AEC2000

Assistant Professor of Missions and Evangelism, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana

Return to Point 3

Return to Beginning of This Presentation | Return to AEC 2000 Index

____________________________________

What else does it take for a church to faithfully and effectively communicate the gospel cross-culturally?

What do I mean? Well, culture is a lens through which a people have come to see the world, and by which their attitudes are formed and their actions governed.

But notice that I used—as we usually do when describing culture—the words "they" and "their." Too often, churches forget when they set out to learn about their culturally different neighbors that they, too, reflect cultural assumptions, beliefs, values, and biases.

Imagine, if you will, that in your own country—from the time of the first people . . . today . . . and far into the future—everyone that was ever born, or will be born, was born with two legs, two arms, two eyes, a nose, a mouth and a pair of sunglasses. The color of the lenses in the sunglasses is yellow. No one has ever thought it strange that the sunglasses are there, because they’ve always been there, and they are part of the human body. Everyone has them.

What makes the sunglasses yellow are the values, attitudes, ideas, beliefs and assumptions that North American people have in common. Everything that North Americans have seen, learned, or experienced (past, present and future) has entered into the brain through the yellow lenses. Everything has been filtered and interpreted through all these values and ideas that have made the lenses yellow. The yellow glasses thus represent, if you will, our "Americanness."

Thousands of miles away in another country (Japan, for example)—from the time of the first people . . . today . . . and far into the future—everyone that was ever born, or will be born, was born with two legs, two arms, two eyes, a nose, a mouth and a pair of sunglasses. The color of the sunglasses is blue. No one has ever thought it strange that the sunglasses are there, because they’ve always been there, and they are part of the human body. Everyone has them. Everything that the Japanese people see, learn, and experience is filtered through their blue lenses.

A traveler who wants to go to Japan may have enough sense to realize that to learn about Japan more thoroughly he will have to acquire some blue Japanese sunglasses so that he can "see" Japan. When the traveler arrives in Japan, he wears the Japanese sunglasses, stays for two months and feels he really is learning about the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the people of Japan. He actually "sees" Japan wearing their sunglasses. He comes home to his own country and declares that he is now an "expert" on Japan and that the culture of Japan is green!

What happened? He didn’t remove his own American filters of yellow. You see, before we are open and free to learn about another culture (and put on their sunglasses) we have to remove our own, so that our interpretation of the new culture will not be "colored" or filtered by our own values, attitudes and beliefs. Our obligation is not to judge another culture, but to learn about it. We need to develop "double vision" or the ability to see more than one side of an idea.

How do you remove the yellow sunglasses? It’s really quite simple. By being able to understand and describe the values, attitudes, beliefs, ideas and assumptions of North American culture—and in the case of the churches we represent—Swiss, German, Dutch, and Russian-American culture—the lighter the yellow color becomes and the more blue the other culture becomes. The more we can verbalize and really understand what it is that makes us what we are, the easier it becomes to lighten the yellow filters, and put on the blue lenses, and see a truer shade of blue. (From "How to Learn about a Culture" by Michael C. Mercil in Planning and Conducting Re-entry Transition Workshops, a publication of Youth for Understanding.)

The apostles who remained in Jerusalem when persecution came were not, then, in a position to offer the gospel to the Greeks. The reason was that they had not yet figured out how to remove their Semitic glasses. The Hellenists, Greek-speaking Jews who had become Christians were in a better position. For one thing, linguistically, they were kin to the Jews they encountered. Moreover, they had the advantage of a good translation of the scriptures to help them—the Septuagint. What is more, while they maintained the kerygma, "the gospel tradition," they had received, they were not hesitant to contextualize it. For instance, we are told that they "baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus" (Acts 8:16). What an arresting word that must have been! To translate "rabbi," (the term the Aramaic Jews used) as "Lord" was an astonishing thing to do. For one thing, it was the term of absolute allegiance reserved for the emperor himself. You could get in trouble for transferring that allegiance elsewhere! Even more astonishing, though, was that it was also the word used in the Septuagint for Yahweh!

But it worked! People got it! And they believed it, Jesus was Lord! Why did it work? In a way, you could say, it was because the Hellenist Jews could see blue, where the apostles could see only green.

______________________________

Continue to Point 5 - A Look at the Most Effective Way to Communicate the Gospel Cross-Culturally

Return to Beginning of This Presentation | Return to AEC 2000 Index

Taken from A New Humanity: Anabaptist Ministry Among Many Peoples (© 2000 New Life Ministries). Permission to reproduce for local church use only is granted. Provided by New Life Ministries, 6404 S Calhoun St, Fort Wayne, IN 46807, through its web site at www.NewLifeMinistries-NLM.org

 2000-2008 New Life Ministries (www.NewLifeMinistries-NLM.org). All Rights Reserved.
(see information on our copyright policy)

Top of Page