Then there has been further discussion about whether balance is the right thing to be aiming at anyhow, as though proclamation and cultural engagement are at opposite ends of a spectrum and that the best way forward is somehow to water both ends down a bit so that some middle ground is reached. It seems more accurate to say that both ends of the spectrum must be emphasised – that we must share faithfully the good news of Jesus including the implications of that news for the way we understand ourselves and the world, and that we must engage with the people we are speaking with because their backgrounds influence the way they hear our message.
I want to cut across the discussion to focus on just one aspect – maybe the most fundamental aspect -of engaging with other people and proclaiming the gospel. This aspect is words – the language we use. It is obvious that if I am proclaiming the gospel in English, I can be utterly faithful to the Bible but completely failing to communicate with someone who doesn t speak English. But what is perhaps less obvious and needs more thought is that there are not two neat and clear categories – speaks English and does not speak English . There are many kinds of English, many levels of English, many different accents among English speakers. And among people from non-English-speaking backgrounds (NESB), there are various degrees of ability to speak and understand English. The Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us that about one-third of the population of greater Sydney speaks a language other than English at home, but only about 6% say that they are not good at English. The statistics are variable – many places in the west and south-west of Sydney have half of the population or more speaking a language other than English at home (for example: 70% at Fairfield, 50% in Liverpool and Parramatta), but the proportion who report that they have difficulty with English is much lower (20% at Fairfield, 11% at Liverpool and 9% in Parramatta). One of my concerns, however, is that English-speakers like me are not very aware of the kind of English we are using, and may be communicating much less than we think we are, even with people who don t feel they have any difficulty with English.
At Moore College last year, I made an awkward conversational remark one lunchtime to a NESB student. When I realised a couple of minutes later what I had done, I apologised and said that I had put my foot in it . Then I wondered if I had put my foot in it again by using that expression! Indeed I had – I asked the student if he knew that expression and he didn t, and neither did another NESB student at the same table. Part of my explanation included that the it meant my mouth – and the idea of putting a foot in one’s mouth needed even further explanation. Both students are sufficiently proficient in English to do a Moore College degree, but I had failed to communicate with them by using this particular English idiom.
If you have ever taken a NESB friend to church or to an event, I wonder if you have found yourself listening in a different way, a bit through their ears (or how you imagine their ears to be) – or at least with more sensitivity than you might usually have to the kind of language that is used, including slang, idioms, abbreviations and other strange expressions.
Does this really have implications for our gospel communication? I think it does. In a diocese like Sydney, every church will have a variety of different languages – even if they are all English-speaking. Making our message clearer to one particular group may alienate another group. At CMS Summer School this January, Rob Smith gave a little apology for the word wanna in one of the songs and gave us permission to sing want to if we wanted to . It is a trivial example, but shows that even within one language, words do not just have meaning, but can produce emotional reactions in people.
As we seek to explain what the coming of Jesus into the world means, and how he is the climax of God’s world rescue plan, there is language that we have learnt to use as we tell this story. A lot of this language is not used very much in other contexts – words like sin, redemption, grace, faith. When we have learnt our message using these words, we can be so used to them, we understand them so well, that we forget that their meaning may not be clear to others. It is like me saying I had put my foot in it . In one of my Moore College classes we play a game called banned word of the week . The banned words are these Christian terms that we often use, but that may not communicate well with outsiders. Students (and the lecturer) who use the banned word have to pay a financial penalty. The point of the game is simply to make us more aware of the language we are using, and to try to find different ways of explaining what we are talking about.
Does this mean that we should never use Christian jargon? No, it is important that people know and understand the words that our English translations of the Bible use if we want them to be able to use an English Bible. But we still need to be aware of the steps along the way as we explain and teach and it is helpful to be aware of the possible pitfalls. One Bible translator in Papua New Guinea discovered as he attempted to translate the word sin that the understanding the local people had of that word was things that white people get upset about . It is also helpful to bear in mind, especially when speaking English to NESB people, that they may be having to do their own translation work all the time we are speaking and that this takes a lot of mental energy and effort.
I think it would be helpful if Christians who are regularly communicating the gospel in multicultural and multilingual situations (and ideally that will be most of us) recorded themselves from time to time and listened back to what they were saying – and even to the speed they are speaking at. It would be a disaster for gospel witness in our neighbourhoods if we thought we were communicating effectively, but we were actually not. Listening back with somebody from a different level of English compared with what we usually use would make the process even better.
In my own experience listening to others (and myself) speak – even those who have considerable experience in multicultural settings – it is much harder than we think to modify our language. If we are going to reach our communities with the gospel, particularly those who have come recently from non-English-speaking countries, we are going to have to listen to ourselves through others ears much more. We are also going to have to listen to feedback from people different from us to find out what they are hearing. (And we won t get accurate feedback just by asking did you understand that? )
There are many ways to engage with the many cultures that are represented in our neighbourhoods, but language is fundamental to most of them. There are religions in the world where followers are expected to use the language of the religion’s founder, regardless of whether they understand it. Christian faith is different. God wants us to understand his revelation, as the miracle of languages on the day of Pentecost demonstrates.
If you have got this far reading this article, you may have noticed an irony all through it. I have been writing in the kind of English that I am used to writing – perhaps the kind of language that many middle-aged tertiary-educated English speakers use for this kind of article. But you could go through it again and ask what kind of assumptions about concepts, about the world, about communication and about language, I have been making as I write. I do this more or less unconsciously because I am so used to doing it. That is what we all do unless we stop to think, listen and try to do it better. I invite you to retell these ideas in a way that people in your neighbourhood will understand.
Dr Greg Anderson is head of Moore College’s department of Mission.
