GLOBAL VOICES
Same Kind of Different John Maust
Suddenly our bus pulled off the Pan American Highway and came to a stop. Passengers gasped as a military officer boarded the bus and called for attention. “La guerrilla has hijacked a semi-trailer,” he said tersely. They’ve parked the truck across the highway and set it on fire. The road is blocked. “Pero no se preocupen” (don’t worry),” he said, “we’ll soon have the situation under control.” Then he asked us to get off the bus and left. This was El Salvador in the early 1980s, a place and time of great turmoil, where people frequently “disappeared” or died at the hands of the guerrillas or military. And now, our pleasant drive through the Salvadoran countryside had become a seeming journey into the apocalypse. We grimly grabbed our things and started moving toward the door—me, the only “gringo” in a bus full of farmers and rural villagers. As I stepped off the bus, glancing down the highway at the truck engulfed in flames, I noticed a middle-aged farm woman, a campesina, eyeing me closely. Her gaze seemed directed at my hand, which still held the little Spanish New Testament that I’d been reading before this incident began. I held up the book for her to see, and a look of relief flashed across her face. She pointed at me and the book and then back at herself. It was obvious that she had identified me as a fellow Christian, and that she found comfort in the fact that there were at least two believers on that bus in the middle of a crisis, as did I.
To me, one of the strongest evidences for the truth of the gospel is the growth of the global church and how God continues calling people to himself from every corner of the earth.
Not about culture or ideology Nearly a third of the world’s almost 8 billion population are Christians. Christianity is the world’s largest religious group, with the fastest growth occurring in the so-called Majority World. Critics sometimes scoff at this growth as a mere cultural or ideological phenomenon driven by ignorance or selfish motives. For instance, it is said that people adopt Christianity thinking it will improve their lifestyle, or that they are drawn to Christianity as a “Western religion,” as if becoming a Christian were like switching allegiance to a different sports team.
I vividly remember the deep sense of connection that we felt during that moment, even without speaking a word: two people who could not be more different—a young American journalist and a middle-aged Salvadoran farm woman—and yet bound together as members of the Body of Christ.
And yet, if it were something so superficial, would those Egyptian Christians have refused to renounce their faith and knelt to be killed by ISIS on a Libyan beach, praising Jesus with their dying words? The critics do not realize there is something deeper, something transformational, going on with the worldwide spread of the gospel.
You might say that we were different, but the same kind of different.
New spiritual “hard drive”
If you have met Christians from a completely different culture than your own, then I suspect you have had a similar experience of the spiritual bond between you. I never cease to be amazed by how God unites men, women and children of every nation and culture under the same Lordship of Christ.
12
Christianity is not about ideology, head knowledge or religious practice. It is about men, women and children being radically transformed from the inside out. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation,” Scripture says, “The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (1 Cor 5:17)
