Communicating the Gospel Across Cultures

Today, one of the main problems we have as missionaries face, is how to communicate the gospel across different cultures. Most of us have had different opportunities to share the gospel to persons from our own culture, and this is great, but the problem is when people are not from our culture. Many times we fail at introducing people to Jesus Christ, and we simply can’t figure out why our witnessing has had so little effect.

Individualizing the gospel is an effective tactic in an individual culture, where personalizing is important and understood. In group-oriented societies, though, focusing on an individual can be dangerous – especially if such focus exposes shame, failure or shortcoming. Thus rephrasing “all have sinned” to “you have sinned” may not be wise. Maybe where biblical writers used terms like all, world and whoever they meant to be indefinite of general in deference to a shame-oriented and group-oriented.

Missionaries and anthropologists tell us that many cultures have no clear concept of sin and forgiveness, especially where there is not a strong concept of God. In such places, however, there often exists a strong sense of shame (or “face” or honor), which can be built upon to share the gospel.

Harmony in relationships is an important social value. The violator of harmony bears the penalty of shame, disgrace and symbolic disfigurement. Rending the delicate social fabric causes one to become ugly before others. The only thing more frightening and repulsive to the same-sensitive person is the prospect of having misplaced hope for the future. Erring in the securing of one’s destiny is the ultimate shame, humiliation and folly. But the gospel offers a hope that will not disappoint.

To conclude, I’d like to say that it’s really interesting to see what our challenge is about learning other’s cultures in order to communicate the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For me, this is a big challenge because it is not easy to forget our culture in order to introduce people to Jesus. Jesus let us an example about how to share the gospel cross-culturally, thus, now is the time to put this into practice. Amen!

OLIVER MARTINEZ