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.

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.

You might say that we were different, but the same kind of different.

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.

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.

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.

New spiritual “hard drive”

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)

Christians who may be outwardly different in language, dress, culture, background and other ways are exactly alike in the way that matters most. Each has a personal relationship with Christ and his indwelling Holy Spirit.

“For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit,” says 1 Corinthians 12:13.

No wonder we sense a powerful connection with believers in Christ throughout the world; we have the same Holy Spirit, the same new spiritual hard drive, as it were. We are united as one flock under one Shepherd, and we hear his voice (John 10:16).

What a beautiful diversity in the global body of Christ, each part enriching the other. And God is calling us to help expand his family, sharing the good news and making disciples of all nations.

On the road again

I’m glad to say the crisis on the Pan American Highway ended happily. The soldiers did get the situation under control as the officer promised. They removed the burning truck and reopened traffic. And our bus safely reached its destination.

I did not see the Salvadoran woman again, but our brief encounter gave a hint of the global family we will have in heaven: “After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands (Rev. 7:9, ESV).