Finding Your People
Everyone feels most at home among “their people.” What makes the people around you either “one of us” or “one of them”? Maybe you feel like people who “get you” eat the same kind of food as you, or speak the same language.
Since moving back to my role as schoolteacher, I have found that there is at least one boy in my classes who is one of “my people.” Often, to explain more complex and lofty subject matter, I resort to illustrations using things like Twinkies and Little Debbie Snack cakes. To my shock and surprise, many of my students are unfamiliar with basics of life such as Pop Tarts and Christmas tree cakes. Not this boy. I can always count on him, to not only know what Zebra cakes are, but to enthusiastically explain to the rest of the class what makes them the extraordinary delights that they are. He is one of my people.
It’s not always food that links a people group. That’s just one element of culture that unites people. People who are linked by language, geography, or elements of culture that make them so similar that people who eat and talk and think like them are considered “us” while everyone else is considered “them” are called a people group.
Why is this important to missionaries? Well, everyone needs to hear the gospel message at least once from “their people.” I remember, while being on the field in SE Asia, how beautiful it was to me when volunteers came to visit and I was able to hear the soft, lilting tones of a Southern accent mixed in with the punched staccato of the tonal language of our country. It was beautiful to me because the mixing of the sounds meant believers from opposite sides of the world were working together for the sake of the gospel. But it was also beautiful to me because a Southern accent sounds to me like home. I wanted to listen to a person who I felt understood me, and felt relief when I heard the exact way that fellow Southerners said things. Many times I have mused on feeling this way, hearing a Southern accent after being starved for it for so long, and wonder if this is how believers feel who are forced to worship in a trade language. When and if they finally get to hear the message, or a praise song, in their own language, do they feel that relief that I felt?
A trade language can be functional, yes, and it’s better than nothing. But incredibly, according to the Joshua project, over 2500 people groups in the world still lack access to the Bible in their own languages. Imagine, as a native English speaker, having taken high school Spanish, then having to show up to church every Sunday and read every song lyric in Spanish, pray in Spanish, listen to the sermon in Spanish, and read the Bible in Spanish. Would you be prepared? Would you even continue to come? This is what it’s like for those who still lack the Bible in their heart languages and have to function in a trade language, if they even care enough to attend church and study the Scripture.
How can we best reach them in, and speak to their innermost thoughts, hopes, and fears? How can we help them learn to speak to their Creator about those innermost thoughts of their hearts? This is best done in their heart languages, by one of “them.” This needs to be done by a person they feel is “their people.” To get a person like this to the remaining unreached people groups of the world, we need incarnational, long term witnesses among them. We must train leaders among every people group of the world, so that when the Uighur Muslim of China or the Yemeni Arab of Yemen hears the gospel, the message is not impeded by a lack of cultural understanding or by a strong, strange accent. Each one of them needs to hear it spoken in a way that allows him to relax, and say, “This is one of my people. I can trust him. I will listen.” And the “gospel of the kingdom” must continue to be “preached in a whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” (Matt. 24:14). If we keep speaking it and praying and sending, increasingly, worshippers will be able to look beyond the bounds of language and culture, and simply see anyone who is speaking that precious gospel message and say, “THAT’s my people.”