Culture and/or Geography

In the last 2,000 years, we have seen the advance in the gospel that include both culture and geography.  

Just take for example the Indo-European Homeland.  They were among the 5th millennium BC horse breeders of the East European steppes and that is almost universally accepted by scholars open-minded enough to synthesize all evidence: linguistic and archaeological. Many linguists have a dogmatic aversion to non-linguistic evidence, an over-simplified view that ignores geography! Linguistic diversity depends on factors like terrain: diversity in the Caucasus mountains, for example, implies persistence, not origin.  

Take a look at another culture although there are some serious differences among Charismatics, Pentecostals and Faith "people" in regards to how the gifts are defined and manifested in Christian life, there is a fundamental agreement about them among all three groups: that they are legitimate realities that can no longer be explained away. The Church stands at the brink of the World and Age to Come and is in dire need of the divine empowerment for evangelization and edification that openness to the gifts would provide. There are also vast segments of the Body of Christ who dismiss the possibility of Christians being enabled to serve God and people through extraordinary and supernaturally provided giftings not attributed to human skill, wisdom or talent.

What about the Renaissance – a movement or period of vigorous artistic and intellectual activity; rebirth; revival? We see this in our First Nations in Canada.  There are many factors contributing to the renaissance of traditional Aboriginal values and mores and the growing conviction that Aboriginal people are much more than victims of non-Aboriginal invasion and colonization. At least one of those factors can be traced to declining pressure within the last fifty years of active and aggressive colonization processes. Within the last several decades, Aboriginal people have been able to create enough cultural space and freedom to analyze and integrate concepts of “loss" and “impermanence” on their terms. They have taken opportunities that have been presented to inscribe new relationship between themselves and the dominant culture, and to create new and renewed links between themselves and their immediate world. This has the effect of bringing Aboriginal people together to work on issues that have long been dormant and hidden, even from their own view, and allows them to confront other issues that have run rampant in their social structures for far too long.

The growing, self-directed shift in Aboriginal communities from social and cultural disintegration to healing and community well-being will provide the impetus for research in this area.