Carolyn Givens, a fellow Cairn alum, concludes her reflection on time spent in Asia as a young expat in very different faith communities.
I was baptized at age ten in a church my parents helped start in Manila, Philippines. My father, an ordained minister and a missionary, dunked me under the water in a tank on stage in a church that eleven years earlier had been a Bible Study in my parents’ living room.
We were living in Hong Kong that year, and I did my baptismal class via correspondence. My mom helped me work through the Bible passages and theological documents they gave me to read and assisted me in writing essay responses, clarifying my beliefs about salvation and baptism. She said she’d never seen a baptismal class like it—and I still return to things I learned in those weeks of preparation when I’m talking about soteriology and baptism.
The folks in that church in Manila called themselves “Bible Christians”—it was a way for them to explain to the country’s Roman Catholic majority how they were different: they defined themselves according to the Scriptures many of their countrymen had never read. That term could be applied to the people in most of the church-plants we visited that year.
My parents were on a short-term assignment that year from their mission organization. They were spending a year in Hong Kong, both doing research on Mainland China—which was then only just opening to Westerners—and gathering media about the ministries going on around the rest of Asia. We visited church plants in the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan that year, and I saw new believers gathering together for the first time, putting into practice the New Testament picture of the church. They were Bible Christians.
In every place the traditions were different. The music sounded different, the words were in different languages. Some met in living rooms, some met in rented space, some met in church buildings. There were churches that crossed cultures, and churches that were specifically targeted to a particular people group.
And my little understanding of “church,” shaped by the 1980s in the affluent suburbs of the North Central United States, shaped by the straight pews and well-worn hymnals of my childhood was amended, and stretched, and developed, and corrected, and grown. I discovered that year that the Church is a living, breathing organism. I discovered that year that there is more than one way of doing it—and that the New Testament doesn’t give a lot of guidance on the details. I discovered the beauty of tradition and the lovely sound of a “new song.” And I learned that while there are helpful things about denominations and church traditions, no matter which one we fall into, we should seek to be Bible Christians.
The craziest part of it all, though, is this: over the past quarter-century, the American evangelicalism that formed me has slowly learned many of the things I did in that year. God just gave me a head start.