Journeyman

This trip is almost over. Tomorrow will involve one more hot day sat in a meeting room before getting on an air-conditioned plane in the evening to start the flight home. I’ve learnt a lot here, but two things are going to stick in my head above all else.

1 – Asking the wrong questions.

On Sunday I asked about church, what people think about it, what the concerns are and how they viewed the service. But, here, in Burkina Faso, these are non-questions. People that go to church aren’t concerned with the volume of the music, whether they sit in chairs or on pews, or how long the minister speaks for. Standing outside the church you aren’t met with a barrage of opinion in the same way you would be outside a church in the West. Church is much more about the life of the community than personal opinion.

In many ways this is a regular feature of life in Africa. The kinds of things we would see as problems in the West just aren’t relevant here, and we’re not going to discover the real issues until we learn what the questions are that we should be asking.

2 – The medium is the message, and this applies to language too.

There are three levels of language in Burkina Faso. French, the national language, used for national trade, politics and by tourists buying African shirts (yes, I’ve just got one).

Then there are two national languages which would be used by nationals for trade. These languages would be used at the markets and when travelling around the country. They mean that, even those individuals that don’t have a high level of education, are able to travel and work within communities.

Finally, there’s the language of the community. What’s spoken in the village and in the home.

In somewhere like Burkina Faso the Bible is already available in French and the two national languages. The educated can read and understand French and many nationals can work in one of the two national languages. But, the unwritten message associated with this is (French) you have to be educated to know God, or (two national languages) a relationship with God is based around trade.

It’s the language of the home that deals with feelings and emotions, how you conduct your life and how you relate to people. That’s why it’s so important that the Bible is available in the languages of these communities. Knowing God is about being in a relationship with him, not about being educated in the right things or conducting some kind of business meeting, to express this fully it’s essential to do it in the language that is used by people for these kinds of conversations.

As a bit of a footnote I’ve just read some comments from Onesimus Online (HT: Mark) who illustrates the differences in African and Western cultures when it comes to issues of faith and belief.

So thorough is the westernization of my African students that they don’t seem to notice that all of their education, all of their theology, all of their assumptions, can be traced to the efforts of well-meaning western missionaries. These missionaries came (and sometimes still come) with an assumed posture of superiority, namely that they are here to ‘help’ these Africans escape their darkness and get saved like us. Salvation too often means getting Africans to accept that our problems are their problems and that our solutions must be their solutions. For example, most Western missionaries assume that Christ has come to save us from our legal problem before a holy God; namely, that our sin makes us guilty before God and deserving of his condemnation and wrath. Christ resolves our problem by becoming our sin on the cross, bearing our punishment and thus freeing us from the penalty of the law. We are no longer under condemnation, but are accepted into fellowship with God, with the end result that we will go to heaven and not to hell.

This is standard fare for Western Evangelicals and their predecessors. And while a solid case may be made from the New Testament that this is indeed an aspect of our salvation, our polemical stance against the perceived ‘works righteousness’ of Roman Catholics has meant that this becomes increasingly, by over-emphasis, the only aspect of our salvation, or certainly the most important, and certainly what is preached from Sunday to Sunday.

The problem is that Africans on their own don’t perceive that their main problem before God is their compromised legal status. So in order to get them to understand ‘the gospel’ – or at least our Western understanding of the gospel – we missionaries must first teach them about God’s law and what sin is and what Christ has done to satisfy God’s law. Once they understand these things, then they are in a position to ‘accept Christ as their personal Savior’ and be forgiven. To this end, evangelists urge congregations to respond to the ‘free’ grace of God in Christ so that their sins may be forgiven and they be reconciled to God.

Again, this sounds so normal to our Western Evangelical ears that we may be immediately suspicious of anyone that seems to have a problem with it. But as mentioned above, most of my African friends don’t first and foremost worry about their legal standing before God. Rather, they are far more concerned about demons which seem to afflict every aspect of their lives, they are concerned about people who manipulate spiritual power for good and ill in other people’s lives, they are concerned about sicknesses and barrenness, for which there seems to be no cure, they are concerned about capricious weather that makes their crops fail and their cattle die and causes them to go hungry, and they are concerned about death. The tremendous irony that I observe is that our Western gospel has come full force into Kenya (and many other African countries) through the ministries of thousands of Western missionaries, resulting in the majority of people here and in a number of other countries professing faith in Christ and testifying to having been born again. And yet this gospel does not touch those aspects of their lives that reflect their deepest needs and most profound concerns.

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