by Phill Butler

The relationship between specialised ministries and the Church is a matter of widespread concern. But, for radio broadcasters, the matter has special significance. The vast reach of our signals and potential size of our audiences raises the level of responsibility we carry. Further, the implied credibility which broadcasters enjoy extends that responsibility. Our programs provide a model around which many individuals, families, and communities pattern their lives.

What we believe, teach, and do with regard to the Church is of great significance.

Community Orientation of Traditional Cultures

Traditional, non-western cultures have a long pattern of community-based, intensely relational structures. Whether it is extended family, caste, or tribe these cultures prize an individual's ability to establish and maintain strong relationships in the "community' established by the culture. One's personal identity is usually bound up in being a member of that community.

For Christianity's message to have effectiveness and power, we must be able to offer members of these communities an alternative community better than, or more attractive than the one in which they are presently involved.

Individualistic Orientation of the West

Since the time of the famed European mathematician and philosopher, Descartes, the west has moved increasingly away from community-based social structures and toward cultures that prize individualism.

The disintegration of families and communities in the West - and elsewhere - is now a well-documented reality, demonstrated daily by the stories and statistics in our popular media. And through its educational institutions and mass media, the West has had, and continues to have, a powerful effect on particularly the more educated and affluent of nations.

Inside the Church in the West, this individualistic view of life has a slow, often unnoticed, but nonetheless profound impact. We tend to interpret Scripture from this individualistic rather than community-based cultural context. This is despite the clear reality that both Old and New Testament activity was lived out and comes reported to us from the context of a deeply-rooted, community-based, traditional Eastern cultural setting.

Furthermore, our evangelism strategies and tactics reflect this individualistic, Western world view. From training in evangelism to evaluation of "success" we are heavily - if not almost exclusively - focused on individual conversations.

In radio broadcasting we are therefore set free from any direct, long-term responsibility for the formation and continuing health and maturity of local bodies of believers. Essentially our strategy even though we might not want to admit it, is "just preach the Gospel and the Holy Spirit will pick up the pieces and make something of it."  And while it is true as we have seen in many cases that the Spirit will "pick up the pieces" and do quite wonderful things, does this free us of the deeper, longer-term challenge of encouraging formation and long-term health of local churches, the "community of saints?"

In short, we teach explicitly and implicitly, our personal experience: individualism rather than the biblically-based understanding of community and relationships.

The West's Functional View of the Church

While we thank God for some wonderful exceptions, a large percentage of Western Christians and those influenced by the West have a functional rather than a mystical view of the Church.

We see in the New Testament record that there were, immediately following Christ's ministry and during the leadership period of the apostles, these gatherings called churches.

But, just as there are groups in society for a thousand other reasons, so the Church provides the horizontal or social aspect to Christian living. Worship, sacraments, group action are all best attempted with someone rather than privately, on your own.

It is a fairly rare experience in the Western or Western-influenced Church to find a sense of the mystical power of a local fellowship - power that allows the fellowship, as a unit, have a witness that is quite different and in some cases much more significant than individual witness.

It is even more rare that such fellowships exhibit such Kingdom qualities of life and power that the communities around the Church acknowledge with awe and respect the presence of God living in and through the local fellowships.

Community orientation of Scripture

It is always difficult to hold God's truth in one hand. Such is the case of God's treatment of the role or place of the individual and the role or place of the community. As in other paradoxes, God's character streams through the light of scripture holding both as significant, indispensable to the balance of Christ's Kingdom.

In the Old Testament the "Let us make man in our image" of Genesis 1 suggests that God dwells in community in eternity, outside of time. Man, made in God's image, would be expected then to naturally gravitate into a community setting. So we should not be surprised that when God called Abraham he promised to make Abraham a great nation. Later, after her sin and dispersion Israel, restored as a nation, would be a witness to the other nations.

In the New Testament, this same theme is given new character and power as Christ announces the new community in John's Gospel.

Note how in the book of Acts there was special impact on the surrounding communities because of what was happening among the Christians as a group. Paul elaborates the theme of the Church as a community, a visible, powerful organism for Kingdom witness and service.

Finally, it is the community of saints, the Church, that becomes the Bride of Christ in Revelation.

Summary

The majority of audiences we address are community-based cultures. In this respect they are much closer to the original character of God's created order than Western civilisation.

Christian broadcasters and other communicators must energetically work to reclaim this lost ground through renewed study and understanding of the Biblical teaching about these two kinds of witness; through experimentation and personal experience of community; and through both implicit and explicit teaching of these principles through the channels of communication available to us.

(adapted from Radio and the Local Church that first appeared in RiceFields Journal  Vol II No 1 February 1989)