Context is king

I was shocked, and had no context to understand what I was seeing.

Early one morning, while we had lived in a Solong tribal village in Papua New Guinea only a short time, several of the people decided to work in their gardens on another island. A number of people were already in a large dugout canoe, and at the rear was a man with his son operating the outboard engine.

Right before the father started the engine, another man walked to the back of the canoe and told the young man to go to the front. The man's son walked to the front, got out of the boat and started throwing a tantrum. He was throwing stones at the houses, pulling planks off the sides and breaking dishes that were sitting on the porch.

While he was doing this the father started the engine and headed off to the garden with everyone except his son.

About 15 minutes later the boat returned with everyone in it. The son was still carrying on his tirade and the father got out of the boat and started whipping his son. Not too hard but hard enough. He then started walking up and down the beach kicking the boy and after some time, they both got back in the boat where the father started to hit the son again.

At this point the mother came up behind the boy, took a plank of wood and hit her son right in the back. The father became even more angry and was getting ready to hit his wife when the people in the boat restrained him from doing so. Everyone then calmed down and once again headed off for the garden.

What this has to do with teaching

If you are asking what this story has to do with chronological Bible teaching, we need to go back a few years. When my wife Cheryl and I decided to become missionaries, we wanted to head to some remote area of the world where the Gospel had never been and get this message to as many as we could.

While we were in training, our focus shifted. We quit asking the question, "Do we want to see believers in these tribes?" and started asking, "What kind of believers do we want to see raised up?" These two questions are at the heart of why New Tribes Mission teaches chronologically.

Every single thing that you have ever been taught is built upon previously understood information. A sentence is built upon words which are built upon an alphabet and "Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" is built upon 4,000 years of previously understood truths.

Think what a person must know in order to make sense of this simple statement. They must know what a lamb is, who God is, what sin is, the need for sin to be taken away and what relationship all of these have to each other. It would be as confusing to them as me saying, "Look, the trashman who takes away the garbage to the dump." Imagine if you had never heard any of these words before. What would it mean?

As Cheryl and I pondered how we might approach the ministry, we decided that our ultimate goal would be to do the job well rather than quickly. After all, it wouldn't be us who would reap the consequences of our choice. It would be the tribal people.

New Tribes Mission uses a very effective strategy called a "mature church model." We define what a mature church looks like and then consider what steps are needed to reach that goal. Chronological Bible teaching is one of those steps but not the only.

When we first move into a tribe, our first priority is to learn the language and the culture of the people we are living with. To do this takes concentrated study on how they view reality and communicate those concepts with each other.

In most of the tribes we work with, the people can speak two or more languages and one of those languages is usually a trade language. In Papua New Guinea, the trade language would be Melanesian Pidgin. In Senegal, it would be French. In Mozambique and Brazil, Portugese, etc. Once we learn the trade language, we often move into the tribe and use it to help us learn the tribal language.

'Beverly Hillbillies evangelism'

Now, most people ask the question, "Doug, if you and the tribal people can speak the trade language, why not teach them in the trade language, saving years of time getting the Gospel to them?" Good question! Here is the answer. It was because we didn't want to use what I like to refer to as "Beverly Hillbillies evangelism."

In the TV show, the Clampets and the Drysdales are two perfectly American families but the TV show is premised on both parties misunderstanding each other. And why did they misunderstand each other? It was because both families were interpreting the same words from two different cultural perspectives, one from the hills of Tennessee and the other from the hills of Beverly. It is a perfect example of what we are trying to avoid.

In the tribe we worked with there had been at least five different religious groups who had worked with our folks in the last 100 years. None of the religious groups had ever done any ministry in the tribal language. They had ministered in either the trade language or English.

If you asked them to tell you a Bible story in Pidgin, they could recite it to you almost word for word but it was how they were interpreting that concerned us the most.

In one village, there were three different stories of what the original sin was. They thought that Eve had had sexual relations with Adam, the serpent or Satan. They thought Jesus Christ was someone who came right before World War II. They thought that the reason Mary, Martha and Mary Magdalene ministered to Christ was because they desired him, and the reason that the Pharisees were jealous was because all the women wanted to hang around with Christ.

To put it simply, they were trying to interpret the stories they were hearing from their own cultural perspective, or worldview.

We learned the language of the people in order to clearly communicate the message God wanted them to hear and we learned their culture, or how they viewed reality, so that we could predict with accuracy how they were interpreting the message they were hearing. Without learning the language and culture first, we would run the risk of them misinterpreting the message that we wanted to share with them.

Sharing the whole story

After spending three years learning the language and culture, we decided that the most effective and efficient first step to bringing them to maturity was by telling them the whole redemptive story, not just the last chapter.

We started with God in eternity past and the moved on to the creation and rebellion of the angelic realm. Then we moved onto the creation of the physical universe culminating with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. When our people started realizing the origins of the spirit world and the physical universe, they were truly amazed. To them, it all made sense.

From there we went into the fall of man and the judgment on humans and the physical creation. Our folks were stunned to realize that they now knew why their gardens didn't grow well, why their children got sick, why they died, why there was murder, stealing, adultery, etc. They saw it all as a result of sin, not some sorcerer working magic. This explained to them why they failed at making their gardens grow better and all the other issues that they could not control, especially death.

As we moved through the Old Testament, they realized that God never changes and does not lower His standards for anyone. They saw themselves as sinners under judgment but they also saw that God was going to provide a way to escape the judgment.

When Jesus Christ was introduced, he became the hero of the story -- God's Story. They never doubted that He could do the things that He could do because He was God, and therefore could do everything that God did in the Old Testament. It wasn't until they saw Him die on the tree that they struggled with the redemptive story. Different tribes have responded differently. For some, they immediately realize the significance. For ours, they struggled with God allowing His Son to be shamed on the cross but their ultimate realization was that their sin must have been awful for God to have to do that to His own Son.

A worldview shift

The chronological Bible teaching that NTM uses has an ultimate aim of seeing people's worldview shift, not just get them saved. Asking the right questions in the beginning of our ministry helped us to decide what course of action we would take when moving into a tribe.

Many subjects need to be considered to see a mature church established such as relationship building, culture and language acquisition, literacy, Bible translation, Bible lesson preparation, teaching, discipleship, etc. Chronological Bible teaching is not a silver bullet but it is an important step in the process to bring people to maturity.

At the beginning of this article I shared about our people going to the garden and the ensuing event that happened. I shared this event because I want you to see how important it is to communicate clearly and the only way to do that is to understand their language and culture and now you are going to hear the rest of the story.

I did not understand this event for an entire year. What happened was that when the man walked to the back of the boat and told the young boy to move to the front, he shamed the boy in front of everyone. The young boy then threw a tantrum to help get rid of his shame.

The boat left and then returned and the father got out and started hitting the boy but he wasn't upset at his son, he was mad at the man who shamed his son and when he started hitting his son, he was, in reality, shaming the man. The more he hit his son, the more shame he was bringing on the man.

When they got back into the boat the father wanted to shame the man some more and started to hit his son but when the mother came up from behind and hit her son in the back with the plank, she signaled to everyone in the boat that it was finished. If anyone would have hit the boy at that point, there would have been huge penalties and payments that would have been imposed.

I could not understand what was going on without knowing the context. And the same is true when it comes to sharing the Gospel.