What Are the Challenges and Opportunities of Working in Animistic Context?

What are some of the unique challenges or opportunities of working in an animistic context?

The challenges and opportunities in an animistic context are pretty apparent from the get-go.

One, you are fighting against something that you've got to know, and you've got to be ready—that they are going to try and syncretize. They're going to try and mix the gospel with their existing belief system. That is very common in almost every culture, but the animistic worldview particularly is suited for mixing. And so that was a challenge to us: that they would keep this separate. You can choose one or the other. You cannot mix these two. That was challenge number one. That was a really big challenge.

The opportunity was that they had a—pretty much, not a blank slate—but their understanding of the gospel was going to be so new. If we could teach this in a way that their ears and their minds could understand, if we could teach this in a way that was fresh and that was new, this could have a really powerful effect.

And so that's the opportunity with animistic peoples—which are most of the peoples today. They've syncretized Islam. They've syncretized Hinduism, Buddhism. But most people groups on the earth are animistic, with that thin veneer over top of it—whether that's Roman Catholicism, whatever it is. And it's the wise missionary's job to get to that level, to get to that: what do they believe at their root? What's at their heart?

And so animistic peoples—and Yembi Yembi was an example of this—they present certain challenges, but there's some tremendous opportunities as well.