Roland Muller's The Messenger

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Robby Houppert GLST 290-001 2/5/14 The Messenger, by Roland Muller, offered great insight into how to approach cross cultural ministry and have a lasting impact on the community that the missionary may be apart of. To even become apart of that community, however, it takes time, effort, and an understanding of how you, the messenger, will have to engage the specific target audience you so desire. In reading The Messenger, three chapters stood out to me in particular when thinking about how I would start to approach ministry in a cross-cultural setting. Chapter one, six, and seven caught my attention seemed to me to be very thought provoking chapters. Chapter one allowed me to think thoroughly about…show more content…
So we know what we want but how do we get to that goal of credibility in a culture different from our own? Plain and simple it comes down to being intentional in building relationships, knowing your role in the culture, and working hard to become an insider; all of these take time, patience and effort. Muller made a very interesting point in chapter six about the difference between the salt and light types and the necessity for both of them in ministry. He used the analogy of salt effecting the whole pot of potatoes if you put some in and light shining in a small spot of the darkness but soon that light grows and grows. In the same way, salt type of ministry can affect large groups of people at one time while light types get to the individual. Chapter six, I felt, tied into chapter one and the way in which we begin to communicate once we have become more involved in the culture. We are messengers and storytellers, and a way that we can tell those stories is through parables and proverbs. Muller writes that the point of a proverb or…show more content…
The Lord works in our faithfulness and our actions. In the seventh chapter Muller shifts the topic of conversation to contextualization. As messengers in a foreign culture would the story that we grew up learning be the same story that kids growing up in the Arab world learned? Most likely not, our whole world is filled with differences in culture so how do we share the Gospel without changing it? That is where there is much debate on the idea of contextualization and if we, as messengers should do it or not. I think the way Muller goes about describing contextualization is great, he encourages us to strip down our cultural ideals and look at the culture we are in focusing on the values of that culture; at the same time he also informs us that quite simply, there are certain things about other cultures that will never allow you to be the same as the people you are with and instead of taking that as this awful thing, we take it, address the current place we are at, and from there we share the gospel to the likes of the relationship we share with the culture we are in. Overall, I can say that in reading The Messenger I was challenged and reminded

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