discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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86 From Every Nation
that are wonderful by-products of the global missionary enterprise. One must
wonder as well whether churches in the West would maintain a high level of
global mission zeal if they quit sending out their own members as missionaries.
Another question in globalizing a missionary force relates to how mission
boards prepare their missionary candidates for service on multinational missionary
teams. During a missionary ladies’ retreat in Benin, for example, a German
missionary said that while she had been well trained on how to work with
Africans, she was having trouble knowing how to work alongside her American
missionary colleagues. As multinational teams of missionaries have become
common, intercultural communication with its challenges and opportunities
has emerged as a critical issue. Mission leaders must find ways to lower the potential
for misunderstandings between missionaries from different cultural
groups. There are communication issues to be faced when missionaries come
from different language groups. Does a mission board adopt one “official language”
in which it will do all its communication with its missionaries? If so, is
the mission board thereby favoring one language over another?
To help mission leaders understand cross-cultural communication issues,
David Hesselgrave has used a three-culture model to illustrate how a variety of
things affects cross-cultural communication of the gospel. Hesselgrave notes
that missionaries must be aware that three cultures—the missionary’s own culture,
the target culture, and the biblical culture—affect communication of the
gospel. 12 Ignoring the effects of any one of these three may mean the missionary
will be communicating a distorted gospel. With a multinational missionary
team, Hesselgrave’s diagram becomes a four-culture (or even more) model in
which missionaries from different cultural backgrounds must recognize that
their missionary colleagues have cultural filters from their own background
that color or shape understandings. Failure to realize this can quickly escalate
small misunderstandings into big problems.
Among the positives of a multinational missionary team is that such a
team is not likely to uncritically replicate aspects of one particular missionary’s
home church. Another positive aspect of multinational missionary teams is the
flexibility they offer in approaching some visa and resident permit issues. Occasionally
a door closed to missionaries coming from one country will be open
for missionaries carrying passports from a different country. One majority
world missionary who illustrates that was Honorato T. Reza who preached
both in person and via radio across Latin America. Reza, a Mexican, was particularly
instrumental in helping maintain relations with churches in Cuba after
Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Reza also impacted the English-speaking
world by authoring Our Task for Today, a small volume on mission theology
and strategy written for lay church members. Reza’s story stands as a reminder