discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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168 New Contexts for Mission
what the missionary had written: “Pray for us here on the front lines as we battle
the Enemy.” Pausing, the African leader then said, “This proves that the
missionaries were collaborating with [our opponents]!”
What the African leader did not understand is that when Christians talk
about a battle they do not mean against “flesh and blood, but against . . . the
spiritual forces of evil” (Ephesians 6:12). However, because a paragraph in a missionary
newsletter was misunderstood, two American missionaries were imprisoned
in that country for a year and many churches were shut down. With the
passage of time, that nation has repudiated the ideology of its former president,
allowed closed churches to reopen, and invited Christian missionaries to return.
Though that unfortunate episode is fading from people’s memories, the lesson
that words can be misunderstood with tragic results needs to be remembered.
To be sure, Islam has its own militant-sounding vocabulary, but the point
is not to win a debate over whose terminology is more militaristic. Christians
seeking to gain a sympathetic hearing for the gospel must understand how certain
terms may be misunderstood. In most cultural contexts, using the biblical
themes of love, blessing, reconciliation, submission, suffering, and forgiveness
will be far more profitable than confrontational-sounding words and phrases.
In Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well recorded in
John 4, the Lord masterfully demonstrated how to deal with confrontational
speech and move past it. The Jews and Samaritans despised each other. The
Jews called the Samaritans “dogs” and some even believed that the Samaritans
were possessed by the devil (John 8:48). The rift between the two cultural
groups was so deep that most first-century Jews would walk miles out of their
way to avoid traveling through Samaria.
With that cultural context as a background, John wrote that Jesus “had” to
go through Samaria (4:4). As Jesus and His disciples approached a town on
their journey northward they stopped at a well where Jesus spoke to a Samaritan
woman, asking her for a drink of water. In spite of the shocked woman’s attempt
to reestablish the wall of hostility—“Jews do not associate with Samaritans”
(v. 9)—Jesus leads her to a point of receptivity and she winds up saying,
“Sir, give me this water” (v. 15). Ultimately, because of the woman’s testimony,
many from that Samaritan town accepted Jesus as the Messiah.
This story is more than a revelation of Jesus’ modus operandi. It can be a
model for the Church’s mission outreach. Between the time the woman went
to town and came back, Jesus said something to which mission mobilizers have
pointed as a biblical mandate for mission, “Open your eyes and look at the
fields! They are ripe for harvest” (v. 35). Some biblical commentators have suggested
that as Jesus spoke those words, He was gesturing toward Samaritans arriving
from town, thus pointing out to His disciples that their ministry needed