During my sabbatical this summer, I read Bruce Olson’s autobiography – Bruchko. This is the story of a 19 year old American who takes the gospel to the primitive Motilone Indians.

Before Olson connected with the Motilone tribe he encounter another Indian tribe that some American missionaries had began to reach. He found the missionaries had taught that Indian converts that they should separate themselves from their former tribe. As a result the missionaries reported that the converts had experienced sever persecution from the tribe.

Olson began to reach out to this same tribe, they allowed him to accompany them when they went hunting, when he couldn’t keep up their pace, someone stayed behind with him. When he tripped over vines and roots, they help him up. They shared everything that they owned. He ate their food, slept in their hammocks. How could these Indians be “persecutors”?

When Sunday came Olson suggested to one of them that they should all go to the church, which wasn’t far from their camp, and listen to stories about God. Olson says the Indian looked at me and frowned, and said. “No, we don’t do that,”

Olson asked them “Why not?” “Because those Christians are strange.”

They wouldn’t tell Olson more, but they took him to the village chief, a big, strong character who laughed when he was told what Olson wanted to know.

“Listen” he said. “Those Christians don’t care about us anymore. Why should we care about them?
“Why, they’ve rejected everything about us,” he said. “They won’t sing our songs now. They sing those weird, wailing songs that are all out of tune and don’t make sense.....and how those Christian’s dress! Such foolish clothes...”

Olson says, that he thought about the Indian Christians he had seen at the missionary compound. They had been taught how to dress in western clothes, and how to wear shoes, how to sing Western songs.

“Is that what Jesus taught?” Olson asked himself. “Is that what Christianity is about? What does the good news of Jesus Christ have to do with North American culture? In Bible times there was no North American culture. Were the missionaries making a mistake in their preaching? Of course, it probably made them happy to see the Indians dress like Americans and sing “Rock of Ages.” But was that the only way Jesus could be worshipped? And was there a certain amount of satisfaction in having the Indian Christians persecuted by the rest of the tribe?” Olson says “I began to wonder?”

“I decided to try to tell the Indians what the gospel really was all about ....but I had to overcome their suspicion and mistrust of “foreign missionaries.” The Indians would listen politely to my explanations, then point in the general director of the Indian Christians and shake their heads.”

“We don’t want to become like them,” they would say emphatically. “Our way is right.”

When I read this passage, I thought it sounded remarkably similar to our North American context today. Many Christians have “separated“ themselves from their lost friends and neighbours to such an extent that unbelievers think Christians don’t care about them. Many Christians in North America have taken refuge in a Christian subculture that has isolated them from unbelieving friends and neighbours – and when the subculture is threatened it is viewed as persecution.

Every culture has good and bad elements in it. Jesus did not come to drive people from their culture, but to drive sin from the culture.

I invite your thoughts and comments.