End-month news February 2024
Dear Friends,
A Day in the Life of …
Tuesday 20th February I set off for the Coptic mission station that is near my home at 6.30am. It’s about 50 minutes by bicycle. 8:15am the weekly fellowship of the hospital staff gathered. This typically includes between 10 and 25 people. I am their regular speaker. This time my theme was ‘Christian Marriage’. Given the theme, I am pretty sure, that even those whose heads were bowed as I spoke were hanging on to every word. Marriage is such a big issue for everyone.
Tuesday is a fellowship day for an indigenous church. That’s around 40 kilometres from the Coptic Mission compound. I tried a new way of studying: I listened to three short books being read out to me from my smart phone as I cycled! (I am researching the theology of a prolific Egyptian author …) 3 hours later – I arrived at the home of the fellowship just 4 minutes before it began. We were way out in the sticks. I shared much the same message, but this time in the Luo language rather than Swahili as at the hospital. The hospital workers are relatively ‘educated’. This time the congregation, as many as could squashed into someone’s sitting room, was about 40 young mostly village women – farmers. Again, the reception of my message seemed to be good. (Amazingly, the following day I was offered to take the course on ‘marriage and family’ when teaching in Tanzania at the end of June! Please pray that this work out.)
Please note – that due to changes being made by the hosting service, my personal website jim-mission.org.uk is ‘down’ at this time of writing. I hope it will be operational again very soon.
Give thanks – for my participation in a 3-day online conference on language learning for missionaries, that ended on 24th February. The conference was attended by around 150 mostly language-teaching coaches.
As I write I am in Nairobi. I did the conference from here. I am visiting various people and doing other tasks while here. I am to go back home home on Wednesday (28th February).
Poorly thought-out responses to Globalization
This may seem a strange thing for a missionary prayer letter, but it is critical all the same.
Missionaries (biblically the term is ‘apostles’) are people sent to different parts of the world, to do Gospel work amongst the communities they reach. This has always required an adjustment to the culture and ways of life of the people concerned. This adjustment clearly requires language learning.
We are now in an unprecedented age of globalization. This has many implications for missionary work. One such implication is that, despite lip-service given to the need for a missionary to adjust to the culture and language of the people they are reaching, dominant global ideologies at the same time find such practice abhorrent. That is, it must increasingly (at least for Africa) be assumed;
1. That African people know English, and
2. That no cultural adjustment is required for effective communication with them using English.
There are many reasons for this. A major one is, that there are now many people of African origin in the West. In the West, it is considered vital that people of African origin not be considered culturally ‘different’ from original white populations. To do otherwise is condemned as racist. As a result, especially because what happens in the West is what counts in today’s world, efforts at adjusting to African people’s ways of life can be considered very dubious indeed. An outcome of this, African people’s failing to understand, comprehend, never mind ‘master,’ how they are told they should nowadays live, must at all costs be ignored. As a missionary, one is required to remain silent as one witnesses people being rendered dum for the sake of political correctness in the West. This is difficult.
The same difficulty applies to academic work: as soon as one is honest, one’s writing can (all too easily) be rejected. The same difficulty seems to be driving the world crazy! The only supposedly legally and morally acceptable position to hold, is that which assumes functional equality between people from vastly different backgrounds, e.g., African as against Western European. The standard is always Western Europe. (One never asks whether Whites can do what Blacks can do, but always the other way around. The ‘norm’ is the Whites.) This is totally ahistorical – how can a population of people simply ‘acquire’ the history of another? This position subsumes ‘culture’ under ‘race’ (i.e., because one is not allowed to be partial on the basis of skin colour, in effect this means one cannot be partial regarding Africans’ culture, religion, traditions, values, and so on. Everyone has to be the same as the white European!! Even if this is untrue, and even if this is impossible.)
Some may ask, if writing the above is really the business of a missionary to Africa? I would say, fortunately or unfortunately – yes it is. As a result of it, African people, i.e. my friends and colleagues, are constantly discouraged from thinking for themselves. They should just do what they are told. But the people who tell them what to do (Europeans) ignore who African people actually are and what they are like! The whole situation is mindboggling.
As always, your prayers are valued,
Jim
