global 

I want to tell you about a conversation I had in Myanmar.

I was sitting with a group of pastors from ethnic minority communities in Myanmar, Chin, Karen, Kachin. For these communities, being Christian isn’t just a personal faith decision. It’s part of who you are as a people. Faith, ethnic identity, and survival are woven together in ways most Australian Christians have never had to think about.

These pastors lead congregations that have lived under persecution for generations. Their people know what it means to be shamed by the state. Displaced from their land, stripped of dignity by a majority culture that has never recognised their worth. Honour isn’t abstract for them. It’s what their communities have been fighting to hold onto for decades.

I asked one of them what part of the gospel hit hardest in his context. He pointed to Luke 15. Not the younger son’s repentance. Not even the father’s forgiveness. The moment the father saw his son and ran.

He said: in our culture, when someone has shamed the family – left, squandered, rejected their people – the community closes. You don’t run toward that person. You make them earn their way back. But this father saw him from a distance and ran. He didn’t wait for the explanation. He didn’t make him prove himself. He covered him before the village could get to him first.

For a community that has spent generations being told they are worth less – by governments, by dominant cultures, by systems built to exclude them – The father running is not a warm feeling, it is the whole gospel. God moves toward the shamed before they’ve had a chance to explain themselves.

I’ve taught that passage in Australia many times. I’d never felt its full weight until that room.

The Gospel Is Bigger Than We’ve Been Preaching It

Western Christianity runs almost entirely on one framework. Sin is breaking God’s law, Christ paid the penalty, we are forgiven and justified. It’s true. It’s biblical. But it’s one lens. And for most of the world, it’s not the primary one.

Jayson Georges, Roland Muller, and Jackson Wu have each written on this from different angles. The Bible speaks across three primary cultural lenses: guilt and innocence, shame and honour, and fear and power. Western Christianity defaulted almost entirely to the first and exported it as if it were the whole picture. It wasn’t.

Shame and honour cultures. Most of Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific. The question isn’t am I guilty – it’s am I shamed? Have I dishonoured my family, my name, my people? Christ entered the ultimate public humiliation. Crucifixion was engineered to destroy honour, not just end life. He wore our shame so we could wear his honour. Seated with him at the right hand of the Father (Hebrews 12:2).

Fear and power cultures. Parts of Africa, animistic contexts across Asia and the Pacific. The world is alive with spiritual forces. Ancestors. Curses. Powers that can harm or protect. The primary question isn’t guilt or shame. It’s who has authority?

One of our students in Africa told me he used to dance for the devil. He painted his face, and wore the bones of animals. He danced before the shaman. In West African traditional religion, the shaman is the intermediary between the living and the spirit world. The dancer before him isn’t a performer. He’s functioning in a spiritually significant role, embodying or invoking a spirit, becoming a vessel. The face paint is ritual preparation. A boundary crossing from ordinary person to something else entirely.

Coming to Christ meant leaving all of that. And leaving is not a simple thing. Initiation into these societies involves oaths, spiritual covenants, community identity. Leaving is considered betrayal. In some cases it carries real social consequences and threats. There’s a phrase in the culture around these societies: ifa mo. Do not speak it. He told me anyway.

What he said when he described his life now wasn’t complicated. He said the fear was gone. He’d carried it his whole life. And then one day it wasn’t there anymore.

That’s Colossians 2:15. Christ disarmed the powers and made a public spectacle of them. For a man who spent years as a vessel for those powers, that’s not a doctrine. It’s his testimony. .

What This Means for Your Suburb

That pastor in Myanmar wasn’t doing creative theology. He was reading Luke 15 in his cultural mother tongue. That student in Africa wasn’t describing a psychological shift. He was describing a power encounter with the living Christ. Same Jesus. Different mother tongue. Both completely real.

The communities in our cities who process the world through shame and honour, or through spiritual power, are often sitting just outside the reach of our church plants. Not because they’re resistant to Jesus. Because the Jesus we’re presenting doesn’t speak to the deepest questions they’re actually asking.

A Filipino woman in Parramatta carrying the weight of family shame isn’t primarily asking how to get her legal record cleared before God. She’s asking can I be restored? Can I belong again? Is there honour on the other side of this? The gospel answers every one of those questions. 

The gospel doesn’t change. Jesus is Lord. He died. He rose. He’s the only way to the Father. None of that moves.

But Scripture speaks to every human being, in every culture, in every century. That’s not just contextualisation. That’s just the Bible doing what it has always done.

How much of it are you actually preaching? And who in your suburb is waiting to hear the part you’ve been leaving out?

Next: Part 3 — What to actually do. Practical steps for planters building churches in multicultural Australia.