Looks Like a Duck, Must Be a Duck? Missions and Ministry

Appearances can be deceiving, especially when it comes to ministry.

Last week when I was in Turkana (northern Kenya), I attended church in a rural village.  Traditionally, such a gathering of people, indeed every important gathering of people, would be convened under a tree.  Any Westerner attending one of these church services quickly realizes there are some major differences in worldview present!  However, during this most recent trip to Turkana, I found myself inside a building for Sunday morning services in the village.  Sure, it still had a different feel to it (mud walls, tin roof, different language, different music, etc.), but the feel was at least a bit more familiar to my Western mind.

Traditional Turkana Church, Under a Tree

I thought, with some sadness, “Will this non-Duck (non-Western church) keep looking more and more like a Duck (Western church)?  But it is NOT a Duck!”

As the Turkana church begins to “look” more and more Western, we need to be careful to continue to contextualize the gospel message.  In other words, just because the church in Turkana begins to look more and more like a church in the West, the people living within the Turkana context have a very different worldview.  The message of Jesus is meant to reach people at a deep level, their heart level, and this cannot happen if the hearer’s worldview is not taken into consideration as ministry “programs” are developed.

The danger in doing ministry within a situation that “looks” familiar to us is that we will often fail to do the research, up front, to understand how our hearers think, feel, and perceive the world. In a more familiar context, it is much easier for us to simply assume we already know the worldview of our audience.  We assume we already know their thoughts, feelings, and needs.

Good ministry will always do the hard work of contextual research before implementing various forms of ministry.

So the question becomes, “This looks like a Duck, but is it really a Duck?”

This is the major failing of the Western church today.  Her leaders too often fail to ask this vital question.

We (speaking for those of us in the ministry profession) are really good at doing the “copy” and “paste” thing when it comes to ministry.  We see something working well over-there, and over-there looks like me over-here, so it must be true that that-thing will be successful over-here as well as over-there.  In reality, it is highly likely what is working over-there is the result of a lot of good contextualization, and research.  Someone has done the necessary missiological work of trying to understand their ministry context, and it is paying off!

Campus Ministry?  Well, students look like “normal” people to me, so it must be OK to treat them like normal people.  Wrong!  Students are quite different than their older counterparts.  They have a different outlook on life.  They have different needs.  Their hopes and dreams are far different from the generation which precedes them.  They’re NOT a Duck.

Many ministers have not figured out, even after years and years of doing ministry, that they are actually missionaries.  And as missionaries, they also need to be missiologists…they need to understand that doing culture and language study is a part of every ministry gig…not just a part of the “foreign missions” gig.  It is this lack of missiological understanding and application that is responsible for the existence of a Western church that is on the verge of death!

So, what does the Western church need?  No, not a doctor, but a missiologist…and a good one!

I have MUCH more to say on this topic, so I’ll take more time to discuss this over the next couple of weeks.  I’d love to hear your thoughts, feelings.