My wife Marla and I moved to Poland in 1991 and over the next ten years worked to understand the Polish language and culture.
In the beginning, we discovered the widespread perception that Evangelical Christianity is a foreign religion. Over the last twenty-three years, this false perception has also been observed in Belarus, Latin America, India, and the Middle East.
In many of the countries where EGM has developed ministry, the general population has developed the notion that Evangelical, Protestant Christianity is a foreign, imported religion.
Indians are Hindu's, Belarusians are Orthodox, Arabs are Muslims and Latinos are Roman Catholics. In Poland, if you are Polish, then de facto you are Roman Catholic, or so the saying goes.
This tends to marginalize the message of the gospel and discount its biblical message. It can prevent Christianity from deeply penetrating the society, often allowing Christ to be portrayed as someone strange and irrelevant.
In the next three articles I would like to suggest three reasons why this has occurred and offer some solutions.
English Should Not be the Lingua Franca
One Sunday, we had a Swedish Pastor visiting our Polish church in Krakow, Poland. He did not speak Polish or English and there was no Swedish Polish translator.
Therefore, in order for him to preach they had to translate from Swedish into English and then English into Polish. The thirty-minute sermon took an hour and a half.
During one section of the sermon, the Swedish-English translator referred to the man in Mark 8:21 as having no eyes. She did not know the word "blind" in English. I later referred to the service as a linguistic nightmare.
One of the reasons that Christianity is often labeled a foreign religion is due to the proliferation of English language ministry in other cultures.
One hundred and fifty years ago, missionaries understood that in order to carry on ministry work in another culture, you had to learn the language of the culture. Over the last fifty years, the ease of travel and technological advances as created several phenomena that have changed our views on language.
Short-term ministry has been one of those phenomena. Today thousands of English-speaking Christians travel the world for 1–2-week ministry trips in other cultures.
They are carrying on a variety of work including street witnessing, teaching, preaching, humanitarian work, training conferences and the like.
This wide array of ministry work is being done in English. In many cases a translator is alongside, and in other cases English alone, is the avenue of attempted communication. During our ten years of service in Poland, we had guest English speaking preachers at least once/month.
Another development has been the proliferation of translated American Christian writings. There are a number of Christian authors whose work has been translated into more than 35 languages. I have traveled in many countries and observed first-hand the widespread publications of American Christian writings in other languages.
Many of the Bible colleges in Eastern Europe use translated materials from American Evangelical writers. If you peruse their ministry websites, you will find data on the how widely translated are an author’s work. James Dobson's books have been translated into more than 25 languages. He is not alone.
Finally, English worship music (American, British, and Australian) has been translated into many other languages and is being used in churches across the globe. The music itself is the same.
I remember stepping into an evangelical church in Cairo, Egypt and the worship service was featuring a worship song written by one of my friends, being sung in Arabic. The reason I knew, was the music had not changed.
These developments have cast English into the role of "lingua franca", the language of the world. Unfortunately, this has created two separate problems. The first involves communicating to people in their own language (Acts 2:11).
Our disregard for communicating in the heart language of people is a separate and crucial issue. However, the second problem is that Evangelical Christianity is easily characterized as a foreign religion.
With so much public ministry being done in English, countless books translated from English and even English music styles the gospel can be claimed to be foreign.
The church in the English-speaking world, particularly the US is large and well resourced. Those resources include finances, technology, and leadership. There are very gifted leaders serving in the English-speaking world, with very significant financial resources and state-of-the-art technology.
This has created an English-speaking church with the potential to exercise enormous influence for both good and bad.
To help local, indigenous expressions of Christianity to flourish the English-speaking church should consider the following:
- Limit the use of English based ministry to low profile development of Christian leaders in other cultures. Avoid conducting public ministry in English, but rather put the indigenous local Christian leaders in the forefront and maintain a servants position of anonymity. This is particularly true in countries where Evangelical Christianity is emerging or facing strong opposition.
- In the event that the culture/peoples are unreached and have no church community. The message of the gospel should be declared within their own language and culture. Language learning has to precede ministry work.
- Encourage indigenous Christian work literature and the arts. Rather than spending resources on translating and distributing music, books, sermons that were written in English into another language, we should encourage the development of these expressions from within the local Christian community.
The term "lingua franca" ironically was coined during the period of the Crusades. It was a mix of the various Romance languages and used as a means of communication among varying languages, particularly in the Middle East.
Webster Dictionary notes that the term lingua franca is often associated with an Empire. This is certainly the case with the French, Belgian, English, and Spanish colonization of Africa and parts of Asia.
The unfettered use of English is creating the worldwide impression that Evangelical Christianity is the religious partner of "American imperialism".
The challenge for the American church is to join God in developing an indigenous expression of the Kingdom of God within every people of the earth.
→ Read the second part of Why Christianity is a Foreign Religion