So, where does it itch?

Last Thursday I had my first meeting with Gary, and we discussed some characteristics of God that can be seen in the first two chapters of Genesis. Afterwards, as he was driving me home, we started talking about the studies he´s doing for his doctorate degree. The program he´s in has classes all over South America, and he´s going to Lima, Peru in August to take a class.

After talking about theology briefly, we got onto the subject of how much of an advantage it is for him to be studying theology within the Latin-American world. "What´s your theology regarding ancestor worship?" he asked me. I admitted that I didn´t have any, really, because in understanding God, I needed to think very little about worshipping my ancestors. It became very clear to me at that point how understanding the God who created a great variety of cultures could involve different things for people of different cultures.

Gary told me about a conversation that an American missionary had once with an Argentine citizen in a church up north somewhere (don´t quote me on the location) about the work the ministry his team as foreigners had within the national church.
"You do an excellent job of scratching," the local man said to him. "Just not where it itches."

Foreign missionaries coming into a country and culture they don´t know have a big job in front of them. The people will not ask the same questions or struggle with the same issues as the missionaries did when they were getting to know God, but the missionaries will tend to preach the same messages and teach the same lessons as they heard when they themselves were learning about God. In doing so, they will fail to address things the local people need to learn. God created all existing cultures, and in him are the answers to all their possible problems. In doing his job, though, the missionary´s difficulty is to ensure that he is addressing the right problems.