MISSIONS:
CAUTIONS ABOUT

To be saved, the Lord does not require people to change their common ways—except so far as they may be contrary to simple righteousness—but permits them to live after the accepted customs of their own people.

It would have been well for the church if it had remembered this as it sought to carry truth across ethnic and cultural lines during the last hundreds of years. Too often it has confused pure Christianity with Christianity as modified by a particular culture. Its requirements for a person who desires to become a Christian have frequently followed a narrow and prejudiced conception of what constitutes a good life within one or another social bracket. Often missionaries have attempted unconsciously to make new converts good Canadians or Americans, forgetting entirely that the traits marking people as belonging to a particular nation have nothing whatsoever to do with Christ or salvation. Failure to take this into account has hindered the spread of the gospel in no small degree. The inability of the missionary to accept an alien culture as valid has created barriers to the Christian faith where no such barriers should ever have been erected.

Acts 15:24–29; Romans 14:1–6, 17–19; Galatians 5:1

Let My People Go: The Life of Robert A. Jaffray, 37, 38.