Adiaphora

In the past few years, there has been so much cross-fertilization of Christian churches and that really warms my heart. Our Young Families class has lots of stories about friends and family who have been part of this. Many young people today marry someone from another background and have to find a Christian home at some new church. This week we were discussing Catholicism and it jogged my memory of a most amazing pastor and his congregation.

About 1983 (?) my Protestant denomination began a bi-annual event called the Great Commission Convocation and I was one of the attendees at the original convocation in St.Louis. The speaker who stole the show wasn't one of the leaders. It was a 20-something pastor from Corpus Christi. He was a Minnesota Swede who got assigned to Corpus Christi because he had taken high school Spanish. His church had about 20 members. It was a run-down building and when he got there, a hurricane had blown half the roof off. Church members were talking about closing down the whole enchilada. He told about how hard he prayed for that church. Sitting in his motel room he said he learned what G. K. Chesterton had said about how the army of God is a strange army which advances on it's knees.

By and by he found a group of Mexican guys who would do the roof cheap. As work progressed, he visited with them and discovered they were not regular church guys, Christmas and Easter attendees of the Catholic parish. What excuse? They hated the English services which they couldn't understand. As a lark, he told them he would do his service in both English and Spanish, thereby teaching them English if they would come. At the promise of learning better English, they thought this was a can't-lose proposition. Nobody in those days had given much thought to Hispanic ministeries.

So the Mex guys came and they loved it. And they began to tell friends. In three years the tiny church had grown to 1000 people, almost entirely Hispanics. He had 3 services now, Spanish, Spanglish and English. And he talked about some unorthodox ways he did things. When he told about how they had a rule that anyone who held office in this church had to attend a Bible Study that met minimum once a week, the crowd of convocation-goers was shocked. An elderly pastor held up his hand, "How do you get 'em to do that?" The MN Swede said, "I just tell them, if you didn't want to study the Bible, you could have just stayed Catholic." Did they have dissension? Not much, he noted. To which a Hispanic person in the crowd who knew Latin tempers asked disbelievingly, "How can you say that?"

Well, he noted, when they started, they had Catholic traditions in mind. So they would come to him with questions, "Do women need to wear chapel scarves? Do we need to fast on some days?" But he knew that a successful Christian, a successful church, needs to keep it's focus on Jesus Christ and a relationship with Him. But he didn't know the Spanish word for "It doesn't matter." So he taught them the Greek word "adiaphora" which loosely translated means "free choice". And it is really funny, he added, to see a bunch of Mex guys going around saying Adiaphora all the time. It has replaced "munyana" as the favorite word. An argument will erupt and then some guy throws up his hands and says, "Adiaphora!" Everyone grins and all is well, grace is in action.

Then he leaned back reflectingly and said, "You know, I think the reason they like adiaphora so much is because that is what it is like being American." Well put. Dinesh D'Sousa says the thing that is so compelling about America is that you are free to be your own person. You don't have to have an arranged marriage or do what your dad did. You are free to start an enterprise or try a new thing without government interference. To have freedom to choose within the context of a walk with God is the Christian sense of the word. To have freedom to choose within the context of being a responsible citizen is the American meaning. That's different than the European meaning of freedom. To many Europeans, freedom means being about to wear a shirt with an obscene gesture on it. That irresponsible free choice is crucially different than the responsible one. Irresponsible freedom storms an old prison and beheads innocent people, then celebrates the whole thing as Bastille Day every July 14. I gag when I read about the French Revolution. It is as if we had a day to celebrate the Newark and LA riots. But the American version of freedom means free choice to pursue what really matters. That's powerful stuff.

Knowing what really matters and what is "free choice" is most important for all of us.