Episode 5: And These Must Harmonize

About this episode

“Just follow Scripture” sounds simple—until two sincere people read the same text and land in different places. Episode 5 wrestles with the hard work of harmonizing truth and humility: how to go without centering ourselves, how to help without performing, and how to build something through mutuality, instead of being one-directional. Through voices like Mekdes Haddis and Sarah Breuel—and a musician’s ear for dissonance and resolve—this episode asks what it would take for missions to move in harmony again.

People featured in this episode

Imer Santiago⁠ — Host. 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 from Fuller Theological Seminary.

⁠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.

⁠Mekdes Haddis⁠ — Ethiopian-born missiologist and author challenging “missions as usual” approaches in the Western church. Founder of The Mutuality Lab. Author of A Just Mission.

⁠Sarah Breuel⁠ — Christian leader originally from Brazil and based in Rome. Founder/director of Revive Europe; has served with IFES and the Lausanne Movement.

Music

Mira Ma / Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major / courtesy of ⁠Epidemic Sound⁠
El Equipo Del Norte / Sulco / courtesy of ⁠Epidemic Sound⁠
El Equipo Del Norte / Bahia / courtesy of ⁠Epidemic Sound⁠
Blair McMillen, Conway Kuo / La Capricieuse, Op. 17 / courtesy of ⁠Epidemic Sound

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 5 transcription

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Episode 5, where we talk about sharing our toys. A little bit of a tangent maybe, but as an educator, and I’ve been teaching for a while now, there are music educators who will say, well, and unfortunately I’ve heard this from people at the college level, high school level, and middle school level, where they’ll say the true music is classical music.

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You can teach your kids jazz or mariachi and these are different forms of music that actually are found in academia. And I challenge that because I say good music is good music. And so I can learn from Bach, but I can learn from Ellington. I can learn from Stevie Wonder. So it rubs me a certain way. And I get it. Like, we want to have good posture and good breathing technique. But to me, who am I if there’s a culture that has never heard of

classical music and they can play music beautifully to say that that is not an acceptable form, that it has to be jazz or it has to be European classical music. So it’s interesting, but I run into that quite a bit actually. Yeah, I think, mean, sort of framework too is to think about, well, what’s mentioned in the Bible? Did the Bible tell you how to play music or like the classical music?

But no, there’s nothing like that for thousands of years. in areas of the Bible that silent, we should be incredibly hesitant to say this is the right way to do it. So, I think that’s a good judge for like, when is an issue a cultural issue, an amoral issue, a non-issue? And when is it, no, this is what needs to be asserted as the truth. Well, what does scripture say? What does scripture say? I wish it were that straightforward.

Most people believe they are following scripture even when the way they do something or the outcome is very different. So, how do we do missions well? Taking into account the truth we are trying to share and the spirit we are trying to go

It’s not easy for those things to sync up well. And as a musician, I know about the difficulties of harmonizing. There can’t be an African store without drum. uh It goes hand in hand. But I think I’ll let the real drummer do the beating of the drum. I will do like one or two rhythms. I’m still learning, And I will join with you because I’ve got the talking drum here.

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6 8 pattern.

They give it the name, I’m forgetting it right now, Corvee. So I don’t know if we can jam together with that. With Bushman and I being from different backgrounds, having different training and skills, and even using different drums, would we be able to jam together? It wasn’t looking so good at the start. mean, another topic that I would say is a rising topic that

actually gets me kind of excited is mutuality. the idea behind mutuality is that, you know, when I’m with you, I’m not with you from any type of position of power. I’m not trying to affect or influence our relationship ah because of what I have, what you don’t have, what I’ve experienced, what you have an experience, etc. Which I think has been one of the…

you know obvious problems with colonialism is that people that were wealthier were ministering to people that were less wealthy and they use that power dynamic and as we move into a new era of indigeneity in which people want to be able to express their K-pop or whatever you know forms of culture they want to express that we do that on a truly mutual basis where we’re sharing back and forth.

I don’t know how possible that really is in real life based on what we see in human nature. But I think that is kind of a goal and something that we want to aim for. It took Bushman and I a few minutes warming up to find out that indeed we could jam together. But it was only after a bit of struggle and some give and take. As Christians, we will need to learn how to struggle forward together as we figure out a better way of doing missions.

The concept of mutuality that Ted mentioned came up in a discussion I had with an author and speaker originally from Ethiopia, but now living in the US. At first, I wasn’t sure how to pronounce her name, but I would soon learn. Hello, Jim. I would love for you to introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself, including, and I’ll get into this in a little while, how do you pronounce your name?

Okay, sounds good. uh So my name is Mekdes Haddis and Mekdes means temple of God. I like to tell people in Ethiopia, our parents kind of give us a prophetic name, a name that they want us to live up to. So I have a big name to fill. Thank God for, you know, uh salvation in Christ. uh

And yeah, so I’m originally from Ethiopia. I was born and raised in Ethiopia. um Stayed there until it was time for college. And then I moved to the States to pursue higher education. I felt called to ministry around the age of 16 and just had a very uh

just very vibrant experience with the Lord. And I knew clearly that ministry was where I needed to be. So when I went to college back home for about a year, there was just nothing that resembled what I felt that God was calling me to do. So I started looking for opportunities in the States and then got to go to Christian school here, um was given a full ride. So it was God’s provision and came. And then after college, um

served at uh several churches. Right now I live in Charlotte, North Carolina um with my husband of almost 13 years and I have two kids. I have a 10 year-old daughter and a five-year-old son. I currently work for the National

Association of Evangelicals. I lead our Racial Justice and Reconciliation

Collaborative. um And then I also have

This experience experimental space that I call the mutuality lab that was kind of birthed out of my book uh place where We get to experience each other’s cultures talk about you know difficult topics That is where I am and who I am So before we get into like the meat of the conversation, I say a couple things that so uh In about a week in a day, it’ll be 13 14 years of marriage for me

Okay. wife Laisa and we have three children. The eldest, we got boy, girl, girl. Boys, 13. The uh girl is 10 and the second daughter, the youngest is five. So it’s interesting. Two of our children are kind of in a similar stage of life. so recently we don’t go on as many dates as we’d like to, my wife and I, but about two months ago, yeah, we went to an Ethiopian restaurant in Orlando. And I had only been to one before, um maybe 10 years ago in Nashville. That’s where we met many years ago.

So when we went this time, and usually I’m the one that’s a little bit more of the risk taker in the relationship, like, hey, babe, let’s try Indian food or let’s try, you know, we’re a Puerto Rican descent, so we can do Puerto Rican food all day long. But when we’re exploring, but she was the one this time, Liza, saying, hey, let’s try this Indian restaurant called The Nile in Orlando. And the food was amazing. But I was a little nervous, if I’m being honest, because I know in my first experience, I sat at the table, I ordered, I sat at the table.

at the table and then they brought me my food but there were no utensils. Exactly. And I’m like, and this is me who I, you know, I learn about, I’m a student tried different foods, yeah. Yeah, and I’m like, what do I do? And I was really green, not understanding. And finally a young lady looks at me from across the room and comes up to me and says, you can use the bread. I think it’s pronounced, is Injida? Injida, mm-hmm. Injida, thank you. And so that was my first experience. So at least this time I kind of knew like,

uh What to do. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, what was beautiful as well is that the owner of the restaurant, it was a husband and wife, but the husband comes up and I’m not going to attempt to say the names, but he said that, and please correct me if I’m wrong, there’s some type of custom where like you can feed each other. Yeah, I was just going to tell you that because I was like, if you were terrified of using your own hands.

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Imagine somebody else using their hand to feed you. But it isn’t like that is an expression of love and kind of an endearing, you know, gesture to do. For someone you love, give them and it’s supposed to be big too. I have to eat gursha. We call it gursha. It’s like somebody else will feed you. Or like traditionally, if you’re cooking, like if the woman is cooking and the men are eating.

the husband will make a gurshan feed her so that she’s not hungry while she’s serving everybody. So it’s to show that you care for someone, they’re included in that. And so it was, it stretched us culturally. Yeah. But I love that because we are learning something beautiful and I really do believe that in every culture in the world, you can learn something from them. Exactly. No one culture holds all the goods in the air, like we can learn.

whether it’s what to do, what not to do, that kind of thing. Exactly. That’s one of the concepts of the mutuality lab is actually is kind of letting people experience my, specifically my culture, because I interact with a lot of people that have not experienced Ethiopian culture. And in our culture, there’s just so much beauty and community and all of that. So I do something similar to that where they’re either eating Ethiopian food

food for the first time or they’re, you know, looking at pictures of people feeding each other. I haven’t made them feed each other yet, but just kind of breaking down that how cultural values, you know, are transferred in these spaces. And so, yeah, I love that, that you got to experience that. Thank you. The other thing was when I asked you about how to pronounce your name correctly, that’s something I’m also passionate about as an educator.

I wish I could tell you this is not the case, uh but, I do teach grades six through eight here. So that’s what we consider middle school here in central Florida. Every year, and I’m talking every year without fail and really every semester I’ll get two, three, four, at least two or three, but sometimes upwards of five or six kids, Mr. Santiago, thank you. You’re the first teacher to ever say my name correctly. Oh, I love that. Yeah.

And I get a throw inside, it also, if I’m being honest, I feel sad because I’m like, so that means from kindergarten through sixth grade or more, you know, no one has bothered to actually. So what I do is I literally, I tell them, hey, I’m gonna read the list of the name. If I say your name incorrectly, or maybe I said it correctly, like for example, I might say Rodriguez, which is correct in Spanish, but they may say, no, I want it Rodriguez. Cool, I don’t ask questions. I wanna honor my students.

And so, and I want them to know that they are worth being honored. And so I’ll write down the phonetic pronunciation and then I’ll read it back to them. And usually I get it the first time, but if not, they’ll correct me. It really means that much that I’ll take half a period the first day to let them know like, hey, I want you to respect me, but it starts with me honoring you and getting to know. middle, Emed is my middle name and I get all kinds of pronunciations, know, Eimer, Ahmad, and so.

It’s interesting who pays attention and who doesn’t. So that’s a litmus test for me. Who’s really listening? Who cares? Right? can go off, you know, that’s a little sidebar there, but I appreciate you explaining how to pronounce your name. Yeah, absolutely. But I’ve heard that you speak about the concept of mutuality. So I’m wondering if you would take time to explain, introduce and explain the concept to those who may be listening to this podcast. Yeah.

The easiest way I explain it is um having the capacity to give and receive at the same time. em And so I want us to think about mutuality as we’re doing mission, especially from a Western context, because typically em what I see is that we go to give from the West, but I don’t see this expectation of receiving or valuing the things that you might have already received.

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I want us to think about mutuality as we’re doing mission, especially from a Western context, because typically um what I see is that we go to give from the West, but I don’t see this expectation of receiving or valuing the things that you might have already received. A lot of the feedback I hear once people have been, especially on short-term missions, is that people are so joyful. That’s like the…

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the universal feedback that I get. And they would say, you know, they didn’t have much, but they were so happy. We were able to like light up their day.

And I feel like that’s uh very reductive of the, whether it’s the experience or the work that God is doing through this exchange of culture and exchange of, uh you know, your ability to go and share the gospel and

and what they already may have that you don’t know about because there’s a cultural gap there, there’s a language gap there. And so a lot of times it’s like a lot of things have happened on one side, but the other side has understood something completely different. And I’ve had an opportunity to go to Ethiopia a couple of times and translate for medical group and such.

And that’s when uh this idea of mutuality started percolating in me because

I was fully understanding what was happening on my team side, the English speakers, the doctors who are going to give the medical exams, the people who are excited to share the gospel. On the other end, you have people who do not speak English, who’s never seen a white person in their lives, and are so excited for the ability to interact with somebody from a different culture and just be touched by a foreign doctor.

They have a doctor in their community, but just the experience itself was so exciting. This one trip I went on, it was for the elderly. And we spent about a week there. And what we did was work with an organization that works with the elderly, like a health organization. They kept coming and coming. All we did, they examined them and whatever. From all of that, the…

the trainings that we can give and the medication that they gave them was multivitamins. Some like they were constipated, so stuff to help them with that. And then education on hygiene. That’s it. That was like the, that was the big medical relief mission. And I was like, what are we, what, why are we here? And then on the other side, I hear the conversations of people, you know,

what it is absolutely not doing for them. The vitamins we were giving them, we were buying from the local uh pharmacy. It made no sense. It’s already there. Why are we spending thousands of dollars to take this team and going there when one individual can go and just get the, a local doctor can just check on them, give them the vitamins that they need and give them the hygiene education.

It was very basic, but we do basic stuff all the time in hopes that our people here from the West get to experience something different that they’ve never experienced. So it’s really one-sided. It’s about the experience of the ones going, feeling like they’re contributing, giving back to a community that they see may not have access, where in reality there is access.

It’s just different. Just because you go to Africa doesn’t mean it does, you know, it doesn’t exist. But it’s just kind of this illusion that by going and feeling sacrificial, you’ve achieved achieved something. And so that was one of the places where I was like, what is happening? I didn’t there was no exchange of the gospel because there’s a lack of communication. you know, what are they going to say to them? And so

And then in my job as a translator, these people were already Christians. They’re Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox believers for the majority. There’s no way they’re going to change their minds and become evangelical with that interaction. And so there were so many gaps in that type of interaction that I was like, oh my gosh, but it was a way for

the locals that worked with them for the organization to bring in foreigners to make them feel sorry for what they were observing and then to guarantee funding or whatever it may be. so it missed the point of it being, and I’m okay if it’s about aid work and you want to do this, that’s fine, but for a church to organize this, for a faith organization to say you’re going to go share the gospel, it was deceitful.

for the people that are going, I’m sure if they really heard what I was hearing, they would be like, why am I here? Like I could be, you know, helping people in my community. They, you know, and so there are these types of gaps that exist everywhere, especially in these short-term trips. That makes no sense. And they become about the goer rather than the people that, you know, that are there and the need that needs to be met. So when we say mutuality, that means we have to really understand if, if

there is actually a need for us to go. But the way we come into communities needs to be a little bit uh less authoritative and more humble and relying on the knowledge and leadership of locals and being able to receive from them as well. God may be already at work. God may have already done, you know, a lot in their hearts. They may already be believers. Poverty doesn’t mean that you’re not a believer.

So kind of this idea, if we go to the ends of the earth, because they’re poor, they don’t know Jesus is also, it’s kind of built into this movement that we have to pull back and really understand, know, humans are so complex, how God works in different cultures is so complex. We must listen. I still learn so much from my own community, let alone, you know, go into it like.

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I’m very careful when I cross over to a different culture because it’s so complex. And if we have respect and honor for image bearers of God in every context, we have to really pull back and see what we can observe and receive from that culture before we say, I have something I can contribute and give, you know, they may already have it. just doesn’t look like what you’re offering them. So to me, mutuality kind of

It’s very complex and tough, but that’s how I see it play out. One thing that stuck with me was Mehta’s critique of a short-term mission trip to Ethiopia, where she was the translator. She said many of the people they were serving were already Christians and were just being given vitamins that were already available locally. This is a common and valid critique of shortterm trips.

doing things that eat up precious resources and are many times unnecessary or redundant. After the discussion, my wife and I were talking about doing a short-term trip as a family and it made me pause and consider how we would be going. But I wonder if this critique applies to long-term missions work in the same way. So, I talked with my friend Sarah from Brazil. She shared about loving bossa nova music in an earlier episode. We had met at Urbana years back.

And while she was thoughtful about how we go, she was also aware that sometimes those concerns can make us hesitate. Well, Sarah, what a pleasure and honor it is for me to get to chat with you today. I actually wore my Urbana 22 shirt. I know you, I met you at Urbana 18 a few years ago and and your husband as well, Renee, if I’m correct. uh yes, it was it was beautiful the way both of you served.

administered at Urbana. It was a huge impact to me. again, an honor to speak with you today. I was going to ask you if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and the work you do, but also how do you pronounce your last name? kind of, I like to honor everybody as much as possible by pronouncing first and middle and last names correctly. So I’m curious as how you pronounce your last name. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you.

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It’s a joy to be here and you asked the hardest question in the beginning, my last name!

just say it whoever is easy for who’s listening. So I say Breuel for English speakers because it’s German. My husband is German descended and it’s supposed to be, and I don’t speak German, it’s supposed to be “Broil” or something along the line. So whatever, the Germans will know how to pronounce well, but I would say Breuel in Brazil, I say pre-well. So whenever it comes, I’ll take it, no offense whatsoever. And it was a joy to meet at Urbana. We are big Urbana fans since we were university students, in fact, our lives. So it’s been such a journey and a joy to be involved with Rubena.

a bit about me. am a Brazilian, originally from Brazil. My husband and I, we love our country. And we have been as cross-cultural missionaries here in Italy for, in May will be, 15 years. So we love this land. We have two teenage boys. We name our boy Italian names. He was two months old when he arrived, but we named him an Italian name, Pietro. That’s Peter in Italian.

just as a statement for Him and for, you know, before our commitment to God. like, God, we are going to be in this land until you say otherwise, you know? So we love here, it’s our home. And He pastored the church that we church planted here. And I love university students. So I’ve been working with university students all my life. So some context to my personal story and the way that I see missions, my…

uh There was this American couple uh many years ago that they fell called, he was an engineer and she was an English teacher, and they fell called to move to Brazil as missionaries. And they moved to this small town at the bottom of the Amazon. And basically to get to the Amazon tribes, it would take…

Sometimes it takes three, four or a week with canoes and things. And they have those small planes and he’s calling with an engineer just to fix these planes and allow the missionaries to get into the Amazon in an easier way. uh And being that town and serving, they just ah talk about Jesus with people in that town. And one of the people that they talk with was my grandmother. And that’s how the gospel entered into my family. So that will shape me forever because this couple, uh

about eight years ago said yes and gave their life to Jesus and went to Brazil unashamed to serve Jesus and do their best in the contest and be bold. That’s how the gospel ended my family. So I feel just a deep sense of like gratitude as a Brazilian and as a Latin American for the American church and the role they had to missions. And throughout the years seeing people going places that were.

uh difficult and maybe hostile to the gospel years ago and actually see God’s grace also see decades today, Brazil was very much a missionary field with uh in now being a missionary force with about 25,000 missionaries uh in cross-cultural missions. uh So I would say uh in even lately the discussion about missions in colonialism and the sensitivities that is around

Yes, be sensitive and partner in others. I just had this deep sense in my spirit as well that the enemy will try also to use that to to hinder our boldness and to hinder our yes to actually go in it’s needed. And I don’t think in any in any point we sense, oh, it’s not needed in other places. And there’s places that not to be reached. Like the respect for culture will actually hinder our yes. um

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I don’t think uh it’s honoring to Jesus or the Great Commission who has called us to go. So I would say to anyone considering missions, yes, of course, it’s also more possible to be contextualized and relevant, but go and serve because we have uh a world that is in need and God is calling out for workers. For Sarah, it was very personal. Had the American missionaries to Brazil been too concerned about how they would fit into the culture, they may have never gone

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and her family may have never come to faith. So, how do we balance the call to go with the desire to go well? A concept I had learned in my time as a teacher could be helpful. Is that term mutuality popping up in teaching circles as you’re a teacher? I mean, I don’t know if we’ve said it specifically mutuality, but I know one concept.

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that maybe 10 or so years ago became popular. And education was the idea of instead of the sage on the stage, the guide on the side. So really encouraging us to move around the room, to draw more out of the students, allow them to kind of teach each other. mean, you were still as teachers were the guide, right? So we’re moving them in a certain direction or helping usher them towards a goal, but letting the kids kind of rise.

and bring some of their ah experiences and knowledge. And it’s interesting because even before that, I have been the type of band director and educator that the kids know.

who the boss is in the room, you can’t, especially with middle school with instruments in their hands, it’ll be very chaotic if there’s not order. But I’ve always said as long as you’re respectful in how you ask Mr. Santiago, if you want to consider a different way to get to the goal, I’m fine. And every year there’s two or three instances of students saying, Mr. Santiago, you said to do blah, blah, blah, what if we tried it from this other angle?

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let’s try it and it’s actually better than my way and i’ve got that you know education ah and so that’s a powerful moment because

It shows that I can still be teachable, even after teaching 20 some years. But it empowers the student that they have ownership as well in the process of education and in the direction of our band program. When you said stage on the stage versus guide on the side, I think that idea has also influenced quite a bit how we’re doing mission today. So I think the colonial model of the preacher teacher standing up in the midst of a bunch of natives.

and kind of directing everything has really given way toward to a different model, which is more coaching on the side, which is from the beginning trying to put indigenous people in positions of leadership. I do think those, I mean that’s really a good paradigm I would say to talk about a shift that happened. It really started I would say about 30 years ago, oh but it continues on in the way that we think about

spreading the gospel, planting churches. It has shifted positively in my view, opening up the doors for more mutuality, more indigeneity. So that’s kind of a good paradigm, I think, upon which to think about this issue and describe it. Okay, so instead of centralizing ourselves, we should come alongside local workers and make sure there’s a two-way line of communication between us, give and take.

But Neil Shenvi brought up a nuance about mutuality that is worth considering. The missionary learns from the person and the person learns from the missionary like that. So I think there’s certainly room for that, right? Because it’s just obvious examples like language learning. Like the missionary comes in and speaks the language, there’s mutuality. Like the missionary is trying to the gospel, yes, but the person in the culture is literally teaching the language. So if the missionary comes in and be like, I am the great missionary, I don’t need any help at all.

Of course you do. And this is thing is, so my father-in-law and mother-inlaw are missionaries and I can’t imagine any missionary in 2025 who is so utterly pure blind as to claim that they don’t need anything. They’re just there to give to these pure blinded ignorant, no, no one’s saying that. I hope. I won’t say no. So there’s always some mutuality.

But I think it’s dangerous when you get into this spirituality that’s almost a spiritual mutuality. Even there, know, people, non-Christians can point out problems that I have that I don’t see. I’m a human being. I’m a sinner too. So I might go into a culture and I’m sharing the gospel, for example, and they look at me and they say, hey, have you talked to your, how come what the Bible is about the gospel, but in the Bible we see that parents and family are very important. On your mother and father is the fifth commandment, right?

When did you talk to your mom last? Like, I don’t know, she’s fine. No, wait a minute. They’re shutting light on a blind spot that Americans have culturally, right? Americans are individualist, we do our own thing, parents are fine, we’ll talk to them every few months or so. But it’s to be that arrogant to say that, you know, I have it all figured out because I’m a Christian and you’re a heathen. No, no, no, that’s nonsense. So even spiritually there can be a mutuality there. But I think we have to separate that from the first things again.

Like, I don’t go to a non-Christian culture and have them teach me about their gods. I can listen, but like, they’re not shedding light on who the real God is because our ancestors taught us that there are actually many gods. They’re not though. Are there true statements that are objectively true in scripture that reveal who God actually is, and are we all accountable to that? Actually, I’ll give you an example that I heard from Tim Keller, he’s a Presbyterian pastor. He passed away. He talked about how…

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when Presbyterian missionaries would go into say, people groups in developing world, and there’s your Presbyterians, right? So they were very hesitant to talk about demons and the supernatural. But often these indigenous cultures were like, what are you talking about? The demons are everywhere. And they were. And so these Presbyterians were kind of like, oh. But he was like, the indigenous people were pointing out something that we as Presbyterians,

have often missed that there’s a spiritual realm and a warfare going on. he’s pointing out that they’re not asking us to change scripture, they’re asking us to listen to scripture and maybe realize that, maybe I’ve kind of muted this part of scripture that actually is there that I’m kind of ignoring. So I have no problem then as a Protestant with saying, hey, let’s re-examine our

Emphasis or even our beliefs in light of scripture. That’s that’s okay But I’m not saying let’s replace what we believe because we have to listen to the lived experience of these people No, no, no, no, there is some truth in scripture and we should stick to it Whatever it says whether or not it is in line or out of step with what any culture believes about these realities And I think about it in terms of like anything like science or math, right? There is a truth about math and science

out there in nature, in the world. And maybe we got it wrong in the West. Sure, sure. But show me how. Don’t just tell me, well, I guarantee it. You listen to them and said because they’re brown. Look, I’m brown. You don’t listen to me. Listen to scripture. That has to be our guidepost and our bedrock. So I feel like I’m always trying to have people portray me as a centrist. I’m not a centrist. I’m kind of a fundamentalist. But I think

we can have the fundamentals right, and then appreciate there is some balance there. I think, ironically, I think that sort of more progressive people act as if in 2025, missionaries are just diving into the culture and just telling all you, you all need to worship like this, you need to speak English, gonna teach you English, you can read the King James Bible, because that’s the real Bible. It’s like, maybe that’s a thing somewhere, but the vast majority of missionaries that I’ve actually met are not thinking that way at all. See, the opposite problem, which is that

They’re so hesitant to interrupt the culture or to be insensitive that they don’t, they’re not confident that this is what God wants you to do. It’s okay. I’ll give you one really shocking example. I was at a missions conference giving a talk on critical theory and talked about all this stuff about how critical theorists and post-colonialists will question all norms, all things, their Western values, and even logic itself. I read a quote from a critical theorist.

using post-colonial theory, actually a Christian, a person evangelical even, think, talking about how logic is a Western epistemology. Logic itself, of non-carnitination is Western, and we have to embrace or make room for indigenous systems of logic. And I said, that’s crazy. After my talk, a person in the audience said, I think it’s very arrogant to say that logic is just there.

there’s one kind of logic. think we need to embrace other forms of logic that don’t involve things like non-contradiction and true and false. I’m like, I just stood back in front of a whole room and I thought, I said, that’s what I’m talking about. It’s like, if you cannot abandon logic as a Western thing, like this is the danger and this is a room full of missionaries. I’m like, thank you for saying that because this is the fear that I have.

I mean, is Jesus both God and not God? Is Christianity both true and not true? mean, are other and actually the quote that I read was literally about how Christianity can coexist with indigenous religions if you abandon European logic. That was the argument being made that we don’t have to just be Christian. We can also embrace these religions. We can’t do that if you’re affixed to European logic.

But if you get rid of European logic, then it’s fine to be both Christian and whatever it is, animist. And the person in the audience was saying, yeah, what’s wrong with that? I’m like, there’s a lot wrong with that. So that for me was a moment when I was like, what I’m saying is not just hypothetical. It’s on the ground among the missionaries who are saying these things. you going to get rid of the Nicene Creed? how far back are you going to go?

That’s a real worry. I think people are often much more relational. They’re like, I just want to share Jesus with people. And all this abstract stuff about logic and epistemology, that’s all weird. Yeah, it’s actually very practical. It’ll affect how you talk about and think about Jesus. Like Neil said, these concepts can sometimes seem abstract or unrelated to real life. But they have real-world implications.

And while there is no true music or true way of doing missions, I do believe they have similar building blocks, a melody and a harmony, the truth and the spirit, the desire to share the gospel of Christ and the desire to go in a spirit of humility. And these must harmonize. The danger of they do not is total deconstruction.

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