For the past few years, my health hasn’t been great. I’ve had a lot of pain and not a lot of energy, a lot of the time. Sometimes it felt like my legs had 50-pound weights on them, walking up the stairs. I often had to consciously push myself to do what I needed to do.
Then, in December, I received surgery that made all this go away. I’ve felt back to my old self again. I’ve felt years younger.
But what astonishes me is how quickly I have forgotten this. There are days when not one memory of how I used to feel crosses my mind. I forget to be grateful that my health issues had a solution, unlike so many who don’t. I forget to be grateful that I have health at all, unlike some who have never had it.
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You’ve got plans to hold a VBS this summer in a cross-cultural or overseas context, and you’re feeling the challenges: How do you communicate effectively with kids who don’t speak English? How do you come up with activities that you can fit into a suitcase? Maybe you’ve got a limited budget or time constraints. Yet you have a sincere desire for your team to share Jesus during your trip.
So maybe you are considering the classic go-to activity for sharing the gospel with kids from a different culture or language: the simple wordless bracelet.
You can order 12 kits for $5.99. They’re fun, they’re cute, and kids love them. Plus, the children now have a tangible reminder of the gospel, right there on their wrists, no language skills required. Perfect.
Maybe not so perfect. Sometimes cross-cultural communication is a lot more complicated than just a language barrier. This classic VBS activity might not be communicating what you think.
Before you put wordless bracelets into your cross-cultural VBS curriculum, take a moment to consider the following thoughts.
Many cultures in Asia, Africa, and South America have strong beliefs in the spirit world. In order to protect their children against evil spirits, they will often tie an amulet around their wrists. This will be a cloth, twine, or leather cord and may include a few beads.
So when a group of religious foreigners arrive in their country and put on a children’s program and start tying bracelets around the kids’ wrists that have spiritual meaning…..
Unfortunately, you may have just given those kids a new amulet.
Languages divide up colors differently. For example, in English, we have a word for red and a word for pink (not light red!). But we say light blue and dark blue. Other languages might use the same word for blue/green or red/orange. And when a person doesn’t have a word for different colors, he might not see them as different. This is fascinating stuff – and something we need to be aware of.
Other cultures assign different meanings to colors than we do. We may see green as representing growth. But in Indonesia, it’s associated with exorcism. In China, it can be associated with infidelity, and in South America it’s connected with death. White is correlated with purity in Western cultures, but in some Asian cultures, it’s a symbol of death. The children in your host culture may not understand the gospel story the way you intend to tell it if they are not making the same color associations.
Contemplate for a moment the implications of a missions team with lighter skin visiting a group of people with darker skin and telling them that black means sin and white means holiness.
The gospel presentation that goes along with wordless bracelets is grounded in a guilt/innocence paradigm, which may not be the best way for the message to make sense to the people you are trying to reach. If you are unfamiliar with what I am talking about here, check out this excellent 7 minute video on guilt/innocence, honor/shame, and fear/power worldviews.
I realize that this list might make you feel a little uncertain about not just wordless bracelets but your entire VBS program. Because if something as simple as a colorful craft might be communicating something different than what you intended, then what does that mean about all of your other activities? So if you are feeling that tension, great! That’s a good place to be. That’s where learning and growth start.
So what should you do?
Start with some research. In the time you have available, your team needs to learn all they can about the history, customs, worldviews, and religion of the people you will be visiting. Hofstede Insights is a great resource for this. Remember–don’t assume that what works in your own country will automatically translate to another culture.
Most importantly, before you set any plans in stone, run your entire program–teaching, activities, games, songs–past your missionary or local contact. Make it very clear that you want feedback and are open to change. Even better—if there is any way that a local person can do the teaching instead of someone on your team, make that happen! The best way for you to impact a community is to train others to do the program alongside you and then later—without you.
For more reading about short-term missions, check out these links:
Also, this excellent video series Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions by the Chalmers Institute is extremely valuable for any church or organization that wants to prioritize short-term missions.
I loved telling this story–one of my favorites from our years in Tanzania.
One of the first things that stood out to Peter and Eunice when they visited Reach Tanzania Bible School was that the teachers drank out of the same plastic cups as the students. In their denomination, the leadership would remain distant from those under them. Visiting guest pastors would choose the best hotels and restaurants. And certainly, they wouldn’t socialize with their students.
But they knew they had found a unique Bible school in Tanzania when they heard the philosophy of the director, Mark Dunker, a ReachGlobal missionary. “If you are looking for a paper to hang on your wall, this is not the right place for you,” Mark told them. “Here we teach for life change.”
Peter and Eunice were instantly hooked—this was the place they had been looking for. They didn’t realize their lives were about to change far more than they could have ever imagined.
By the time Peter and Eunice stepped into Reach Tanzania Bible School in early 2017, they had already been full-time pastors and missionaries for 20 years. Originally from Kenya, they had joined their denomination (founded by American missionaries) as young adults with a sincere desire to serve God wholeheartedly. They received some mentoring and then were sent to locations all over East Africa, evangelizing, pastoring churches and discipling others.
They were shining stars in their large international denomination, faithful to teach the truth about how to be born again from Acts 2:36-38: Repent and be baptized. Peter explained that repentance meant regularly making lists of your sins, publicly confessing, and often being publicly rebuked and humiliated in front of the church. Once you’d cleaned up your life enough, you were ready to be baptized—and you weren’t saved until that moment. And even once you had been baptized, you lived in daily fear that you might mess up too much to keep your salvation.
Like Cornelius or Apollos, Peter and Eunice feared God, earnest in their pursuit of Him. Before being assigned to his denomination’s church in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Peter took classes at a Pentecostal seminary. He agreed to go to Tanzania in 2013 with permission from his leadership that he continue to pursue Bible education, but theological education is sparse in Tanzania. So in 2017, when Eunice saw a Facebook ad for Reach Tanzania pop up in her feed and noticed it was not far from their home, they decided to check it out.
They quickly signed up and started classes shortly after, but Eunice was disappointed to see that the first required course was on Bible study methods. “I have already been studying the Bible for 20 years,” she thought. “What else are they going to teach me?”
She was about to get the shock of her life. The first of many.
“What explains why some leave while others stay? Sometimes the only difference I could see is what they did with their trials. The first group ran away from God while the second ran toward him. Instead of letting doubt and disappointment fester in darkness, they dragged it into the light. They joined the great biblical tradition of prophets who expressed their grievances to God, often in harsh and accusatory language.”
“I can easily identify many things we did—or did not do—that may have contributed to our sons’ departure from the faith. I hope to see others avoid such an outcome. In that light, here are seven parenting errors that can influence adult children to turn their back on Christ.”
Whoa, this is fascinating and scary and super important: “The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity. The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.
It’s a huge business, and will soon be larger than arts and entertainment combined. Everything is getting turned into TikTok—an aptly named platform for a business based on stimuli that must be repeated after only a few ticks of the clock.”
“We live in a time of self-creation. The traditional markers of identity that once came from outside ourselves—from our family or friends or community or past—are viewed as subpar, even repressive. We’re supposed to chart our own course, to look deep inside to discover our desires and define ourselves as we determine.
This way of life sounds exhilarating at first, but the result is fragility. What happens when we adopt the therapeutic assumptions of our age, when we look into our hearts and find only failures and frailty? Many of us begin to define ourselves by our maladies, to base our identities in suffering.”
I wrote about Part 1 of this biography a couple of years ago here at A Life Overseas. Part 2 did not disappoint. What a fascinating look into what was going on in Elisabeth’s life during the time she wrote the books that influenced me so much.
My garden has started blooming. Happy Spring to you all!
The Medina family arrived at San Francisco airport on March 26, 2020. It was evening, and as we got to the baggage area and met my parents, I burst into tears as I hugged my mom. I’ve written in detailabout the previous week’s events that got us to the States, but I haven’t yet told much of the story of what happened next. I didn’t want to think about those months. It’s not a time I want to go back to.
Because we had been traveling internationally, we weren’t supposed to leave the house for two weeks. At that moment, quarantine was one of the biggest blessings to me. My soul was so overwhelmed with tension and confusion and loss that I hadn’t even begun to process – I was just surviving. Seeing only my husband, children, and parents was all I could handle.
We moved into my parents’ house – Gil and me in my old bedroom, the boys in the office, the girls in the living room. Vevette brought us over homemade pizza the next night. Gracey brought us homemade masks. I waved from the doorway, put on a pretend smile, and yelled out my thank-yous. I was grateful, of course. Just too bottled up with sorrow to really smile.
The kids got stir crazy quickly so my ever-creative husband got to work. He ordered a used XBox and Kinect (like a Wii) on eBay, and the kids, especially Johnny, spent many hours jumping and running in place through imaginary obstacle courses. We printed out a note: We’re wanting to buy a basketball hoop. It looks like you have one that hasn’t been used in a while. Interested in selling it? And left it on several neighborhood front porches. The very next day, a woman down the block called us. You can have mine for free, she said. And we wheeled it down the street.
