HAVE YOU EVER found yourself in a place where you couldn’t speak the language? How did you communicate? Today, things are easier, with translation apps available on your phone. But I didn’t have those when I used to travel internationally; heck, I didn’t have a phone. Once, I flew to France to speak at and participate in a conference there, conducted in English. Outside the conference, however, as a tourist, I had to dust off my high school French, occasionally throwing in some hand gestures to fill in my missing vocabulary.

On the final day before returning home, I had dinner in the hotel dining room with a couple of my American colleagues. They didn’t speak a word of French, so I had to translate the menu for them. The waiter helped, but his English also seemed limited.

But it wasn’t as limited as he first let on. When I made the effort to ask him in French if they had decaffeinated coffee, he seemed almost offended, as if I were an uncouth American suggesting that the French were a primitive people. “Decaf?” he answered, in perfect English. “Of course.”

Learning a new language as an adult can also be a challenge. When we’re still babies and toddlers, our brains are constantly being sculpted by experience, including the languages we hear spoken around us, implicitly learning the basic sounds and rhythms. That’s not to say our brains stop learning from experience when we get older, but we’re much more open to being molded at that early age, particularly when it comes to language.

And with language comes a whole host of other things we learn from the world and culture around us: values, social rules, ways of thinking. These can become like the air we breathe, invisible and taken for granted — until we have to live or work with someone who comes from another culture. We may be able to communicate at a basic level in a common language, but that doesn’t mean we see things the same way, have the same values and priorities.

Something similar is true of becoming a Christian. We can “learn the language,” so to speak, so we can fit in with other believers. But that’s not the same thing as being transformed by what we’ve heard, so that we no longer see the world in the same way.

Think of how this may have been true of John’s community. Part of the confusion is that some of the folks in the community sounded like Christians but didn’t act like it. They had translated the words of the gospel into the thought world of…well, the world as John defines it. That’s why he says the following about the false teachers who had left the community:

They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. (1 John 4:5, NIV)

Put differently, they speak the world’s language, even while using Christian vocabulary. They use the name of Jesus, but have very different ideas of who Jesus was. As Eugene Peterson paraphrases John’s words in The Message:

These people belong to the Christ-denying world. They talk the world’s language and the world eats it up.

DON’T GET ME wrong. The cause of the gospel can be well-served by people who learn other languages and cultures; just ask a missionary. After all, given John’s insistence on the Incarnation, we need to appreciate what it means for God to come to us in the flesh, in a specific human body located in a specific place and time, speaking a specific language in a specific cultural context. The entire Bible has been translated into hundreds of languages, and the New Testament by itself, hundreds more.

Our missionary work and understanding of the gospel, however, always runs the risk of sneaking in values and assumptions that may be invisible to us. An American missionary, for example, may bring the gospel to another land. They may have studied the language and the culture. They may have figured out how to communicate biblical truth in a way that people of that culture would understand.

But that’s not the same thing as being aware of one’s own culture and how it influences the process. We could put the question this way: is that missionary helping people understand what it would mean to be Christian in their own cultural context, or what it means to be an American Christian? Those aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but they’re not the same thing either.

IN JOHN’S COMMUNITY, therefore, it may have been that some folks had received the gospel enthusiastically, without realizing the extent to which they were filtering the words through the values, beliefs, and priorities of their own culture. They already held to some version of Gnosticism, and were eager to promote Christianity as Gnosticism 2.0. Those in the community who resisted them were seen as unenlightened and backwards, in need of correction. When that failed, they left, finding a more eager audience for their ideas outside the community instead.

Who knows? Someone may even have written a best-seller, or started a new and popular church.

All of this, of course, is speculation. John doesn’t give us much to go on. But that doesn’t stop us from learning from his words. We ourselves are people of our own time, place, and culture. That’s intrinsic to our humanity; it can’t be otherwise. We speak our own native tongue, but also have our own native values and ways of thinking that we’ve internalized from our environment and experience.

It’s to the glory of God that the gospel might spread to every tribe and tongue, every people and nation. Some of my most moving experiences have been when I was among people who were worshiping God in a language completely foreign to me.

But we need to be wise about the extent to which our own cultural assumptions are coloring the way we interpret and communicate the gospel. Those who left John’s community, it seems, failed to do this. They spoke the language of the world and found a ready audience there — but pressed the gospel into the world’s mold, possibly without even realizing they were doing so.

Let’s not make the same mistake.