A Missionary looks at 1 Corinthians 13

What is it like being a missionary? It's hard, it's confusing, it's lonely, and it's humiliating. It's not just the lack of creature comforts that we have grown up with. In fact, that's usually the least of our problems. We leave the culture, the customs, the language, and the people we have always enjoyed to be thrust into a new and totally foreign culture. We have to mingle with people who look different, smell different, and act different than we do—and we have to respect them and love them. We have to accept ourselves as their inferiors, people who don't really know how to survive or even talk right. We have to ask for help for the simplest things and be mocked for our deficiencies.

And in that situation we have to present Jesus in a culturally sensitive way, knowing that if they were to follow Jesus it could cost them their life. It's hard.

Before going to the foreign mission field we study cultural adaptation, theories of contextualization (learning how to present Biblical truths in a foreign context), linguistics, and other things. Yet we arrive seemingly totally unprepared for the reality on the field.

It was during one of these perplexing times that I was meditating on 1 Corinthians 13 and trying to apply it to my situation in Pakistan. This is what it said to me...

1 Corinthians 13 - My Attitude in a Strange Culture

Though I speak with the tongue of a national, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

And though I wear the national dress, and understand culture, and all forms of etiquette; and though I copy all mannerisms, so that I could pass for a national, and have not love, I am nothing.

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I spend my energy without reserve, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.

Love suffereth long hours of language study, and is kind to those who mock his accent; love envieth not those who stayed home; love does not exalt its own culture, is not proud of its national superiority,

Doth not boast about the way we do it at home, seeketh not her own ways, is not easily provoked to tell about the beauty of her home country, thinketh not evil about this culture;

Rejoiceth not in the deficiencies, but rejoiceth in the advantages of this culture;

Beareth all criticism about his home culture, believeth all good things about this new culture, confidently anticipates being at home in this place, endureth all inconveniences.

Love never faileth: but whether there be cultural anthropology, it shall fail; whether there be contextualization, it shall lead to syncretism; whether there be linguistics, it shall change.

For we know only part of the culture, and we minister to only part.

But when Christ is reproduced in this culture, then our inadequacies shall be insignificant.

When I was in America, I spake as an American, I understood as an American, I thought as an American: but when I left America, I put away American things.

Now we adapt to the culture, awkwardly; but He will live in it intimately: now I speak in a stammering tongue; but He will speak to the heart.

And now abideth cultural adaptation, language study, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.