Every People and Every Language!

Every People and Every Language!

We are all good imitators.  Children imitate their parents, students imitate their teachers, and followers imitate their leaders and so on.  Most of our learning is naturally through imitations.  We in Indian missions and churches continue to imitate many of the practices and methods of the western missionaries who served in India for more than two centuries.  Most of the mission societies and agencies from the west were denominational and also were national.  Many of the missionaries who served in India belonged to the same nationalities.  Therefore they had very few issues in terms of inter-personal relationships among them.  Their focus was of course on the cross cultural mission where they were serving and relating to people different from them.

Most missions in India started in the last 50 years have followed this trend.  Mission agencies from Kerala had mostly Malayalees, from Tamil Nadu had mostly Tamilians, from Mizoram had mostly Mizos, from Orissa had mostly Oriyas, and from Nagaland had mostly Nagas and so on.  All of them are focused on serving different people groups and language groups. The leaders of these agencies say that their experiments of recruiting people from other backgrounds have never been successful. Few inter-denominational and inter-national agencies operating in India were able to break this trend as they recruited young men and women from different backgrounds.  But normally this trend does not seem to dominate the rest of the missions and churches.

Paul and Barnabas were part of a multi-cultural Antioch church when they were first sent out as missionaries. (Acts 13: 1) As they served they built their mission teams with members who were from different backgrounds.  When we are called to serve the least reached or un-reached people from every ethnic and language group we should also model a picture of serving together from different backgrounds.   All our mission efforts have the vision of people from every ethne, language and tribe worshipping the Lord before His throne. (Revelation 7: 9)  How can we fulfill this vision if we are unable to practice this in our churches and mission teams? We should begin to model this in our mission teams by being intentional in recruiting and forming multicultural teams in our leadership, staff and field.  This is the key to break down regional, language, caste and even denominational differences.  Leaders must focus on helping their followers by teaching them inter-personal skills that are needed in a multi cultural set up.

India Missions Association (IMA) has been intentional in modeling this within their leadership, staff and in its membership. Building multi-cultural teams is one of the important core values for IMA staff as well as all the members.  In a globalized context, we should start growing out of our regional, linguistic, caste and denominational bias and inculcate the values of the Gospel that we preach.  In our generation of mission leadership we can make a change that will allow the future generations of mission leaders to follow a good practice that will extend our influence in transforming communities for the sake of the glory of God!  John Amalraj

Published in Indian Missions, Quarterly Journal of India Missions Association, Hyderabad, October 2007