Perspectives10Bakery

Week 10 - How Shall They Hear?

2022-10-27

Lloyd Kwast

Four layers of culture:
- Behavior - customs, products, language. What is done?
- Values - standards of conduct and judgement. What is good or best?
- Beliefs - belief systems that do no necessarily affect values or behavior. What is true?
- Worldview - fundamental assumptions about reality. What is real?

Paul G. Hiebert

A key difference between Indian and American culture includes their perception of purity and pollution. India’s streets are filled with poop, garbage, and open sewers while Americans wear short shorts, dirty torn jeans, and shirts covered with ads. Indians may have public filth but they value personal cleanliness. Americans may have public cleanliness but lack personal cleanliness.
Recommendations for Christians ministering in India:
- Dress - for men, leave jeans, old t-shirts, and worn out tennis shoes at home. Dress to impress.
- Public acts - wash your hands in the sink at restaurants, brush your teeth in public after eating, and do not touch food with your left hand.
- Hair - keep it neat and trimmed.
- Food - avoid eating meat in public especially.

Don Richardson

When a missionary enters another culture, he or she is conspicuously foreign. This is to be expected, but often the gospel is labeled as foreign, too. (430)
There existed a means in the Sawi tribe of making peace which required a father to entrust his own child to an enemy father who would raise the child. They became known as the “peace child.” The gospel was understandable in light of God the Father giving His Son to reconcile an alienated people.
The Damal people of Irian Jaya awaited for hai, a golden age where wars and opppresion ceased and sickness was eradicated. They came to understand the gospel message from missionaries as the fulfillment of hai they so longed for.

The Lausanne Committee

Charles H. Kraft

The term “power encounter” was coined by Alan Tippett, a missionary anthropologist in the South Pacific. He noticed early acceptances of the gospel among those people groups occurred when there was an “encounter” demonstrating God was greater than their local pagan deities.
Example includes when a priest would eat the totem animal and claim Jesus’ protection. Their survival and health would open people up to the gospel.
Tippett observed that most of the world’s peoples are power-oriented and respond to Christ most readily through power demonstrations. (446)
Luke 9:1-2 says Jesus expects power demonstrations to be crucial to our ministries.
Many people who saw or experienced power events during Jesus’ ministry did not turn to him in faith. This should alert us to the inadequacy of power demonstrations alone as a total evangelistic strategy. (446)
The Three Encounters:
- Truth Encounter - understanding; vehicle is teaching.
- Allegiance Encounter - relationship; vehicle is witness.
- Power Encounter - freedom; vehicle is spiritual warfare.
Many evangelicals have grown up with a knowledge-truth brand of Christianity that pays little if any attention to power encounters. But we go out to witness and evangelize among people who have grown up in spirit-oriented societies and often find that solid, lasting conversions to Christ are hard to achieve with our knowledge-truth branch alone. (450)

International Orality Network