Class Reflection Monday of Week 9

Today Dr. Bolger gave an interesting lecture on “church growth” and approached the concept positively by reviewing how McGavern thought about it.  Essentially, in India, McGavern noticed how churches didn’t grow when potential converts were asked to jump social boundaries and adopt a new culture.  So McGavern thought about how the gospel might become inculturated in a specific context, and how its expression could authentically reflect a particular culture while also stay true to itself.  The gospel expressed in this way was his vision for a “People Movement.” Lots of good questions were raised about this kind of vision for missions and the church.  Dr. Bolger talked about the specifically modern/western development of a secular sphere and how this concept is foreign to many cultures and, thus, should be seen critically.   And yet the secular sphere, and the individualism that it implies–which we rightly criticize–is a direct outgrowth of a Lutheran hermenutic and of the great American invention, the separation of church and state.  Granted much more (probably such insidious things as materialism and consumerism) than Luther and the freedom of religion go into making us who we are today, but before we go and denounce individualism altogether (and modernism, which gave rise to the concept) we should remember that the concept helped put an end to all the wars and persecutions that ravished a Christian Europe.  No doubt, it also had something to do with what Jesus said, but for some reason there seems to be something cyclical about how the church ignores or obscures what he had to say about killing each other.