Landa Cope - Clearly Communicating Christ: Breaking Down Barriers to Effective Communication

CHRISTIANS ARE SO FAMILIAR with the words of Saint Paul, I have become all the things to all men, so that by all possible means I might save some (I Corinthians 9:22) that the amazingly radical nature of the statement often simply passes them by.

The Principle seems clear enough: For the Gospel to take root among any people, in any class, in any nation of the world, it must be conveyed in a manner that is totally integrated into the culture of the group to which it is being preached. Less obvious is the fact that the mimicking of a language, or even an accent within a language, is not enough.

Just as the Son of God chose to identify in both biological and genealogical ways with the Jews to whom He was sent, so the Gospel must resonate at levels of human response so deep and so intuitive that the receiving group welcomes the message almost like a long lost cousin.

How is that done?

Hundreds of square miles of forest have been cut down to publish the books over the centuries that have attempted to answer this question. The challenging

irony of our own day is that though world is now more than ever truly one in terms of communication links between its various parts, a counter-trend of increased local tribalism seems to be just as strong. More than ever before, separate ethnic, economic, or religious groups demand that any message spoken to them be delivered in their own particular private lingua. It is not so much "political correctness" here as what might be termed identity correctness": Does the message- delivering person really know who or what we are and what is important to us?

Thus-to take an example at random, but one touched upon in this book-to preach to Dutch bikers and druggies in Amsterdam, it is clearly not sufficient merely to know Dutch fluently. The evangelist to this group needs both to understand and to empathize with at a very deep level the particular social and philosophical universe from which this sub-culture derives. The issue, moreover, is not just "cross-cultural evangelism," the earnest staple of many missionary schools and Christian seminaries. It is understanding the very heart of Jesus Christ Himself in His own reaching out to the lost sheep of first-century Palestine.

Landa Cope has brilliantly and succinctly distilled the insights and experience from decades of her own forays into evangelism into more countries and regions of the world than most Christians are capable even of naming. Ranging from Amsterdam to Bangkok with illustrations of both her successes and her candidly ad-mitted failures, she etches out the fundamental keys to shaping an evangelism that honors both its audience and

the One who commissioned it. There are no formulae here, no three easy steps (or three easy anything), no differences to this or that textbook of the correct way: just sharp insights into how the Lord dealt with challenges which were in His own context quite as daunting as any that face modern missionaries.

Landa Cope's area of specialty in the Christian academic environment (at various campuses of the University of the Nations, Kailua-Kona, Hawaii) has been communications. At its core, indeed, this book is about communicating. But it is more importantly a reflection of a preoccupation resting much deeper within Landa's own heart, namely evangelism. Every evangelical Christian, if he or she is serious about the Christian walk, must wrestle with this notion sooner or later. By reading Landa Cope's well-written and fascinating book, that wrestling is certain to be not just a challenge, but a source of excitement.