Or can we encourage people to follow Jesus within the context of remaining a cultural Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim? Do we tell converts not to get baptized and not to join the church? For 2,000 years, this was not even a question. Thousands of men and women from other religious backgrounds have converted to Christ, found salvation in Him, been baptized and joined His bride, the church, at great risk to themselves, risking everything for the sake of publicly acknowledging Christ before men.

I have just read Nelson Jennings’ rambling and nearly incoherent “defense” of Insider Movements (or is it?) and his scathing critique of the PCA Study Committee’s final report on the Insider Movement paradigm. David Garner does a decent job of defending the study committee’s report. You can find both men’s positions here.

The growing phenomenon of Insider Movements represents the progressive frontier of the push to multicultural contextualization in missions. It confronts us with the question: What does one need to believe in order to be saved? Does one need to identify oneself as a Christian- to be baptized and identify with the church- or is it enough to be a “follower of Jesus” in your native cultural context, even if that means remaining a professing Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, etc.? This is not a small, insignificant question. For a Muslim to be baptized and identify as a Christian is, in many cultural contexts, to risk death. For a Hindu, Jew or a Buddhist to embrace Christ, be baptized and join the church is, in many places, to risk complete alienation from family and friends.

Is this cost necessary to being a truly redeemed and reconciled disciple of Jesus? Is this part of what Jesus meant by “taking up your cross daily” and following Him? Is this what He intended when He said, “So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven,  but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.”? (Matt. 10:32-33)   

Or can we encourage people to follow Jesus within the context of remaining a cultural Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim? Do we tell converts not to get baptized and not to join the church? For 2,000 years, this was not even a question. Thousands of men and women from other religious backgrounds have converted to Christ, found salvation in Him, been baptized and joined His bride, the church, at great risk to themselves, risking everything for the sake of publicly acknowledging Christ before men.

Now we are told by the culturally sensitive experts that all of this pubic profession and risk of martyrdom has been unnecessary. We are told that our Western, Greco-Roman, militaristic, imperialist cultural biases have clouded our judgment and made us unnecessarily narrow and even un-Biblical in our understanding of cultural diversity. We must throw out the idea that the church is the visible manifestation of the kingdom of God on earth, that Christ’s mission is to build His church, along with the idea that baptism is somehow a meaningful initiation into anything that really matters for eternity.

I am dismayed that we even need to have this debate and discussion within the PCA. The fact that our cutting-edge missiologists have led so many so far astray so easily is shocking to me. I would think that the Scriptures, the Confession, the church and the history of persecution would have strengthened us against such poisonous nonsense. We cheapen the sacrifice of bold martyrs and we mock their testimony before a hostile world when we embrace such a diluted, compromised, non-Christian “gospel” for the mission field. We take a Biblical theology of the church militant and flush it away flippantly and irresponsibly with such mis-guided mis-understandings.   

I hope everyone will take time to read the Study Committee’s report carefully and also to read David Garner’s excellent defense of the report. I also hope and pray that this false teaching movement will not divide the PCA but will instead lead to a firmer commitment to faithful missions and to a true Gospel-centered unity in the church. 

Jason A. Van Bemmel is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. This article appeared on his blog Ponderings of a Pilgrim Pastor and is used with permission.