Why is it important to learn the heart language of the people group you are working among?

One of the challenges with this style of missions, the cross-cultural incarnational church planting method, is that you have to learn two languages. You have to have a national language that you can generally just live in the country you're in, you can do business in the country you're in, you can deal with the government in the country you're in. But for the sake of planting and the Great Commission of going to the ends of the earth, we are moved into an unreached language group, and they have their own language.

And so it's hard to understand, as a foreigner who only knows one language, or grew up just learning one language. But when you meet somebody who knows a couple different languages, you understand they generally think, process, reason, dream, believe, persuade in a heart language, in a main language. And so when you talk about bringing the gospel, and you talk about bringing the truth of God, the truth of Christ, to a people, they need to be able to wrestle with that in the language that they think most deeply and critically in.

So for us as a team, as we come in, it's vital to us that we learn the second language, this heart language of this language group, to such a high level that we can produce a translation of the Scripture, so they can see the beauty, the wonder of Christ in that language so that effectively reaches their heart. There's nothing about the missionary that saves anybody. It's just by the Word of God. And so if they don't have the Word of God in their heart language, in that mother tongue, they'll never understand that hope that comes through Christ. And so for us, we endeavor and press forward through the many grueling years of language fluency.

The other thing is to understand: language and culture are enmeshed. They cannot be separated. And to learn language just as a pure academic science is never going to allow you to effectively communicate, because culture is always enmeshed there. We see this all the time in the Muslim holidays that are around us, because the people group that we're in practices folk Islam. And so while there's this veneer of Islam over the top of what they do, there is very much a lot of animism and paganism that they still practice.

And it's no different in America. I don't know how many people I've talked to that have gone to an Easter service and yet later that day participated in an Easter egg hunt. And so our people do these same things, where they do an Islamic practice and then they head off and do an animistic practice. And not understanding that culture makes it very hard to speak truth to the heart of the people, without understanding what they truly believe and where they place their hope.

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