Engaging Culture as a Faithful Missionary

Posted in Theology No Comments

Imagine for a moment that you had perfect understanding of the Bible.  Not only that, but imagine that you had the ability to perfectly interpret God’s word.  Being a passionate follower of Christ, you form a plan to move to the other side of the world in order to share God’s word with others.  In God’s providence, you’re able find a few churches that are willing to work together to send you to the
mission field.

So here’s where you’re at:  You have a perfect understanding of
God’s word and the ability to explain what God meant with 100 % accuracy, and you have a network of churches working together with absolute unity. 

Then you arrive at your final destination. You begin your ministry by faithfully unfolding the truths of God’s word.  You continue to do this daily.  As time goes on, people begin to contact you from back home, and you fill them in on your faithful teaching ministry. But you also express a slight degree of disappointment due to a lack of response—people are not growing and changing. Ultimately, you determine that this is just a difficult mission field, and you simply need to persevere. Years pass by and still you continue ministering faithfully. In fact, you end up spending the rest of your life perfectly explaining the word of God to these people.

This sounds like a wonderful scenario. It seems like the perfect use of a talent that has clearly been given to you by God. But let me introduce a slight twist. You have been carefully teaching the word of God in English. But the people you spent your life ministering to don’t speak English. You have been completely faithful and entirely accurate in your teaching, but you have been speaking in a language that the people simply cannot understand.

With that extra bit of information, we would all agree that this potentially perfect scenario turns out to be disastrous. Rather than an example of a faithful ministry, it becomes an example of a wasted life and a misuse of God’s gift. We would all be quick to say that this example is ludicrous.

But here’s the point: you may not be dealing with people who live overseas. You may even be ministering to people who speak English. But are you really speaking the same language? Don’t be too quick to say yes. Have you invested any time in learning the “language” of the culture in which you live? How much time do you spend listening to the people around you? How do they view the world around them? What are their hopes and fears? What do they believe about God and life and death?

Only when we understand the language and worldview of the people living around us can we effectively speak truth into their lives. Only then can we be faithful missionaries to the mission field in which God has placed us.