Crossing Cultures: Conveying the Gospel

Now, as China’s church reengages in mission, the question of how the gospel will be conveyed cross culturally and what kinds of churches will result is central to the long-term success of the Chinese mission movement.¹

The way we convey the gospel cross-culturally depends on how we understand the gospel, and how we understand the gospel is rooted in our worldview assumptions. We absorb those assumptions while in our mothers’ arms and at our fathers’ knees, and even while still in the womb we hear the “tune” of our mother tongue shaping foundational cultural presuppositions.² Those assumptions are deeply embedded in our subconscious and shape our beliefs (what is really real), values (what really matters), and aesthetics (what is lovely, beautiful, and desirable).³  Worldview is like the lens in eyeglasses or a telescope—it helps us clarify what we see; it is like a map that gives meaning and shapes the trajectory of our life journey; it is like a narrative that informs what we feel and think and our hopes and aspirations.

Charles Kraft described worldview as “the fundamental perspective from which one addresses every issue of life.”⁴ James Sire expands that definition to include allegiance to our cultural narrative and commitment to fundamental presuppositions that can be illusive and inconsistent:

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true, or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution or reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.⁵

Jayson Georges’ The 3D Gospel described how our deepest subconscious worldview assumptions inhabit living cultures. He described three archetypical cultural expressions, one characterized by guilt/innocence, another by shame/honor, and another by fear/power.⁶  His accompanying online personal cultural inventory⁷ is enlightening (and fun!). Georges’ work is a must-read to begin understanding how our cultural presuppositions are expressed in our mother cultures. Self-awareness of our own and others’ cultural assumptions makes straight the path to conveying the gospel across cultural boundaries.

Craig Ott described four archetypical gospel metaphors that grow out of deeply rooted biblical and cultural presuppositions. These metaphors include a forensic, relational, cleansing, and deliverance metaphor.⁸ The forensic metaphor (legal/righteous) pictures God as lawgiver and judge, humans as law breakers condemned to death, and Jesus’ substitutionary death as the good news of the gospel. The relational metaphor pictures God as our loving Father; cleansing focuses on God’s holiness and purity; deliverance recognizes God’s power and liberation.

Each of these metaphors is biblically true, and each metaphor can be enriched and made more cross-culturally welcoming by grasping the biblically true worldview nuances embraced by each cultural metaphor. Self-awareness of our own and others’ gospel metaphors makes straight the path to convey the gospel across culturally embedded gospel expressions.

Worldviews are extraordinarily resistant to change, and archetypical cultural and gospel metaphors shape how missionaries convey the gospel across cultural boundaries. That is why it is so important for Chinese missiologists to “understand and critically integrate” imported cultural and metaphor worldview presuppositions lest what they “staunchly affirmed as biblical may have had more to do with nurturing cultural mores…than with God’s eternal truth.”⁹

Paul Hiebert’s centered set construct can help missiologists in their critical integration by focusing on trajectory and relationship, and not exclusively on culturally defined cognitive or theological boundaries.¹⁰ Using this construct the ministering cross-culturally question becomes “how can we nudge people toward relationship with Jesus Christ” and not “how must we protect our culturally informed distinctives.”

May the Lord bless Chinese church missionary gospel conveyance through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit to the glory of God.

1. Brent Fulton, “Chinese Mission at the Crossroads,” ChinaSource Blog, July 28, 2023, https://www.chinasource.org/resource-library/blog-entries/chinese-mission-at-the-crossroads-2/.
2. “Culture,” Encyclopedia of Early Childhood Development, https://www.child-encyclopedia.com/culture; and Milda Bredikyte, Michael Cole, and Pentti Hakkarainen, “Culture and Early Childhood Learning,” Encyclopedia of Early Childhood Development, June 2023, https://www.child-encyclopedia.com/culture/according-experts/culture-and-early-childhood-learning.
3. Paul G. Hiebert, Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic-Baker Publishing Group, 2008), 15. Hiebert argues that worldview consists of the “fundamental cognitive, affective, and evaluative presuppositions a group of people make about the nature of things, and which they use to order their lives.”
4. Charles H. Kraft, Worldviews for Chirstian Witness (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2008), 75-128.
5. James Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic-InterVarsity Press, 2015), 183.
6. Jayson Georges, The 3D Gospel: Ministry in Guilt, Shame, and Fear Cultures (Timē Press, 2014).
7. See The Culture Test, https://theculturetest.com/.
8. Craig Ott, “The Power of Biblical Metaphor for the Contextualized for the Communication of the Gospel,” Missiology: An International Review 42, no. 4 (2104): 19.
9. Brent Fulton, “American Evangelicalism and China: A Necessary Conversation,” ChinaSource Blog, April 30, 2024,  https://www.chinasource.org/resource-library/blog-entries/american-evangelicalism-and-china-a-necessary-conversation/.
10. Paul G. Hiebert, “The Category ‘Christian’ in the Mission Task,” International Review of Mission 72, no. 287 (July 1983): 305–486.

Ken Anderson

Dr. Ken Anderson holds DMiss and MAGL degrees from Fuller Theological Seminary. From 2011–2021 he served as an itinerant extension biblical training missionary in China and Nepal. He is currently leading missiological training in Mark’s Gospel for an indigenous church planting movement in southern Nepal and serves on boards including …View Full Bio

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