2020-06-18 Coffee with Chris - Culture & Christianity Part 1 What is normal

The speaker discusses the importance of understanding different cultures and languages. They highlight the challenges of translation and how it can lead to a loss of meaning and cultural understanding. They also emphasize the value of learning a second language and the mental benefits it provides. The speaker urges listeners to be open-minded and not assume their culture is superior. They give an example of how different cultures have different perspectives on what is considered normal. They stress the need to listen, understand, and love our neighbors, as well as the importance of humility and learning about other cultures. They conclude by mentioning how the Western church is being challenged to reconsider its ways and be open to different approaches. Hello there and welcome to Coffee with Chris. I'm starting a series talking about culture and recent items in the news have made me think about this but also made me think about this within the context of the culture that Jesus was in and just the way that we tend to have conversations about culture in general. So I've written some notes today so basically I'm more or less just reading you my notes today and I'll insert thoughts as needed for the flow but let's just get right into it. So Mandarin, unlike English, is a tonal language. As an English speaker I find it difficult to grasp the tones. This illustrates just how different cultures can be. When we don't understand a language in its native form and rely on translations instead, meaning and ideological understanding are often lost. Many languages have phrases or colloquialisms that are not easily translated. Additionally, some concepts are hard to translate because of lack of an equivalent word. For example, English has one word for love regardless of the degree or type of love that is being expressed. In modern colloquial English, love is used to describe positive feelings ranging from favoring a flavor of cheese or hockey team to the passion and dedication you have for your significant other or for your worship of God. All of these words in English are used, we use simply the singular word for love, love. Many languages have multiple words for love. Take ancient Greek for example, which includes agape, unconditional love, eros, romantic love, phileia, love on a friendship level, and, pardon me, I'm probably gonna pronounce this wrong, phileutia, self-love, and that's just a few of them. From this, we can see how easy it would be to misunderstand what is being said about something as crucial as love when translating from other languages to English. It's more than just how to translate, but it's about a lack of cultural understanding. The fact the Greeks had multiple words for love where we have one could show how little we value love compared to those who wrote the works in Greek, such as the New Testament writers. Some don't push past the difficult early stages of learning a new language before giving up, but for those who persevere, there is a great reward. Studies have shown there are many mental benefits to learning a second language and, quite literally, keeping an open mind. In my next few Coffee with Chris videos, I want to talk about a few different angles of culture in the Bible, but for this video, the thought I want to leave you with is this. We need to be understanding of one another's cultures and not assume ours is superior. We all have a natural tendency, especially when we are young, to assume the culture we grew up in is the base point for common thought or action, not out of any nefarious intention, but quite simply because it's the only one we know. Put plainly, we think our culture is the normal one. Malaysian comedian Ronny Chieng pointed out in one of his sets roughly two-thirds of the world's population are Asian. Humorously, he went on to state that, and I'm paraphrasing here to keep it family-friendly, I could drive down the street with my feet on the steering wheel dancing to Gangnam Style if I wanted to, and if all of us did it, guess what? That would become the correct way to drive. To take it a step further, imagine if everyone in Asia drove this way. How many of us would still feel we set the tone for normal? Now, this is of course a silly example because there's a black and white correct way to drive in terms of how a machine is designed to be operated, but there's many, many examples where things are just different. They're not right or wrong. They're just different ways of doing things, and we have a tendency to assume that our way of doing things is the right way when there might be some things that are just different. So, of course, this is a silly example, but it should make us think what other things we take for granted as being normal. We can subtly assume our culture does everything the right way. This can make us rigid and unwilling to learn about other cultures or other people. In the news recently, we've seen how cultures and peoples have been mistreated and misunderstood, even cultures so close to home, our own neighbors and friends. This has resulted in racism and hatred in some people. The Bible calls us to love our neighbors, and part of loving them is trying to listen and understand, and we need to have an open mind that our way of thinking or doing things, as we've always done, is not necessarily what is normal. Our views on certain things that we may have held for all our lives may not be the right views, or they might just be different. Let's listen with humility. In my next coffee video, I'll be taking these concepts further to talk about the culture Jesus was born into, but until then, let's listen and learn about the cultures outside of our own. I'm just going to add one quick example that I didn't write down here. Pastor and evangelist and book author Francis Chan has told the story on a number of occasions where he went and visited the underground church in a specific country, and they said, they asked Francis, tell us what church is like over in America. What's the church in America dealing with? What's things like that right now? And this equally applies to Canada as well. He said, well, a lot of people, well, there's lots of different churches, he says, and a lot of people, sometimes people will leave one church and go to another because they don't like the music at one, or someone offended them at another one. And the people that he told us to, the underground church in this country, laughed and laughed, and no matter how hard he tried to convince them, they couldn't, they wouldn't believe, they refused to believe that what he was saying was true. They thought, here we are, fortunate to be alive to be able to make it to our underground church, and these people are complaining about styles of music and that so-and-so offended them. When you're underground church, you're not going to, I'm going to go to the underground church across the street if the music doesn't like, doesn't meet my liking. Or, you know, Sister Becky hurt my feelings, so I'm going to venture on to the other underground church. It doesn't work like that. We have to work together as a body of Christ. And so, this is just showing us that I think of this in the context of what's going on right now as the Western church, I'm sure many churches around the world, but the Western church in a unique way is having to be had a bit of a shake-up for perhaps the first time in most of our lifetimes that we've actually had to get a wake-up call on we've been stuck in our way of doing things for a long time and been afraid to do things differently because this is the normal way, but maybe it's not the normal way. Maybe there's lots of different ways that people have been doing church for centuries around the globe. Maybe there's lots of different ways we've been doing many things, so let's not just get stuck in our way of doing things. And again, back to my point for this video to wrap it all up, let's listen and learn about other cultures and other people around us humbly before assuming that the way we do it is the normal way. God bless.