Week 11 - Building Brides of Love
2022-11-06
Finding a Place and Serving
Paul G. Hiebert
- Takeaways
- Most relationships in peasant societies are multiplex in nature. Those in urban settings are simplex.
- Multiplex relationships exist where people meet each other on many different occasions and in many different roles. The strength of multiplex relationships is that people learn to know each other intimately, as whole persons.
- In simplex relationships, people see one another in terms of one role in which they meet. These relationships are less enduring, more superficial and functional, and leave people with a sense of alienation.
One of the great obstacles to effective church planting in the city is our own preconceptions of what constitutes a church. (459)
Identification in the Missionary Task
William D. Reyburn
Identification is not an end in itself. It is the road to the task of gospel proclamation.
- The authors recounts a story of when he was travelling as a missionary alongside a local friend in the Ecuadorean Andes. He perceived himself as having fully immersed himself into their culture by embracing their language and wardrobe. However, just by the way he walked into an inn, the lady worker was able to identify him as a foreigner:
“You Europeans swing your arms like you never carried a load on your back.”
An emptied pan of caterpillars is more convincing than all the empty metaphors of love which missionaries are prone to expend on the heathen.