Today I was fortunate to be able to spend an hour or so in the first session of a lecture series being delivered here at the centre by renowned missiologist, Dr Andrew Walls (see more info here). The session was entitled ‘Words and the Word of God’ and was focused, largely, on how we hear God’s Word. Since Wycliffe’s work is centred around working to make God’s Word available to people in a language they can understand, obviously much time and effort is spent considering how best to translate and prepare that word to GIVE to others. Dr Walls’ lecture this morning, however, was instead focused on the other participant in this ‘exchange’ of information; the receiver, the hearer.
In focusing on the hearer, Dr Walls set out that we all, as human beings, develop our own ‘operating mental map’ of the universe by which we navigate our way through life. This is made up of our past experiences, the lives we’ve lived, the family we are part of, our own observations, the customs we partake in and the accumulation of sources we think we can trust. We copy details from these experiences onto our own map. No one person copies all the information directly from one experience, instead some details we decide are crucial and so we copy those in detail. Others we perceive as being less important and so we just sketch lightly a vague outline. And yet others we see as unimportant, or perhaps just don’t understand the meaning of, and so we leave them off our map altogether. The end result is a true reflection of our operating system, the map through which we see and classify the world, and ultimately through which we decide how to act. This could be called our worldview.
It is into those maps that we introduce a God component. It is through these operating mental maps that we hear God’s word. As we work together with people from different parts of the world, from different backgrounds and with different operating mental maps, we need to remember that they will have copied different information onto their own personal map. Certain areas will have much more detail than others. Some areas will overlap with our own, others will not. As God’s word is introduced into people’s lives, be it here in the UK or elsewhere around the world, we need to remember that nobody hears those words the same way. Everybody has a map full of information, born out of experiences, through which they will interpret and understand it.
What does your operating mental map look like? Where do you think you have lots of detail? Where are there some gaps? How does that affect how you hear God’s Word?
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