Words Apart: A New Language Proficiency Video Series
We have an unspoken problem in the missions world. Missions professors, missionaries, and pastors of sending churches all study Scripture and debate how to best engage in the task Jesus has given us in the Great Commission. While they discuss how and why, they often overlook one key skill: that the missionaries who are serving overseas actually speak the languages of the people that they’re ministering to.
Our culture demands instant results, even in the area of missions. While there’s been significant pushback on that expectation of instant results in church planting, there are other ways an “everything now” mentality can run a mission aground before it sets sail, especially in language learning.
Unsurprisingly, learning a new language to fluency is really difficult. And it is slow. While church planting usually requires a group putting in the hard work, language acquisition is often an individual process, requiring many hours. Even if a missionary is afforded the chance to study language and culture full-time (not always a given), it can take two years. When other responsibilities like family, illness, ministry, or immigration processes compete for attention, this number often grows to three or four years–– or more.
These are years of growth that few in a missionary’s sending church can see or relate to. After all, most people in an American sending church are monolingual. Few will have a sense for the linguistic ability needed, and fewer still will be familiar with the ACTFL Proficiency Scale. But the truth is, language learning occurs on a spectrum; a new learner starts with nothing, gradually adding more and more ability as they study and practice. It is not a binary question of “fluent” or “not fluent,” but rather a progression.
Sadly, many of our churches are simply not prepared to hear from missionaries that after two years on the field they are still engaged in language study. We expect results! “How many people have you led to the Lord?” our churches might ask after our first year on the field. “How many churches have you planted?”
It is these very questions, though they may be asked by people with the noblest of hearts, that begins a process that in the end will undermine the very goal we are all pursuing–– to see mature churches established in the places where our missionaries are laboring.
A common response, on the part of missionaries and sending churches, to these years of seemingly fruitless toil has been to bypass those thousands of patient, unseen hours mastering the language. Mission agencies, motivated by the urgency of their task and anxious to report good news back to their donors, will ask their workers to begin ministry and learn the language along the way.
A missionary who doesn’t know the language and culture well will inevitably miscommunicate important aspects of truth in any worldview-level conversation. It is one thing to tell the vendor at the market “I would like a kilogram of tomatoes” or to ask the bus driver to stop at the corner. It’s quite another thing to explain to a Buddhist or Muslim neighbor that Jesus is the propitiation for their sins and to communicate clearly what that means.
In fact, the situation typically gets worse. Missionaries who’ve stopped language study after a year find out sooner or later that they simply don’t speak the language well enough to teach God’s Word. Often, they will begin to cast about for strategies that don’t require the verbal proclamation of God’s Word in the people’s heart language.
Yet based on the Great Commission, the primary responsibility of the missionary and evangelist is the proclamation of Christ and His death, burial and resurrection, and as such, they need to be competent in the language and culture of those among whom they minister.
However, sending churches often struggle to understand how to hold their workers accountable to any kind of standard in this area, or to know how to speak into a missions agency about a language that no one on their staff speaks. To that end, we’ve created a video series for missionaries and their sending churches: “Words Apart: What Language Proficiency Really Looks Like.”
The Words Apart videos are simple. There’s no test or leader’s guide. I’d only encourage you to spend 30 minutes watching this with your missions team, send it to your church leadership, and share it with young aspiring missionaries.
There are two key elements we want to communicate in these videos:
- To help sending churches understand language acquisition. Language is more complex than fluency and non-fluency. In these videos you’ll have a chance to hear what a learner sounds like at Beginner levels of language learning all the way up to Superior.
- To mirror to English speakers what missionaries sound like to indigenous speakers when they share the gospel at an Intermediate Mid or High level (which is the typical standard for many missions sending organizations).
One of the gifts of a missionary is that they tend to be social people – the kind of men and women who love people and being around them. Most are adventurous, and the best of us are affable and outgoing. Think of these missionaries when you watch these videos. These outgoing gifts are only as useful as their language is. If we are sending our best, as we ought to, we need to ensure that they are equipped “for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12). And that includes language learning. A person who speaks the language at an Intermediate level is poorly equipped for the task of gospel work to unreached languages.
When missionaries have the patience (and support from their sending church) to endure the laborious hours of culture and language study , they will be able to deploy those gifts most effectively. Not only can this learning process be used by the Holy Spirit to “crucify them with Christ” (Galatians 2:20) and thus draw them closer to Him, but it will bring the light of Christ to a people who have never heard of Him.
One of our goals at Missionary is to help churches respond patiently to cultural pressures to have everything now in a way that helps churches to send faithfully. We want churches to understand the need for learning language at a high level, to understand what the full spectrum of linguistic fluency looks like and as a result, to be able to better keep the missionaries sent out accountable to a standard that allows them to declare the message of Christ “clearly, which is how [they] ought to speak.” (Colossians 4:4)