Discipleship in Jesus Movement Missions Subculture in Sociological Reflection

Anthropology of religion investigates the diversity, commonalities, and relationships among religions (Eller, 2007, p. 2). As such, anthropology is a science concerned with explaining religion as a social or physical phenomenon (Eller, 2008, p. 11). Although anthropology presumes a human source to religious phenomena, a Christian can agree that religion is social because it is an aspect of society (Eller, 2008, p. 9).

Charles Kraft (1999) describes Jesus’ approach as honoring a people’s culture and worldview as opposed to wresting it from them (p. 386). It appears that no culture or worldview is “perfectly adequate either to the realities of biology and environment or to the answering of all of the questions of a people” (Kraft, 1999, p. 387). This article intends to briefly explore my experience of Christian discipleship using a social science perspective. This brief emic ethnography applies Delmos Jones’ advocacy for cultural insiders studying their own communities (Zunner-Keating, 2020, p. 44). I see this study of discipleship from an anthropological approach as an opportunity to demonstrate the values and deficiencies of my experience. The anthropological method seeks to define a phenomenon “in terms of something else (…) something other than itself” (Eller, 2008, p. 11). This is not the default perspective most practitioners of a religion use to analyze their own tradition. 

My experience of Christian discipleship has been in the context of Evangelical-Pentecostal cross-cultural missions. I am a third-generation missionary, associated most significantly with Youth With a Mission which my family helped pioneer in the 1960s. Reflecting on my spiritual formation, the central paradoxical paradigms of the worldview I received were multiculturalism and Judeo-Christian monotheism. The church was the global community of those who acknowledge God and call upon His grace. A certain ambiguity existed regarding the salvation of those who never hear the message of Christ’s sacrifice for sin. Although I doubted and strayed from the church in my youth, I eventually came to embrace this gospel and the missionary vocation.

Symbolic Place – Rugged City and Rugged Nature

Geertz (1993) describes religion as “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (p. 90). Symbol here refers to “any object, act, event, quality or relation which serves as a vehicle for a conception” (Geertz, 1993, p. 91). And cultural patterns are “systems of symbols which lie outside the individual organism (…) in that insubjective world of common understandings into which all human individuals are born” (Geertz, 1993, p. 92). 

Anthropologists describe placemaking as a unique type of storytelling that links the physical environment with sacred stories (Zunner-Keating, 2020, p. 139). These stories recall history, build community, and explore ethical questions (Zunner-Keating, 2020, p. 142). In this sense, a particular Los Angeles neighborhood was formative to my cultural values and later, my Christian faith. When I tell people that I am a missionary kid, they usually imagine that I was raised in a Majority World context. However, as a New Zealander, my father was called to urban missions in Los Angeles. My father loved the city, which he saw as having a unique personality and for which a great spiritual battle was waged between good and evil. The city was not an impassable monolithic reality but a vast body of communities where God’s people could build His kingdom for the common good. 

My brothers and I were raised in a neighborhood that was predominantly African American and later Hispanic. This bears on discipleship because the example of Christian witness I saw in my father was one of deep engagement in the local community where our family was a cultural outsider. From childhood, I experienced the categorization of people in their social environments into what is known as ingroups and outgroups (Schmid, 2018, p. 1797-84; Stephan & Stephan, 2015, p. 429-35). My family and the community of the missions training base across the street represented ingroup members, characteristically providing security and a sense of belonging (Ting-Toomey and Chung, 2012, p. 203). The music and language of the larger community represented outgroup members, towards whom I felt the typical emotional and psychological detachment (Ting-Toomey and Chung, 2012, p. 306). 

Another example of placemaking involved my father taking my brothers and I to engage in adventurous activities in the ocean and mountains. In particular, the beaches of California, Hawaii, and New Zealand as well as the mountains of Yosemite where my grandparents had a vacation home. Being a Kiwi raised near a private patch of rainforest and coast, my father taught us that an urbanite unfamiliar with the wonders of nature lacked an essential aspect of their humanity. One way of getting back to what it meant to be human was to engage in vigorous individual sport/play such as surfing, fishing, hiking, rock-climbing. I use the word sport tentatively because competition was something very foreign to the values my father instilled in us. We never played any sports involving balls or teams, and we didn’t even play board games at home. Play in nature was esteemed as far superior to the vain pageantry and violence central to urban culture. 

The Myth of Gospel of External Diversity and Internal Purity

At the heart of the Christian religion lies “a sacred story that reflects and reinforces a community’s worldview” (Zunner-Keating, 2020, p. 139), known in the social sciences as myth. From an anthropological perspective, human lives are not determined by a single author, there is no inherent plot structure, but a myriad of stories that have been constructed by human minds (Zunner-Keating, 2020, p. 140). Nevertheless, human beings tend to imagine their life story as if  following such an arranged thread or scheme (Zunner-Keating, 2020, p. 140). The concept of myth challenges a Christian’s faith in the foundational presuppositions of their religion. However, my father always instilled in me an appreciation for the apophatic nature of Christian theology. That is, an essential part of my discipleship was learning to accept that no humanly articulated concepts can adequately describe a God who transcends all our descriptions. 

My father instilled in me that the greatest present danger in our world was actually false Christian religion. What could be more damaging than a distortion of the universal means for human restoration? Part of my discipleship was learning that Evangelical-Pentecostal Christianity deserved the postcolonial criticism I learned in the Los Angeles public schools system. Thus, my discipleship agreed with anthropologists that “the historical erasure of the experiences of less powerful groups serves the function of shaping our global culture and global mentality in favor of the most powerful” (Trouillot, 1995, p. 6 [ZK p. 148]). As a member of the North American Evangelical-Pentecostal church, I represented themajority religious power structure of the nation. 

Our missions training community emphasized cultural sensitivity and evangelistic humility while maintaining conservative Christian views. In YWAM, attempts to engage a pluralistic world did not mean a denial of the reality of sin. From a missiological perspective, impurity and defilement have been described as when “something is out of place, an order or system has been violated”, or when “contamination has occurred resulting in certain alienating consequences” (Morrison, 2018, p. 117). Sin was indicted as the root cause of pollution or uncleanness, with Jesus emphasizing the inner life as the primary generating locus. Therefore, cleansing comes through receiving forgiveness of sin in one’s heart from a pure Savior who was willing to be “identified as unclean in order that he might bring cleansing” (Morrison, 2018, p. 121). My discipleship experience was consistent with this missiological conception. 

The Ritual of Cross-cultural Kingdom Service

Anthropologists describe ritual as “a prescribed set of actions that employ symbols to reenact the deepest beliefs, feelings, and values of a people” (Kimball, 2008, p. 48; Hiebert, 2008, p. 98). Research indicates a three-stage ritual structure consisting of separation, transition, and reincorporation (Moon, 2017, p. 92) which I experienced on missions trips with my father.  These trips involved separation akin to what Turner (1995) describes as “anti-structure”: a distinct departure from the routines and structure of daily life (p. 106-7). Experiencing my father’s missions work and seeing him operate in influence and honor had a profound impact on me. The transition stage involved Turner’s concept of liminality– derived from the Latin limen meaning threshold – which describes the feeling of being in between (Turner, 1995, p. 106-7). Reincorporation occurred when I would return to my daily routine in Los Angeles. In many rituals, reincorporation is celebrated in a group setting with a meal or party. This powerfully bonds the newly initiated individual to the community and its religion (Moon, 2017, p. 95). These trips with my father lacked this bonding aspect of reincorporation. It was a jarring and disorienting experience to return to my daily context without any community recognition of the rite of passage I had experienced. I had come to a much deeper appreciation of  the values of our missionary community, but this easily washed away because there was little symbolic reference point. I do remember, however, when on a trip with my father to Switzerland he gave me a beautiful pocket knife. I’m sad to say I lost or gave it away at some point without understanding its significance. 

Religious Specialists and Religious Organization

Anthropologists refer to a religious specialist as “one who devotes himself to a particular branch of religion or, viewed organizationally of a religious system” (Vallier, 2023, p. 1). The status of these experts is culturally defined in relation to whether the “transhuman controlling power” is “personal or impersonal” (Vallier, 2023, p. 1). In the case of North American Evangelical Christianity, the otherworldly power is regarded as personal, i.e. God. In this case, Anthropologists use the cultural phenomena as religion rather than magic (Vallier, 2023, p. 1). 

The most significant religious specialists in my discipleship context were missionaries. These men and women influenced my perspective of mainstream Evangelical-Pentecostal institutions. A distinction has generally been made by anthropologists between “two polarities of religious specialization” (Vallier, 2003, p. 1). Weber contrasted priests and prophets associating the former with the maintenance of permanent and ordered structures that relate to the gods (Vallier, 2003, p. 1). In contrast, the prophet is described as a charismatic individual who disrupts the liturgical project which the priest oversees (Vallier, 2003, p. 2). The missionaries who I looked up to as heroes were reformers and revivers of the institutional church. Their example instilled in me a bias towards leaders who were charismatic outsiders rather than bureaucratic administrators or slick salesmen. It seemed obvious to me that the latter two types were predominant in the Evangelical-Pentecostal church of North America. According to the prophetic motif, the missionary leaders I knew employed the toolkit of religious specialists in traditional religions. Like shamans, healers, and diviners the missionaries exercised the full range of New Testament spiritual gifts such as healing, predictive prophecy, and miracles (Hiebert, 1999, p. 324-6). 

The nature of the missions agency I was raised in is like new religious movements, described by anthropologists as arising from marginal groups that denounce inconsistencies and limitations of old religious forms. Although eventually these NRMs gain society’s acceptance and form their own institutions (Hiebert, 1999, p. 333). The initial vision of YWAM was waves of young people inundating the nations with the gospel. The founders of YWAM challenged what they considered an overly slow, formal, and academic process of becoming an Evangelical-Pentecostal missionary within the denominations. YWAM developed a model of doing and learning in short-term cycles. Growing up around this paradigm of ministry instilled in me a deep value of the missional praxis of the mobile church. In that context it was articulated – at times with diplomatic sensitivity and others somewhat arrogantly – that the local church was overly occupied with maintaining its existing demographic and liturgy. I don’t mean to imply that this false dichotomy describes YWAM in general, but it was an attitude I perceived at times.

According to researchers of NRMs, revitalization movements such as YWAM tend towards a “new steady state” (Eller, 2007, p. 175), which will eventually cede to another cycle of disruption, innovation, and diffusion. I joined the mission in 1993 where my process of discipleship continued in the form of training for full-time cross-cultural ministry. Having completed 30 years in YWAM in 2023, hopefully I can make some constructive observations regarding the discipleship I received in this movement. 

One of the liabilities I see in YWAM is that its financial model was developed during the revival and apocalyptic excitement of the Jesus Movement in 1970s North America. I don’t doubt that God lead the founders of YWAM to develop a faith-based structure where each missionary is a self-employed entrepreneur responsible for raising their own support. I see the fruit of this model as self-evident, with over 20,000 missionaries currently serving globally. But I do wonder whether more flexibility and innovation are needed today’s missionaries. Bi-vocational and self-sustaining models for missionaries are controversial and have had mixed results in many organizations. But the same impetus that birthed YWAM – facilitating the sending of missionaries – is manifest in new ways such as the difficulty to raise funds exclusively from local churches and denominations. I have personally heard many missionaries from YWAM and other organizations express the opinion that the financial support models of pioneer generations need some adjustments. In my formative years as a missionary, most of the leaders I sought to emulate were family men who travelled 1/3^rd of the year or more. This was necessary to raise funds and recruit for the ministry as well as for their personal support. As a Gen-Xer, my view is that the minority of us who have survived the long-haul of missionary service have had to embrace a much more egalitarian partnership with our wives. And many of us have developed out-of-the-box ways to supplement the traditional sources of missionary support. 

Research shows several aspects of NRMs that attract new adherents such as the novel environment, smells, colors, foods, lifestyle, and most of all the camaraderie (Healy, 2011, p. 9). 

Studies show that these experiences help secure participants’ membership in NRMs even when they have serious doubts (Healy, 2011, p. 11). I believe that as a type of NRM missionary organizations can be dangerous because of their potentially coercive quality. As a movement such as YWAM grows, its validity is reinforced and participants are dissuaded from leaving or questioning because of the personal investment they have made (Healy, 2011, p. 12). For this reason, someone discipled in a context like YWAM needs to be firmly exhorted to seek their own guidance from the Lord rather than entrusting their future to an organization. After all, a missions organization exists primarily to send people out not to care for their personal security and well-being. 

Magic and Witchcraft in Evangelical-Pentecostal Reflection

As repeatedly mentioned so far, the phenomena related to my discipleship experience happened within an Evangelical-Pentecostal context. Christian and secular Westerners alike often express contempt for Majority World communities that attribute this-worldly events to supernatural forces. This attitude ignores that witchcraft and magic are not a negation of natural causes but an attempt to understand why they happen to certain individuals (Keener-Zeating, 2020, p. 91). Anthropologists study how folk religions use magic and sorcery to deal with situations such as deviant behavior, adversity, and injustice (McPherson, 2008, p. 272-8). Research also demonstrates how phenomena such as spiritual possession are used by marginalized groups to subvert oppressive power structures (Ong, 1988, p. 32). 

My missionary mentors taught me to respect the reality of the needs and forces involved in magic and witchcraft in folk religions as well as major religions that also address mid-level issues. The Pentecostal/Charismatic tradition has many faults, but one of its strengths is its rejection of a Western two-tiered view of reality that deals with the empirical world in naturalistic terms and with ultimate questions in theistic terms (Hiebert, 1982, p. 43). My experience of Christianity was one where the mid-level issues of supernatural but this-worldly beings and forces was an integral part of a biblical worldview (Hiebert, 1982, p. 43). But how my Evangelical-Pentecostal mentors modeled proper engagement with this-worldly supernatural phenomena had many flaws and inconsistencies. 

My mentors did not neglect critical analysis of pagan magic and sorcery. This critical approach is akin to research by missiologists on the use of divination such as Alan Howell. Howell’s research (2012) argues that divination is unable to solve the problems of a community when it is central to their system of responding to illness (p. 132). Howell’s (2012) work points out the deficiency of a split-level Christianity that speaks to abstract theological questions but ignores mid-level questions regarding illness, demonization, and other adversities (p. 133). 

A legitimate split exists in the mind of most Christians in my tradition between two sources of power in the cosmos – that of God and of the Devil. Anthropologists point out that this same dichotomy led to the witch hunts of early modern Europe (1450-1700). Zeener-Keating (2020) attributes such phenomena to “mobility theory” by which community leaders look for solutions because they are “stuck in a bad situation, such as a famine” (p, 92). Anthropologists have also identified the use of the “witchcraft accusation” as a “cultural tool that is used to punish individual who do not conform to society’s expectations” (Zeener-Keating, 2020, p. 89). Heibert (1999) describes a similar phenomenon in Folk religions where interpersonal conflicts boil over into accusations of witchcraft after extended periods of non-resolution (p. 151).

 Conclusion

This research has helped me see the liabilities and benefits of the means of discipleship I experienced as a son of missionaries. I hope that the fact that I embraced the missionary vocation is indicative of the inspiring nature of the environment I was brought up in. It was in this context of missionary training that I came to understand the gospel from first principles until this day. I have participated in many other contexts of Christian formation through ecumenical crossing denominational and national borders over the past 30 years. I come to see the inconsistencies of my own spiritual formation as I admire the riches of wisdom in other faith traditions. But I end this emic native anthropological study of a particular experience of Evangelical-Pentecostal missions with a feeling of gratitude. I believe God’s providence placed me in a rich context for flourishing of the soul if one simply cultivates a tender and teachable heart. 

References

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Healy, John Paul (2011). Involvement in a New Religious Movement: From Discovery to Disenchantment, Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, 13:1, 2-21, DOI: 10.1080/19349637.2011.547125

Hiebert, Paul G. (1982). The Flaw of the Excluded Middle. Missiology: An International Review, Vol.X,No.1, January,1982

Hiebert et al. (1999). Understanding folk religion: a Christian response to popular beliefs and practices. Baker Books. 

Hiebert, Paul G. (2008). Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.

Howell, A. (2012). Turning it Beautiful: Divination, Discernment and a Theology of Suffering. International Journal of Frontier Missiology, 29 (3), 129-137. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.harding.edu/bible-facpub/3

Kimball, Charles. 2008. Comparative Religion: Course Guidebook. Great Courses. Chantilly, VA: Teaching Company.

Kraft, Charles H. (1999). Culture, Worldview and Contextualization.

Moon, W. J., & Moreau, A. (2017). Intercultural Discipleship (Encountering Mission): Learning from Global Approaches to Spiritual Formation. Baker Academic; Biola Library ebooks. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=cat08936a&AN=bio.on1016999087&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=s6133893

Ong, A. (1988). The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia. American Ethnologist, 15(1), 28–42.

Schmid, K. (2018) ‘Social identity theory’, in Y.Y. Kim (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication, Volume 3, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Stephan, W.G. and Stephan, C.W. (2015) ‘Ingroup/outgroup’, in J.M. Bennett (ed.) The Sage Encyclopedia of Intercultural Competence, Volume 1, Los Angeles: Sage

Ting-Toomey, S. and Chung, L.C. (2012) Understanding Intercultural Communication, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press [from Zunner-Keating C7, p. 17]

Turner, Victor (1995). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. New York: Aldine De Gruyter. [Moon, 92]. 

Valier, Ivan A. (2023). Religious Specialists | Encyclopedia.com. (n.d.). Retrieved February 9, 2024, from https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/religious-specialists

Zunner-Keating, et al. (2020). Beliefs: An Open Invitation to the Anthropology of Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion. PB Pressboks.

Morrison, James E. (2018). Sharing the Gospel with Tibetan Buddhists. In. A. Yeh, Alen & T. Tienou (Eds.), Majority World Theologies (pp. 117-130). Evangelical Missiological Society Book 26.