Nate Showalter (ThD) has pastored international churches in Taipei, Shanghai and Hong Kong. He is author of The End of a Crusade: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions and the Great War (Scarecrow, 1998). He and his wife Chris recently led a marriage workshop in Beijing.
Somewhere between Kunming and Beijing, between my father’s clickety-clack and this near-silent glide, I realized how much the world can change in a lifetime—and how faith, like memory, must find its voice again amid the noise and speed of progress.
That this non-Western contextualizing will leave many of our Western theologies and “brands” diminished or transformed could encourage us to repent for the scandal of our divisions…and to redouble our efforts to fulfill one of the final earthly prayers of Jesus that “we all be one.”