Mission, culture and religious background.

John Morehead summarises an important couple of thoughts from Muck.

Those religious communities that allowed individuals to bring as much of their previous religious capital into the new religious community were more successful than those that did not. For example, early Christianity allowed converts from Judaism to bring their religious capital into the new religious community, as did Buddhists with Hindus, and Mormons with Protestants converts. Muck feels that the missiological implications for this are for Christians to find ways that people can use their religious capital in the church, and that priority should be given to positive points of contact with other religious cultures rather than dissimilarities (contra the thinking of missiologists such as David Hesselgrave and Gailyn Van Rheenen).
In Stark's research into revelation, people tend to dismiss those who claim to receive revelation as either frauds or insane. Stark disagreed with this and believed that normal people can receive God's revelation and that God's voice might indeed be heard and filtered through religious cultures in differing ways. The missiological implications for this, according to Muck, are the need for Christians to understand the context of community and its importance for understanding another religion's revelation and why it is understood the way it is in this context, and secondly, that we might consider the possibility that all people hear God in some way but that it is filtered through their cultural and religious matrix.

My question is how far this applies to the non-religious. I suspect that it does; and the question is then what is it to hear God in some way and to filter that through a non-religious cultural matrix?
Morehead's Musings: Muck Lecture: "Lessons from Mormons for Missional Religious Studies"

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