If our relationship with God and our family fails, then our ministry fails. Our priority in the first year of mission work should always be to love God, keep a strong relationship with Him, and make sure our family is settling on a solid foundation.
When you are entering a completely foreign culture, the process of cultural assimilation generally takes some time. During this time, if you don’t speak the language, you should prioritize learning the language so that you can effectively communicate over the long term. Some languages can take two years to get the basics, but others may take four or more years, or a full term of missions commitment.
In your first year, you can be involved in evangelism, church planting work, teaching those who are born again, praying for the sick, networking with any other believers working in the area, educating your children, and traveling as God opens up opportunities. But be careful to not make them the main priority or you will diminish your long term effectiveness and ensure that you always have to work through a translator.
These kinds of outreaches are most effective in the first term when you are serving a senior missionary, as a part of a team. You should always remember the principle of first being faithful with what belongs to another person, so that God can one day give you your own. If you are faithful in little, you will be faithful in much.
Concerning the adaptation stage, Missiologist Gailyn Van Rheenen correctly observes,
“Approximately the first two years on the mission field are appropriately called the learning period or the adaptation stage. Missionaries are learning to live in new contexts and adapt to them.
During this period, four interrelated types of learning take place.
- Missionaries learn to speak a new language,
- to understand the culture of the people among whom they are working,
- to form personal relationships within the culture, and
- to develop models of ministry appropriate to the context.
Two extremes are common during this stage.
On the one hand, some missionaries assume that they should not begin communicating the Gospel until the learning stage is completed–until language and culture learning are accomplished. Christianity, however, is the core of identity.
Missionaries cannot easily lay aside their identity even during the early stages of missionary work. They should learn languages and cultures as Christians and thus express and live out these distinct Christian perspectives! Christian proclamation must be incorporated rather than marginalized during the learning of language and culture. When effective language and culture learning takes place, the first converts are frequently made and a church established, even during this preliminary learning stage.
Missionaries must, however, understand their communicational limitations and work within these. They should teach using broad, general concepts and use indigenous illustrations only with the greatest of care. On the opposite extreme, some missionaries naively bypass the learning stage.
They conceive that ‘people are people all over the world and the Gospel can be presented in the same way in all contexts.’ They, therefore, desire to be teachers without learning first. Without active language and culture learning during the first months on the field, the missionaries’ effectiveness in all other stages is reduced, and the resulting movement is typically anemic rather than a vibrant.”
From: Learning…Growing…Collaborating…Phasing Out by Gailyn Van Rheenen
