CROSS-CULTURAL CHRISTIAN MISSION IN THE GHANAIAN CONTEXT: CHALLENGES, STRATEGIES AND PROSPECTS ISAAC BOAHENG 1 (original) (raw)

The Great Commission (Matt. 28:16-20 and its parallels) mandates the Christian Church to proclaim the gospel in different nations and to all manner of peoples with the purpose of revealing God's salvific plan for humans wherever they might find themselves. Certainly, this missionary role of the Church involves an encounter between the gospel and different cultures. Encountering people of a new culture and introducing the Christian faith comes with challenges. Yet, at the same time, there are a number of strategies by which missionaries can work effectively and make use of various prospects in their field. This paper, through a critical analysis of data extracted from textbooks, thesis/dissertations, and scholarly articles, discusses the challenges, strategies and prospects related to cross-cultural missionary enterprise in Ghana. The main thesis of the research is that the gospel can and should permeate the ethos of a group, its essential attitudes, its institutions and all its structures without necessarily becoming an obstacle to the promotion of the Ghanaian cultural heritage. Hence, to make the Christian faith meaningful and relevant to every culture, missionaries must try as much as possible to contextualize their message. INTRODUCTION Defining culture does not seem to be an easy task. From the Latin words colere, meaning to cultivate or instruct, and cultus, meaning cultivation or training, the term culture has been defined variously by different scholars, few of which are outlined below. From the perspective of anthropologists, culture is "the totality of human learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted within a given societal group" or "the shared and integrated patterns of behavior exhibited by a particular group." 2 In this sense, culture could be described as an organism composed of an integrated system of "ideas, values, plans of actions, ways of implementing, and feelings that keep a particular society moving in specific directions and acting in particular ways." 3 No part of the components of human culture stands in isolation; they all work together and influence one another in order to contribute to the general health of the culture. 4 John S. Mbiti has defined culture as "the human pattern of life in response to man's environment, … expressed in physical forms, such as agriculture, arts, technology; in inter-human relations, such as institutions, laws, customs, and in forms of reflection on the total reality of life, such as language, philosophy, religion, spiritual values and world view." 5 From Mbiti's view it can be deduced that culture is informed by the social, religious, economic, ideational and political environments in which people find themselves. It has to do with accumulated knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, religious patterns, notions of time, feelings, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a particular group of people and passed on across generations. Culture is therefore accumulative,