Let me give you a scenario that comes from India. Actually for a thousand years there have been different ways that people of India deal with the issue of sickness and all of it depends on how they view each individual in a particular sickness. Who they may go to depends on how they view that sickness. If it was a life-threatening sickness, something that would absolutely put someone on death’s door, it might be that the first person that they went to was a sadhu or a saint, one of these holy men of the village who would pray for special insight from the Hindu gods for healing. I use the term God very generally here. These people often don’t ask very many questions about the sickness itself because God knows everything and really does not need to be told what this person is suffering from. So these people in the traditional sense normally wouldn’t charge a fee because they are spiritual men and this is something that comes with a spiritual remedy of prayer and intercession. However it would be expected that you would make a generous offering to this religious person in exchange for their duties, but there wasn’t necessarily a set fee. They basically guaranteed that if they prayed and you had not lied to them or misinformed them of what was going on and you weren’t at odds with the gods that you would be delivered and you would recover.
A second way that you might deal with a sickness of some sort is that if these people perceived in their minds that their sickness, whether it be malaria, chickenpox, smallpox or whatever it is, has some sort of spiritual or supernatural component to it, some evil cause or demon that is afflicting them. Then they may go to the local village magician and the magician by sorcery would determine whether or not a curse had been placed on this person that was causing them to experience sickness. Again, a magician doesn’t need a lot of input because they are operating on a supernatural knowledge of what is going on inside of this other person, these curses or evil or black magic that the person was experiencing. Again, they usually didn’t charge much of a fee.
The third person you might go to would be a doctor. Now a doctor in the village context was somebody who was known and understood to have some sort of scientific understanding of the body, medications and how they work with one another. Usually the doctors don’t need a lot of input. They don’t need to ask a lot of questions because of their powers of diagnosis and just being able to see and understand the problem and what’s going on inside the human body. They would offer medications. Now these doctors usually charge a very high fee because this scientific knowledge is powerful and hard to come by, but they would offer medications making a guarantee that you would recover, such that they wouldn’t charge a fee for the medication. You only pay for the medication if they have made the proper diagnosis and the recovery takes place. So there’s a fee for seeing the doctor, but there’s not much fee for medication.
The last place that someone might go for a diagnosis of some sort of healing from a sickness would be these village quacks. I don’t mean to infer that people who believe in folk remedies and holistic medicinal things aren’t in any way quacks, but in these specific cases, the people believe that they are generally quacks, that they have some sort of knowledge of sickness and could concoct some sort of potion, whether or not they really had any power of really understanding how herbs and things work together. These guys make no guarantees. You take the medicine, you pay a low fee for it, for a not very high degree of success. But it is the cheap way for people to get their sicknesses dealt with.
What happens in a remote Indian village when some missionary comes in and begins to preach the Gospel and there are converts to the Christian religion, where do they go when they get sick? Well, for the most part, these missionaries, evangelists, preachers and pastors advise people to stop going to the local saints, sadhus, witch doctor, or holy man, and to trust Christ to be the healing power for them spiritually and supernaturally rather than Krishna or Shiva. These spiritual diseases could be dispelled through prayer to Jesus, and they turn to Western medicines for their scientific value. Incidentally I failed to mention that when these missionaries first started coming to the local villages, the Western doctors who brought Western medicine actually were most identified with the quacks because they charged a very low fee and they did not make any guarantees that anybody was going to recover. They would say, try this medication. So in the local Indian mind they really equated the Western missionary doctor with one of the local village quacks.
But what was the Christian answer to sorcery, curses, black magic, and generational hexes?
How could the new Christians reconcile these things that they believed were happening to them because of some evil that had been spoken or pronounced over them? How could the Christians deal with that? And really neither the missionary evangelist nor the doctor offered a satisfactory answer to this whole idea of sorcery and ancestors that would get angry and produce some sort of plague on your grass, body, or crops, whatever it is, they didn’t have a satisfactory answer. They basically said: “Hey, black magic doesn’t exist. So just ignore it and pray to God and He’ll help you.” But this was a wholly inadequate answer coming from the Christians for the local Indian mindset, because in their mind these experiences were very real. These were things that they dealt with on a day-to-day basis and to be told that they don’t exist, left these Indian Christians and villagers going to magicians in the long run to keep dealing with their spiritual, generational cursing, evil intent type of maladies. For that reason, Christians actually promoted a worldview that insisted in some ways on Indians holding a dualistic worldview of Christianity for most things, but witchcraft and sorcery as the answer to other things. It’s really quite unfortunate.
We see the world in our platonic plurality as there is a finite world around us that we can touch and empirically sense and experience and then there is an afterworld which is very distant from here. It is a place that we will go to after we are dead. We don’t really have much to do with the afterworld. Most of what happens in our life here in the West seems to take place in the empirical world. Even 300 years ago when people understood disease differently and they would look for spiritual answers because they didn’t understand what’s going on inside of their body, as science developed we became more and more attached to this empirical idea of two worlds–one on this plane and one in the afterlife. And the flaw of this kind of thinking is that the Bible is very clear that there is a middle realm of angels, demons and things that cannot be seen, but are very much in this world and not in some distant afterlife world that we have nothing to do with at this point. Most of the world’s religions operate inside this middle realm of praying to ancestors or saints, going to see witch doctors and we make a mistake as Christian missionaries when we pretend like these ghosts that people are afraid of don’t exist because we can empirically sense, touch and experience them. We leave them without options to be able to understand that middle realm which actually the Bible talks a lot about.
Ephesians would not ask us to put on the armor of God if there were not an unseen battle raging around us. We understand that there are angels and demons. We can’t run the risk of just assigning these ghosts and these ancestors that they are thinking of inside their minds and some of these other cultures to just assigning them to mythology, the stuff of fairies and trolls and stuff that doesn’t exist. We need to understand their worldview in the biblical context of understanding that there are forces, rulers and principalities in this world that we cannot see empirically with our eyes, that we can’t touch and that we cannot measure. In fact, I was reading in the book of Ephesians just this week. One of the passages that came to my attention was this idea that Paul had been entrusted with the grace of ministering the mysterious working of the Gospel out into the world of the Gentiles. That was a specific calling for him to preach to the Gentiles of the unsearchable riches of Christ. Ephesians chapter three now says “to bring to light for everyone, what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things. So that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in heavenly places.” Paul is obviously referring to angelic beings, angelic host to a world of beings that exist in this world that we cannot see or necessarily manipulate with our hands. He is saying that in order for angels to see us and to be able to properly glorify God, they long to look into the things that we are able to experience. They look with jealousy into the human experience of how the church can bring glory to God in ways that they cannot. And so this is our experience as a church that makes the manifold wisdom of God known to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places. It’s a beautiful thought that we are ministering, if you will, to these angelic beings.
Going back to my illustration of how is it that Christians can deal with these worldviews, we need to take on an understanding of the culture in each and every place that we go. We need to be able to study and drill down. That’s why missionaries don’t typically come in and preach the Gospel and leave seeing a great response to the Gospel. No, they stay. They live with the people. They learn the people’s language. They learn every day’s ins and outs of how people see the world so that they can apply the Gospel within the context of our biblical understanding of everything that they are experiencing and bring the Gospel to their experience in a way that liberates, frees and brings joy and lasting peace to those people who have lived in bondage for so long. This again is the Ministry of PassionLife to preach freedom to the captives, to preach a recovery of sight to the blind, the lame will walk, the imprisoned will go free. That is the ministry of Christ and it is the ministry of PassionLife as people walk in the bondage of having been guilty of the shedding of innocent blood through the sin of abortion. This is something that we are learning to contextualize. We ask that you will pray for us as you continue to send us around the world as pro-life missionaries.