discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 96
96 How Culture Affects Mission
in its ministry area. Thus, the Ivorian Christians in Abidjan need to see the
Vietnamese immigrants in their country as people for whom Christ died.
Churches in Portland, Maine, must recognize that the people of more than 70
nationalities living in their city are their evangelistic responsibility.
A Cross-Cultural Experience
It was a bumpy, rock-strewn trail, and we were traveling in fourwheel
drive. Missionaries Bob and Lori Bracy were taking us to their
rural house at Nondugl in the western highlands of Papua New
Guinea. Down the dirt road, Nondugl eventually came into view.
Brilliant red and white poinsettias splashed color around. Every part
of the house where we were going to stay was constructed of bamboo—including
the bed that we were to sleep on.
Pastor Yambe Sike and his wife, Marta, came out to welcome us.
With evening shadows beginning their journey across the Highlands
landscape, the Sikes invited us to have dinner with them. Their cookhouse
was a large thatched structure with a friendly fire in the middle
of the floor supplying warmth as well as light. Marta cooked our
evening meal over the open fire. As we were eating, an early evening
rainstorm blew up and soon sheets of water were lashing the bamboo
cookhouse. But we were dry and cozy inside. The children of
both families ventured out and returned decorated with mud.
Finally, Pastor Yambe picked up his Bible and announced that
we would end the day with devotions. As we gathered around the
fire, our host said he had selected Galatians 3 for the reading. In the
flickering light of the cookhouse fire, Pastor Yambe read, “You are all
children of God through faith . . . There is neither Jew nor Gentile,
neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one
in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26, 28).
I looked across the fading embers of the fire at the two families,
one from Papua New Guinea and one from the United States. Some
of the children were nearly asleep. This is the truth: we are all one
in Jesus Christ, I thought. Jesus spans cultural and ethnic boundaries,
binding us together in Him. 7 —Charles Gailey
In the 1950s anthropologists began using the idea of cultural relativity to
try to move people away from ethnocentrism and to abandon the cultural evolution
paradigm of evaluating other cultures. That older cultural evolution
model put cultures on a “progress” scale where some were categorized as backward
and childlike and others were seen as enlightened and the standard toward
which all other cultures should be moving. Cultural relativity insists that
all cultures be judged on their own merits. Cultural relativity can, of course, be
carried to an extreme with sinful prejudice, abuse, and injustice being glossed