It’s high time that western conservative evangelicals started learning from non-western Christians

I have just had the privilege of visiting a conference held for Nigerian Christians who have settled in the UK.  What a blessing it was to worship with brothers and sisters and to sit under passionate preaching.  It prompted me to reflect on my experience of worship with non-western Christians.  Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to do this with Chinese believers, with Africans, South Americans and with Egyptians. 

Here are some things that each context had in common. First, there was a passion to praise and worship. This was not necessarily about volume -though the Nigerians clearly enjoyed loud and exuberant praise. Rather, there was an earnestness and emotion to singing and music. This reflects particularly in the simple but deeply emotional words of Arabic songs and hymns.

Secondly, I’ve seen a common thread, a seriousness to the preaching of God’s Word. First, this was something not to be rushed, there was a willingness to take time.  Imagine coming to the end of listening to a 50 minute sermon and then straight after, a second speaker stands up to follow straight on, picking up where the first guy left off.  Then imagine finding out that the preachers felt that they had been constrained by time limits.  I’m not saying that we need to prioritise going long in our preaching, I do wonder whether we’ve been too ready and willing to accept the default position on attention spans and whether we have become legalistic about shorter talks? 

We could however become too focused on the time taken and miss other things.  I think that of greater importance has been the content.  There’s a seriousness and that may reflect the an acknowledged gratitude to the likes of Spurgeon and Lloyd Jones.  What I’ve frequently noticed is that there’s less use of humour and less use of stories and illustrations. If there has been a hurry, it hasn’t been to finish but it has been to get into God’s Word.  This doesn’t mean that sermons are theoretical, there is often lots of application and if there aren’t the jokes and illustrations, there’s a lot of use of concrete language and imagery, often running close to the visual imagery of the text. 

Now, I’m not saying that we need to tear up our sermons and service sheets. Perhaps there are good contextual reasons for the approaches we take.  However, we may want to pay attention to some of these things, first if we want to see our churches be genuinely multi-cultural.  Additionally, there may be things we can learn about how we approach worship and the Word as we seek to grow churches that disciple people from western bacgrounds.