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A Key Way to Reach People's Hearts is Arts

It's true - Arts flies the good news under people's radar screen. It's a great way of reaching people's hearts. There are lots of stories that corroborate this. In Asia there was one group that had one hundred hymns translated into their language, but the church was dwindling and few sung the hymns with enthusiasm. Some well-meaning mission workers had had these hymns translated some decades earlier, but the tunes were Western. In came some ethnomusicologists/ethnodoxologists and helped the local people work out which instruments could be used in a worship context, and then helped them write songs which used their own style of music. These songs were so popular that the church moved out of the building and into the village, and many many others started joining in with the worship times! Eventually there were a group of musicians writing songs and leading worship in their community, and the church continued to grow.

This is just one of many stories I could share. What if the people group doesn't have any music? Well any group has arts of some kind - drama, dance, painting, decorated furniture/vehicles/etc, carpet-making, chanting etc. In any case everyone grows up with certain sounds. The city in Central Asia we lived in for five years had the sound of chickens and sometimes sheep or camels! Without that background 'music' any recording will sound antiseptic, or unreal.

In some parts of the world pastors prefer to use translations of Western songs in worship. Why is that? Probably because their worship times aren't very contextualised (relevant) to the local audience. To have local-style music would sound strange when everything else that happens in church is mirroring a Western worship pattern. Sometimes the only 'local' thing about church is the language, and perhaps the food served after the service. Everything else is Western: the dress code, the music, the talk (using Systematic Theology?), the way notices are introduced, and so on. Sometimes this is intentional, because the church movement or denomination wants it that way. Other times the church has been planted by Westerners and continues in the same vein. The way to avoid this is to disciple the local leader of the church, but take a step back in terms of actually leading it yourself, if you are an outsider.

In addition to this, whatever we produce as Scripture engagement products should ideally match local arts and cultural markers such as dress and food as much as possible. If we don't do that we're missing the target.

If you want further information on ethnodoxology here's a good website:

https://www.worldofworship.org/
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