This week, Jana, the kids, and I have the privilege of being the missionary family that this year's family camp at Bass Lake Bible Camp. I will be speaking for the missionary chapels and will leading the teen Bible study. Because I don't know if we will have access to email there, I am going to post this before we leave. We will give a report when we return. Please pray for effective ministry and enduring relationships to be built.
Yesterday afternoon, we left Colorado Springs to head back to Minnesota. This was the close of a great five weeks of training. Reflecting back, we built some great relationships with other missionary candidates, and we learned many valuable lessons through the lectures and discussions.
Now that we are back home, we will begin our traveling schedule again. Please pray for us as we take the opportunity to present God's work in Tanzania.
FYI, we currently have 63% of our support. Pray with us that God would make His provision through His people.
This past week we took the opportunity to look over a list of 50 different values and rate each value with a number between 1 and 5 as it applied to us personally. To give you an idea, some of these were:
Having intimate friendships/ Politeness/ Equality with others/ Achievement/ Adventure/ Job satisfaction/ Justice/ Variety/ Cleanliness/ Freedom/ Loyalty/ Respect/ Mobility/ Education/ Family/ Privacy/ Doctrinal correctness/ Honesty/ Hard work/ Safety/ Being influential/ Experience/ Health/ Routine
After we rated ourselves we were to list our highest values and evaluate them in light of our host culture, asking: "Will they be affirmed?"; "Will they be challenged?"; "Will they need to change?"; and finally "If they need to change, then what new values will you have to cultivate?"
Needless to say, it was a valuable exercise in making us more aware of some of the things we depend on now that will be removed or take a different form when we move to Tanzania.
To continue from yesterday, here are two other case studies that were presented in class. They were intended to prompt discussion about the difficult choices that a missionary needs to make when crossing cultures.
COMPARTMENTALIZATION OF THE TWO WORLDS
Case Study #3
John & Jen McDonald together with their two young girls are Kingdom workers in Bagalore, Karnatuka, India. They work hard at identifying and bonding with the nationals.
John and Jen adapt themselves to whatever aspect of the Indian culture they are in. Often in a typical day, they move from their American culture to the Bangalore culture, and from one context to another within the Indian culture itself. Jen often exclaims: "We visit with Brahmin leaders in a village in the morning, with untouchables under bridges in the afternoon, and with government officials the next day." John quickly adds "This requires 'shifting gears' mentally. We have learned to separate the different cultures in our minds." When some close national friends were asked about their view of the McDonald's lifestyle choices, they made the following comments: "We Indians talk among ourselves wondering why their two-story house has an upstairs that is American, and the downstairs is tribal Indian? Recently we got to read the reports and articles they wrote for their home churches in America talking about life and ministry in Bangalore. This was interesting as we had occasionally observed them in the company of local government officials as well as foreign visitors. When they are with these people they drive them around in their own car. Yet when with us they take public transport. We see dramatic changes in their behavior and so suspect John and Jen privately admitted that they often struggle to cope with the mental stress created by this moving from one culture to another. The McDonalds feel that this compartmentalization of the two worlds they live in has from time to time led to confusion ad insecurity and, in extreme situations, to an identity crisis and cultural schizophrenia.
Case Study #4
Corb and Jane Walker are newly weds living and ministering cross-culturally in Sumatra. Corb and Jane believe their strength lies in the fact that they are not tied to their American culture and are able to see the world through the eyes of their Sumatran hosts. In spite of this they recognize that in some sense they are still "outsiders." Despite this acknowledgement, the community leaders describe this Kingdom couple as being "migrant missionaries" who are "exemplary local citizens." Church elders frequently boast that the Walkers are different to the other foreigners who speak of America as "home" and hope to retire there someday. Corb and Jane acknowledge however that it is impossible to discard their American culture in order to better identify with their hosts. It's their belief that even if they could fully erase the imprint of their US culture on their deepest thoughts, feelings and values it would not always be good to do so. Corb and Jane reflect "Much of our value to the people we serve is our knowledge of the outside world." Some of Corb and Jane's closest indigenous friends say that the Walkers are deeply rooted in Biblical truth and are examples of how to accept what is true and good in both the American and Sumatran cultures and to critique what is false and evil in both of them.
One of the subjects that we have been discussing has been the issue of lifestyle choices: How does one, as an American, adapt to living in a new culture? One of the exercises that we went through was discussing these case-studies. The first two describe people who have attempted to reject one of the two worlds. We will post the other two tomorrow.
REJECTION OF ONE OF TWO WORLDS
Case Study #1
Meredith is a missionary to the Somali Bantu in Mogadishu. She believes that she is called to identify fully with these Somali people for the sake of the Gospel.
Meredith wears their customary dress, shops only for traditional foods in the local markets, refuses to socialize with Westerners and has no familiar conveniences as she enjoyed back home in America. Some of the expatriate community have openly described this messenger of the Gospel as having "gone native!" Mockingly they whisper, "Try as we may, the people will always know we are foreigners." With her usual strong sense of conviction, Meredith exclaims "God's Written Word mandates me to live a simple lifestyle and to share with a needy world." To some of the middle class nationals however, Meredith as an American appears to be wrestling with a deep sense of guilt because she belongs to an affluent society. They wonder if she has in fact rejected her own culture by running away to Mogadishu. In response to this a Pastor of an underground church believes that Meredith's identification with the Somali Bantu cannot come through a denial of some part of herself. He suggests that this may be a spiritual problem that Meredith ought to have faced within herself before entering mission work.
Case Study #2
Bob and Hannah Stevens are cross-cultural messengers of the Gospel to Samoans in the South Pacific. They strongly believe that God has called them to be missionaries to Samoa and so express that it would be wrong to reject the culture in which they are ministering.
Bob and Hannah feel that their culture is civilized and frequently brand the Samoan culture as "primitive and backward." They criticize the local houses as being ill-arranged. Writing to their church mission committee, they have requested a construction team to remodel their house as the bathrooms are different, the kitchen is outside, the laundry is a set of tubs, and the living room and bedroom are combine. On top of this, the Stevens have resorted to guard their privacy by placing a "visitor sign" on their security gate setting boundaries as to the hours of the day when guests are permitted to call. Bob & Hannah have recently bought a Pit Bull that is unchained in the compound during their so-called "family time" hours. As a result, fellow expatriate colleagues criticize them for not taking the natives way of doing things seriously. They have asked the Stevens to consider the impact their lifestyle choices have had on meaningful communication of the Gospel message. Even Bob's converts have openly criticized his efforts to reconstruct his American culture within his home and compound. They joke among themselves that it appears as though Bob & Hannah are "creating an island of security in an alien Samoan sea!" Some of their neighbors have even gone as far as to say "the gospel comes clothed in a foreign dress!"
We are on the tail end of our first week of SPLICE here at MTI. A new group came in on Monday for orientation and we have really enjoyed getting to know them all!
The acronym for SPLICE is:
-Spiritual
-Personal
-Lifestyle
-Interpersonal
-Cultural
-Endurance & Enjoyment
Each of these will be touched on throughout the course as we prepare to begin cross-cultural ministry.
Some of the highlights from the last three days of class have been discussing personal and cultural values, lifestyle choices on the mission-field, expectations vs. reality, and the paradoxical life that missionaries face.
We’ll keep you informed over the next couple weeks.
We had our last day of PILAT class today. The first picture is of Dwight and Barbara Gradin. The second picture t is from class today- just to give you another view of what we have been learning over the last couple weeks. If you've ever learned the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) this may look quite familiar to you.
No matter what the game (Football, Volleyball, Cricket, or Chess), a coach prepares his team through drills. The drills are focused on improving the skills and techniques that are needed to play the game better, but they will probably never be actions that are repeated while playing the game.
There was a significant portion of last week that was devoted to phonetics drills, learning to speak and training to hear language sounds that are not a part of the English language. This is primarily to train our "English tongues and ears" to be able to distinguish between sounds that are not used in English. Unfortunately, when Americans learn a new language, they have a tendency to speak it with English pronunciation. This shows little regard for the language of the people and gives the impression that the American does not care enough to say it right, often when the American has no idea that he is saying it wrong.
While there have been many sounds that we have learned that will not be used in Swahili, the phonetics drills (like any good coaching technique) have prepared us to play better at language learning "game." My Swahili may always have an accent, but I would like it to be a pleasant one.
To get an idea of what some of these pronunciation drills can look like, you can take a look here. This is a video on YouTube that I found that shows our instructor, Dwight Gradin, drilling a class (not ours) on phonetics drills. Right around 2:20 it gets kind of funny.
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