Nation building

I was recently reading The Rabbit and the Elephant: Why Small Is the New Big for Today's Church by Tony and Felicity Dale and George Barna, and one chapter prompted a thought.

The book was discussing the wording of the Great Commission (commonly mistranslated as I've posted before) and talking of how it says "teach the nations". The Greek underlying "nations" is where we actually get the word "ethnic" from. In saying teach the nations, it is actually teach each ethnic group, or each culture. As noted in the book, the number of individual cultures in the world is multiplying. Alan Hirsch has observed that for much of recent history, the number of cultures in the world had been actually dropping (culture defined by tradition, lingo, group-speak, etc), from more than 20,000 world wide in the early part of the 20th century to about 12,000 around 1990. This was due to mass communication and a consolidation of entertainment in the form of TV and movies.

The trend though reversed in the late 20th century, with an explosion of emerging cultures. The economics of culturalization became cheaper, particularly with the internet. Digital technologies have made producing and distributing TV shows cheaper, to the point of an explosion of choices. Getting ideas out there no longer requiring publishing on paper. Thus cultures have fractured. The number of nations has exploded.

What has the church done? I look at most churches, and from the viewpoint of nation building, the church has tried to do what amounts to building another nation. The Great Commission says wherever you go, teach the nations. The interpretation of it by Christianity seems to be "build a nation and add the others". The Great Commission is not about building a nation, but rather about seeding the nations that exist. The communities that exist are to be "converted", not stolen from to build our community. We need to think in terms of creating church within the communities, not building our community by robbing the others. Most churches are about building their nation, not discipling. In a world of multiculturism, the churches try to sap life out of the world by attempting to create large monocultures.