Billions of people in the world are bilingual and even multilingual. It is not unusual for people in India or Africa to speak four or five languages. Why should it be so difficult for missionaries to learn a new language or two? Perhaps we are going at language learning in the wrong way. The normal procedure for our missionaries is Bible college, deputation, and then a language school on their chosen field. There is a vitally important step that is usually overlooked: pre-field linguistic training such as has been available for Baptist missionaries at BBTI for nearly fifty years. Some have greatly benefited from it, however, the vast majority have either not known of its existence or chosen not to take advantage of it.

The language school method of language learning presupposes that a school is available for the language the missionary needs to learn. Language schools teach trade languages such as French, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. There are 7,151 languages in the world, and it would be safe to say that 6,000 or more of them have no language schools. Yet there are billions of lost souls that speak these languages: souls for whom Jesus died, souls that He desires to save, and souls that deserve to hear the message in their heart languages. Some of these languages have only a few hundred speakers while others have several million. With few exceptions, our Independent Baptist missionaries are not attempting to reach people whose languages have no schools because of the seemingly impossible language barrier. Many of these languages are still unwritten which of course means they have no portion of God’s Word. An estimated eighty-five percent of our missionaries go to only fifteen countries and then only to the major trade languages. Most of these countries have several other language groups. For instance, in the African country of Côte d’Ivoire, there are 77 languages besides the official French. Would you not agree that all people deserve to hear the Gospel in the language they understand best, just as we did?

A language school where one is available is a good idea but not when the missionary first arrives on the field. We suggest that he begins vigorously learning the language from the people and progress to a point of fluency in a more natural way. Schools are not the natural way to learn languages. We did not learn our first language in one! The method of language learning that we suggest may sound radical to Americans, but it works, and it is usually better and faster. This plan will require extreme dedication and diligence on the part of the missionary. If he is too undisciplined or unwilling to take on this responsibility and become a learner, leaving behind the mentality of a student, then he should simply go the language school route and live with its results and limitations.

We are not suggesting that the missionary simply go out with the people and “pick up the language” the best he can. No, we are suggesting a plan that involves a tried and proven method. The missionary can go to the field with this method and begin using it upon arrival. But he must learn the method here first. Before you ask, the answer is no; he cannot learn it on the internet. And it will take time. (Missionaries spend the necessary time to prepare theologically in Bible college and financially on deputation. Why should they not spend the necessary time to prepare linguistically?)

This natural language learning method is part of the overall nine-month Advanced Missionary Training (AMT) program of BBTI which provides many language and culture learning tools that are not available in Bible colleges. The first skill we teach is phonetics. I have said it a thousand times; one more time will not hurt: No missionary should attempt to learn a new language without first studying phonetics! (At BBTI both husband and wife take the same classes.) Students spend at least one hundred fifty literal classroom hours learning to recognize and reproduce any sound they may encounter (there are about eight hundred of them). Because he learns to produce the new sounds exactly as the native speaker, he can speak a new language with little or no foreign accent. An accent does not disappear with time; from the beginning, he must keep from superimposing his English habits on the new language by forming new habits that will last for life.

The missionary student uses his newly acquired phonetic skill for a following course, Situational Language Learning. This includes using a language helper (I did not say a language teacher) who speaks a foreign language well. (In recent years, we have used Sina-Sina from Papua New Guinea, Japanese, Korean, Khmer from Cambodia, and Spanish.) The student learns how to elicit the language from the helper in a step-by-step process, beginning with simple object-like words and slowly increasing the length of the utterances. In a short time, he is fluent in all the sounds of that language. In a few weeks, he, along with a partner, will progress to eliciting and learning dialogues natural to the native culture such as buying food in the market. If his target language has no language school, he can continue using this method for as long as needed. If a language school is available, he can enter it after a few months and advance rapidly in grammar and more vocabulary. He begins at the top of the class because he is not struggling with pronunciation. He will sound like a native. Speaking and acting like a native should make him much less of an outsider. He will be comfortable with the people and hopefully they will be more willing to listen to his message. They may even tell him, “You eat our food, you spend time with us, you talk like us. Hey, you are one of us!”

The ground is level at the foot of the cross, meaning that all are welcomed and received equally when they come to God through faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus made a full and final atonement for the sins of Adam and all his descendants. Not only does God desire that all would arrive at the cross (1 Timothy 2:4), He commands it (Acts 17:30). The ground is indeed level at the foot of the cross, but the road leading there is not. For some there are seemingly insurmountable obstacles along the way.

To the place I heard the Gospel for the first time, I drove one mile on a paved road. I passed no checkpoints, and no armed guards asked where I was going. I walked into the building in broad daylight. It was not an underground church service. I feared no retaliation from a religious system. No family member opposed my going or persecuted me afterward. I heard the message in my language without it going through an interpreter. If I did not know better, I might think God loves me more than most people in the world. For me, the road to the cross was smooth and easy. I wish it were for everyone.

Most in the world know nothing about the cross or that there is even a road to it. No one gets to the cross without the message of the Gospel, and it simply has not been declared where they live. Contrary to God’s will, these poor souls live and die without the Gospel.

Another huge obstacle is social control, commonly called peer pressure. A society keeps its people in line with the threat of punishments. Punishment might be mild like gossip or ostracism or as serious as death. We have heard of a father killing his child that converted to Christianity. It is much easier to get to the cross from North Carolina than from North Korea! The fear of exile from a family or group is terrifying. A Muslim in Indonesia told a BBTI graduate, “I am an Indonesian, a Sunda Muslim. If I trust Christ, I am no longer a Sunda. If I am not a Sunda, I am nothing. I have no home, no family, no house, no relationship. I know I am a sinner, and I do not want to be punished for my sins. I know Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world, but I would rather risk suffering eternally in the lake of fire than to lose my social identity in this life.” (Missionaries in these difficult places are not going to see quick results; we need to be patient with them.)

To illustrate this difficult struggle against social control, consider the following from BBTI graduate Emanuel, who along with his wife, Courtney, works with Afghan refugees in Greece:

“Iman is not like the normal Hazara Afghans that are the majority here. In fact, there is a lot of fighting between Iman’s Panjshir group and them. Iman says they all convert easily because they don’t take their religion seriously. They will change again later from Jesus to something else when the situation affords. Iman on the other hand owns his faith. He has a very strong national pride that relates to his religion…But then here comes the dichotomy. For all this die-hard insistence, in the same conversation he will confess that he is tired of religion and wishes there were a way to connect with God directly without going through books, prophets, and go-betweens.

Over the weeks, we have had many conversations about the identity of Jesus. We showed him many scriptures, each of them shedding more light, but still, he would insist that he cannot accept that Jesus is God. We learned not to press the point. Instead, we befriended him, along with many others. We built trust, and he started coming and reading the Bible. When his younger brother was missing for days, we prayed with him. We let him talk about his life, his brothers who are fighting the Taliban, his mother whom he loves more than any other person, the three cows they have, the customs and values they live by, the climate of his mountain home, why he left it, the challenges along the way, and how he misses his family. For every hour we have spent teaching, we have spent as much listening. Slowly he was drawn in.

Now, he enjoys the Bible more and interacts with it better than most Christians I know. I can give him a passage, and he will read it and then preach it to me. He would make a great preacher. He loves Jesus… Still, he could not accept Christ’s identity. Until recently that is.
The other day we had a God-ordained hour with him, showing repeatedly that Jesus was in fact worshipped by men and angels, that he not only permitted it, but God commanded it, and that one day every tongue, including Iman’s, will confess that Jesus is Lord. At the end, he confessed that he believes it is true, but he has a family, which I suspicioned, for all his claims of independence, was the real reason he could not accept Jesus as the Son of God. If Jesus is right, his family, his nation, his heritage, has been mistaken for hundreds of years. That is an incredibly hard pill to swallow for one who is not bitter and hurt by his native culture, but proud of it…For such a person to become a follower of Jesus, what must he lose? Father, mother, brother, and sister, yes, Islam. He must find a new reference point, with new values, new beliefs, a new community, a new Lord and Master, a new Book, a new road, a new everything. Nothing old can stay the same. All that is dear to him must be eclipsed by One who beckons to him with nail scars in his hands and feet.”

It was easy for me to accept Jesus. I did not lose my family, my job, or my country. Not so for many. What will it take to get people like the Sunda Muslim or Iman down the road to the cross? Someone must obtain specialized training for the task. He must give up all he knows and loves and go to where they live, he must patiently learn new tongues and cultures, and he must not look for shortcuts or quick results. He must be willing to walk a difficult, dangerous road with the seeking sinner until they reach the level ground at the foot of the cross.

Spring 2022

Understanding of a people’s culture is vital. If the missionary does not know the culture, he is likely to deliver a confused message. The following article by a BBTI graduate, whose identity we must conceal, demonstrates this fact. Understanding of a people’s culture is vital. If the missionary does not know the culture, he is likely to deliver a confused message.

In the process of language learning, we have heard several folktales and children’s stories and have learned much about the people’s cultural mindset and worldview. We have seen at least three common themes.

Firstly, people are collectivists, NOT individualists. In America, we have been rooted in humanism to the point that “I define me.” In other words, I get to decide what I think is right and wrong. In general, westerners want to stand out of the crowd, be their own person, and have their own opinions. It does not work that way here. A person’s goal in a collectivist society is to progress the community; all are equal, and everyone is happy. Nobody has more than anyone else, we are all one big family, and what is mine is yours. This could explain why communism, to a certain point, makes sense here culturally. It is when the people discover that the dictators are above everyone else, have more, and are bossing people around that things begin to change. Which brings us to the next point…

Authority (without reason) is almost always resisted and rebelled against. If others (the pu-nyai) are over you, they are expected to show respect and understanding to you and everyone else (the pu-noi) under them. This means that if you give a rule, you should also explain why that rule is being enforced. Giving a reason shows you care about others and are helping to further everyone so that all live in unity. Otherwise, you are just a jerk full of pride scolding the underlings.

Last of all, deception is considered heroic. A typical hero in a folktale is an underling (pu-noi) who deceives the dictator/jerk (pu-nyai) in order to shame him, make him “lose face” in the community, and bring down his pride. We have seen this pattern over and over in these stories. A clever trick played on someone, usually in a humorous way, shows not only how the trickster does not like the jerk, but that he thinks the jerk is something he should not be. It is a way to “get the upper hand” so to speak. Here is an example of a story involving these things:

“Please don’t put me in the bucket!” called a soft voice.
“Oi! The fish can talk!” the lady said with a startle.
“Please don’t put me in the bucket!” the little fish begged again.
“But if I don’t catch you, I will not have anything to eat!”
the lady replied.
“But I am so young and very small,” implored the fish. “You will not have enough to eat. Why don’t you put me back in the water and wait until I am fully grown? Then you can catch me again, and you will have more to eat for that meal.”
After some thought, the lady conceded. She gently placed the little fish back into the river.
The little fish, happy to be free again, swam and splashed as far away from the net as he could, determined to
never return to that spot in the river.

Here we observe the pu-nyai, the lady who will catch and eat the fish (which only benefits her and leaves no mercy for the fish). The pu-noi, the little fish, resists and outsmarts her, even lying to her that he will be there again for her to catch once he is grown up. His trickery saves the day, he swims free (a small victory for all fish everywhere), and the woman is assumed to go hungry that day.

How does this affect the missionary? Take, for instance, the story of Adam and Eve. At first, if you hear the story through our people’s ears, God could
be considered a bad pu-nyai, giving rules without reason; the hero of the story would be the serpent, Satan. In deceiving Eve (by mixing truth with lies), he really deceived God and foiled His plans. And now all the earth and humankind are as corrupt (thus on the same level) as Satan. Imagine trying to convey the Gospel when Satan is seen as the hero!

However, if we show that God is a good pu-nyai, giving reasons for his rules (“In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”), thus trying to look out for and protect the pu-noi under Him, we see that deceiving Him is the worst blasphemy ever! Now, the deceiver is harming the one that protects the community, making himself the pu-nyai who is getting something only for himself and hurting everyone else. It shifts the situation entirely.

Now consider Christ Jesus. He was and is THE Pu-Nyai: Creator God, holy, sovereign, all-powerful, eternal, worthy of all praise. He stooped down and became a humble Pu-Noi. He had no more than anyone else around Him; He roamed homeless, often only finding solace on the Mount of Olives. He helped make the lives and souls better for those around Him. He had compassion on His fellow men. He did not come as Pu-Nyai, even though He is worthy to make the rules. He came as one of us, so He could be accepted by us.

As missionaries, we MUST be learners before we can be teachers, or we will find ourselves having to correct grave errors in our teaching. We cannot just spread the Gospel without giving due attention to culture. The way we pre- sent things may or may not make sense to the hearers. We must be pu-noi, just humans among fellow humans, serving our Heavenly Father, the Pu-Nyai of pu-nyai, the holiest and worthiest of all.