Christianity Rediscovered

One would think it would be a fairly simple matter to define missionary work, to describe it, to explain its meaning, its purpose, and the methods by which it must be carried out. One would think, also, that a missionary from East Africa, for instance, would find no difficulty in communicating with a colleague working in South America. Both thoughts might be true if missionary work had not been carried out in history. But history has ensured that communication is virtually impossible between the aforementioned missionaries. And history has offered the opportunity to deflect and distort the meaning of missionary work in every age.

History, of course, has also offered us the opportunity to understand better the mission of the church, but for some reason we have rarely availed ourselves of this opportunity. The history of East Africa in modern times, an era that coincides with the time of the missions in that area, is a good example. Right from the beginning of the missions in East Africa there have been factors at work which have deflected missionary work from true center and which leave us today, in any discussion on the matter, floundering on the periphery.

Consider the problem facing the first missionaries who came to East Africa just over a century ago: slavery. It is not easy for us, so far removed in time from that period, to imagine the dimensions of the problem. Before slavery, as a system, came to East Africa, the people had an orderly, fairly stable way of life. But when the Arab slave traders and their European backers arrived on the scene, they brought havoc and confusion and misery unimaginable. There was scarcely a section or a tribe of East Africa that was not affected by it in one way or another. Anarchy took the place of the order that was once the life of the East African tribes. The Arab raiders went far inland to get their slaves and they drove them back to the coast toward Zanzibar. The last stop on the mainland was Bagamoyo. ^[1]

It is said that Bagamoyo takes its name from the two Swahili words, bwaga and moyo. Bwaga means to throw down, or put down, or let down. In a long safari, the one leading the safari, at different points, would yell to the porters, "Bwaga mizigo," "put down your loads." Moyo means heart. Bwaga moyo would thus mean, "Put down your heart." Bagamoyo was the place where the captured slave, after his long trip from the interior, would put down his heart, lay down the burden of his heart, give up hope—because it was his last contact with his own country before the trip to Zanzibar and a life of misery.

It is easy to understand the feeling of the missionaries who arrived on the scene in the last century, their concern with doing something about the system of slavery which was the cause of all these horrors. They did the only thing they could in the circumstances. They bought the slaves. They bought them left and right, with all the money they could get their hands on. They bought them by the hundreds and by the thousands—and they christianized all they bought. Buying slaves and christianizing them became, in fact, the principal method of the apostolate not only in East Africa, but on the entire continent. There were exceptions to this method, such as the work in Uganda, which was begun some time after that in Zanzibar and Bagamoyo. ^[2]

Money for this vast enterprise was supplied by Rome, by Protestant missionary societies, and by antislavery societies in Europe and America. The missionaries were, in good conscience, fighting the system of slavery. But in looking back, one wonders if the best way to fight a system was to buy the products of that system.

The missionaries bought those slaves, took care of them and fed them by means of huge farms and plantations, run by the ex-slaves themselves. One would feel reassured if the missionary journals of that time showed evidence that the lot of the ex-slaves was noticeably better than that of their slave counterparts on Zanzibar or elsewhere. Physical cruelty, of course, was never part of the mission compound regime. But the word "free might not be the most accurate word to describe life on the mission plantations. And even for that freedom, such as it was, there was a price to be paid—acceptance of the Christian beliefs. One wonders how many missionaries of the time questioned the wisdom of what they were doing. Because what they were doing was sheer folly. They were trying to build the church in the most artificial way imaginable. Following baptism of these ex-slaves, and the training of many of them in the work-shop schools, the mission arranged marriages among them, hoping to settle them as Christian families and villages on some part of the vast "mission compound." According to the normal rate of progression, by our time a century later, the number of Christians descended from these ex-slaves should have reached gigantic proportions. But just the opposite is true. Their number is negigible in East Africa. The apostolate to the slaves had been a miserable failure. : —_

But perhaps more serious in the long run—this early missionary effort in East Africa has left its subtle mark, the mark of slavery, on all succeeding generations of missionary work. The mission compounds are still in evidence in East Africa. And the questionable motivation for baptism, the subservience and dependence of the christianized peoples, the condescension of the missionaries, are themes that have returned again and again the intervening hundred years. And the distortion as to the purpose and meaning and methods of missionary work has taken us far from true center. —

Baga_moyo_ stands like a ghost town today, with its huge and empty cathedral, its slave blockhouse, its tall coconut trees with their branches hardly stirring in the stupefying heat, and its melancholy graveyard filled with the remains of so many young missionaries, with the sleep of a century upon them.

Bwaga _moyo_ indeed—‘leave here your heart and hopes," a fittng symbol for the thousands of slaves, the many missionaries, and a half-century of missionary work in Africa.

There was one man who was worried about the apostolate to the slaves—as far as missionary work was concerned—and did something about it. Just after the turn of the century, about the year 1906, Joseph Shanahan, bishop of Southern Nigeria, took money which was coming from Propaganda in Rome, money sent specifically to ransom slaves, and used it to begin the building of the extensive school system of Southern Nigeria. He not only affected the destiny of a tribe, the Ibos; he helped to change the missionary history of all of Africa. A new era began in the African missions with Bishop Shanahan. ^[3]

Not long after Bishop Shanahan, both East and West Africa took up the school system as a new apostolic method. The schools were not much to begin with, mostly catechetical or bush schools, where reading, writing, and religion were taught. Religion was the main subject. And the main character on the scene was the catechist. He became the mainstay of every mission compound. He was usually a dedicated and good-living man, not young, and not trained. One aspect of the apostolate to the slaves carried over into the catechetical period—an emphasis on children, the parents of tomorrow. The catechist has persisted on the East African mission scene even until the Present time— but with nothing of his former importance. An alarming fact was noted in a survey which was made in the early sixties, a survey which covered all of East Africa. It was the fact that ninety percent of all religious instruction was being given, not by the missionary or the priest, but by the catechist. Even in this directly religious task, preaching the gospel such as it was, the missionary was not immediately involved, was not at the center, but was off somewhere in the periphery. But worse than that, these untrained catechists were ignorant of the true Christian message, and they passed on their ignorance to others. It was not a comforting thought in the early sixties to realize that a major portion of the edifice of the church and of Christianity in East Africa rested on that shaky foundation. ^[4]

The catechetical schools gradually developed into schools of secular learning; into primary schools, middle schools, secondary schools, teachers’ training colleges. The battle of the schools was on. Catholics and Protestants joined earnestly in the battle. It is hard for someone who was not there during that time to understand the intensity and bitterness of the struggle. Whoever got the schools in a certain area was sure to get the Christians who came out of those schools. The basic premise underlying all of this was that if children entered a mission school, they would not emerge from that school without being Christians. And the premise was essentially correct.

Now, in the place of the catechist, the teacher of secular subjects became the main figure on mission compounds and in mission out-stations. He became the right hand of the missionary and the instrument of missionary policy. It is no exaggeration to say that the school became the missionary method of East Africa. This was a policy eagerly backed by Rome. In 1928, Monsignor Hinsley, Apostolic Visitor to East Africa, told a gathering of bishops in Dar es Salaam: "Where it is impossible for you to carry on both the immediate task of evangelization and your educational work, neglect your churches in order to perfect your schools." ^[5]

Young missionaries followed that advice and spent their lives acquiring, building up, supplying, and teaching in schools of every description. This activity continued down into the sixties. There is no doubt about it, it was a heady experience being in the forefront of an adventure that was bringing education on an enormous scale, to what was then called an underdeveloped country.

But to return to the original question of this book: what is the purpose and meaning of missionary work? Once again, historical factors had intervened and thrown out of focus the essential notions of this important issue. I think few missionaries of the time of the educational apostolate could have given a straightforward answer to the question.

The colonial governments were slow to recognize the value of the school system, or perhaps were afraid of its implications. At any rate, it can be truly said that the school system of East Africa was the creation, by and large, of the mission. Eventually the governments did move in on the educational field, and with increasingly feverish activity as independence neared, tried to take over more and more of the program. But they had a late start. At the time of independence in Tanganyika, for instance in the year 1961, seventy percent of all the schools in the count were still being run by the missions.

By the time independence came to the three East African countries, the missions had come to maturity. All three leaders of these countries had been educated in mission schools, and two of them continued to be professing Christians. The parliaments of all three countries were filled with Christian legislators. The number of Christians had grown to sizeable and representative Proportions of the countries involved. Education was not the only benefit Christianity had brought to Africa. Western medicine and other elements of civilization had penetrated the most remote areas. There was reason for immense satisfaction in looking at the credit side of the missionary ledger.

But let us look at the debit side:

1) Missionary and church work had become even more child-oriented than ever it was in the slavery and catechetical days. 2) Religion had become a subject taught in the school, similar to mathematics or Swahili. 3) Liturgy had been entirely neglected, 4) After close to a hundred years of the church’s presence in the country, the first African bishop was set up as an Ordinary in a diocese of Tanganyika, in the very year of independence. There was none in Kenya. 5) African clergy, numerous among certain tribes, were few in proportion to the overall number of Christans. In the important and large diocese of Nairobi, there was only one African priest. Such African priests as there were had become, through their training, almost completely un-African, and extremely conservative and suspicious of any change. 6) In this educational period, an old familiar price had come to be exacted from those who sought a new freedom, freedom from ignorance—and that price was the acceptance of Christianity. 7) As far as the Christianity itself was concerned, an inward-turned, individual-salvation-oriented, unadapted Christianity had been planted in Africa. 8) The Christian churches were made up of subservient, dependent people. As far as finances went, there was scarcely a diocese or a parish that could have stood on its own, without continued outside support. 9) The Holy Ghost Fathers, the White Fathers, the Maryknoll Fathers, the Capuchins, and the Benedictines were firmly established in East Africa, but it is doubtful if the church was. Mission compounds resembled nothing so much as foreign outposts. 10) Missionaries, who should have had pride and contentment in their accomplishments, were in the greatest quandary of all. Few of them had really wanted independence to come, and when it had, many of them had lost their nerve, their sense of direction and purpose. 11) The newly independent governments were to become increasingly jealous of the schools as their prerogative, and by 1970 all mission schools in the new Tanzania, ^[6] for instance, were taken over completely by the government. By this one swift move the government was to rob the missionaries of their main apostolic method, and to render the advice of that Apostolic Visitor of 1928 hollow indeed. 12) Finally, the meaning and purpose of missionary work had been so thoroughly distorted fat it was scarcely recognizable. Missionaries were at a loss to describe meaningful missionary methods in the existing situation.

A badly deteriorating situation almost received its "coup de grace" from the turbulent events of the sixties.

Among the first ones to jump into the void of missionary thinking were the African leaders of newly independent can tries. Very capable and thinking men, these leaders addressed themselves time and time again to the missionaries in their countries. They lectured them on the meaning of missionary work. Thanking them for their past contributions, they reminded with them that the day of the school apostolate and the medical apostolate were swiftly passing away, and they called on them for a new missionary contribution. They invited them to take part in the battle against ignorance, poverty, and disease. They encouraged them to take an important part in nation building and in aid to developing countries of the third world, as they were now known. They asked them to be servants of these developing countries, to serve under the respective governments of these countries, to help them carry out their policies both internal and sometimes even foreign—as regards Rhodesia, Portugal, and South Africa, They were specifically invited to be "agricultural missionaries" in one country. The president of another East African country was actually asked to address the General Chapter of one missionary congregation, involved in the up-dating of its missionary aims and purpose. There is no doubt that he influence that congregation tremendously. The similarity, even to wording; between his speech and their new guidelines is remarkable. ^[7]

One cannot doubt the intelligence nor the sincerity of these African leaders. They are extraordinary men, and any missionary who has even had contact with them, cannot but feel a deep admiration for them. And they can give us a deep insight into the aspirations and needs of the African people. They can even serve as signs of the times for us. But the question still must be asked: When we are searching for the deepest biblical and theological meaning of missionary work, is it to statesmen and politicians that we should turn for the answer?

The decade of the sixties was also the time of the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath. One of the most important discussions of that assembly was the debate on the mission of the church, It was a very intense debate, which tension does not fully appear in the finished documents of the Council. ^[8] It was a debate over whether the deepest meaning of the mission of the church concerned itself with the evangelization of pagan peoples, or with the re-evangelization of Christian peoples. There were some firm principles enunciated with regard to the primacy of first evangelization, as it was called, but there was also compromise allowed when it came down to spelling out the all-important distinction between missionary and pastoral work. In another important section of the Council proceedings, the Catholic church went on record for the first time in its history in support of true freedom of conscience and tolerance for other religions. Every missionary was grateful for the immense amount of light thrown on the missionary situation by the Second Vatican Council.

But shortly after the Council, one began to hear such statements as, "France is the mission, Holland is the mission," or, "Chicago is as much mission as Nairobi." Young. Dutch members of missionary congregations began to desire to be missionaries to the Dutch, to the people of their own country, especially the young, who needed them as much as any people in foreign mission stations ever would.

Then the voice of tolerance began to be heard questioning missionary work among peoples of non-Christian religions. This voice insisted that it was a violation of conscience to convert any people from their own beliefs to beliefs of your choosing.

Finally from all of this there emerged the new definition of missionary work: aid to developing countries, material help to these countries without any strings attached. Conversion was out of the question. A new breed of missionaries appeared—behind the plow, laying pipes, digging wells, introducing miracle grains, bringing progress and development to the peoples of the third world—a kind of ecclesiastical peace corps. This is the new and exciting meaning of missionary work and of missionaries—a discovery of our time. ^[9]

I wonder if one would be allowed to ask what is new about it. Material development? Isn’t that what was involved from the beginning in the work in East Africa, with the freed slaves, the workshops, the plantations, and in the building and running of schools? Perhaps the only thing new about it is the machinery available today, and the motivation of the missionaries.

By the very nature of the case, this new breed of missionaries must condemn the previous system of missionary work—and one would have to agree with them in their condemnation. To bring freedom or knowledge or health or prosperity to a people in order that they become Christians is a perversion of missionary work. But what of a system that would bring them progress and development for its own sake? Is that not just as bad? Nazism will stand forever as the ultimate indictment of progress for its own sake. How would a Christian missionary involved in such work be differentiated from agents of socio-economic systems such as communism or socialism, or even from workers for the United Nations? Or should no such differentiation be made, as some insist? Have we come to the end of the era of the mission? Are they no more relevant than the British Foreign Office for colonial administration?

Or is it possible that none of the systems already described throw essential light on the true meaning of missionary work?

There is no mistaking the fact that missionary work is in a shambles. Born in slavery, disoriented by the school system, startled by independence, and smothered in nation building— mission in East Africa has never had the chance to be true to itself.

To make any sense out of mission, out of the meaning an purpose of missionary work, one has to start all over again—at the beginning.

How does one go about describing the Masai ^[10] —the most glamorous and written-about people in East Africa? I have seen few Europeans who have come across the Masai who have not gone away with a deep feeling of admiration and affection for them. It is hard to explain their attraction. Their history is not known like that of the Zulus of South Africa—with even the times and places of their battles recorded for history. Masai history, as much as it can be reconstructed, is pieced together from the horror stories of the surrounding Bantu tribes. But unlike the Zulus, the Masai are still there in all their glory, living basically the same life they were leading before the Europeans landed on the coast. Unlike the Zulus they have never been conquered. They have been repulsed from time to time by people like the fierce Wahehe, but never conquered. So they have that unmistakable, exasperating air of invincibility, of a superiority complex, about them. One has to see them suddenly silhouetted against the horizon, tall, spare, proud, leaning on their shields and spears and staring silently across the plains, to catch a glimpse of that wisp of history still being lived.

They are spread over thirty thousand square miles of Tanzania, some sixty or seventy thousand strong. ^[11] An accurate census is not easy to come by. Besides the fact that they are semi-nomadic, often on the move, it would need a stout-hearted census-taker to reach all their isolated and far-flung cattle kraals, right through the heart of lion and warrior infested country.

The heart of the Masai culture is the warrior class (il murran), guardians of the flocks and of the tribe itself. Insolent, vain, and incredibly courageous, these young men enter their majority on the day they are circumcised. All those circumcised within a certain time span belong to the same age group (orporor), the most outstanding class distinction and most important cultural value in the tribe. The circumcision itself is their first test, and it is a real one. The slightest flinching of eyes or face or twitching of muscles or arm or leg during the circumcision ceremony would entail a lifelong social ostracism. For close on fifteen years after their circumcision these murran have no responsibility except defense of the tribal herds and enlarging of the herds through cattle theft. It is not really thieving. All cattle in the world belong to the Masai by divine right. So it is just a question of returning the cattle to their proper owners. The warriors are not allowed to get married, nor are they encouraged to take part in the councils of the tribes. There is, therefore, a great deal of sexual freedom allowed between warriors and unmarried girls. The dances of the young people, indeed, of the Masai in general, are very spartan, almost military in style. The grunt of the lion repeated in chorus by the male dancers serves as the rhythm of their singing. The lion is much admired.

Living in the midst of the last great concentration of wild game left in the world, they have worked out a system of peaceful coexistence with the animals. They do not eat wild meat, therefore they do not hunt it. But the lion remains a constant danger and challenge. He is a threat to their herds, and they are willing to take on a lion, in groups or single-handedly, with the aid of their razor-sharp knives or six foot spears. To kill a lion, for a Masai, as difficult and dangerous as such a test is, is sure proof of adulthood and manhood, and a guarantee that he does not have to spend the rest of his life trying to prove that he has grown up.

At the end of their warriorhood, a whole age group of murran goes through the eunoto ceremony—the entrance to elderhood. They cut off their pigtails, the sign of warriorhood, have their last bachelor get-togethers, and build a house called osinkira, which symbolically represents their wives. After their last meal together, a specially prepared black bull, they rise up on the horizon and race screaming to the osinkira, which is defended by the elders, reluctant to allow this group into the responsible leadership of the tribe. Running several miles across the plains towards the house, with tears streaming down their faces for the first time in their lives, they are running their youth away. When they reach that house, they will no longer be young. They will be elders, eligible now for ownership of cattle and for marriage.

The leadership of the tribe, conducted by the elders, is democratic in the extreme. There has never been a paramount chief of the calibre of Shaka, king of the Zulus, or the Kabaka of the Baganda. Each section of the Masai has its own leader. He does not reach that position by political maneuvering or personal ambition. He is chosen for his excellence, for the qualities deemed necessary to lead his section and to arbitrate difficulties. It can truly be said he does not even want the job. He is called legwanan, and it is his job for life. It is all very symbolic. The legwanan is considered the one who will be first in battle, first to own cattle, first to get married and the first to die—all for the sake of his age group.

The girls are circumcised also, but they belong to the age group of the men they marry. Polygamy is the normal way of life for Masai women. But one must be careful about making hasty judgments concerning the status of women in such a social structure. Masai women are far more independent, financially and otherwise, far more influential in the life of the tribe than many other African women. Attractive, healthy, and extremely intelligent, these Masai women will center their lives around the kraals, which they themselves will build and maintain, homes made of sticks and mud and cow dung. They are in charge of the milking of the cows but take no part in the herding. Regular herding is done by uncircumcised boys. There is not much cooking to be learned, since milk is the staple diet of the Masai, sometimes thickened out with blood from the living cow’s neck, and sometimes roasted meat.

If the rhythm is supplied by males, it is the girls and women who supply the melody, and much more, to the Masai singing and dancing. They are the heart of it, and the living treasury of the repertoire of Masai music. Girls prefer to have their heads shaved bald, and covered with an ochre and fat mixture for feast days and dancing. They always wear a circular necklace of beads, the more auspicious the occasion, the greater number of rings of beads. The necklaces are reminiscent, and most probably not accidentally so, of the circular neck rings worn by the nobles and pharaohs of ancient Egypt, even as to color combinations chosen by both peoples. Masai women are skilled in the handicraft of leather and bead work. Their use of color in bead work is not easily imitated. It is not garish or gaudy, but rather surprisingly subtle and sophisticated. They are practiced in the necessary art of keeping milk containers scoured and antiseptic. ^[12] A Masai woman is a true "mulier fortis," accustomed to a hard, demanding life, remarkably enduring of physical, bodily pain. As in any Pagan society, a Masai girl has no official status in her tribe, but she walks tall and proud, conscious of the true power that is in her.

The cow is not sacred in the Eastern Indian sense, but it is sacred in the daily meaning of life. Everything the Masai has comes from the cow—his home of cow dung, his food—milk and beef, his clothes of cow skin, his medium of exchange and wealth. The life of the Masai is certainly determined by the cow, the places of grass and water, the times to burn down the homestead to move on to other pastures. The very form of a Masai kraal is an enclosure for cattle, with homes on the periphery. Any danger to the cattle is a danger to the Masai, and the attraction of herds of neighboring tribes is irresistible.

The Masai is a true pastoralist. Farming is anathema to him. The Masai word for farmer is olmeg and is truly a term of opprobrium. He uses it for everything that is non-Masai. For a Masai, the word olmeg means Bantu, European, barbarian.

The Masai are not Bantu like the majority of Africans south of the Sahara. They are classified as Nilo-Hamitics, who have a dim remembrance of their origins along the Nile—the last of the Hamite invasion to reach East and Central Africa.

There is no future tense in the Masai language. Tomorrow will be like today. The Masai are utter conservatives, afraid of change of any kind. They are practically the only tribe in Tanzania that has been exposed to every kind of change, and have successfully resisted it. European clothes, houses, Western education and agriculture have very little value in their eyes.

They have the positive characteristics of pastoralists. They are hospitable, generous, affectionate, worshipers of children, unbelievably domestic and gentle, and religious. They are firm believers in the one God, Engai, but are plagued by a fear of evil spirits, which fear is exploited by the witch doctor, the laibon. They have no ancestor worship like most Africans, no belief in immortality, no burial for the dead. Hyenas fulfill the last named function.

Bravest of the brave, a warrior tribe living the life they have led unchanged over these hundreds and hundreds of years. Neither gatherers of food, nor hunters nor farmers, they are a sixteenth or seventeenth century people, with tomorrow all around them, whose today is yesterday.

There is a trace of ancient Egypt in their finely chiseled features, in their slightly slanted eyes, in their reckoning the beginning of any month by the dying of the moon, in their half forgotten customs, and, perhaps, in their blood.

Dressed for all the world like Roman soldiers, red from head to feet, red tunics, red helmets made of mud, with spear, short-sword and shield, they stride across the plains and consciousness of Africa, the finest example of what Africa once was.

Work among the Masai in Tanzania was begun more than twenty years ago by the Catholic Mission. There are hundreds of Catholic Masai, but most of them are school boys and all of them are scattered over thousands and thousands of square miles, without any vital relationship to each other or to the church of which they are a part. Many of them, on leaving school after Standard Four or Standard Seven, return to an environment that is so foreign to the Christian life, that they are simply swallowed up in paganism, retaining not much more than their Christian names.

I made my way early one morning with a Masai catechist named Paul to a carefully selected Masai kraal, the kraal of an influential Masai elder called Ndangoya. I asked Ndangoya if we could speak with him about something very important. He immediately sent for the elders of the three neighboring kraals, and when they arrived, he asked what I wanted to talk about. I said I wanted to talk to them about God, and he answered, "Who can refuse to talk about God?"

I then pointed out that we were well known among the Masai for our work in schools and hospitals, and for our interest in the Masai and their cattle. But now I no longer wanted to talk about schools and hospitals, but about God in the life of the Masai, and about the message of Christianity. Indeed it was for this very work of explaining the message of Christianity to the different peoples of Africa that I came here from far away.

Ndangoya looked at me for a long time, and then said in a puzzled way, "If that is why you came here, why did you wait so long to tell us about this?"

I had no answer for that, but I said I would like, now, at this late date, to explain the Christian message to the Masai people. and I would like to begin here. I wanted the permission of the elders to talk to all the people of the four kraals, who would be interested in listening.

Ndangoya turned to the other elders and talked with them for a few moments. And then he turned to me and said "Yes, we agree. You may come and talk to all the people. We will let them know, and advise them to come and listen to you, as long as you talk to them here near the kraals, and not far away by your mission house, and as long as you can come here early in the morning at this hour, before we send the cattle out to graze." I agreed to come back the following week and one day every week, and I thanked them for their respectful weighing of my request.

Shortly thereafter, I went to five other sections of Masailand and repeated the process with the elders of those sections. Surprisingly, the question they asked in each section was the same. "Why have you not come to us before?"

Each section agreed to attend the instructions once a week. Since the only suitable time for instructions was that early morning hour, I could manage only one a day, so most of my working week was filled out. Later on, as I planned to go farther and farther afield across the far-flung parish, where even to reach some of the Masai kraals would require a full day’s safari, I began to see the difficulties involved in evangelizing a nomadic people. But as for the present, I could expand no more until I had finished instructions in each of the sections I had begun. And I knew it would take a year to do that. But what if all these distant kraals would accept baptism? What would we do then? How could we possibly take care of them as Christians, and still look to the completion of evangelization in this whole area? Loliondo mission, indeed, the whole notion of mission compound, would be shattered.

I preferred not to look that far into the future. The difficulties of the present were enough, because now that the preliminaries were over, I had to get down to the task of presenting the Masai with the message of Christianity.

Ndangoya was as good as his word. When I returned the following week, he and his colleagues had gathered a very sizeable representation of the four kraals in his neighborhood, to gather to listen to me—both men and women. I certainly did not realize at the time how difficult it was going to be. But as the weeks went by and turned into months, I began to experience the most difficult and tense period of my missionary life.

Here I was, at last, face to face with an adult pagan people, with nothing between me and them but the gospel of Jesus Christ. I knew that beyond this work I was now doing, there were no further moves to make. I was not trying to sell them the school system or Western medicine in order that one day they might accept Christianity. I was trying to convince them directly of the inherent value of Christianity. If I failed here, there would be no going back to some other gimmick to try to draw them once again to receive it. If I failed here, I might as well go home.

I had no way of knowing, no previous experience of myself or of anyone else, how they would react to any point, as step by step I opened and explained the Christian message to these pagans of the pagans.

Each day, in that brisk, early morning hour, still unheated by the equatorial sun, there in the Masai highlands, with the background of the lowing cattle, as I stood waiting for them to gather, I was conscious of the knot in my stomach, wondering if this were the day it would all blow up in my face, with Christianity being utterly rejected by these sons of the plains. Many is the time in that lonely, nomadic setting that I wished I were back in the comfortable company of familiar and acquiescent Christians.

I had to tell them that very first day, when they had all gathered, that I had come to talk about, and deal only with, God. From now on, I would not go in their kraals to sleep, nor would I drink their milk. I would no longer ask for their children for our schools. I wanted no land for mission buildings. I wanted nothing from them. Nor should they expect anything from me. I brought them no gifts, no sweets for the children, no tobacco for the elders, no beads for the women—no medicine for their sick. I had come only to talk about God. They must understand this at the beginning. If they had come for any other motive to listen to me, they must now try to understand.

All of this was rather shocking to them, and unnatural to me. But it was a decision made after much thought. It was not normal, but neither were the previous hundred years of missionary effort normal, and what that effort had led people to believe and expect of missionaries.

Perhaps in all the hundreds and hundreds of years of Masai history, this would be the only opportunity for the Masai to be presented with the bare message of Christianity, untied to any outside influence. I believe that never before in their history had they been presented with such an opportunity—and perhaps never again. For this one, fleeting moment, they should have their chance, and Christianity should have the chance to stand before them in its own unencumbered light. I told them I believed that they knew about God long before we came, and that they were a devout and very pious people in the face of God. It was not our belief that God loved us Christians more than them, nor that God had abandoned them or forgotten them until we came along. From the beginning it was evident that we were going to have to learn from them as well as teach them.

As I look back on the whole adventure now, I am certain that if I had known the difficulty involved in the process of meeting a pagan people with a Western version of Christianity, I would never have had the courage to begin. Fortunately, my naiveté was boundless. Up until the day of that first instruction I had never spoken to a Masai about God. I had only the most traditional exposition of Christianity to present to them, and not the slightest idea of strategy or missionary principles of first evangelization.

I did not know that there would be whole areas in their life and language that would be blank as far as Christian concepts go—no word in their language for person or creation or grace or freedom or spirit or immortality. There were times in the cold mornings as I faced those nomads when I found myself bitterly resenting the church that had sent me among them, so ill-prepared to deal with them, times when I wondered about the sincerity of that church which styled itself essentially missionary.

Every single thing I prepared to teach them had to be revised or discarded once I had presented it to them. Just what was the essential message of Christianity? What did philosophical reasoning (which we call theology) have to do with it? Had any of those Roman or European theologians, who have given us that theology, ever met a pagan? How much of what we know as morality was involved in the message? What was the church?

As a result of all of this, I know that the original, traditional teaching of Christianity that I presented to them was so revised, adapted, distilled, and filtered in the process that by the end it was hardly recognizable. Now at a point many years later, it is still in the process of revision. From the moment I decided to take the step into first evangelization, I knew that I would have to begin anew a whole process of study, in any spare time that would be left to me. Scripture, theology, missiology, even anthropology, in any books I could get my hands on, would fill my nights. Safaris would fill my days, Even books on social action would be valuable. One shocking discovery 1 made was to the effect that there did not seem to exist a single book in the Catholic church on the subject of first evangelization, either as to the methods which might be suited to it, or as to the principles which would govern the work of evangelizing a pagan people.

But perhaps it was just as well there were no books. They would undoubtedly have been like so many of the theology books I had known, treatises woven out of thin air, with little or no relation to life and experience. I was to learn that any theology or theory that makes no reference to previous missionary experience, which does not take that experience into account, is a dead and useless thing. One day the theologians of liberation would say that praxis must always be prior to theology. I knew nothing about that at the time. Liberation theology had not yet made its appearance on the ecclesiastical stage. All I knew was that in my work, it would not be a case of going from theory to practice. It would have to be the other way around, a necessity of proceeding from practice to theory. If a theology did emerge from my work, it would have to be a theology growing out of the life and experience of the pagan peoples of the savannahs of East Africa.

I wonder if you ever reach that point in your life or in your work where you are certain you will never have to start all over again.

In America, if I were to walk into a classroom with bad news for one of the students, say a death in his family, he would immediately show shock, then shed tears, and probably run out of the classroom. His culture teaches him to do that.

In the section of Africa where I worked, the results might be just the opposite. A boy being told that his father died, for instance, would show no surprise, no grief, and would continue on with what he was doing, as though nothing had happened. His culture teaches him to do that. It tells him if he really feels sorrow, to grieve in private. It is the same with love. If a young man in Africa really loves a girl, he will speak with other girls in a crowd, flirt with others, even kiss or embrace others. But he will severely ignore in public the girl he loves, if he truly loves her. His culture teaches him to do that.

What about such a basically human thing as the use of words? Surely all human beings would use words in the same way, the way we do. Not so. With us the purpose of words is to take the thought in our minds and put it outside ourselves for everyone to see or hear that thought, a kind of logical use of words.

With these Africans the purpose of words is not to establish logical truth, but to set up social relationships with others. That is quite a difference in the use of words.

As an example, if I were in charge of a boarding school in East Africa and saw a boy break a window in the school, there are two ways I could deal with the situation. I could act out of my own Western culture and call him in and ask, "Johnny, did you break that window?" I want logical truth. He undoubtedly would say, "No," not because he is a liar, but because he is trying, with his words, to repair the social damage I have done with mine.

The second way of dealing with this situation would be to act in consonance with his culture. I could call him in and say,

"Hello, Johnny, how are you?"

Fine How are you doing in your studies?

"Better. I’m getting much better marks in math."

"Good, how is your health?"

"Not bad. The food here is good, I’m getting big and strong. I can now kick a football fifty yards. I kicked it through a window."

Culture is all encompassing and all important in the history of salvation. I’m not so certain that is what we were taught before we were sent out here. The church was the receptacle of salvation, and the cultures and nations of the world were the ones to whom salvation was to be doled out by the church.

But you just have to look at the teeming masses of pagans across Africa alone to know there is something wrong with that thought. All these cultures, all these nations outside the pale of salvation, of grace, of holiness, of God’s love? Until the church reaches them, if it ever does?

Going back to the New Testament, to that original mandate which sent missionaries all over the world, we find the command of Christ to preach the gospel to all the nations of the world, to disciple, make disciples of, to evangelize all the nations. The words used in the Greek Testament for "all the nations" are panta ta ethne. In fact, every time it is mentioned the word "nations" is translated by the Greek word ethne. I do not believe that the bible knew of nations in the modern political sense of the word, like the nations of America and Canada and Tanzania.

Ethne would refer more to ethnic, cultural groups, the natural building blocks of the human race. While the political nation of the United States might have very little to do with salvation as such, the Masai culture or a Hindu culture or the cultures that make up America might have very much to do with salvation.

It is surely here in the midst of the cultures of the world, and not in the church, that the ordinary way of salvation must lie, the ordinary means of salvation, the very possibility of salvation for most of the human race. Or else it is a very strange God we have.

The gospel must be brought to the nations in which already resides the possibility of salvation. As I began to ponder the evangelization of the Masai, I had to realize that God enables a people, any people, to reach salvation through their culture and tribal, racial customs and traditions. In this realization would have to rest my whole approach to the evangelization of the Masai.

I had no right to disrupt this body of customs, of traditions. It was the way of salvation for these people, their way to God. It was one of the nations to whom we had to bring the gospel— bring the gospel to it as it was. In those customs lay their possibility of salvation.

Christ himself said, "I did not come to do away with the law (the Jewish culture and religion) but to fulfill it" (Mt 5:17).

Everything concerning a nation (an ethnic cultural group) has to do with salvation. It is the job of the people of that nation, it is their affair to respond to their own call of salvation. It is not the sphere of the evangelist, of the missionary. If we would be consistent, I think we would see that the field of culture is theirs. Ours is the gospel.

An evangelist, a missionary must respect the culture of a people, not destroy it. The incarnation of the gospel, the flesh and blood which must grow on the gospel is up to the people of a culture.

The way people might celebrate the central truths of Christianity; the way they would distribute the goods of the earth and live out their daily lives; their spiritual, ascetical expression of Christianity if they should accept it; their way of working out the Christian responsibility of the social implications of the gospel—all these things, that is: liturgy, morality, dogmatic theology, spirituality, and social action would be a cultural response to a central, unchanging, supracultural, uninterpreted gospel.

The gospel is, after all, not a philosophy or set of doctrines or laws. That is what a culture is. The gospel is essentially a history, at whose center is the God-man born in Bethlehem, risen near Golgotha.

At that moment facing me was that vast, sprawling, all-pervasive complex of customs and traditions and values and dictates of human behavior which was the Masai culture, a nation in the biblical sense, to whom I had to bring the gospel. At this point I had to make the humiliating admission that I did not know what the gospel was. During those days I spent long hours thinking long, difficult thoughts, and sometimes frightening ones, about the momentous task that faced me—the bringing together of a culture and the gospel.

To begin thinking about evangelizing the Masai at that time was as difficult as trying to explain it is now. Then and now, the first thing called for is a kind of cleansing of the mind, a beginning with a tabula rasa mentality, or something very close to it. This is necessary for a couple of reasons: first, what we will call first evangelization is, for all practical purposes, a new field for us. By first evangelization I mean the preaching of the gospel for the first time to any group of people, enabling them to hear for the first time the name of their savior, Jesus. It would encompass the time involved from your very first meeting with any people to talk with them about Christ, up until the time they accept the Christian faith and are baptized, or reject Christ and Christianity. It should be distinguished from the further instruction and guidance needed after baptism for any Christian community until the day when it can stand on its own and you can leave it. The concept of first evangelization lies at the heart of the distinction between missionary and pastoral work. It is directed essentially to people who have never heard of Christ.

The second reason for starting with a clear mind, a mind free of preconceptions, is that there is no other way to deal with a subject that is so strange to us. If we allow our minds and our attitudes to be filled with the convictions and conclusions arising from our pastoral experience, I think we will never arrive at the freedom necessary to make first evangelization possible and understandable.

It was at this point in my searching that I was introduced, by a Lutheran colleague, to the writings of Roland Allen. Roland Allen was an Anglican missionary in China at the beginning of this century. From his experience there, and from his studies, he became convinced that modern missionary methods had strayed far from the missionary methods of the early church, far from the apostolic method. He saw that many of our present day problems in the missions stem from that departure from apostolic method, a departure which led not only to a different way of carrying out mission, but even to a difference in goal, to a difference in the very purpose of mission. He concluded in his classic work, Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? that we today in the missions have something quite different in mind than St. Paul had when he began his famous missionary journeys to carry the gospel into the world outside Jerusalem. His suggestion that we could, with profit, look to the apostolic missionary method as enlightenment and corrective to our own method was like an open door to me. Going through that door was the first step to limitless possibilities. There is probably no point we have reached in our work here, or, in our conclusions, since then, which would agree completely with the thoughts and conclusions of Roland Allen. But I do not think he would have expected us, or wanted us, to come to the identical conclusions on every point that he himself reached over sixty years ago. Our whole world has been transformed, turned upside down, and revolutionized in those sixty years. But the main and general insights and questions of this remarkable man are as valid today as they were when they first stunned and disturbed the church of his day.

Pere Lebbe was a Catholic counterpart to Roland Allen in the Chinese missions, at almost the same time. His thoughts, too, needed years before they gained acceptance in his church. Roland Allen never had the opportunity to carry out and apply his missionary principles in any mission field. If he had the opportunity he undoubtedly would have preferred to apply them among the "highly cultured" peoples of the East, not among the illiterate tribesmen of East Africa. He seemed to display some hesitancy in accepting the validity of these principles as applied to "primitive" peoples. But I am certain that today he would agree to take such a step, taking into consideration the deeper appreciation we have today of the unsuspected richness of the so-called "primitive peoples" of the earth.

Roland Allen’s insights and questions challenged most of the missionary theories I had ever heard, and would make it all the more necessary for me to proceed cautiously from real practice and experience towards a new and different theory of mission.

In any action taken in the name of the church today, one of the key criteria to measure the fitness of what is being done is the bible. "Is it biblical? Is it evangelical? Is it scriptural?" are questions that must be asked time and time again. Could we not, with some value, expose our missionary efforts to this criterion? With all its necessary organization and structure, with all the development entailed in the unfolding history of its successes and failures, the missionary effort should, in its main and basic outlines, be biblical. What would be the result if we were to turn our scriptural spotlight on the work being carried out in the name of mission today, say, in Africa? What would we have to answer if we were asked, "Is the mission work in the church today biblical?"

Of course, the main missionary we see in action in the bible is St. Paul. And we can surely believe that those sections of the Acts and epistles describing the missionary work of this extraordinary man, like the rest of scriptures "were written for our instruction." ^[13]

St. Paul made three famous missionary journeys, or safaris, as we would call them. Before these journeys began, there was no church in the areas under consideration. The three journeys took about ten years in all. They began sometime between 45 and 49 A.D. (probably 47 A.D.) and ended in 57 or 58 A.D. ^[14]

The first journey of St. Paul, beginning about 47 A.D., took him through the country of Southern Galatia (or the Provinces of Pisidia and Lycaonia). ^[15] The safari took in about twelve hundred miles in all. The area in which Paul went to preach the gospel was between ten and twenty thousand square miles, depending on how much territory we include in Galatia. There were just three missionaries along on that first journey—Paul, and Barnabas and John Mark. These three missionaries had a territory to evangelize that was the size of a large East African diocese. Paul preached in one place, Lystra for six months ^[16] and in another, Iconium, for some time, ^[17] and then left the country, his work finished, the church in the province of South Galatia founded.

The Council of Jerusalem took place after this journey.

The second journey of St. Paul took place between the years of 50-52 A.D. With him on this journey went Silas, Timothy, and Luke, four missionaries in all. This was an even longer safari than the first, perhaps some twenty-six hundred miles. Paul sited the churches he had founded on the first journey, then went on to evangelize areas taking in almost thirty thousand square miles. He went to Macedonia, preached in Thessalonica for five months, ^[18] in Phillipi for a shorter length of time, then went off to the province of Achaia and labored there for one and a half years ^[19] at Corinth. He founded the churches in Macedonia and Achaia during the course of this journey and then went back home, his work completed.

The third journey of St. Paul came between the years of 53 and 57 A.D. As many as ten different missionaries are mentioned as taking part in the evangelization of this Roman Province of Asia. ^[20] He also picked up several workers from the very church he was evangelizing. ^[21] This was a safari of approximately fourteen hundred miles, and his many efforts were concentrated in a much smaller area, perhaps five thousand square miles in the province of Asia. His main point of attack was Ephesus. He preached the gospel for two and a quarter years, ^[22] and then left, satisfied that the church was established in the province of Asia.

We have to face the startling fact that before 47 A.D. the church did not exist in these four provinces of the Roman empire. By 57 A.D., a little more than ten years later, due to the missionary work of Paul and a handful of others, the church existed in the provinces of Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia, and Asia. We know these churches from letters afterwards addressed to them as the churches of the Thessalonians, Phillipians, Corinthians, Ephesians, and Galatians. ^[23]

Not only were the churches established there. St. Paul was satisfied that his work was completed there.

He writes in the year 58 A.D., to the Romans: "All the way from Jerusalem to Illyricum I have preached Christ’s good news to the utmost of my capacity" (Rom 15:19). Then a little later on he explains (or complains), "Now, however, having no more work to do here…​" ^[24] And in the same letter he speaks of the churches of Macedonia and Achaia ^[25] as churches taking in entire provinces.

And all this just shortly after having finished his last missionary journey in the year 57 A.D. All we can do is look at this and wonder.

What would we find if we applied this biblical criterion to our work today?

We foreign missionaries have been in East Africa for more than a hundred years. We started off with two missionaries, like Paul, but when a hundred years had passed we were still here— 1,951 of us, counting only priests, with many generations of our predecessors dead and buried in this land.

Our original safaris from our homeland were much farther than St. Paul’s from his, but once arriving at our destination, no single one of us has an area of work to cover anywhere near the staggering areas covered by St. Paul. It would be closer to the truth to say that the areas covered by St. Paul on each journey would closely approximate our present dioceses, in each one of which we have many foreign missionaries, anywhere from twenty to one hundred to a diocese. We won’t even mention the means of travel available to Paul and to us.

After one hundred years we still do not consider our work finished. New missionaries are appealed for, for this hundred year old work, and they are still coming.

There is something definitely temporary about Paul’s missionary stay in any one place. There is something of a deadly permanence in ours.

Besides the amount of time Paul spent in any one place—two and a half years at Ephesus being the longest stay—there is something else different in Paul’s missionary strategy. He evangelized just a few centers in each province (diocesan area today?), and considered his work done. ^[26] We do not consider our work finished (even apart from the time element involved) until we have fairly inundated a section with missions—placing mission stations a few miles from one another.

We have not even looked at the specific goal Paul had in mind when he was evangelizing a section, nor the method he used, in any detail. We might be even more startled if we did. All we have looked at is his general plan or strategy of missionary work, and that is surprising enough in the light of our own.

We might not agree with St. Paul’s general missionary strategy or his overall method. We might give many reasons why his method would not work today, and why the biblical system has evolved into the system we know. At this point I am not really trying to argue against such objections. All I am trying to show is that we must admit what is true.

If we can say nothing else at this point, at least we have to admit that our work, in this respect, is not biblical; indeed, we have strayed far from the biblical criterion and method. To doubt this is to deny the staggering amount of evidence in the bible.

When I began to work among the Masai, there were thirty-three thousand Catholic missionary priests in the world, and together with our Protestant brethren and all our missionary predecessors, we could claim to have evangelized eighteen percent of the world. Without trying to disparage the work of obviously sincere men, one could still wish that St. Paul were alive today. Or if this is a futile thought, what about another one: despite all the arguments against it, suppose, instead of the thirty-three thousand missionaries of the type we have known, we had one thousand men of the mind of Paul, convinced of the method of Paul. I wonder what proportion of the world would be evangelized.

St. Paul must have had a fair notion of the geography of his known world, judging from the journeys he planned. He must even have had a kind of strategy worked out (like a military campaign), to cover his world.

At least it was a place to begin. What if an attempt was made to follow the lead of St. Paul, the general strategy of St. Paul, on a local level? Wouldn’t it change the whole notion of missionary work, the entire method and time needed to carry it out? The idea was intriguing.

Loliondo was the name of the mission to which I was assigned in the diocese of Arusha, in Tanzania, East Africa. It consisted of a mission house for priests, another one for nursing sisters, a small bush hospital, and a little church capable of seating a hundred people. The nearest town, Arusha, was two hundred and fifty difficult miles away. The mission covered an area of five thousand square miles, over which the seminomadic Masai were scattered to the number of approximately thirty thousand inhabitants.

After much scouting and exploring, I discovered that the whole area could be divided into twenty-six sections. A different section could be reached every day if one moved out of the mission house and lived in a Land Rover and a tent. Instructions in the Christian message would take about a year in any one section visited once a week. Realistically, six sections could be reached in a year. So, the whole Loliondo area of twenty-six sections could be evangelized in five years; less, if others joined me in the task. This struck me as of extreme importance and significance. It would mean I could leave that particular mission after five years, having completed my work.

Theologically, I considered the fact that Christianity is now a minority religion in the world, and will probably always be so. We should not set out to evangelize everyone, or even the majority of people. We were out to evangelize a minority, but a minority in every section. St. Paul, in his work, evangelized two or three centers in every province, and considered his work done in those provinces. These centers were to become the centers for further evangelization and the spread of the church. It seems he was working on the minority strategy also. My plan would not be to establish two or three centers for the entire area, but a center for every single, individual section of the mission area. That would amount to twenty-six centers, and could actually be considered over-evangelization. Nonetheless, it was a goal to aim at, and it was a radical departure from the current system in that it could actually be finished in five years, whereas the presently existing, static mission of Loliondo had stood there for seven years already with zero results. And the goal envisaged was not to be mission compounds or mission stations in every section, but Christian communities in every section. Missions belong to the missionaries. Christian communities belong to the people; indeed, they are the people.

All these practicalities derive from the very important distinction between missionary and pastoral work. Pastoral work, the tending of the Christian flock, by its very nature and definition will never be finished. But the work of evangelization (the biblical definition of missionary work) in any particular area, by its very nature, must be finishable, that is, it must be planned and carried out in such a way that it is finishable in the shortest possible time, not in some vague future, but now.

Christ’s command to evangelize the nations cannot have been directed to a vast, limitless, impossible, insuperable, unfinishable task. St. Paul would never have complained that he had nothing left to do, having finished his task. And in any/one area, we can and must finish ours. There are many reasons for believing this to be true. Some have to do with the actual situation of the church in the world, and the distribution of missionary personnel and finances. Others have to do with the attitude of the missionaries themselves who are involved in such a work. Still other reasons stem from the effect produced in the people being evangelized by a prolonged stay of missionaries among them. Finally, there are reasons coming from the actual political and historical situation of today. In many respects we have come to the eleventh hour of the missions.

When I first went to Africa 1 was assigned to the beautiful country of Kilimanjaro, the twenty thousand foot high mountain on the equator, to learn the Swahili language. I can remember an old missionary telling me that he had spent his life under the snows of Kilimanjaro, and his dream was to die and be buried under the snows of Kilimanjaro. I was deeply impressed at the time. It was a beautiful thought, but looking back on it now I do not think it was a particularly missionary thought. Nor are any involving hundred year plans.

The old Masai chief, Ndangoya, in calling together the people of his own and neighboring kraals represented the first community of Masai, the first section of the mission area, to be evangelized. There were five other communities, located in five other different sections of the mission, that, together with Ndangoya’s community, constituted the first step in bringing the gospel to the Masai. Going back and forth among these pagan communities week by week, I soon realized that not one week would go by without some surprising rejoinder or reaction or revelation from these Masai. My education was beginning in earnest.

The process followed was simple. I would mention a religious theme or thought and ask to hear their opinion on it, and then I would tell them what I believed on the same subject, a belief I had come eight thousand miles to share with them. I have done pastoral and social work in America and Africa, and have taught in a major seminary. But I have never been so tested in my life as by these pagan sons and daughters of the plains. I soon began to realize that I was involved in a basic confrontation, the most ultimate confrontation Christianity can ever have—the one with paganism, with the world that does not believe as we believe.

I remember the very first week of instructions when I asked the Masai to tell me what they thought about God. I was more than startled when a young Masai elder stood up and said, "If I ever run into God, I will put a spear through him."

Here he was immersed on one side in an unshakable belief in the existence of God, and faced on the other with the numbing reality of a life that includes pain and sickness, death of children and loss of cattle. This young elder was trying to come to terms with a God who seemed to be responsible for it all. His thoughts were really not very far removed from those of many young Americans and Europeans today; not really very different from the mentality of Albert Camus in The Plague. This is the point at which religious reflection began for him in a very real way. So this is the point at which we began to speak with him and his fellow tribesmen about the Christian idea of God. The question evoked by this comment of his was his question, not ours, and we tried to answer it the best we could.

It is as good a starting place as any for preaching the gospel to the Masai.

For the Masai, there is only one God, Engai, but he goes by many names. Sometimes they call him male, sometimes female. When he is kind and propitious they call him the black God. When he is angry, the red God. Sometimes they call him rain, since this is a particularly pleasing manifestation of God. But he is always the one, true God. They asked if we did the same. I had to admit that for us, also, God goes by many names, and that in the long history of the bible, the same is true. Indeed, I was to find from research, as a result of this question of theirs, that the Jews called God, on occasion, fire, breeze and God of the mountain. ^[27] They were a bit incredulous to learn, that, for all practical purposes, we leave the female out of God, and we consider him as only male, which is, of course, as patently wrong as considering God only female. God is neither male nor female, which is an animal classification, but certainly embodies the qualities which we like to believe exist in both. If the Masai wanted to refer to God as she as well as he, I could certainly find nothing theologically incorrect about the notion. Their idea seems much more embracing and universal than ours—and not a whit less biblical:

Does a woman forget her baby at the breast, or fail to cherish the son of her womb? Yet even if these forget, I will never forget you" (Is 49:15).

A Time to Speak and a Time to Act 43

Then they told me of God, Engai, who loved rich people more than poor people, healthy people more than the sick, the God who loved good people because they were good, and rewarded them for their goodness. They told me of God who hated evil people—"those dark, evil ones out there"—and punished them for their evil. Then they told me of the God who loved the Masai more than all the other tribes, loved them fiercely, jealously, exclusively. His power was known throughout the lush grasslands of the Masai steppes; his protection saved them from all the surrounding, hostile, Masai-hating tribes, and assured them of victory in war over these tribes; his goodness was seen in the water and rain and cattle and children he gave them.

I finally spoke up and told them they reminded me of another great people that lived long ago, and live until the present time. "They are the Hebrew tribe, the Jews, the Israelis. They are famous the world over for having preserved in the world the knowledge of the one, true God. But it was not always easy for them. They often tried to restrict that God to their tribe and to their land, and so made him less of a God than he really was.

"One time, in the early days of their tribe, he called a man named Abraham and said to him, Abraham, come away from this land of yours. Leave your people and your tribe and your land, and come to the land I will show you. And all nations will be blessed in you, if you do this.

"The God of the tribe of Abraham had become a God who was no longer free. He was trapped in that land, among that tribe. He had to be freed from that nation, that tribe, that land in order to become the High God."

J realized when I reached this crucial point that I was touching a sensitive nerve of the Masai.

Paul Tillich points out that only if God is exclusively God unconditioned and unlimited by anything other than himself, is there a true monotheism, and only then is the power over space and time broken. ^[28] He lists as examples of limiting spatial concepts such things as blood, race, clan, tribe, and family. Abraham’s call was the turning point. It was the beginning of the end for polytheism. God must be separated from his nation to become the High God. ^[29]

Each African tribe believes in God, and it is generally considered to be a monotheistic God. But each tribe likes to restrict the attention and protection of this God to its own territory, thus planting the seeds for polytheism.

I continued talking with the people who were now listening very closely: "When Abraham followed God out of his land, there began on this earth the story of the one, true, living, High God.

"Everyone knows how devout you Masai are, the faith you have, your beautiful worship of God. You have known God and he has loved you. But I wonder if, perhaps, you have not become like the people of the tribe of Abraham. Perhaps God has become trapped in this Masai country, among this tribe. Perhaps God is no longer free here. What will the Kikuyu do to protect themselves against this God of the Masai—and the Sonjo? They will have to have their own gods. Perhaps the story of Abraham speaks also to you. Perhaps you Masai also must leave your nation and your tribe and your land, at least in your thoughts, and go in search of the High God, the God of all tribes, the God of the world. Perhaps your God is not free. Do not try to hold him here or you will never know him. Free your God to become the High God. You have known this God and worshiped him, but he is greater than you have known. He is the God not only of the Masai, but also my God, and the God of the Kikuyu and Sonjo, and the God of every tribe and nation in the world.

"And the God who loves rich people and hates poor people? The God who loves good people and hates evil people—those dark, evil ones out there’? The God who loves us because we are good and hates us because we are evil? There is no God like that. There is only the God who loves us no matter how good or how evil we are, the God you have worshiped without really knowing him, the truly unknown God—the High God."

There was silence. Perhaps I had gone too far. The mention of a wandering search that took a lifetime must have evoked memories of their own ancestors recalled from generation to generation around nomadic campfires. Abraham himself must have seemed like a long lost ancestor to them, he who used to like to "fill his eyes with cattle." The Masai are a Nilotic people, and they have a dim remembrance of their ancestors crossing the "great river" in their wandering exile. If you look at a map of Northeastern Africa you will find the record of that historic trek. All along the way the sites they passed through have Masai names until today. The word khartoum in the Masai language means "we have acquired." That is where they believed they acquired their first cattle. Khartoum today is the capital of the Sudan. When they came up out of the steamy jungles of the Sudan into the cold plains of Kenya, they said, "nairobi," which means cold, and it stands as the main city in Kenya and East Africa today. They finally discovered their promised land of milk and honey (the two most desired and appreciated items in the Masai diet) in the empire they carved out of East Africa. But the High God! That was something else.

Finally someone broke the silence with a question. Whether he asked the question out of curiosity or anger, I do not know. I only know it surprised me:

"This story of Abraham—does it speak only to the Masai? Or does it speak also to you? Has your tribe found the High God? Have you known him?"

I was about to give a glib answer, when all of a sudden I thought of Joan of Arc. I don’t know why I thought of her, but suddenly I remembered that since the time of Jeanne D’Arc, if not before, the French have conceived of God (le bon Dieu—what would the Masai think of him?) as being rather exclusively and intimately associated with their quest for glory. I wonder what god they prayed to?

Americans have some kind of certainty that "almighty God" will always bless ¢heir side in all their wars. Hitler never failed to call on the help of "Gott, der Allmachtige" in all his speeches, in all his adventures. A Nazi doctor once told me that they could always count on the Catholic school children to pray for Hitler every morning, to ask God’s blessing on him. What god, the Teuton god?

I have been to many parishes in America where they prayed for victory in war. I recognized the god they were praying to—the tribal god. I will recognize him more easily now, after having lived among the Masai. And what about the God who loves good people, industrious people, clean people, rich people, and punishes bad people, lazy people, dirty people, thieving people, people without jobs and on welfare—"those dark, evil people out there?" Which god is that?

I sat there for a long time in silence looking at the Masai people. They called their God Engai. Well, that is no more strange-sounding than our gods. The god invoked by the pope to bless the troops of Mussolini about to embark on the plunder of Ethiopia, and the god invoked by an American cardinal to bless the "soldiers of Christ" in Vietnam, and the god of French glory, and the German god of Hitler were no more the High God of scripture than is "Diana of the Ephesians" or Engai of the Masai of East Africa.

To each one of these cultures must ever be presented again the proclamation of the message, symbolized in the call of Abraham—to leave their land and their nation, to learn of the High God, the God of the world. AU nations are to be blessed in Abraham.

I finally spoke out again, and I marveled at how small my voice sounded. I said something I had no intention of saying when I had come to speak to the Masai that morning:

"No, we have not found the High God. My tribe has not known him. For us, too, he is the unknown God. But we are searching for him. I have come a long, long distance to invite you to search for him with us. Let us search for him together. Maybe, together, we will find him."

I got up and walked away from the Masai village, to go back to my tent. As I walked, I remembered the shortest summation of the gospel message St. Paul ever made, in his letter to Titus (3:4): "The goodness and kindness of God our Savior has appeared to all men." That is really what I had been trying to say. I hoped I had gotten it across, at least to my friend, the young Masai elder who wanted to put a spear through God.

I walked away numb from my first confrontation with paganism.

As far as preaching the gospel to the Masai was concerned, a greater obstacle to it than the God who stood in danger of being speared, was the God who in no way could be speared, or even touched—so remote was he. I once asked a Masai elder where God lived, and he took me away from the village and the trees so that I could get a clear view of the sky. He then pointed past the fleeting, fleecy white clouds, beyond the pale blue dome of the sky to a patch of dark blue, deep, deep in the sky. In his astronomical view, admittedly limited, he was pointing to the farthest point away from the place where we were standing. "Engai lives there," he said. A terribly remote God.

Not a God of creation who exists in and with the things he brought into being. Creation is a key part of revelation. No nation, no culture could have come to it on its own. For the cultures outside of Christianity, the earth is complete once and for all, and the world is not going anywhere in particular; everything is chaotic and directionless. People of those cultures are trapped in the terrible dilemma of a fatalistic world vision— empty of the notion of continuing creation and personal responsibility and opportunity. A missionary’s greatest contribution to the people for whom he works might well be to separate them from God, free them from their idea of God.

No nation, no culture on earth could ever have come to the notion of continuing creation. It is probably at this point we begin to realize that revelation, as it comes to us—the gospel, the secret hidden from the beginning of the world—is outside every culture, is supracultural. It comes from outside our cultures and yet is destined for all of them—a supracultural, unchanging message of good news.

The Judaeo-Christian religious inheritance has never dismissed as illusion what comes from the hand of God. The world is Maya, illusion, in the Hindu culture, an illusion to be cast off in reaching the state of perfection. That might be very inspiring and uplifting, but it does not really offer much hope to a world of flesh and blood, of poverty and hunger. It is only in the Jewish and Christian faith that a Messianic hope first breaks upon mankind. ^[30] The lack of a future tense in the Masai language is, I believe, symptomatic of a lack of expectant hope for the future. I doubt if it is possible for any pagan culture to take part in true human development.

One time after I had finished a year of instructions in one of my villages, a lady resident of the village said to me: "I think I understand what your message (the gospel) is saying to us. You are telling us that we must love the people of Kisangiro. Why must we do that?"

Kisangiro happened to be the next village, three miles away. The people of that village were of the same tribe as the people of her village, but of a different clan. Being people who existed beyond the boundaries of the clan, they qualified for her as being "those dark, evil people out there." This young lady’s difficulty lay in extending the obligation of love not to me and my white-faced tribe, or to the brown-faced Indian traders, or to people of hostile, alien tribes surrounding her own. Her difficulty lay within her own tribe, towards people of another clan who lived three miles down the road. That was the giant step for her. That was the chasm impossible to cross. That was the testing point of Christianity.

Can you imagine speaking with this lady about nation building, or about joining in a common endeavor to establish a school or medical center for the surrounding villages, or about a joint effort to build a road between her village and the hated and feared village of Kisangiro?

If someone does not help that village lady, and millions like her, through that first step, across that impassable chasm; if she and they do not come to believe in a God above all the tribes and clans, and in a sacred world of unlimited possibilities and expectant hope, there will be no nation building, no human development. And she and her fellow Africans could well be destroyed by the development and science and technology we bring to them so enthusiastically.

Masai country in present-day Tanzania is an isolated place. I would be reminded of this sitting in my tent each night, alone from seven o’clock onward, the Masai village near which I was camped, completely closed in by a circular, thorn barrier fence, against the wild animals in the midst of which these people lived, against the evil spirits of whom they were terrified, against the night. There were no lights, no artificial sounds coming from modern technology, no sounds of traffic, no refrigerators humming or air conditioners whirring, no amplified rock beat, no blare of radio or T.V. The only sounds I would ever hear night after night were natural ones, the wind rushing across the plains, the rain drumming on the tent and splashing on the ground outside, the campfire crackling, an occasional roar or grunt from a lion. Sometimes I would see the yellow eyes of the lions as I replenished the fire. They seemed to be drawn to the fire, checking out who had invaded their turf. Sometimes I would see them in the dawn going back from the kill, or a lonely leopard with his evil eyes watching me drive past in the early morning light.

The extreme isolation, the solitude, cannot help but get to you, do strange things to you. You begin to wonder if there is really a world outside, or if it is something you only dreamed up. You question whether the world is not passing you by. Occasionally in the night you see the satellites sent up from another continent passing silently through the African, equatorial sky. While your fellow countrymen are hurling themselves at the stars and stepping on the moon, you are in the midst of people from the same planet in the same century who have to barricade themselves in, away from wild animals and evil spirits.

It makes you wonder when you come face to face with these people on the morrow if anything you do or say in such isolation can be relevant to the real world; if anything you decide to discuss about religion would necessarily be so insular and provincial that it could have little meaning to the rest of the world. Yet, at times, sitting there by the morning fire in the cold Masai highlands, I could sense that what these people were pondering, many had pondered before them. They were touching the raw nerve of a sore that is festering throughout the world. They were reflecting on the possibility of opening themselves up to every other tribe and race on the face of the earth, bringing with them all the cultural and spiritual riches of their tribe, exposing themselves at the same time to every sort of exploitation and waste.

If the God of the world were the God of all the tribes and nations of the world, and loved them all equally, that would change things, as far as the way they looked at other tribes and clans, and acted towards them. The Masai had become great by the conquest of most of the tribes that had come across their path. Like the lion, whose grunt they imitated in their dances, they walked proud and unafraid across the plains. Must they now bleat like sheep, timid, stupid, prone to being lost and slaughtered?

I do not know if the reader can appreciate the novelty and difficulty of such a thought for them. We can glibly say the human race is one; we all belong to a brotherhood, all sons and daughters of a common Father, all equal in value and importance. We have inherited such a thought. I doubt if we could have ever come to it on our own. It was an essential part of the gospel message, with which Paul and the early evangelists turned the world upside down.

Suppose you belonged to a tribe like the Masai, for whom there was no abstract notion of brotherhood, but only a concrete, specific idea of brotherhood, arrived at by initiation and extending only to a restricted group within a clan line—an age-group brotherhood called orporor. It was by no means universal. It was limited to those initiated within a certain time span, generally a seven year period. This orporor taught them everything they knew of love and loyalty and dedication and responsibility and sacrifice. But it was necessarily limited by that very time, that very space.

What was being suggested to them in place of this limited and specific brotherhood, was so disturbing as to be frightening, so beautiful as to be tantalizing.

The use of the word "brother" by the black race in America as a specific greeting and designation, is amazingly similar in its implications and in its limitations.

One morning while the old man, Ndangoya, and his community were struggling with this problem, I could not help but notice a colleague of his, a man named Keriko, in obvious pain. I was certain he was ill. But my Masai catechist helper, Paul, chuckled at my concern.

"Are you worried about old man Keriko? Don’t worry, he is all right. You see, for a Masai there is not much need to think in life. Almost everything he learns, he learns by memory, by rote. It becomes automatic for him, like tying your shoes or buttoning your shirt is for you. He learns about food and clothes and houses and kraals and cattle and grasses and women by memory—even things about God and religion. When he needs an answer to a question, all he has to do is reach into his memory and come up with the correct answer. He can reach his adulthood without thinking at all. What you are asking Keriko to do is to take the first thought about the Masai brotherhood of the orporor, and the second tbought about the human race and the God of all the tribes, and to put the two thoughts together to make a new thought. That is very difficult work. What you are witnessing in Keriko is the pain on the face of a man who is thinking for the first time in his life." Paul chuckled again out loud. He had a unique sense of humor.

What the Masai were wrestling with was a decision and a dilemma, in miniature, that the whole world is facing, and has faced many times before.

Before I came to Masailand, or even to Africa, I used to wonder, whenever I came across it, at the insistence the bible, especially the New Testament, placed on the nations, on the drive towards the nations. I used to wonder if this was not, perhaps, an obsession of classical times, that had little meaning for today, for us. It is only since I came to Africa, that I have seen how wrong I was.

The burning hatred, hostility, and prejudice of one race or tribe toward another is the force that has torn apart the Congo and Nigeria since I came to Africa, seared Rhodesia, and is building up to an explosion in South Africa. It is the force boiling over in the Middle East between Arab and Jew, in the Far East between China and Russia, and in America between black and white. It is the same force that Paul and Peter had to fight against so desperately. The whole bible squared off against this elementary evil.

To fail to see this in the New Testament is to miss indeed the main thrust of the gospel message—the universalism of the good news. So many people today are asking if missionaries are important or even necessary. I would have to answer: "Yes they are, perhaps more for this reason than for anything else." Every artificial attempt from the time of the Tower of Babel, up to the United Nations to "make a great people, a people which is one," has failed. I believe that only Christianity has the inherent capability to accomplish this, the inner strength necessary to match the primeval force of racism and tribalism.

For this reason, more than any other, do the final words of our Lord make any sense at all to me, "Go out to the ends of the earth and preach the gospel to every nation."

The irony in this particular case of the African Masai, who know little, if anything, about the long history of the church, is that history is now on their side. The christianized Jews and the citizens of the Roman empire have been shoved aside in Christian history. Now it is the turn of the European-Americans to be passed over. Before this century is out, even as the Christian church continues on its way as a dwindling minority in the world, in this same period, the members of the predominantly nonwhite third world, for the first time in history, will begin to become the majority in the Christian church. ^[31]

As I pass on this message of Peter and Paul and John to the segment of a nation before me, I am overcome with a kind of melancholy. History is playing itself out, in capsule form, before my very eyes. As I watch these Masai men and women, the old man Ndangoya, the agonizing Keriko, and their community, ponder the implications of this message, I know they will have to work out their own response to it. And their response, whatever it is, will not have very much to do with me.

As the message passes from us to them, I find myself hoping that they will make better use of it than we did.

Going back to visit and speak with Ndangoya and his friends and the people of the other villages week after week, we necessarily had to come into conflict, not with them, but with the church that sent us. There were several things wrong with the neat format our church and its theologians had set up for us. One thing was that we were sent out as church-planters, church-builders. For all practical purposes we were sent out to preach not Christianity, but the church. The church was the Ark of salvation. Those inside the ark were saved. Those outside perished. This was an unanalyzed assumption on which all missionary work was built. According to this assumption, we were to consider the Masai a lost people, and therefore had to convert as many of them as possible by converting them in great numbers. That would, of course, imply that all the Masai who died before we got there were lost. Perhaps if we lived in Europe or America and knew of the Masai only theoretically, we might have been tempted to come to such an unhappy conclusion. But living as we do among the Masai, and knowing them and their lives, and being friends with them, we have an advantage over the theologians and theoreticians of Europe and America, who study a Pagan people and a pagan religion at a distance.

Salvation is not a magic formula produced by a secret mixture of sacraments and church membership. It is the result of love of God and grace and holiness and goodness. It is all one process, continuous, unbroken. Goodness and holiness are the beginning of salvation, and they do not reside exclusively in Europe and America. I have seen too many good and holy pagans in Africa to believe that. The Masai are no more a lost people than the Christians of Africa, or of Europe and America, are. The Masai are a people loved by God, and the signs of this love are manifest in their lives. Salvation is as possible for them as it is for us. Making salvation possible or easier for the Masai could not be our reason for bringing Christianity to them. If I had been inclined to think it was our reason, I would soon have been disabused of the notion by the old man, Ndangoya, who one day told me, "This High God of whom you speak, he could not possibly love Christians more than pagans, could he? Or he would be more of a tribal god than ours."

Another assumption we had to discard in going to the Masai was the very assumption that had kept us from evangelizing them in the first place, an assumption and declaration we had heard on every side: "It is impossible to preach the gospel directly to the Masai."

I believe such an opinion stems from that "lost tribe" mentality, or from the conviction that the pagan peoples of the earth are not quite bright enough, or open enough, or good enough to accept Christianity directly, if it is presented to them, but must somehow be lured into Christianity.

It is on such a nebulous and uncertain foundation that the entire structure of what has come to be called preevangelization rests. Preevangelization is a noble theory constructed by theologians, according to which it is stated that not all peoples are ready for the gospel, and somehow must be made ready for it. In its arrogant cultural assumption, preevangelization may be the most vicious system of thought and action ever invented by missiological theologians. :

It smacks mightily of the attitude of Dr. Livingstone—who, in the last century strode into the universities of Europe making a plea to the young people of those universities to come to Africa to help him make the Africans "free, civilized, and Christian"— in that order. He had an incredibly high and naive idea of Christendom.

Are the pagans of today, like the Masai for instance, somehow in a more desperate antigospel situation than the pagans of classical times. Are the Africans pagans of today living in a more sin-filled, grace-less atmosphere? The apostles came in contact with a world which was unconscious of the niceties of what we call sexual morality. Read closely the epistles of St. Paul: for instance, the one to the Ephesians, where he mentions the actual situation of his world. Pagan worship and pagan theater were often starkly sexual. Among the Phyrigions whom Paul evangelized on his first missionary journey, and from whom he made his first converts, marriage was unknown. ^[32]

Are Masai pagans further away from salvation than European and American Christians? Is endemic and incurable cattle thieving further removed from salvation than assassinating and killing and selling deadly weapons and cheating in business and lying in advertising?

As far as the Masai were concerned, we had to overthrow the assumption that they were not yet ready for the gospel. We had to believe that the gospel, the message of Christianity, the revelation of God to man, is for everyone, for the entire human race, for every people in every segment of that human race—as they are, where they are, now. Or else we would have to retranslate the mission mandate to: "Preach the gospel to all the nations— except to those who are not ready."

Another assumption on which missionary work was built was this: we had to convince the world of sin, instead of leaving that task to the Holy Spirit, as Christ suggested. We had to convince the world of sin, or the world would never feel the need for redemption, and the Redeemer. We had to tell them of the sin of Adam, original sin, which we all inherited, or they would never feel any need for Christ. It was the assumption underlying all missionary catechesis. This way we could lead them to Christ.

Having no other tradition to rely on, I did just that with the Masai—the story of Adam and Eve and the garden and the fruit tree, and the serpent and the Fall.

The trouble was that they had their own stories about the beginning of the human race. And in their stories, as in the stories of every pagan tribe with which I am acquainted, there is the recounting of a Fall. In no way do any of the stories bring about a consciousness of guilt, or need for personal redemption, any more, I suspect, than the story of Adam succeeds in doing for the young people of our culture today.

The Masai complained, with some justification, that our story about the beginning of the human race is more than a bit agriculturally biased, what with the garden and the fruit trees and the command to till the soil. For them, the cowboys of East Africa, tilling the soil is anathema. Only an olmeg (a farmer, a barbarian) would cut open the thin layer of topsoil nurturing the life-giving grass of the Masai steppes, exposing it to the merciless equatorial sun, and turning it into desert within years. So, understandably, all their stories of the beginning of the human race are veterinary in character, that is, they all refer to cattle raising in some way.

The story of the garden of Eden was bad enough. I followed with a worse one, the story of the first farmer, Cain, murdering the first cattlemen, Abel—the beginning, as the Masai saw it even by our accounting, of all the troubles between the two groups even until now. And Cain got away with it, just as the farmers do today, and always have, with the government backing them. They began to wonder if that book I held in my hands with such great reverence, was not some kind of an agricultural or governmental plot against them.

And after hearing their myths and stories, it seemed a little strange offering ours about a man and woman in the garden of Eden, and a fruit tree with forbidden fruit, as the definitive and final story about the origin of evil in the world, pretending our story were not a myth, a myth with a very important teaching perhaps, but a myth nonetheless, and one encased in a very pronounced cultural setting at that. I never told the story again.

So I had to try in other ways to convince them of sin. I had nothing else to go by, except the theology I had studied, to set the stage for the need of redemption, of Christ. The missionaries of Hawaii must have been tortured by the same thought. We and they had somehow become convinced that selling guilt was indeed our mission.

After I had worked along this line for some time, I became conscious of the hopelessness I was engendering in them by building my teaching on the foundation stone of sin. I was haunted by the look in the eyes of these good pagan people as I went on insisting they were steeped in sin, and their peers, who had not even heard the word I was bringing, even more so. And their ancestors, whom they did not worship as existing spirits, but whom they revered as founders of their tribe and doers of great deeds, were they all a sinful, wicked people?

The Masai consider their ancestors and their peers beautiful. How can it be a part of the Christian message to tell them they are not? And if you look honestly and openly at pagans—as almost every missionary can testify—they are beautiful people. St. Paul and St. Peter said as much: "The loving kindness of God has appeared to all men…​. God lets each nation (each tribe, each culture) go its own way…​. He is evident to them in the happiness he gives them."

There is no use arguing that it isn’t true happiness they have, or that they aren’t really happy—because they are, at least in that momentary escape from their loneliness and hopelessness while drinking the rich butterfat milk of their Zebu cattle, or striding across the Masai plains, or dancing the beautiful dances of nomads. St. Paul says this happiness is a sign of God among them. He was there before we ever got there. It is simply up to us to bring him out so they recognize him.

While I was going about the evangelizing of these first villages, I noticed from time to time, a man on the outskirts of the different communities under instruction, the same man appearing in different places. He seemed poorer than the average Masai, and he did not seem to belong to any of the communities. One day in the midst of our discussion, he asked a question. It was a simple question but it mystified me. He asked, "Can you people bring forgiveness of sin?"

I hadn’t gotten around to forgiveness yet (or confession). I was still trying to get across the consciousness and reality of sin. I thought the man was really not paying attention. I did not answer his question. I told him I would get to that some other day. Then, afterwards, I found out who he was. He was a man who had committed a great sin against the taboos of the Masai tribe. So he had become an outcast, belonging to no community. No community wanted him or was willing to have him live and work with them. A man with a sin on his head would bring nothing but evil on any community with which he lived. The worst part of it was that the sin in question was unforgivable. There was no forgiveness possible from God or man. He was destined to live the rest of his life as a despicable outcast. No wonder he asked me if ] and my people could bring forgiveness. By the time I had found out about all of this he was gone. I felt miserable.

That man and his people knew all about sin. What they did not know about was forgiveness of sin. They did not even know it was possible.

I found out more about sin and the Masai. Some sins were unforgivable, like that man’s sin. Other sins were not unforgivable, but nearly so. The difficulty involved in obtaining forgiveness for certain sins was so great that it bordered on impossibility. The Masai had to sweat and strain and suffer to reach forgiveness, even when it was possible.

If a son offended his father seriously, this was considered a sin of great magnitude. The sin not only brought a disruption in the relationship between the father and the son, but in the whole community and village where they lived. The son was banished from the community and was even shunned by his colleagues in the military encampments in which they were required to spend time as warriors. It was thought that a kind of curse followed a "sinful" person around, and brought misfortune on all who associated with him. This state of affairs could go on for months or years or even a lifetime.

Sometimes the peers of the father would encourage him to ask God for the "spittle of forgiveness" so that he could forgive his son and bring blessing once again on the village. Spittle, a very sacred element of a living, breathing human, was considered the sign of forgiveness. It was not just a sign, as we might be inclined to describe it, or an empty sign bereft of meaning. It was an African sign, which means it was a symbolism in which the sign is as real as the thing it signifies. (We might call it an effective sign, one in which the sign effects what it signifies. We could even call it a sacrament.) In other words, spittle was not just a sign of forgiveness.-It was forgiveness. And so the father prayed to God for that spittle. Sometimes it was not granted him. He could spend the night on a mountainside Praying for it. I once visited an old man doing just that. I sat with him in the middle of the night as he prayed in vain for the spittle of forgiveness.

Sometimes it is given him. Whenever it is, word is sent immediately out to the bush to the guilty son. During that same period that son might have been advised time and time again by his own peers to return and ask forgiveness of his father. But as with young people anywhere in the world, that can be a very onerous and distasteful task. But if word does come that the spittle of forgiveness has been granted his father, he will be earnestly entreated by his peers to take advantage of it. They will accompany him back to the village. And his father will be waiting with other elders. The two groups will cross from different sides of the village towards each other in the center. When they arrive there together, the son will ask his father’s forgiveness, and the father will spit on him, and forgiveness comes, and there is great rejoicing.

I came across another extraordinary custom of the Masai. Sometimes the sin occurs, not between individuals, but among groups in the same community. One family might offend another family, and disruption sets in on the whole community. This can be disastrous to a nomadic type community who must have unity above all else for the sake of their herding together and moving together and for their common defense against enemies. A disruption like this can rupture the whole agreement or pact or covenant on which the community first came together and on which it remains together. If at all possible, both the offending and the offended family must be brought back together by an act of forgiveness sought and bestowed. So at the behest of the total community both families prepare food. The word for food in Masai is endaa. But this will be a special kind of food called the endaa sinyati, meaning holy food. This holy food is brought to the center of the village by the two families accompanied by the rest of the community, encouraging both families all along the way. There in the center of the village the food is exchanged between the two families, each family accepting the food prepared by the other family. Then the holy food is eaten by both families, and when it is, forgiveness comes, and the people say that a new osotua has begun. Osotua is the word for covenant or Pact or testament.

A new testament of forgiveness is brought about by the exchange of holy food. What can one say?

This mighty struggle and effort of pagans to reach forgiveness touched me very deeply. It sent me back to the sources of Christianity to begin again to try to find out what it was all about. I went back to the New Testament, to the Acts and the epistles, to Peter and Paul, who were the first ones to preach the gospel to a pagan world. What does it mean to preach the Christian gospel to such a world?

If you study the apostolic approach very closely, you will see that something is missing. Sin is missing. There is no mention of original sin or any other kind of sin. Sin will come in later, after Christ, after getting to know Christ, in relation to Christ, but the sin portrayed by the first preachers of the Christian gospel is forgiven sin, something entirely different—the felix culpa. After all, isn’t that the only kind of sin there is in the world, forgiven sin?

Christ, after his resurrection, said the same thing: "Now that the resurrection is a reality, now that forgiveness of sins is accomplished in this new covenant, go out to all the earth and preach the good news of the forgiveness of sins to all the nations." Isn’t that what he is recorded as saying in Luke and elsewhere? This is good news, to the Masai, to the guilty man cast out of his community, to the sinful son and to the offending family. I do not have to convince them of sin. They know of sin. What they did not know of was forgiveness. It has touched the earth. This is where Christianity parts company from Judaism and from Hinduism and from Paganism. Sin is a conquered thing. This is a redeemed world. One wonders if one should dare talk to pagans about sin—apart from Christ, until they know Christ.

The job of a missionary, after all, is not to teach sin, but rather the forgiveness of sin.

It is all clear to me now, many years later. It was not clear to me when I first began to evangelize the Masai. Whereas, at that time, I felt I had got off to a fairly good start as far as God and creation were concerned, I truly bogged down when I came to man and salvation and sin. The nearest colleague with whom I could confer on such a matter was two hundred and fifty miles away. I had to face the difficulty alone and it almost finished me. I became discouraged in a way it would be hard to describe. More than that, before I began to see the way out of the mire, I was ready to give up. I was ready to announce to the church that had sent me, and to anyone else who wanted to listen, that Christianity was not valid—not valid for these Masai, perhaps not valid even for me. I suppose you would call it a crisis of faith, a loss of faith. I had begun to doubt the very message of Christianity.

I can sympathize with and feel with young Americans, whom I have met, who are going through the agony of unbelief. I used to think that faith was a head trip, a kind of intellectual assent to the truths and doctrines of our religion. I know better now. When my faith began to be shattered, I did not hurt in my head. I hurt all over.

Months later when all this had passed, I was sitting talking with a Masai elder about the agony of belief and unbelief, He used two languages to respond to me—his own and Kiswahili. He pointed out that the word my Masai catechist, Paul, and I had used to convey faith was nota very satisfactory word in their language. It meant literally "to agree to." I, myself, knew the word had that shortcoming. He said "to believe" like that was similar to a white hunter shooting an animal with his gun from a great distance. Only his eyes and his fingers took part in the act. We should find another word. He said for a man really to believe is like a lion going after its prey. His nose and eyes and ears pick up the prey. His legs give him the speed to catch it. All the power of his body is involved in the terrible death leap and single blow to the neck with the front paw, the blow that actually kills. And as the animal goes down the lion envelops it in his arms (Africans refer to the front legs of an animal as its arms) pulls it to himself, and makes it part of himself. This is the way a lion kills. This is the way a man believes. This is what faith is.

I looked at the elder in silence and amazement. Faith understood like that would explain why, when my own was gone, I ached in every fiber of my being. But my wise old teacher was not finished yet.

"We did not search you out, Padri," he said to me. "We did not even want you to come to us. You searched us out. You followed us away from your house into the bush, into the plains, into the steppes where our cattle are, into the hills where we take our cattle for water, into our villages, into our homes. You told us of the High God, how we must search for him, even leave our land and our people to find him. But we have not done this. We have not left our land. We have not searched for him. He has searched for us. He has searched us out and found us. All the time we think we are the lion. In the end, the lion is God."

The lion is God. Of course. Goodness and kindness and holiness and grace and divine presence and creating power and salvation were here before I got here. Even the fuller understanding of God’s revelation to man, of the gospel, of the salvific act that had been accomplished once and for all for the human race was here before I got here. My role as a herald of that gospel, as a messenger of the news of what had already happened in the world, as the person whose task it was to point to "the one who had stood in their midst whom they did not recognize" was only a small part of the mission of God to the world. It was a mysterious part, a part barely understood. It was a necessary part, a demanded part—‘Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel." It was a role that would require every talent and insight and skill and gift and strength I had, to be spent without question, without stint, and yet in the humbling knowledge that only that part of it would be made use of which fit into the immeasurably greater plan of the relentless, pursuing God whose will on the world not be thwarted. The lion is God.

It was going to be a decidedly difficult task, bringing the Christian gospel of forgiveness, and the Christian understanding of salvation to a culture so different from my own, a task calling for extreme care and delicate caution and much humility. So many mistakes could be made. Americans can sometimes be victims of the most incredible culture blindness. I should know. I am one of them.