Great Expectations and Cultural Misconceptions

      Expect much. That line was repeated over and over again within the January 1919 edition of The Other Sheep. The Nazarene missionaries who penned these various articles were filled with great expectation. The God they served was not one that could be held back by cultural barriers or financial struggles. Their expectations were grand because their God was mighty. While this expectation provided great motivation it also led to evangelical strategies that today might appear culturally insensitive. 

Holiness is an element Wesleyan branches of Protestantism focus on greatly. This emphasis on holiness is something Nazarenes believe is possible for all to achieve if they give their lives to Christ and allow Him to sanctify them. This “battle cry” for holiness and their expectation that God can bring holiness, is what drives their mission. However, bringing this message to various cultures often presents difficulties that can make cross-cultural evangelism quite hard. One issue that is addressed here is the concept of sin. The missionaries expressed their frustration with the idea that these seemingly educated people could not understand the Biblical truth that they were imprisoned to sin and needed to be saved. Their conclusion was that the idea of sin had been distorted in Japan, the area to which this story was focused. In order to amend this issue and present the message of holiness, Nazarene missionaries turned to fire and brimstone tactics. They believed that only this way would these people begin to understand their sin and turn to Christ. Though this method was in response to their desire to bring people to holiness and their expectation that God is able to redeem these people, it begs the question of what is a proper way to spread a gospel that is so foreign to many cultures. Is it helpful to use scare tactics, or does that show a lack of expectation in God? If they expected much from God, why did they assume that the only way convert people to Christianity was to scare them? It would seem however, through reading other articles from this edition, that it was not a lack of faith in God’s ability, but a construed perception of foreign cultures that led to this method of evangelism. Instead of taking time to understand how the Japanese viewed sin, they automatically proclaimed their view as distorted, and jumped to scare tactics. This misunderstanding is presented even by missionaries on the American home front. 

One article in this edition of The Other Sheep, spoke of missionaries in New Mexico who found that many of their neighbors were Japanese. When first reading this article I found myself taken aback by the phrase, “In our backyard are some heathen, idol-worshipping Japanese.” I had to read this section twice to realize that the author was not criticizing her neighbors but expressing excitement at the fact that even her backyard was a mission field. She had great expectations for God to work in the lives of these people and was excited to be a part of that movement. However, her perception of the Japanese culture was one that dubbed them “heathens.” This language seems very insensitive, yet it was not said out of hatred but out of great expectation. This response to the Japanese, both in New Mexico and in Japan, causes one to wonder, how do missionaries today find a balance between expecting much from God and embracing the cultures in which they find themselves? It would seem that the great expectations we have as Christians that God desires to redeem His people should cause us to expect His message to transcend cultures. We do not need to find a way to scare people out of their cultural mindsets, and we do not need to view other cultures as creating "heathens." Instead we can expect that the God who created these people has a way of reaching them even in their own cultures.