Finding the Commonality Among Cultural Differences

So, I realized that I think I grossly read my own context into my last blog. Matt & I ended up having a big discussion later today with Nate (on staff here with Josiah Venture) about what Czech church is like and what the word means to Czechs.

Here, the negative feelings toward church are more toward Catholicism rather than Evangelical Christianity like in our country. Where in the US, society is taking an increasingly disdainful view of the Evangelical church based on factors like homosexual opposition, hypocrisy, and judgement, here in Czech minds Catholicism has become both the stale, irrelevant religion of grandmothers and also an incredibly greedy institution (after the Velvet Revolution & the fall of communism, many catholic churches went to the government demanding payment for their property that had been siezed when the country had fallen to communism--these demands amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, were plastered across the news, and left a bad taste in the mouth of people across the country)

In some senses it sounds so similar: God's people not being what they were designed to be, and people being turned off to it, but in other senses the reactions differ. Here, once someone has a chance to experience evangelical Christianity for themselves through someone they know, an English Camp, etc., a very distinct difference from their negative perceptions becomes apparent. Well, I guess it can be the same in our country, but the perceptions are sometimes over nuances between "traditional/conservative", "pragmatic/seeker sensitive", and "emergent" models rather than the more drastic theological differences between catholicism and evangelical christianity. In that sense, the church is able to keep things more simple.

So here, perhaps the solution isn't a church in a bar like it could be in our country, but perhaps in both contexts the solution is a community of authentic Christ followers who are engaged with their world and sharing the gospel/bringing the goodness of God's reign through that.

Maybe amidst all the differences we aren't so different after all.