DotCom 9: A little about language

I read yesterday the following from Leslie Newbigin (he was a missionary and Bishop in India who returned to Britain after 30 years and deliberately treated Britain as a “mission field” and he applied the same rigour of understanding the culture to Britain as he did to India):
“The language of a people provides the means by which they express their way of perceiving things and of coping with them.”

The challenge for us as Christians is that if we speak in a language that is not understood by those we speak with (and I don’t mean a foreign language, simply different forms of words and meanings of phrases) then we will fail to communicate. At the same time the gospel will inevitably challenge the culture and that means it will challenge the language used because it challenges the way people perceive things and cope with them. We also must be aware of syncretism – that is by adopting the language of the culture around us we also adopt their way of perceiving and coping.