The Journey 300
Saturday, October 27
Read: Acts 10
    We all know that gospel message transcends culture, race and religion. The message of gospel is now seen by many groups of people, that could be incorporated in their life, in their own social, cultural and religious milieu. There was a time when the thought process was that if one had to be a Christian one had to leave the very social fabric in which one was born and adopt the lifestyle and cultural practice of the church or the person who shared the gospel with the individual. But certain developments in the northern part of India, especially in the state of Punjab, reveals a landmark trend that challenges the present style of functioning of the Christian church and the way gospel is presented and way it is practiced both in an individual’s life and also in the corporate matters of worship and ministry. The group that now missiologist are both supporting and also criticizing is a group called Yeshu Satsang. Yeshu is the Hindi word for Jesus and Satsang is a Punjabi word for  gathering of people or in other words fellowship. Thus today you have believers in Punjab who calls themselves Yeshu Satsang, who join together for fellowship and worship. When they meet for fellowship and worship, they use the traditional ways of worship like singing of bhajans and kirtans and use traditional instruments that people of Punjab are familiar with. What is unique of these Yeshu Satsang is that they also have communion service and other sacraments, but the only difference is that the communion elements that they use is not bread and wine, but coconut milk and other food that they are familiar. They also have the sacrament of baptism for the new converts. But one of the important aspects that the group Yeshu Satsang stress is that when you become a member of Yeshu Satsang and wants to become a Christian you don't have to forsake your social and cultural practices in which you were born, nor your social and cultural identity. So you have a church that exist in the Sikh and Hindu cultural traditions, practicing and witnessing ones faith in the cultural and social setting that they were born. These Yeshu Satsang began about seven to eight years back and now it is presumed that there are lot of people who are interested in the message of gospel and want to have the life style of the believer who belong to the Yeshu Satsang group. In fact there is a Yeshu Satsang group in Toronto, Canada and they have a Facebook page too.  When we hear of groups named Yeshu Satsang, I am sure people in this part of the world especially in Europe and North America will wonder and may sometime feel that this is not the way ones faith and ones commitment to the Lord is to be practiced. But as said in the beginning, the message of the gospel transcends all cultural, religious and social context, making transformation in the lives of people. It is in such a context that we need to analyze and think whether as members of the church, whether through our expression of faith and witness, have diluted the message of the gospel and whether we are blind to the new patterns of church and fellowship groups that want to make Jesus Christ not a model of institutionalized religion but a life style that each one of us has to follow.
       We are meditating on the theme “ Transformed Living” and the portion that we shall use for our meditation is from Acts 10:1-16. This is one of the portion that is an eye opener in the context of the early church especially with regards to ones understanding about the mission and ministry of the church. Here we find God being pleased with a man named Cornelius. Cornelius was not a Jew, he was Roman Centurion. According to the traditional understanding that existed, Jews believed that they were the chosen ones and that God would not like to show his favor to anyone else other than Jews. It is at this context you find God communicating through his angel that He is pleased with Cornelius. As God communicates his favor to Cornelius, God is also teaching a lesson to Peter by showing his disfavor when Peter refuses to eat what God had purified. This was the vision that Peter had seen. Soon both Peter and Cornelius meet according to the divine plan and that is when Peter makes the most wonderful faith exclamation “God treats everyone one the same, He welcomes everyone who receives him”. Thus you find a new way by which Holy Spirit worked in the early church and it is for the first time that a non Jew becomes a believer and Cornelius experiences the power of Holy Spirit. Peter is later reprimanded by fellow Jewish Christians saying that this type of mission and ministry was not acceptable. But God moved in a powerful way in the early church and later in Acts 15 you find the landmark decision taken by the Jerusalem Council. As  members of institutionalized church’s or non denominational church, each of us claim that we follow the message of the gospel by the way  we live our Christian life and do our ministry. But let us remember that it is God who works through the Holy Spirit to create new landmarks and new and fresh avenues so that message of the gospel transcends not only cultural, social and religious boundaries but also all limitations and discrimination that we carry in our mind with our own understanding of the gospel and what it means to be a “church’.