When America Makes No Sense

You can’t understand Tanzanians without understanding their view of the spirit world. It permeates every facet of life. Witchdoctors are often present at national soccer games, fending off the curses of the other team. Albino children have been known to have a limb cut off in the middle of the night, the appendage sold by a family member to a wealthy businessman who uses it in magic rituals. A herd of witchdoctor’s goats on our street ran free, tended by a spirit creature.

These beliefs were not just seen as superstitions or old wives tales. They were embedded in the worldview, part of the air the people breathed. Coming from our western, enlightened, scientific worldview, our heads would spin from these stories. But we learned, early on, that this was serious business. We needed to pay attention. 

If we had come in scoffing and mocking, critical and judgmental, how well do you think Tanzanians would have listened to us? They would have written us off. Though some stories were speculative, every Tanzanian has experienced situations with the spirit world that defy western imagination. They know what they have seen, or felt, or heard. Blowing it off was not an option. If we wanted to have a voice in Tanzania, we needed to first be learners. 

Steven Hawthorne* wrote, “If our impression of another culture is that it ‘makes no sense,’ then we can be sure that we are not making sense to them either. The solution is to become a learner.” 

My job these days is to help prepare new missionaries to move overseas. What I am discovering is that the same things they are learning can be just as easily applied to American Christians. 

The spirit world may not be an issue for the average American, but what about current thinking about sexuality and gender? What about racial or economic issues? It’s easy to say that these things “make no sense.” But have we considered that we Christians are not making sense to average Americans either? 

Missionaries are taught to enter a culture as a learner. Instead of forming judgments, they need to ask questions. People act in a way that makes sense to them; missionaries must find out why it makes sense. What are their underlying beliefs? What is the fundamental way they are seeing the world? 

This is simpler to do overseas. When missionaries enter another country as guests, it’s easier to see themselves as learners. It’s harder to do in our own country, especially if we feel that the culture we are used to is being slowly pulled away from us. It’s harder to be gracious and teachable when we feel like an alternate culture is being imposed upon us, against our will.

But yet, as Christians, do we have a right to insist that the world do things our way? Should we be shocked when the vast majority in our culture choose values that are the opposite of ours? When we chose to follow Christ, we chose a life as an outsider, an exile, a missionary. So if we start to feel that way, even in our own country, we shouldn’t be surprised.

This doesn’t mean we embrace everything about the outside culture. But we should be a student of it. Instead of becoming automatically offended, we can be curious. Maybe that means reading books by authors we disagree with. Maybe it means watching a documentary we would normally avoid, in order to understand the worldview. Maybe it means suspending judgement on a neighbor’s lifestyle, and making an effort to really get to know them. If we want the message of the gospel to make sense, we’ve first got to understand where people are coming from.

What surprised us in getting to know the Tanzanian spirit world was that we found that it expanded and stretched our own worldview. We found that our western, rational worldview clouded out a lot of what the Bible had to say about the supernatural. So not only did being a learner help us to better know how to minister in Tanzania, it also widened our own perspective and gave us a deeper understanding of our own faith. 

Is it possible that an exploration of current American culture could do the same for us? We don’t stop speaking up for truth, of course. We don’t compromise on the essentials of our faith. But if we want to be effective missionaries to our communities, that’s going to start by becoming learners.

*Perspectives on the World Christian Movement