"Those who like to feel they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home." –Aldous Huxley
Culture
September, 2020
MJM writes from Colombia—
Oh the joys of language and culture acquisition! What does it mean when someone sends a Whatsapp message and asks, “Hey, could I come and stay with your family for a couple days?” In light of the fact that the last “couple days” visit ended up lasting a...
August, 2020
"One of the abiding values of language acquisition is developing the capacity to listen well. Most missionary training programs focus almost entirely on teaching missionaries what to say with very little emphasis on learning to listen well. However, as anyone who has been a missionary knows,...
May, 2020
by Aaron Crider, with a response by Steve Sanford
This writing was provoked by the book Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, where former Bible translator Daniel Everett tells about his life and language work among the Pirahá people in the Amazonian...
February, 2020
“No one can penetrate very deeply into the minds and hearts of the people till he has learned to speak to them in their own mother tongue. A missionary is incapable of knowing the thoughts, ambitions and deepest throbbing of the native heart without first knowing his manner of speech”. —John G....
November, 2019
"Having good, methodical teaching over an extended period of time is important...You cannot breeze into a community, hold a seminar showing better techniques, and instantly move their community into prosperity. Until you form strong relationships with them, they will find it difficult to trust...
November, 2019
"Just as each culture brings something new to humanity, so does every language. Each language is capable of expressing some things better than all other languages. Why else do coffee shops sell cafe latte rather than milky coffee? On a deeper note, each language has the ability to express itself...
April, 2019
What do you get when you take an Anabaptist farm boy and his family from the mid-western United States and deposit them on the other side of the earth? You get culture shock. In our training we learned about culture shock. I am grateful for our training. It removed the element of surprise....
March, 2019
Yesterday we went to the visitation of a sixteen-year-old boy. We took along a case of Pepsi as a gift to the family, according to the custom of the village. Other people brought Pepsi as well, or flowers and candles to place around the corpse.
As we entered the small, one-room house, we...
January, 2019
“There is an offense in the foreignness of the culture we bring along with the gospel, which must be eliminated. But there is the offense of the gospel itself, which we dare not weaken.” —P. G. Hiebert