In a very important recent book, missiologist Darrell Whiteman tells a revealing story a couple of missionary who had been preaching in a specific community. Without realizing it, the missionary gave offense by wearing expensive shoes in a spot where people couldn’t afford shoes of any type. For Whiteman, this anecdote illustrates how much missionaries have to learn—and what number of presumptions they may have to abandon—so as to bring the gospel to people in other cultures.
Whiteman’s book Crossing Cultures with the Gospel: Anthropological Wisdom for Effective Christian Witness, challenges his readers—and missionaries particularly—to acknowledge the possible ethnocentrism of their perspective, which may distort and impede their ability to speak well across cultural boundaries. As he explains, each culture has its own ways of understanding and coping with the issues of life. All of us understand biblical truths in ways in which seem natural to us in our own cultures but to not individuals who have grown up in other cultures.
In each community, traditions of communication and interaction develop over time, leading to distinct customs. Every community has its own sense of the past, its own traditions of loyalty and obligation, its own rules of courtesy, and its own conceptions of virtue and honor. If missionaries are to speak with individuals who have grown up in other cultures, argues Whiteman, they have to lay aside their very own presuppositions and cultural conventions and commit to acquiring knowledge of unfamiliar customs and ways of thought.
Watching, listening, and asking questions
The missionary project, as Whiteman reminds us, is to insert the universal message of the gospel “inside the very heart of a culture.” As he observes, “Unless the gospel connects deeply with the culture of the people, there can be little or no transformation.”
Furthermore, if the gospel is unnecessary inside a specific community, the people might well distort it to suit their very own presuppositions. Whiteman recalls a community in Madang Province of Papua New Guinea, whose members heard the gospel from missionaries and turned it into the claim that after being baptized, blessed by a pastor, and living good lives, their spirits would depart their bodies and go as much as heaven three days after dying. Even leaving aside such extreme misinterpretations, it’s likely that a poorly understood message can be considered irrelevant, boring, or unimportant. Unfortunately, says Whiteman, “seldom is [the gospel] heard and seen nearly as good news.”
It was firsthand experience that brought Whiteman to the conviction that missionaries need higher instruction on communicating inside other cultures. After living for 2 years with missionaries within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he realized that that they had little awareness of how the gospel was reaching the local people. It seemed evident to him that preparation for missionary service ought to incorporate training in cross-cultural communication.
Some people, he notes, spend years taking courses in Bible and theology, but these studies leave them only partially equipped to transmit the gospel to a different people. They learn interpret biblical passages, but they’re unprepared to interpret the situations they may encounter in a wierd community.
Before going along with his wife to the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, Whiteman accomplished a PhD in anthropology. After serving abroad several years, he joined the college of Asbury Theological Seminary, eventually becoming dean of its E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Ministry, where he served for 21 years. Along along with his seminary duties, Whiteman worked with many organizations to assist aspiring missionaries learn to speak to people in other cultures. He has traveled broadly, visiting as many as 78 countries to show missionaries and churches about delivering the gospel across cultural boundaries.
Anyone who wants to do that well, Whiteman says, should pay attention to the messages we inevitably convey even without uttering a word. As he writes, “The lions’ share of evangelism is what’s spoken nonverbally. The tone of our voice, our lifestyle and our behavior are all communicating volumes of data.” Indeed, what local people see and listen to within the behavior of holiday makers can influence whether they may need to know them or learn from them.
How, then, is the deeply felt sense of God’s like to be brought across the boundary between missionaries and the people they need to succeed in? Whiteman recommends a practical method that involves watching, listening, and asking questions.
As an example, he describes a method he got here to know among the beliefs about spirits held by people in his Solomon Islands community. A friend had stopped by for a visit, and after staying some time, he said as he left, “I believe it’s protected for me to go home now.” Asked why, the friend explained that he had come from the bush, where malign spirits had attached to him. He had stopped by to permit the spirits to dissipate before going home, where he had a newborn child he desired to protect from their attacks.
Fundamentally, the cross-cultural project requires following the instance of Christ, who allowed himself, as he took on human flesh, to accumulate the cultural conventions of a first-century Jewish community. “The Incarnation,” writes Whiteman, “is greater than a very important theological doctrine about God becoming a human being. It can be a model for cross-cultural ministry. Being incarnational means we empty ourselves of our pride, prejudices, personal agendas, ambitions and lifestyle so as to enter deeply into the world of one other culture. Incarnation often means downward mobility.”
Some missionaries, Whiteman regrets, never make that transition. He points to a missionary who disliked the food of the people he was alleged to reach, which gave him little probability of being effective. Missionaries can unknowingly offend their host communities by violating their conceptions of correct behavior. For instance, one missionary offended his neighbors by talking to his dog. They believed that humans only talk over with other humans, and so they wondered what type of relationship this man had with the dog.
A second conversion
In fact, argues Whiteman, the commitment to incarnational outreach requires a “second conversion.” Beyond their conversion to Christ, missionaries have to experience a “cleansing of unnecessary assumptions concerning the gospel and the way in which that it’s to be communicated.”
That takes work and time. Whiteman relates the story of 1 missionary who lived in a Bangladesh community for 18 years before feeling like he understood it well enough to make the gospel appealing to its people.
Whiteman explains the perfect of a “second conversion” like this:
We take our understanding of the gospel, as culturally conditioned because it is, and we develop a relationship with people who find themselves different from us of their culture. We try and read the Bible through their eyes and to know and interpret it from the attitude of their worldview, not our worldview. When this begins to occur, there’ll not be only a one-way arrow pointing from the missionary communicator to the non-Christian receptor. Now arrows will go each directions since the missionary will learn many recent things about God after they view life through the lens of their host culture.
Essential to the second conversion, says Whiteman, is humility. Missionaries can come to understand the experience and perspective of others by moving into dialogue with them. As they develop friendships, they’ll turn into conversant with recent ways of considering and, notably, discover how other people see God of their worlds. As Paul declared, God has not left himself without witness in any society (Acts 14:17).
Whiteman describes the profession of a German missionary who saw “the image of God within the Tamil people” of southern India and sought “to cause them to a fuller knowledge of God as revealed in Jesus.” The way that an imprint of God already exists amongst a people is usually a place to begin for explaining the gospel. Paul, in his speech on Mars Hill, presented Christ because the unknown God that the Athenians had already been worshipping (Acts 17:22–31).
The book also mentions a missionary in Nigeria who learned a very important lesson from an area elder on how his service was perceived. When the missionary exulted in having been sent to those people by God, the elder responded, “We are glad you may have come, however it is our Igbo god Chukwu who sent you to us so we could learn more about God, now that you may have told us about Jesus.” Whiteman writes that God already has a witness in every culture “at every period of human history.” This makes the missionary project exciting and inspiring; as we see how the gospel becomes meaningful to a different people, we “learn more about what God is doing on the planet.”
Whiteman stresses that, ultimately, the basic technique of crossing boundaries is friendship. Miscommunication is inevitable when people come together from different cultures, but as Peter says, “love covers over a mess of sins” (1 Pet. 4:8). Miscues, blunders, and misunderstandings needn’t derail a relationship if people like one another and luxuriate in one another’s company. There is not any substitute, concludes Whiteman, for kindness, respect, and love—qualities of the Savior who commissioned the missionary enterprise.
Robert Canfield is an emeritus professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.
