discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 84
84 From Every Nation
Just look at an African-American church today and you can see testimony
to our new era: richly decorated, air-conditioned sanctuaries with carpeted
floors are now quite common. Many drive to church in the latest model
cars. Today, instead of working tables at restaurants, many African-Americans
own them. God has blessed us. Now it is time for the African-American
to bless the world in evangelization efforts. In the past many African-Americans
cried because they could not become involved in missionary work. But
now the doors are wide open and we are without excuse. 10
Hopefully, a new day of involvement in global mission is dawning for African-
Americans and other minority churches around the world.
Telling Their Stories
Mission history published for Western consumption has focused on missionaries
from the West. There is nothing unusual about that. However, by not
telling the stories of missionaries from the majority world, the Western Church
is in danger of letting those other missionary stories vanish from the Church’s
collective memory. For example, in the late 1940s Alice Khumalo from Swaziland
obeyed God’s call to go with American missionaries George and Jeanette
Hayse to the Pedi people, a people group in South Africa. In an interview in
Swaziland near the end of her life, Alice shared with gusto how she had learned
the culture and language of the Pedi people. Suddenly, she bolted to her bedroom.
Coming back holding a well-worn Bible in the Pedi language, she told
how the Pedi people responded to her preaching from that very Bible.
In Papua New Guinea, the stories of Australian missionary Will Bromley’s
trek to the Jimi Valley are legendary. By his side, but virtually never mentioned,
was a young man named Ap Tul who learned the language of the Jimi
and served as Bromley’s translator. Other names little known in the West include
Semisi Nau from Fiji who was a missionary to the Solomon Islands and
John Sung of China who ministered in half a dozen Asian countries. Their stories
belong to more than one cultural group; those stories are the patrimony of
the global Church. That they get overlooked in the telling of global missionary
outreach can be illustrated by the experience of two of missiologist Andrew
Walls’ graduate students. Both students did their doctoral dissertations on
Christian missions in southern Ethiopia. One drew primarily on missionary
archives kept in Canada. The other student’s research utilized oral history interviews
among the Oromo (or Galla) people in Ethiopia. Relying on those
different sources of information, the doctoral candidates’ dissertations painted
two different pictures of church development and expansion in southern
Ethiopia. “Reading the [two] works,” said Walls, “you could be forgiven for
thinking these were two different places.” 11
Fortunately, Jonathan Bonk and a team at the Overseas Ministries Study