When we lived in a remote area in Burkina Faso with no running water or electricity, we decided to make hot chocolate one morning. We had cocao powder from neighboring Ivory Coast powdered milk, and sugar. So we thought we had it covered. We got out our trusted Betty Crocker cook book. The recipe said to heat chocolate milk! Of course, the nearest chocolate milk was hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away.
For me, instructing me to heat chilocolat milk is not really a recipe. I came to realize when I moved to a place very different from home, even how-to books didn’t have good answers that fit my new circumstances.
When I first took an assignment in Ghana in 2011, Mary Steele had already been here for almost 50 years.
She came to Ghana from Ireland to do Bible translation way back in the 1960s. She went to live among the Konkomba people in northern Ghana. In a video made a few years ago, Mary said that her first years were very difficult because none of he Konkomba were interested in what she was doing. That was on top of the fact that the Konkomba lived in a semi-arid area known for high temperatures with bad roads, no electricity, and no running water. Mary lived simply among the Konkomba and she persevered.
Eventually, the Konkomba began to see the usefulness of literacy in their language. The trickle slowly became a torrent. It renewed their sense of identity and pride in being Konkomba. It helped their children succeed in school. Many thousands of Konkomba adults learned to read even though they had never been in school.
Then came the translation. At first, it too was not well received. But over time more and more read the translated Scriptures and found them compelling. It took decades, but eventually they were reading their Bible avidly. A religious renewal ensued. Whereas there were very few Christians and churches when Mary arrived in the Konkomba area, there are now hundreds of churches and hundreds of thousands of Christians. Today, a third of the more than 1,000,000 Konkomba profess Christianity. The Konkomba have moved from being a people untouched by the Gospel to one that embraces, or at least respects, Christianity. That has resulted in a reduction in drunkenness and other ills. People moved out of poverty. The status of women was raised. So, like literacy, Mary’s translation work was eventually widely and enthusiastically received. Even though that took many decades.
In fact, Mary became a Konkomba hero. Everyone knew her. Konkomba chiefs and politicians praised her and granted her favors. The president of Ghana conferred on her a national award as did the Queen of England.
When Mary died in 2017, the Konkomba held one of their largest funerals ever. It made the national news. Chiefs and politicians attended.
What started humbly with an unmarried Irish woman braving difficult conditions and profound indifference to study a language, do literacy and translate the Bible became a big deal. It took decades of small, imperceptible changes, none of them dramatic. But now the Bible, Jesus and the God of the Bible are a living part of Konkomba culture.
Here is another illustration Jesus used: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed planted in a field.It is the smallest of all seeds, but it becomes the largest of garden plants; it grows into a tree, and birds come and make nests in its branches.” – Matthew 13:31-32
I recently started watching The Dust Bowl, a PBS documentary about the drought and subsequent dust storms that drove farmers out of the midwest in the 1930s. The documentary starts with descriptions of the dustbowl by people who lived through it. Here are some things they said:
Let me tell you how it was. I don’t care who describes that to ya, nobody can tell it any worse than what it was. There ain’t no one exaggerates that. There ain’t no way for it to be exaggerated. It was that bad.
It was just unbelievable. It’d blister your face. It would put your eyes out. Well, I, I guess I can’t describe it. It was just, it was just constant, just that steady blow of dirt.
You can try to get out of it, but it follows you, follows you, follows you. You can’t escape it. Looking back on it, it carried with it a feeling of, I don’t know the word exactly, of, of being unreal but almost being um … evil.
As these quotes show, when people see things beyond normal experience, they give up on straightforward description and resort to comparison, metaphor, figurative and even moral language. The dusty wind is given moral purpose by calling it evil.
In the same way, when the Old Testament prophets were allowed to see real future events, they also found that normal descriptive language failed them; so they resorted to the kind of figurative language we call apocalyptic. Like this.
As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl. And the four had the same likeness, their appearance and construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel. When they went, they went in any of their four directions without turning as they went. And their rims were tall and awesome, and the rims of all four were full of eyes all around. (Ezekiel 1:16-18 ESV)
Artist’s rendering of Ezekiel’s vision
The prophets are not being deliberately obscur. Nor were they engaged in wild fantasizing. They were just expressing as best they could events they saw in visions that were beyond their words.
In many churches in Ghana, the congregation gives frequent feedback to the preacher during the sermon. People might say amen, or make another affirming comment, giggle in appreciation or even clap. Once when I was in church, the congregation was not giving enough verbal feedback for the preacher so he stopped and asked us: “Are you preaching with me?”
The mother tongue of my mechanic in Ghana was Ewe (pronounced eh-vay). He learned English in school. He learned English after learning Ewe and Twi. But he knows the names of car parts in English that I, a native English speaker, don’t know.
A person who learns another language almost always learns it unevenly. They may know all the words needed to talk about grocery shopping (the names of all the fruits and vegetables, etc), all the words for quantity (pound, ounce, bunch, dozen, etc), but not know the words needed to talk about politics, religion or biology. You might speak to someone whose mother tongue is Spanish, for example, and who speaks perfect English only to have the conservation switch to politics or religion and find that the person struggles to communicate. Or you may discover that the person has a deeper vocabulary in English than you do about car parts, or some other specialized topic; because someone who learns another language almost always learns it unevenly
A group of pastors in Africa told a colleague of mine that they literally did not know the words for the spirit world in the language they preached in – a trade language that none of them spoke as their mother tongue. It is usually a mistake to assume that people can understand the Bible in a language in which they can engage in everyday conversation fluently. Maybe they never talk religion in that language and so have never learned the vocabulary associated with religion (such as sin, spirit, and holy).
Example depth of vocabulary
So when it is thought that some group of people are bilingual enough to understand the Bible in a language not their own, I want to test that.
The worldwide Pentecostal movement started on Azusa street in Los Angeles. It was led by the son of a former slave: William J. Seymour who studied theology by sitting in the hallway outside the classroom because segregation laws forbade him entering the classroom. Immediately, the racial and ethnic makeup of the group began diversifying. While some Pentecostal denominations segregated, the movement has remained very diverse. American Pentecostals are much more likely to worship in diverse congregations and have diverse friends than most any other religious grouping – far more than American Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and Episcopalians. This is ironic because pentecostalism is considered intellectually inferior to those forms of Christianity, and it is predominantly working class unlike its white collar Christian cousins.
Also, pentecostalism has spread all over the world becoming at home in many cultures and languages. In Africa, it was often the Pentecostal churches who first allowed local art forms into worship. This included local music styles, local instruments and local dance. They allowed this at a time when more “respectable” forms of Christianity such as the mainline denominations opposed those things. Pentecostal churches often quickly promoted local Christians to positions of leadership. In fact, many African Pentecostal churches were founded by men with low levels of education. They nevertheless became very successful, growing to be as big as or bigger than churches with highly educated leadership.
Pentecostalism has most often been an unsophisticated, working class, and theologically conservative Christian Movement. It would not say that diversity is one of its greatest values, yet it might be the most open, diverse and inclusive modern movement of any kind, religious or not. It beats more sophisticated Christian churches at manifesting their own professed values. It makes one wonder if the road to real diversity is not where the proponents of diversity think it is.
Many people planning a missionary career change their minds after the first two or three years. Those are the hardest years because there is so much adaptation. It becomes easier to go back home.
But after the hard work of learning the culture and getting comfortable with it has happened, then it’s easier to stay. If a career missionary lasts 4 years, then they’ll stay many years.
But after enough years go by, the missionary can become more comfortable in his place of ministry than back home in his own country. At that point it can become easier to stay in one’s place of ministry and harder to move back home. At this point, the missionary may stay even though their health is failing or faithful local people are capable of carrying on the ministry. The issue ceases to be following God, but rather living in a place where one feels comfortable.
I’ve heard missionaries say this directly and shockingly: “I like it here”, “This feels like home” but not “I feel like God wants me here.”
When I first went to work in Africa, I was gone for 3-5 years at a time. Turnaround time for a letter was 4-6 weeks. Phone calls were expensive, so we called home once a year with a stopwatch running. I was really absent.
When we returned home for brief stays, my dad would want to see us of course, and he sure enjoyed his grandchildren. But when we were going back he would pray God’s blessings on us and encourage us to follow him.
He often said that all he really wanted was for his children to follow the Lord. He said that again the day before he passed away. He got great joy and satisfaction from knowing that I was following the Lord. That was enough for him. If I were to tell him I was going to establish a mission at the gates of hell and take his grandsons, he would bless me for following God.
He would rather have his children and grandchildren far away if that’s what they had to do to follow the Lord. It wasn’t just that he wanted his children to follow the Lord, nor that he wanted that the most. It was more than that. For him, having a child following the Lord was enough. It was so satisfying that it filled the void left when we went away giving him joy when he thought of us.
A few years back, I was talking to a pastor in Ghana about his vision for the Presbyterian churches in his area. Later, as I looked at the notes I had made of our time together, I noticed that his desires were both universal and local.
He wanted worship services in local languages and Bible studies using the Bibles in those languages. He knew that many people in the area considered church foreign. He knew that using local languages would erode that perception. In short, he wanted the churches to be considered part of the local communities. This part of his vision was local.
But he also wanted the believers who gathered in the churches to feel that they are part of something bigger than their community. He wanted them to feel connected to other Presbyterians in Ghana and beyond and to believers around the world. This part of his vision was global.
During this time I read an article about Brexit – the UK leaving the European Union. Most voters in the UK voted to leave the EU because they wanted something more local. Others voted against because they want to be part of something larger. I see this local versus global tension in many places.
The Christians in smaller languages value the Bible in their languages for a variety of reasons, including that it gives a local expression of the faith they share with others worldwide. The Bible in their language affirms both the ethnic and linguistic identity God gave them and their belonging to God’s people worldwide. Most other things turn the local-global issue into a tension or even a fight, but not the Bible in one’s language. I remember a village chief holding high the first copy of the New Testament in his language and practically shouting “We are now part of the people of God!” He never said that if the Bible in English.
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” – Revelation 7:9-10
There are 7,151 languages spoken in the world today. You might think that this number is just one of many dubious statistics that come you way. I wouldn’t blame you. But the number of 7,151 comes from the Ethnologue which is recognized by the International Standards Organization as an official list of the languages of the world. The Ethnologue supplies the codes your phone and computer use to properly display Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew and all other languages. Governments, tech companies, schools, researchers and many more rely on it and find it reliable.
But you might ask if there are really that many languages or if we are just counting dialects. The ethnologue lists dialects too, at least many of them. They number at least ten times more than the 7,000+ languages. For example, English as it is spoken in the UK and North America is listed as one language with many dialects.
Or you might ask if these languages are related to each other. They are – the same way English, German, Romanian, Hindi and Pashtune are related to each other. Actually, those languages are very closely related. But being related does not mean that by understanding one you can understand another.
People have long asked why there are so many languages. There are several theories, but no one really knows. I think that it has to do with identity. For many people their language is part of their identity or status, so they jealously guard it. A bit like English teachers who rail against bad English to preserve what they consider the real thing. Whatever theory is right, we have many languages.
You may have heard that many languages are dying. That’s true. UNESCO says that 2,500 are endangered. Even if all of them became extinct, we would still be left with about 4,500 languages. That’s still a lot of languages
Heart Language 