When Your Gospel Is Mere Words

If you want to convince people that they are your enemy, disrespect their cultural practices. If you want to confuse them, tell them Jesus loves them while you’re doing it.

A Christian pastor in Wyoming has called Arapaho ceremonies “idol worship”, and members of the Indigenous community now want her church gone. Presumably, this wasn’t the outcome she was hoping for.

Before we get into what happened, imagine the situation reversed. Someone arrives in your community hoping to introduce you to their religion. They dismiss your sacred traditions as offensive to their God but assure you they’ve come because they love you. Would you feel loved? Would you want your children learning from them? Or would you wonder why their love seems to require such a low opinion of the people receiving it?

Here in Australia, I’ve heard Christians condemn a Welcome to Country, refuse to participate, and even turn their backs. For American readers, a Welcome to Country is a ceremony in which a Traditional Owner, or someone authorized by them, welcomes people to their ancestral land. It recognizes the continuing connection of Australia’s First Nations peoples — Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples — to the place where everyone has gathered.

Think about that exchange for a moment. Someone is saying, “Welcome.” You’re showing them your back.

I don’t expect Christians to agree with every belief expressed in another culture. I do expect us to understand that people will form an opinion of our faith by watching how we treat them. If our first contribution to a relationship is to insult something they hold sacred, their reluctance to hear more shouldn’t come as a theological mystery.

So, when I read about the conflict in Wyoming, I wanted to know what the pastor had said. But I also wanted to hear from the people she’d said it about.

So, what happened?

Pastor Sarah Lucas leads Foundations for Nations Church on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, home to the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone Tribes. According to the

Associated Press, a video circulated in July in which she called the Arapaho Sundance — a sacred ceremony of renewal — “idol worship”. She later regretted her delivery but stood by the message.

I’m not sure a warmer tone would have solved this one. If someone dismissed Communion as offensive to God, I doubt many Christians would say, “Well, at least they were pleasant about it.”

Protesters began gathering outside the church on Sundays, praying while the congregation prayed inside. Tribal leaders want the church to be gone. Lucas owns the property and refuses to leave.

That’s quite a place for a church to find itself: preaching God’s love indoors while the neighbors gather outside asking it to go.

The church had helped families with food and children’s programs. One former congregant, raised with both Christianity and Arapaho traditions, told AP, “I thought they accepted us.” His grandfather had survived an assimilationist boarding school, and the pastor’s words brought that history to mind. He left for a Catholic congregation that welcomes his traditions.

He’d already walked through the doors and joined in. Somewhere along the way, he discovered that the acceptance he thought he’d found required him to give something up that the church hadn’t understood: His culture.

If I were his pastor, I’d want to hear him out before preaching another word.

Did God get here when you did?

One thing I find strange about the idea of “bringing God” to another people is that Christians generally believe God is already everywhere. We teach children that there is nowhere they can go where God is absent. Then we talk about entire communities as though God has been waiting for a missionary to supply the address.

So, where do we think God was before the church arrived?

It’s a serious question. Generations of people had loved their children, mourned their dead, wrestled with suffering and tried to understand their place in the world. Do we imagine God watched all of that from a distance, declining to get involved until someone explained Christianity correctly?

I can’t reconcile that with a God who loves the whole world.

And if God was already present, surely a Christian entering that community has something to discover. You might ask what people understand about responsibility to one another, what their ceremonies mean, or how their traditions help them live with grief. You might hear something that challenges an assumption you’ve carried for years.

Of course, you might also disagree. Listening doesn’t oblige you to adopt someone else’s beliefs. But it does give you a chance to understand what you’re disagreeing with, which seems a reasonable minimum before announcing God’s verdict on it.

The difficulty is that we often recognize the cultural packaging around everyone else’s religion while treating our own as though it arrived directly from heaven. Our buildings, music, clothes and ways of praying feel normal because we know them. Someone else feels suspicious because we don’t.

I wonder how often we’ve asked people to become more like us and assumed we were helping them become more like Jesus.

If I believe God has been involved in someone’s life long before I entered it, that ought to change how I approach them. I’d still have things to share. But I’d want to pull up a chair and find out what I’d missed.

But what if you genuinely believe they’re wrong?

I can hear the objection: “Surely a pastor has a responsibility to tell people the truth. If she believes these practices are wrong, wouldn’t staying silent be dishonest?”

It’s a fair question. I wouldn’t want someone pretending to respect my beliefs while privately plotting how to change them. An honest disagreement gives us something we can actually discuss.

But “I believe this is true” is the beginning of an explanation, not the end of our responsibility. We still have to ask whether we’ve understood the people we’re addressing, whether we’ve earned their trust, and whether we’re willing to have our own beliefs questioned in return.

Imagine accepting an invitation to dinner and discovering, halfway through the meal, that your hosts, who happen to be people of a different faith, have concerns about your Christianity. They think Communion is spiritually dangerous. They’d prefer that your children stopped attending church. They’re happy to help your family, but they’re hoping that, in time, you’ll leave these troubling practices behind.

You might appreciate their honesty. You probably wouldn’t ask them to lead your next Bible study.

Yet when Christians approach other people with similar expectations, we can be remarkably surprised by the response. We were only trying to help. We care about their souls. We’re telling them this because we love them.

I believe those intentions can be sincere. I also think the people receiving that love get to tell us how it feels.

What would make me willing to discuss something deeply personal with someone who disagrees with me? I’d need to know if they were interested in my answer. That they could describe my beliefs without making them sound ridiculous. That our friendship would survive my saying, “I’ve heard you, and I still don’t agree.”

That last one is a useful test. If someone never converts, never joins your church and never gives up the tradition you find troubling, can you still be their friend? Can you still help with the groceries, enjoy their company and recognize something good in their life?

I’d have far more confidence in a conversation about God that began with that kind of relationship.

Paul found somewhere to begin

There’s a story in Acts that complicates the idea that faithfulness requires us to begin by condemning everyone else’s religion.

Paul arrives in Athens and is distressed by the idols he sees around the city. If you’re a Christian who feels uncomfortable with another religion’s practices, you might recognize his reaction. But look at what he does when he addresses the people gathered at the Areopagus, an Athenian council.

He tells them he has been looking carefully at their objects of worship. Among them, he has noticed an altar dedicated to an unknown god. That becomes his starting point for talking about the God he believes in.

He has paid enough attention to finding somewhere to begin.

As his speech develops, Paul draws on their own poets to explain his understanding of humanity’s relationship with God. He can recognize something worth quoting in people who don’t share his faith. Apparently, being an apostle doesn’t prevent you from learning a useful line from someone outside your religion.

And what does Paul say about God? That God gives life to everyone, that people might seek and find him, and that he is “not far from any one of us” (Acts 17:27).

That’s a rather different starting point from imagining a community abandoned by God until a Christian arrives.

Paul certainly challenges his audience. He argues against representing God through objects made by human hands, calls people to repentance and speaks about judgement and resurrection. Some listeners scoff. Others want to hear more. This is a real disagreement, and the story doesn’t pretend otherwise.

But Paul’s speech gives me a reason to question the assumption that everything outside Christianity must be dismissed before anything Christian can be said. He finds language within their culture that helps him explain his faith. He speaks of a God already sustaining their lives, already within reach.

I’d like to see more of that curiosity in us. Before deciding what, another people’s traditions reveal about their supposed distance from God, we could spend some time finding out what those traditions actually mean.

Would they be glad we came?

Of everything I’ve read about this dispute, “I thought they accepted us” is the sentence I keep returning to. I wonder what the pastor would say to him now. Could she hear those words without immediately explaining what the Bible requires her to believe?

There’s a question here for any church that wants to serve a community: if the people you help never become Christians, would you still consider the relationship worthwhile? Would you be glad you’d fed their children, known their families and shared a little of their lives?

I hope the answer would be yes. I’d like to think loving someone counts for something even when there’s no conversion story to tell afterwards.

Here in Australia, I’d settle for seeing Christians receive a Welcome to Country with the courtesy they would expect from a visitor to their church. Face the person speaking. Listen. If something troubles you, ask about it afterwards. You can take your faith seriously without making someone regret welcoming you.

We have plenty to say about how much God loves the world. I’d like the people who meet us to find that a little easier to believe.