoid sinful thoughts if your daily walking among the people involves having to take in what you might ordinarily be able to avoid in western society (provided the TV is off!)

 

[a mere housewife]

Ruben and I were talking about this yesterday and had reason to talk about it a great deal last year. Some things are cultural and 'Westernization' is easy to confuse with holiness. For instance in the case of natives who don't wear clothes -- (and in watching videos or programs about such people neither Ruben or I have ever had a reaction of lust: quite the opposite), our reaction that they must put clothes on AT ONCE is probably more Western than Christian: if it's not causing rampant immorality in their culture it may be less destructive than some clothing worn into evangelical churches on Sunday by good Christian women in the states. Not that I don't believe in wearing clothes. We aren't in a state of innocence, but sometimes our clothes reveal that more than even the lack of them; and we tolerate a great deal in the US. As regards polygamy, Paul was very patient with the pagans. The fact that the deacons and elders were required to be the husband of one wife seems to indicate that there were quite a few people in the churches who had more than one wife. Christianity seems to subvert polygamy in the same way it subverts slavery: not by ordering all the Christians to free their slaves at once, or all the men who are married to more than one wife to suddenly ditch all but one of them (what would happen to the other wives?) but by undercutting the whole foundation of such practices. Most of the patriarchs were polygamists, and we don't find that they repented as David did of his murder and adultery: it wasn't on the same level, and I don't know that it is on the same level, still (Paul doesn't seem to deal with it on the same level).

Paul was dealing with obvious sins (a man sleeping with his mother) and abuses for years after the churches were planted, and though he does not compromise on these issues at all, he is very patient in that he doesn't expect the pagans to snap to without any problems in the first three weeks after conversion. I'm not sure what he would say about outlandish body piercings: his policy as regards cultural things seems to have been strictly one of not trying to Jewish-ise the Gentiles, in an age where Jewish custom must have been far more closely associated with Christianity than Western civilization now is. Is there a biblical precedent for considering some body piercing as objectively 'outlandish'? Wouldn't this be something if it does cross the line that teaching about modesty and glorying in Christ alone would in the course of time undercut? Could you teach on it as something not essential for membership in the church, but simply to explain your own position from Scripture?

I thought Paton had something about some of these things in his autobiography but can't remember now....

 

[JonathanHunt]

Interesting thoughts Heidi. Just a little point on the 'lust' thing - I too have never felt any watching such things on TV. But I am certain sure that my adversary would try and make things difficult when 'up close and personal'.

JH