Episode 3: Mixed Blessings

About this episode

Culture isnʼt a museum piece—it moves, mixes, and mutates. In this episode, Imer steps into the everyday texture of culture (and its fragility) with Bushman #1, then widens the lens with voices like Brian Stanley, Harvey Kwiyani, Neil Shenvi, and Mark Charles. From music and language to clothing and worship, the question keeps returning: when the gospel crosses borders, what gets honored, what gets lost, and whatʼs created in the aftermath?

People featured in this episode

Imer Santiag o — Host. Puerto Rican–American trumpeter, jazz musician, and worship leader based in St. Cloud, Florida. Puerto Rican–American trumpeter, jazz musician, and worship leader based in St. Cloud, Florida.

Ted Esler — President/CEO of Missio Nexus (since 2015 . Former church planter in Sarajevo, Bosnia; previously held leadership roles with Pioneers.

Author of The Innovation Crisis; holds a PhD in Intercultural Studies Fuller Theological Seminary).

Brian Stanley — Historian of world Christianity and Christian missions. Professor at the University of Edinburgh; has written and edited multiple books on missions history.

Timothy “Bushman #1” Adebule — Owner of Three Masks, Inc. African goods shop near downtown Orlando) and a local cultural guide/educator featured in this episode.

Harvey Kwiy ani — Malawian theologian and missiologist known for work on decolonizing mission and global/diaspora Christianity. Author of Decolonizing Mission.

Neil Shenvi — Writer and speaker known for apologetics and engagement with questions of faith, philosophy, and culture. Holds a PhD in theoretical chemistry UC Berkeley) and studied at Princeton.

Mark Charles — Speaker, writer, and consultant on the intersections of race, culture, faith, and American history. Co-author of Unsettling Truths (with Soong-Chan Rah) on the legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery.

Music

Fisk University Jubilee Quartet / Swing Low Sweet Chariot / Public domain via archive.org

Out To The World / Theories / courtesy of Epidemic Sound

Philip Ayers / Riverwalk / courtesy of Epidemic Sound

Bokyung Kim / Gu Arirang Instrumental Version) / courtesy of Epidemic Sound

Dex 1200 / Saya Cair / courtesy of Epidemic Sound

Dark Native American Flute Solo / courtesy of Envato Elements

Credits

Host: Imer Santiago
Produced by: Arrival Creative
Presented by: Missio Nexus

Show overview

Polyphonic: Mission After Empire is an 8-episode narrative podcast hosted by

Imer Santiago and produced by Missio Nexus. If youʼve ever wondered whether “mission” and “empire” can be untangled—or if weʼve been pretending itʼs simpler than it is—this show is for you.

Imer brings his experience as a musician and teacher into conversations with historians, missiologists, practitioners, and everyday voices—tracing what we inherited, what we missed, and what we might need to admit before we can move forward. Music isnʼt background here—itʼs the glue, the metaphor, and sometimes the argument.

This isnʼt a definitive answer guide, because we probably wonʼt get all the answers before Heaven. Itʼs a place to start listening—polyphonic in the truest sense: many voices, each with its own melody, heard together.

Host

Imer Santiag o is a Puerto Rican–American trumpeter, jazz musician, and worship leader. Heʼs from Lorain, Ohio, and now lives in St. Cloud, Florida.

He studied Jazz at Ohio State University and earned a Master of Music in Jazz Studies in New Orleans.

He serves as Director of Bands at St. Cloud Middle School and performs and leads worship throughout the year.

Transcription for this episode

Episode 3 transcription

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Episode 3, where we talk about cultural erosion. I do love the AfricanAmerican spiritual tradition, as I was saying earlier, because I think that is incredibly powerful. I don’t know if you know about rugby football in Britain, which is sort of our version of American football without the padding, but the England rugby team, whenever they’re doing well, the crowd sing

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an African-American spiritual.

By an interesting route. It’s come into British popular culture, largely, I think, through a group called the Jubilee Singers who came out of Fisk University in Tennessee in the 1870s and who popularized African-American spirituals, brought them to Britain. They don’t understand what they’re singing. The Swing Low Sweet Chariot is actually about being prepared to cross the river into glory.

So it’s a bit ironic that when the team is doing well, they’re singing that rather than when they’re about to be obliterated by the opposition.

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Who would have thought that an African spiritual from over a hundred years ago would be integrated into modern day British popular sports culture. What a fun mashup. But that’s the world we live in. A blender of unknown historical moments. In this world of blurring lines, how do we honor cultures while living among people who are different from us?

Hello, hello, sir. Hello, hello. How are you? Bushman #1. Yes, yes. Good to see you.We are near downtown Orlando. We’re about to walk into Three

Masks, Inc. It’s an amazing store. Their slogan is sharing Africa from within.

And it’s owned by my friend Tim “Bushman #1.” And I’m excited because I’ve been coming here for over a year um buying different articles, whether it’s clothing or accessories. um

Shea butter, it’s good lotion for the hands. And just for the hang, honestly, Bushman #1 is a beautiful spirit, beautiful individual, and he’s super welcoming, and he’s been welcoming to me and to my family. Even though I’ve known him for just over a year, it feels like I’ve known him for like 20. He’s that type of guy. I’m not sure exactly which, part of the country, but he’s Nigerian and super knowledgeable. mean, anytime I buy something from him, I’m asking him, like, what’s the origin? What does it mean? Where is it from?

but everything in the store is from Africa. Growing up in Nigeria, everybody believes they’re from the city. So if you do anything crazy, they’ll say, what are you, a Bushman? So I said, you know, I’d rather abuse myself first before anybody else abused me. I’m Bushman #1. That’s good, yes, yes. Early last year, maybe you remember too, I was looking to get a dashiki.

Yes. I didn’t know the term buba yet. And I made a, I should know better.

but I purchased something on Amazon. And it came in and I was like, this feels inauthentic. So that’s when I looked up 3 Masks and I said, okay, but Google said, or my Maps app said it was closed. It was a Saturday afternoon, like 5.30 or something, and it said closed. I drove all the way out here from St. Cloud. So then I said, well, I’m gonna call the number just in case.

And Bush number one answered, said, hello, three mass. And I said, Hey, are you guys open? He said, yeah, we’re still open, but it says close. Come on by. And that day I was with my daughter, two daughters, but say love the older one. And I mean, immediately upon entering the store, the space, even though he had never met me, it was a hug. was just very warm, loving, same thing with my daughter. And I felt at home. It started with me seeking that article of clothing. And he immediately was not, you know,

sharing with me, it’s called a buba and explaining. And so I appreciate that it’s gone from that to jewelry to just learning more about different African cultures. Culture constantly comes up in the discussion about missions. It seems like it’s inescapably linked. And since Bushman’s shop is called Three Masks, we quickly got into that topic. He shared with us the importance of the mask carver as an educator of culture within that society and the mask itself.

item used for worship. uh Way back in the past, going to school is like taking their children to a master cover. A master cover is wealthy. A master cover is the right-hand person to the chiefs or the kings because they tell the stories of the masses. All right? So for that reason, you take your children to a master cover to learn. a master cover then tell you, this is our tribe.

And this is how we carve this particular piece in our tribe. Remember now, way back in the past there is a religion that is uh our religion, before the missionaries came, before the Islamic religion came. So most of all of these are all religion of itself, you know, and that’s why you have the ceremony that I’ve done to be able to

uh honor the spirits or honor the land and things like that. So they have their own different religion that they practiced before the popular religions coming. And it’s still there very much, still very much so now. And that’s the reason why I said if you go to most of the African countries right now, even though most of the things that you see in here are carved by them, you’ll at least see them in their homes because they believe that if you have it, you you become more like a pariah. uh

And that, it’s almost an erosion of culture itself because I believe there is a parallel between religion and culture. Culture is what’s been there. You can’t mix it with religion. You can obviously embrace a religion, but it doesn’t mean you have to do without your culture. Your culture is your identity, who you are.

Who you are? How possible is it for a missionary to really integrate into a new culture? This question takes me back to a story Ted told me at Sippendip, related to his time as a missionary in the Balkans. To what extent can you really become another culture? Right. I I worked in a culture that I would say has pretty high insider-outsider uh ideas in it.

I remember meeting somebody that uh they were actually a British, it was a British guy that had lived in the culture for 20, 25 years, had married a person from the culture, spoke the language from my outsider’s perspective fluently. But then as I became more culturally fluent and linguistically fluent, I began to learn that those people didn’t necessarily see this British guy as an insider. And so… uh

You know, I don’t know how well we can ever really incarnate ourselves in another culture. Although, I mean, I think that’s a goal is to be as understanding and respectful of a culture that you’re administered to as possible. But you got to understand there’s limits there. But do these limitations impact the missionaries effectiveness? This made me think back to Harvey. His story is linked to one of the most famous missionaries in Africa who didn’t necessarily see deep.

cultural integration as the most important thing, but still made a significant impact on that community and eventually on Harvey himself. When I was born in Malawi, was the first British mission station in that part of the world.

I would think many of you listeners would know the name David Livingston.

I’ve heard of David Livingston, but I’m not terribly familiar with the details.

An overview of his life on Google says,

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David Livingston was a Scottish missionary, doctor and explorer who spent

30 years in Africa. Though he was initially driven by a desire to spread Christianity, he also worked to improve the living conditions of African people and promote commerce and civilization and his advocacy against the slave trade significantly influenced its eventual abolition in East Africa. Okay, back to Harvey, whose own faith was an outcome of Livingston’s work in Malawi.

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who doesn’t love a good origin story. He brought the university’s mission to Central Africa, to my village in 1861. And what that has meant is that my village has this history that we celebrate until today as the first place to receive the good news in this part of the world. I think because of that, I…

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I had this sense of God calling me to mission from a young age. When I started hearing like God is saying this to me, it did not make sense at all. This is rural Malawi. I did not have my passport until I was in my twenties, but I had this sense from the age of 12. The probability of a young African village boy growing up where I grew up to end up

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being working in Switzerland, coming to the UK to do a Masters, go to the US to a PhD. It can only be God who makes that possible. And it’s because, of course, I know that there’s a calling. Is that calling connected to the history of my village? Most probably. And so, I to some extent, yes, the first missionaries came to Malawi in 1861. But

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In 1861, God knew that sometime, sometime in the future, I’ll take a boy from this place and he will save me somewhere else. It’s God working out God’s plan. I mean, I think fundamentally that the sharing of the gospel

does not necessarily need to lead to…

01 changing a people’s culture.

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that they can become followers of Christ in their own cultures. So there is that. That we, again, we need to find ways to do that better. But if we are sharing the gospel and making people adopt our culture, there’s a deeper problem there that actually we need to think about carefully. There is.

Earlier, we learned about William Carey and his work in India. I wondered if there was another missionary who was focused on maintaining and celebrating the local culture where they were serving. Going back to maybe missionaries who wanted to respect the indigenous cultures and learn and connect really with the individuals they were learning to love and to work with.

Yeah, and James Hudson Taylor came from a Methodist background in the north of England. He went to China uh initially with a body called the Chinese Evangelization Society. uh Later he set up his own mission, the China Inland Mission, which became the largest Protestant mission in China and which really dominated

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Chinese Protestant missions through to the end of the missionary era in

1949. It still exists under a different name, the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, OMF. Now Hudson Taylor was not very keen on the European presence in China because it was associated with um the gunboats that used to sail up the great rivers, um trying to

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enforce opium on the Chinese market uh and he felt that was a very bad thing from the Christian point of view. he wished to separate uh the Christian mission as much as possible from European cultural forms. It’s a long history in China of regarding Westerners as barbarians.

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you know, they turned the European thing on its head rather than seeing uh Asians and Africans as barbarians. The Chinese saw the Westerners, the whites as barbarians. So Hudson Taylor said, we’ve got to minimize our European-ness. So he insisted all of his missionaries adopted Chinese dress and that the men wore a pigtail, knotted their hair in a pigtail like the Chinese. uh

and he went into the interior, whereas most of the missionaries resided in what were called treaty ports along the coast of China, which were enclaves of European influence, where Europeans could trade ah without interference from the Chinese state, imperial state. He said, no, it’s no good. We’ve got to get out into the countryside. So he began to actually win converts.

um in the villages among the peasantry of China. uh And that was the right way to go, I’m sure, but it was very much flew in the face of the missionary orthodoxy of the day. Talking about Hudson Taylor and the way he adopted local dress made me think of modern day issues like the discussion about cultural appropriation. When I first met Bushman, I was looking for a dashiki.

Was it acceptable for me to wear this even though I wasn’t from that culture? Last time I was there, I asked him this question. You know, it’s like going against the grain. You don’t have to just wear what is here. You uh take, for example, you’re Indian now and I was able to enlighten you on what the African culture is about. And you say, you know what, I love it so much. I want to be able to just wear it to display it. You don’t have to answer to anybody. know what I mean? Just wear with pride and enjoy yourself.

Just like Guy might do, I mean, almost all the time. mean, even though padhove is roots, it’s got the African feel to it. But still, who will question him why he wears what he wears? I mean, I don’t come in and question you, or you, you wear it. You know what I mean? So I think it’s a beautiful thing. And I tell you, I do it with a gracious stride everywhere I go.

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I mean, people sometimes says they want to be seen. If you want to be seen, something different. uh People will see you. So the muddy merrier. Bushman’s approach was to have a gracious stride wherever he went.

Certainly that would mean understanding that Ashikis would be worn incorrectly, proper styling wouldn’t always be adhered to, and some form of amalgamation with other cultures would occur.

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Maybe there’s something important about genuine appreciation rather than costuming. I wondered if people critiqued Hudson Taylor’s attempts at cultural adoption. Amalgamation is inevitable to an extent. When the criticism one might make of Hudson Taylor is that it was, was inculturation on the outside. You change your dress, um you change your hairstyle, but

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He was very resistant to finding ways of…

interacting with the Confucian classics, the great classics of Chinese culture. You say, no, Christianity is totally different, discontinuous from all that. I’m not interested in Chinese learning. So on one level, he was all about enculturation. On another level, he was quite resistant to it. Whereas some of the other missionaries who um

didn’t see any need to pretend to be Chinese, uh actually began to open up the deeper issues of what it means to present Christianity in terms that make sense to Chinese people. There was one particular Scotsman called James Legge, translated all the Confucian classics. His editions of the Confucian classics are still in print today.

Um, some people felt he went too far. Cause once you really begin to say, how do we express Christianity in Chinese terms or in Hindu terms or in African terms, that’s when you begin to get into real arguments about where are the boundaries? How far is too far? And those are still issues that are being wrestled with today and always will be. Back at Bushman’s.

A local guy had wandered into our discussion. He had lived various places around the world and had recently come back to the U.S. from Spain. He loved talking about his heritage and we naturally got into a discussion about the mixture of cultures. Like I can say, I have part Caribbean, know, because Puerto Rico is in the Caribbean. So it’s specifically. Yeah. And then they don’t call you American over there. They say it’s down. didn’t say it’s that. Yeah, because America.

America is, it or not, it’s Mexico, the United States and Canada. But if you look back to it as well again, it has more of a mixed blessing to it. I mean, when the so-called colonizers went to the continent. And discovered, quote unquote. They didn’t discover nothing because there were people there, government, know, they were doing their thing. That is true. But when it went then, it’s just men.

They didn’t go there with women, with them, and they stayed there. The travel alone takes months. Years, even. Yeah, staying there takes a while as well, too. So they’re mixed with the people there. And even the people that are brought here, oh to wherever they go as well, too, there’s also mixed blessings there. So that explains all these different people from different…

is asking questions. What’s going on? do I have this in me? How do I have Irish in me? do I have the Tartarish in me? Things like that. I’ve never considered myself white, because my father always told us, we’re a mixture. Because I was explaining to him that my great grandmother on my father’s side was Puerto Rican and she was born in the 1800s. Her granddaughters, which would be my aunts,

They would say, oh no, grandma was really light skinned and she had green eyes and oh, she was beautiful. That’s why the Spaniard that was in charge of that part, because we were province of Spain.

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um… fell in love with her. She was very attractive. But they never mentioned that she had nappy hair, you a loose hair. And then you know that she had features of African. She has a wide nose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you could tell that she was… she looked like people from Louisiana, something like that. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah.

But one people, people. One people. It’s amazing. At the end of the day, we still have to eat. We still need to be loved. That’s right. We to get clothes, you know, like work clothes. And if they cut you, you bleed. You bleed, yeah. Red. Everybody, you so. People aren’t just one thing. They are a blend. And there isn’t really a moral aspect to that blend. My background is 8 % indigenous Puerto Rican.

36 % Spanish, 26 % Portuguese, and a mixture of a bunch of African nations. And there’s nothing wrong with that, or better or worse than anyone else. But does this extend beyond our molecular makeup to the cultural distinctives themselves? I talked with Neal Shenvy about this, who has quite a mixed up background himself. So I don’t know if you would just want to tell us a little bit about yourself maybe. Yes. Sure.

So I am uh Neil Shenvy. I have a PhD in theoretical chemistry from UC Berkeley and did a postdoc at Yale and then another one at Duke. But then about 11 years ago, I quit my job as a theoretical chemist to homeschool my four kids. And so now I’m an author and speaker and uh homeschooling dad and tutor and teach through my local homeschool co-op. that’s, I mainly though I’m now.

ironically known for my work on critical theory. So I wrote a book two years ago with my friend, Dr. Pat Sawyer, who has a PhD in critical pedagogy. And we wrote a book called Critical Dilemma, uh The Rise of Critical

Theories in Social Justice Ideology, Implications for the Church and Society, which aimed to show Christians uh what critical theory is and then why it is not a good idea to adopt it as a framework for the church.

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A hundred years ago, I think that there was a lot of heavy handed colonialism. I mean, it was literal colonialism. had imperial powers taking resources from the local population, governing them, ruling over them as a foreign power. That was true colonialism. Whereas today you have what they’d call neo colonialism. That it’s not so much that say England is literally ruling India, but English norms and values have infected the Indian population say.

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in a way that seems normal and objective, but is actually a manifestation of British power and Western ideas. So that way of thinking is just, it’s true that yes, colonialist norms have influenced the colonized, but, and yet there are actual good norms and values that are independent of what the British or the Indians or the Peruvians or anybody thinks. There’s God’s norms. So we have to be very careful. There’s a pendulum here. On the one hand, we can be naive and think that,

The way the way that British people do it is just the right way always. But that’s not true. mean, every culture is sinful. Every culture is sort of arbitrary norms and values like cricket and tea. That’s a British thing. It’s not a divinely ordained thing. But the other side of the pendulum is to say, well, the no values and norms are actually objectively God ordained. That’s not true either. So when it terms of missions, I think it’s totally fair to look at past missions and say, you know,

We really shouldn’t march into another nation and say, you want to have a church here? has to be a red brick church with a white steeple on it. you have to have pew. Like, well, that’s a very modern American thing. mean, churches in the first century didn’t look like that, certainly. So there’s no divinely ordained way to build a church, for example, right? On the other hand, you can go the other direction and say, well, even things like sexuality and gender or even things like uh

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I mean, gender roles and relationships, those are all just arbitrary. They’re all the result of Western power. Well, no time out. The Bible does speak to that directly. So we want to be, I think a helpful term is critical realism or critical engagement. We can be critical of past movements and ask ourselves, how are we unintentionally or intentionally imposing unbiblical or extra biblical norms on local cultures? That’s totally fair game.

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That’s very Protestant, right? When I stick with the Bible. On the other hand, we don’t want to throw away all norms and say it’s all just Western imperialism. And I’ll put another even more provocative point in there. Sometimes local norms, local cultural norms or religious norms are actually bad. It’s not wrong to say, this is cultural practice of foot binding. We’re going to bind up women’s feet. We’re going to burn widows on the pyre of their husbands. That’s a cultural thing.

Well, no, it’s an evil cultural thing in the same way that say, well, in South Africa, we just have apartheid. Well, that’s an evil cultural thing. It’s a cultural thing, yes, but we critique that from a biblical perspective. So it’s not actually bad for missionaries to come into a culture and say, yes, this is your culture. And parts of it are amoral. They’re not moral or amoral. Some of it is moral. You have a good understanding of things like the sanctity of life or the goodness of family and other things the Bible says are actually wrong. That’s true.

all cultures, Bible is above all of our cultures, and we should have the, we should critique our culture and everyone else’s according to God’s word. So I wondered, aside from the moral issues that Neil spoke of, what were some examples of the ways missionaries pressed their culture onto others, and in what aspects did that bleed out? In most of Africa and in the Pacific Islands, missionaries

insisted that the proper way to build a house is a square house with a square front door and square windows and a nice little fat roof like an English cottage. Whereas most Africans and Pacific Island peoples discovered it makes more sense in our culture and given the materials we have to have round houses. the battles, that seems a trivial example, but it’s one example.

um Dress was another issue. Europeans couldn’t cope with the nakedness or semi-nakedness of many indigenous peoples, insisted on dressing them often in typical Victorian European clothing. ah Missionaries insisted on going around in their piff helmets and very

elaborate clothing and there’s still a relic of that in Africa today where many African clergy will insist that they must wear a black suit on a Sunday. is, whatever the temperature, that’s the God-honouring thing to do on a Sunday is to go to your church in a black suit. It’s a sort of relic of missionary cultural imperialism which has become indigenised.

And you can see the same thing in music, but go to many churches in Africa and you’ll find some of the great classic British and American hymns still being sung. And I have no particular objections of them singing them.

They may be indigenized in rhythm and in musical idiom, the words are still

the old British words and the tunes you can still trace back to European or American melodies. So some of the cultural impositions of the past have become indigenized and yeah, maybe that’s a good thing, but they need to be set alongside um music that shows indigenous forms and indigenous inspiration.

Brian, I feel like you’re, this is it resonating deeply with me, the music.

Excuse me, because I’m a musician. I had the opportunity to travel to South Africa in 2019. And it was a conference of pastors and worship leaders. I was there for about a week in Johannesburg and Cape Town. But one of the things I noticed in the services we attended is the use of American

praise and worship songs. the rhythms were different, the harmonies were different, there was a contextualization there. But it was alarming to me that I think 90 % of the songs we heard were songs I could have heard here in Florida or in the United States. And maybe 10 % was something that was like, oh, this is the language of the local congregation, local context. And so we had some discussions on that, but it was alarming to me.

Um, and, and so I’m curious as to what you see or your thoughts, you know, why, and I see this as well. I’m of Puerto Rican descent, descent. see this in a lot of Spanish congregations locally here and throughout the United States where there’s less and less of the traditional Spanish language songs and there’s more translating.

the English songs that are popular on Christian radio, um even if there’s a changing of the rhythms, you know, but yeah, I’m curious to your thoughts on why this might be happening. What’s going on is that culture changes with generations. Culture is always a moving screen. When we talk about a musical culture or artistic culture of a particular people, we’re attempting to sort of freeze

a shot of it at a particular moment in time, but all the time it’s moving. Whatever your culture is that you’re brought into, that’s what you know. Right. And that’s what you practice. That’s what you show the world. But it doesn’t mean my culture is better than your culture. Exactly. It just means I need to be able to love and embrace what you have because that’s you. What’s interesting because, you know, I’m a worship leader and for years

I’ve been thinking about how do we fuse musical styles

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and languages into something new, but also honoring each tradition. Sometimes you don’t want to mix something. Maybe if it’s classical music, let it be what it is. Don’t add a rock beat to it all the time or whatever. And I

get pushback. ah And sometimes folks are not willing to have conversations. And my thinking is, well, golly, we’re all…

believers and we’re on the same team so there’s a final destination that’s similar. But you would think that. Why can’t we at least we can have our preferences right there’s nothing wrong with that I think but have conversations that are wholesome and I really want to learn from you you want to learn from me we can even if we disagree there’s a respect because we’re still on the same team but it’s very few and far between those conversations. I have a friend his name is Johnny B. Denison

He was raised traditionally, actually was led to faith by a missionary who came to our reservation, an exception to the rules I’ve been talking about.

And when he got there, this missionary got there, he noticed that our people weren’t singing our song. My grandfather helped translate some of the hymns into the Navajo language. He worked as a translator. He was a boarding school survivor. He helped translate both the Bible and the hymns into our language.

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The novel language is tonal, so the intonation of your voice affects the meaning of the word.

The hymns in our Navajo hymnal, most Navajo Christians, especially the older ones, their Navajo hymnal is one of their most sacred books next to the Bible.

And if I sang the song from this hymnal, you would recognize the songs, right? Jesus, I, oh, I’ll show it now. I’m singing Jesus Loves Me, right? And it’s because the missionaries required translating my grandfather to keep the tune of the song.

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But for a tonal language, that butchers the words. When you go up instead of down or long instead of short, because the tune goes one way, but the word goes another way.

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And so when Johnny B. Dennison became a Christian, he asked my friend Ben, he said, how do I worship? And my friend Ben said, I don’t know. You have to figure that out with God.

And Johnny B went back and he took out his Bible, Navajo Bible, and started singing it the way it’s supposed to be sung in the Navajo language.

I love what he’s doing.

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because that is some of the most from the heart authentic worship I ever have seen. One of his favorite songs to sing is Psalm 119.

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He’ll go on for hours.

Right? I mean, it’s beautiful. It would never be loud in a church because everyone’s roast beef would burn, right? Or they’d miss their football game. But it’s beautiful when he just sings and brings not only our language, but our culture and our concept of time and is using our language correctly. And that is the

And when I see that, not just with my Navajo people, when I see anyone worshiping God in the fullness of who they are.

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and it’s not been conformed or adulterated to fit into the culture of a church. I love it. I’ve written extensively about contextualized worship. I’ve met with Indigenous Christians from all over the globe encouraging them to use their culture and their language and their worldviews to allow themselves and their people to bring the fullness of who they are.

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before creator.

Cultures can help us to understand and express ourselves as we relate to other people and to God. But they are becoming more complicated and mixed up as the world becomes smaller. When David Livingston came to Africa, he brought parts of English culture with him, which were adopted in Malawi. Then Harvey left and took parts of that culture with him, which would mix with the places of the world he was going, and so on.

and all sorts of new cultures and subcultures would be born. So, the discussion is no longer simply about honoring individual cultures, but about how to live and move in a world that is constantly mixing and reshaping itself.

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Swing Low Sweet Chariot, indeed.

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Polyphonic, Mission After Empire is hosted by me, Imer Santiago, and produced by Missile Nexus and Arrival Creative. Thanks for listening.