How Did You Approach Contextualization on the Mission Field?

How did you approach contextualization on the mission field?

So the task of contextualizing the gospel message to the Yembis, first and foremost, was we had to know their language and their culture to what I like to call a worldview level—to where you can handle Q&A, you can speak about abstract, you can speak about complex topics, you can tell jokes and people laugh, and then you can hear their jokes and laugh at the same time as everybody else. To be fully fluent in their language and culture.

And then to take the gospel, and to take what you know is the biblical truth—not adjust that in any way whatsoever—but to make it as relevant as possible. The aspects that the Yembies would latch on to in the biblical narrative, to highlight those, and to know the stumbling blocks—the things that they were going to have a hard time with—and to make sure we didn’t lessen the punch, but we made it clear. So if they stumbled, they stumbled at the message, not at the messenger.

And so, to make it as contextually relevant as possible, we taught in a way—we would teach in the time of day that they wanted, or that was most favorable to them. We would teach in a house that they would feel. So we don’t have a church building. We have a teaching house. And the church now gathers in the teaching house. But it has a dirt floor, it’s an open-walled thing so that the breeze can come through.

Anything we could do to lessen the barriers to their level of understanding, we tried to do. But we didn’t want to lessen the gospel in any way, shape, or form.