CHAPTER 81

Discovering the Holy Spirit’s Work in a Community

T. Wayne Dye and Sally Dye

T. Wayne Dye is an emeritus professor of Scripture engagement at Dallas International University and has been an SIL international consultant for almost 50 years. He and his wife, Sally, pioneered the subdomain of missiology now called Scripture engagement. Wayne has an MA in anthropology from the University of Michigan and a PhD in intercultural studies from Fuller Theological Seminary.

Pete is a missionary to a tribal community. He has become deeply concerned with the problems of polygamy, betel nut chewing, and smoking. But the local people aren’t too concerned about these things. They care more about avoiding discord in the village. Disobeying husbands, refusing hospitality, ignoring leaders, denying clan obligations, and showing anger are far more serious sins in their eyes.

Pete is frustrated. He is becoming convinced that he is beholding a serious lack of obedience to God among the new believers. From what he sees, several have even fallen into sexual sin. He reasons that since he can’t see the evidence of repentance that he expects, they can’t be trusted to hear the Spirit of God speaking to them.

Pete’s problem began long before he arrived in this village. Pete had something of a prophet’s role at home. His leadership was valued among his peers. In most situations he had been able to judge between right and wrong. He had learned to discern the spiritual roots behind problems and to effectively exhort his peers to follow God’s ways.

Pete now lives in a community that holds a different worldview and recognizes different priorities about right and wrong. He doesn’t understand this. Perceiving himself as the most trained and “spiritual” person around, Pete feels that he should trust the spiritual intuition he developed in his home culture and preach and teach against sins in the new culture.

Pete is working under assumptions about how God’s Spirit deals with the sins of individuals and communities—assumptions that are more likely to weaken, rather than strengthen, the new community of believers. However, his job (in fact the job of every missionary) is to trust that the Holy Spirit is already working in the lives of the people, to carefully observe and understand how He is working, and to cooperate with it.

The Role of the Holy Spirit

Missionaries must understand how God’s Spirit implants His standard, His way of holiness, into the heart of a community. They must learn to faithfully listen to the word of God. As they do, God’s Spirit enlightens them. “Let God transform you inwardly by a complete change of your mind. Then you will be able to know the will of God—what is good, and is pleasing to Him, and is perfect” (Rom 12:2 TEV). The Spirit uses the word in this way to bring individuals and communities to Christian maturity. The missionary must train himself to recognize this process by which the Spirit works and be patient with it.

The Role of the Community

Every community has a standard of right and wrong. Depending on the worldview, beliefs, and values of the culture, this standard may be closer or farther from what the Bible teaches. There is evidence, though, that some core concepts of right and wrong are indeed universal and can be found in the values of communities that have never heard Judeo-Christian teaching. Prohibitions against lying, stealing, murder, and adultery are virtually universal, although what exactly constitutes each sin varies from community to community. We saw this in parts of Papua New Guinea and the Philippines that had not yet been affected by Christian teaching. Alan Beals described a similar set of moral norms in a Hindu village in India.¹ In all three locations the ancestral rules were similar to the Ten Commandments.

The role of culture and community in conditioning our understanding of sin is seen in Romans 14. In the Roman church some people were vegetarians because they had formerly worshiped idols by eating sacrificed meat. Others were Jewish Christians who ate meat but insisted on keeping Jewish holy days. Their different cultural backgrounds resulted in these disagreements about behavior.

Paul responded that it is not the act itself that is important but the underlying character of one’s relationship with God (v. 17). A person must do what he or she believes is pleasing to God (vv. 12, 18, 22–23). Different people will choose to take different and maybe even opposite actions to please God (vv. 2–3, 5–6). This is why Paul taught that it is wrong to be contemptuous of those who follow rules that seem irrelevant to us; we should not feel more spiritual than those who don’t follow our own ideals of Christian behavior (v. 10). Put another way, each of us is answerable to God. Only the Master knows exactly what He wants each servant to do.

All this sounds like moral relativism, but it is actually quite different. Moral relativism allows each individual to choose what is right and wrong for herself or himself based on pragmatics or simple preference. In contrast, the Bible contains universal principles intended to shape our consciences; people cannot decide their own moral rules.

The evils in a particular community may be easy for a new missionary to see, but not for the members of that community. They may be quite concerned about following certain behaviors, yet be unconcerned about others. They may treat moral issues as civil or even as personal matters that do not concern them spiritually. In such a community, the state of the people’s conscience can be a poor reflection of God’s ultimate goal for them. But as they respond to God, He is able to revolutionize their understanding of what is good and right.

Progressive Conviction and Change

Anyone who has followed Christ for long has experienced the Holy Spirit convicting him or her of behavior that they had not realized was sinful. This is not a once-for-all experience. God repeatedly and progressively leads individuals through a process of transformation to become increasingly like Christ. In a similar way, God moves by His Spirit and speaks by His word to bring about gradual changes in a community of believers. We find that the Holy Spirit brings conviction for particular sins in different sequences from one people to another.

As the Holy Spirit convicts and teaches individuals and communities, eventually whole societies can change toward greater justice, mercy, and moral uprightness. Throughout history, reforms in society have been instigated as many Christians responded to the word of God together. An example of this is how God moved to expose the slave trade as sin among the British people. John Newton is known as the writer of “Amazing Grace.” For years he was a Christian slave ship captain and did not recognize that slavery was inherently evil. It was long after his conversion that he recognized that his involvement in the slave trade was wrong. He then assisted William Wilberforce in his work to abolish slavery.

Pete was trying to correct sins that God was not yet convicting the local community about. He ignored other sins that were real problems for them. In effect, Pete was unintentionally taking the role of the Holy Spirit for these people. He would have been far more effective if he had made efforts to listen to how the Holy Spirit was convicting the people and cooperated with His work in the lives of individuals and in the entire people group.

While there were believers who responded to Pete’s preaching, they still faced difficult problems. Because what they heard from Pete did not match what they felt they were hearing from God, they became confused and faced a long struggle to learn what God wanted for them. Some communities may even slavishly try to obey everything the missionary suggests or does, which might include brushing their teeth and putting flowers on the dinner table. Christian action separated from the context of local understanding of right and wrong prevents the Holy Spirit from developing the new believers’ ability to hear and obey His voice.

This confusion delays the development of an indigenous church. A leading pastor in Yaounde, Cameroon, once explained some difficult moral issues faced by his church. Cameroonian Christians disagreed deeply with Western Christians about standards of Christian living. As a result of these cultural misunderstandings, some Africans left the church and formed their own independent movements. Even worse, other Cameroonians, determined to follow the missionary, responded in ways that actually violated their internal sense of right and wrong. The vitality of their faith was lost.

Pointing People to the Bible

New believers need to be introduced to the whole range of Scripture. They must learn to consider the Bible as their final authority.

Teaching needs to emphasize the principles God wants people to follow about loving their neighbor, forgiving each other, peaceful interaction, and respect in the family. Instead of teaching these principles, the human tendency is to substitute rules about foods, ceremonies, rituals, times, and places. Paul states the principle clearly:

For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and receives human approval. (Rom 14:17–18 NIV)

What we observed in the Bahinemo church made this passage come alive. After the majority of people in Wagu village came to Christ, we urged them to go to God for wisdom and direction regarding how they should act, what they should or should not do, which ceremonies could be kept or dropped, dealing with sin, etc. We taught them to pray and go to God’s word. We gathered passages that were not yet translated on topics for which they were seeking answers. We tended to be impatient about some activities we knew were displeasing to God, but we carefully avoided telling them our opinion. We wanted the leaders and everyone to develop a relationship with God and learn to hear His voice, rather than following us.

They focused on loving each other and making peace with their brothers. They looked at different aspects of their ceremonies and took out those rituals that caused pain or could be associated with any spirit beings. They kept the aspects of the ceremonies that brought unity, beauty, joy, and peace. They revived a lost art of village court to solve conflicts rather than yelling and fighting about issues. They could not see any Scripture against polygamy but decided it was selfish for the older men to have several wives when the men under thirty had none. They did not require anyone to divorce (which was unheard of in the group), but they forbade anyone to marry a second wife if there was a single man without a wife. This rule drastically cut the rate of adultery and promiscuity in the village. After fifteen years all the young men had wives and most of the polygamy was gone by the natural process of death.

A missionary must be a learner in the community he serves. He must study the ethical and spiritual values of his host community and compare those with both the Bible and the values of his own culture. This will sensitize him to the way the Spirit is convicting and teaching this new community so he can reinforce it. As more and more people become believers, he can help them as a group to discover God’s will for them. As he directs new believers to the word of God, they will be able to work out their own salvation “with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12).

CONTINUE READING Sidebar: As the Holy Spirit Works to Transform

Notes

1. Alan Beals, Gopalpur: A South Indian Village (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), 50–52.