A Novel Approach: The Significance of Story in Interpreting and Communicating Reality

A Novel

Approach

The Significance of Story in Interpreting

and Communicating Reality

MICHAEL MATTHEWS

Contents

Commendations

Special Thanks

Foreword

Coming to Terms

Backstory

Prologue

Overture

ACT I: THE CHARACTERS DEBUT

THE FOGGY MEANING OF IS

Interpretation of Reality

THE LONG SHADOW OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Reality of Interpretation

ACT II: THE PLOT THICKENS

THE CROWN JEWEL OF HERMENEUTICS

Place of Story

THE CRYING NEED OF ORDER

Story of Place

ACT III: THE DISSONANCE RESOLVES

THE NOVEL APPROACH OF DISCOVERY

Understanding of Culture

THE NECESSARY RESTORYING OF ORDER

Culture of Understanding

Epilogue

Bibliography

Copyright

Commendations

Read this book! You will be amply rewarded. Know that this book is not a quick fix by any means; more accurately, it has parallels to the Slow Food movement. You will have to do some heavy sledding through theology, history, philosophy, sociology, and narratology. And speaking of narratology or storytelling, I was once asked why I focus on the biblical story so much. My answer is that despite frequent tellings, Bible-believing Christians do not know the grand story that well. Matthews supplies many foundational reasons to focus on story and particularly on the grand story of the Bible! Not only is this book biblically and hermeneutically wise, it also helps us to interpret any culture in a wise fashion. In today’s world, we are all involved – even in the West – in cross-cultural situations. That is why I can say with enthusiasm and conviction, Read this book!

~Dr. David Naugle, Distinguished University Professor, Chair and Professor of Philosophy, Dallas Baptist University; and author of Worldview: The History of a Concept (Eerdmans, 2002).

Let me offer this commendation right up front regarding A Novel Approach: Herein lies a treasure trove of practical, real-world help for laying the necessary solid foundations for a clear Gospel presentation – in any cultural context – and for setting forth the necessary framework that will guide new Christians onward to maturity in Christ. I am very excited to see Dr. Matthews’ excellent work finally being made available to the missions’ community at large. Please, do not pass this opportunity by! Having personally gone through the complexities and rigours of cross-cultural ministry to see churches established among an unreached people group, and having provided consultation to others in a dozen different countries, I can honestly say that you will find help here like nowhere else. There is nothing else like this available. How I wish I would have had this kind of resource! Anchored to the Scriptures and impeccably researched, A Novel Approach guides you each step of the way in how to minister deeply at a heart level. The demands of cross-cultural ministry are well-attested. There simply are no shortcuts for effective ministry. What Dr. Matthews shares within these pages will not diminish the ever-present demands of cross-cultural ministry; instead, the brilliance of his work shines forth as he lightens the load by providing practical guidance regarding the ever-evasive how of cross-cultural ministry. I cannot recommend this volume highly enough!

~George Walker, Cross-cultural Trainer and Consultant with Ethnos360

From the first act to the fall of the final curtain, A Novel Approach pulls you into the history of worldview formation, illuminating and demystifying complex issues of reality, interpretation, place, story, culture, and understanding, all interwoven with gripping personal tales ranging from Montana to Siberia. Providing a practical story-based methodology for exegeting a culture, Dr. Michael Matthews has produced the definitive volume for training cross-cultural workers in worldview studies.

~Dr. Robin Harris, Assistant Professor and Director of the Center for Excellence in World Arts, a Division of the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics

If you need intercultural insights but expect a rapid reply or quick-thinking tweet, this is not the book for you. On the other hand – it is the right book. Why? The challenges of working in cross-cultural contexts demand deliberation and different designs. Matthews provides both. In an inimitable style, he combines down-home illustrations from Western prairie ranchlands with rigorous scholarship from venerable academics. He reveals the relationship between story, hermeneutics, and worldview. Then, he applies his insights in a novel approach to ministry across cultures. Saddle up – this is going to be good.

~Dr. Robert Strauss, Faculty of Program Design and Evaluation, College of Business and Economics, Regis University, Denver, Colorado

As an engaging storyteller himself, Dr. Matthews understands the appeal, pervasiveness, and power of story. Characters, setting, and plot are the stuff of our lives. While living and seeking to communicate in a cross-cultural setting or anywhere, it is encouraging to know that it is in these accessible, everyday, real life stories being told and lived out all around us that we will find answers to how to relate with love and grace. In an unassuming and brilliant way, A Novel Approach brings to light the deep assumptions flowing out of the story of any particular culture. This intuitive and relational approach to understanding a people’s story and how it affects everything in their lives leads naturally to the next steps needed to effectively and deeply communicate God’s Story. These steps are articulated in A Novel Approach. I highly recommend this book to anyone who desires to clearly and accurately represent God, in grace and truth, to the people they love.

~Esther Giesbrecht, Director at FirstStory Ministries, Canada

In this unique and rare read, a Montana ranch philosopher meets academic philosophers and theologians resulting in a novel approach to discover a host culture’s worldview(s) so that the True Novel can be communicated in ways that not only challenge existing stories, but replace them with His stories.

~Dr. Tom Steffen, Emeritus professor of intercultural Studies, COOK School of Intercultural Studies, Biola University

Through his natural wit and humour, Matthews lays out why we think different from others. His book addresses how we process information due to our own past or the story in which we grew up. He then shares a model for learning and breaking down our understanding of any culture or community. He gives the reader key principles that allow one to understand someone else’s story and their interpretation of reality. This knowledge is foundational to clearly communicating ‘The Story’. I only wish that I had this resource when I was first starting in ministry. Practical and applicable.

~Joel Sewell, Cross-cultural church planter with InterAct Ministries of Canada

The novelty of A Novel Approach is found not only in the use of story as a hermeneutic toward worldview discovery, but also in the very novel (unique and storytelling) way in which Dr. Matthews addresses the complex issues involved in worldview discovery and change. This book combines a unique meld of scholarly investigation couched in relevant narrative expression born out of Dr. Matthews’ own life experience. A great tool for anyone desiring to understand how powerful and profound changes can happen in lives by knowing how to interact the Story of God with the Story of the listener.

~John S. Cosby, Trainer and Consultant, Worldview Resource Group

Everyone who wants to tell the gospel story with understanding needs to read this book AND put the lessons into practice. This not a quick read, nor is it a quick method. It is, however, a reliable guide to understanding another culture through utilizing stories to learn how that culture interprets reality. Matthews leads us through the watersheds of philosophy and hermeneutics. He wants us to know how and why stories display a culture’s worldview. He accomplishes this achievement creatively. This is a welcome tool for cross-cultural church-planters.

~Dr. Gary J. Ridley, D.Miss., SEND U Missiologist

Many books have been written about the importance of understanding culture and of communicating the gospel in culturally appropriate ways. Although that’s essentially what this book is about, Matthews provides many fresh insights as he creatively discusses 1) the variety of ways in which different cultures, including our own, understand and interpret reality; 2) how a particular understanding of reality shapes worldview; 3) the impact on worldview from the key stories in the life of an individual or group; and 4) the inevitable areas of conflict between all human stories and God’s story. Matthews demonstrates deep familiarity with a wide variety of significant philosophical, anthropological, and theological writings and illustrates his key ideas with examples from the several cultures in which he has lived and ministered. He concludes the book by showing, step by step, how to apply his insights when developing a strategy for communicating the gospel in a specific cultural context. And he does all of this in an interesting, engaging, and accessible manner. I heartily recommend this book.

~Ray Prigodich, Assistant Professor of World Christianity (Retired), Denver Seminary

Special Thanks

No person is an island. Neither is any book. Without the help and input of others, this book would simply not be. It would not exist, and you would not be doing what you are doing. There are many who helped make this book possible. Here is where authors can get a bit sentimental. Without going to the extreme of thanking my first grade teacher in that two-room prairie country schoolhouse, the hard-nosed drill sergeant in the army, the university wrestling coach, the old mink farmer on the edge of town who opened the door to nature like no other, and that special missions professor in seminary who hailed from Brazil and spoke with a thick accent, I do want to specifically thank my fellow workers at Worldview Resource Group: Robert Strauss, Tom Steffen, and John Cosby. These men have taught me much, and each has been a significant encouragement and example. Plus they are friends. Good friends.

And finally I’d like to thank my wife, Kathleen. She has helped me more than any other person on Earth to understand God, myself, and others.

Foreword

Many years ago, as a young pastor, I was engaged in an informal counseling session with a slightly older gentleman in my congregation. He was gravely concerned about a particular problem, and as I listened, my mind jumped forward with an ingenious solution to the issue he was facing. I interrupted him as gently as I could and proceeded to impart my wisdom. He quietly waited until I had finished, and then politely said, Thank you. Now, if I could finish what I was saying…? Whereupon I discovered that my ingenuity was anything but, and that my advice could not have been more wrong for his situation. Having failed to listen to the entire story, I also failed to be of any real help until I had rectified my fault. Embarrassed? Yes. But hopefully wiser for the experience as well.

Now, as an older man myself with a few more experiences behind me (some, I regret to say, just as embarrassing), I find myself more than ever desirous of really knowing those to whom I minister, counsel, and serve. I have taught evangelism courses for over thirty years, and long ago became frustrated with the all-too-often formulaic approach to winning souls. As the director of a missionary sending agency, I have seen my own efforts in other cultures fall flat at times, while at other times the reception to the gospel has extended beyond enthusiasm to reach genuine comprehension and acquisition. But honestly, from the human side of the equation, I have often found myself at a loss as to what, if any, difference there was in what I did or said. How thankful I am for the work of the Holy Spirit, who takes frail tools like us and uses us to further the Kingdom! How thankful I am that our Lord promises that His Word will not return empty to Himself, but that it will accomplish the purposes for which He sends it out!

Still, if you are like me, there is confidence to be found in the ministry when we do things with purpose and understanding in cooperation with the Spirit, rather than just, as the old saying goes, letting go and letting God. We can have the best of intentions when speaking to others of the gospel story, and great urgency, and truly biblical content. We can even have some basic knowledge of a given culture’s practices, taboos, language, history, food, religion, and so on. Those things are all helpful. But if we do not really know what glues all those things together, we will frequently speak past, or over, or around our audience, whether it be one person or a thousand. The glue that I am referring to is their story.

When I met Michael Matthews and began to get to know him, it became quickly obvious that he was on to something. My own training in speech and oral interpretation of literature, though in a different discipline, helped me to see that the idea of discovering the big story behind all the surface, everyday stories was huge. Really huge. Gargantuan, even. And I came to see as well that the times when I was most effective as a communicator – whether as evangelist, preacher, missionary or as husband, father, friend – occurred when I was most aware of the points of knowledge, belief, and experience that were the anchors and referents to every thought and action that the person across from me had and did. Thinking again of the Holy Spirit – would it not be better to avoid being an obstacle to the communication of truth that the Spirit must overcome in the mind of the hearer? Would it not be better to instead follow His example of engaging the very heart of the sinner in an effort to replace a sin-marred story that governs his life with the genuine story of our connection with the One who made him? Would it not be better to address the heart rather than merely the surface matters of understanding and practice?

At the heart of A Novel Approach is the desire to know God, others, and ourselves rightly. John Calvin had this to say about knowing God and knowing ourselves:

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.¹

Dr. Matthews understands what Calvin was saying so long ago. A Novel Approach is one of the most significant contributions to the subject of practical, field apologetics and evangelism that I have ever encountered. Dr. Matthews will shake your assumptions to the core concerning what you know about God, the world around you, and yourself. I don’t mean in the sense that he will cause you to doubt – far from it! Rather, I mean that the horizons of your perception will be magnified exponentially. If you have ever stepped up to the rim of the Grand Canyon, or the brink of Crater Lake, or some similar place elsewhere in the world, then you have an idea of what I am talking about. The vista really does leave you breathless, as you struggle to grasp the scope of what lies before you. Even if you are an experienced pastor, missionary, evangelist, or witness, you will gain perspective and tools here that will equip you to an even greater extent for the labour of declaring the glories of God to every nation, people, culture, and subculture that lies before you. You will be taught how to identify those many ties of which Calvin spoke. You will learn to speak to the core of a person’s culture, not just scrape away at the surface. And you will comprehend how to truly be, as the Apostle learned, all things to all men in your service for the King. Furthermore, you will be warmly engaged in both heart and mind as you converse with Michael on the journey. I cannot commend this book to you more highly.

Thankfully, that man in my congregation of long ago did not give up on his young pastor, and together we served that body for many years afterwards with mutual love and confidence. Such is the power of actually listening to one another. Such is the power of story. What a novel idea.

Rev. Leonard W. Pine, D. Min., Assistant Professor, Western Reformed Seminary

1 Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Chapter 1, Section 1.

Coming to Terms

Coming to terms is an idiom that conveys the idea of beginning to accept and deal with a concept (or definition). For example, I am coming to terms with what it means to write a book. So let us now, at the front end, come to terms with some vocabulary used in this book.

An archetype is a typical character, thing, or action that appears to represent a universal pattern or model.

Culture is the story-based learned and shared patterns of perception and behaviour of a community of people.

Deism is the mindset that God created the universe, but then left it to run on its own.

Dualism is the mindset that the world consists solely of mind and matter.

Eisegesis is interpretation from a biased perspective.

Empiricism is the mindset that experience is the key to knowledge.

An episode is a single incident within a larger story.

Exegesis is the explanation or interpretation of a text, usually a text of the Bible.

An expression, in the FRAME context of this book, is any other word or set of words, in addition to metaphors and similes, that convey a figurative and culturally derived meaning. Idioms, proverbs, euphemisms, etc. are different types of expressions.

A foil, in literature, refers to a character with characteristics that compare with or contrast against another character.

A Grand Story is the overarching distillation of all the episodes and key stories of a community of people.

A Key Story is a culturally significant and embedded story, which is the summary of a group of related episodes.

A metanarrative is a culturally derived grand story of perceived reality along with the connotations of that overarching story.

A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two things without using the words like or as.

A narrative is a story along with the perceived connotations that accompany the actual events.

Norms are the ways in which things are actually done or thought about in a particular culture.

A prime driver is any element of culture that chiefly governs a social group’s fundamental attitudes and activities.

Rationalism is the mindset that reasoning is the key to knowledge.

Reality is God, his creation, and the relationships inherent within and between those two entities.

A ritual is any action, activity, or ceremony performed in a customary manner.

Secular originally meant a focus on the time and space immediacy of this world. It has evolved to mean a focus on the worldly and material aspects of this world.

A simile is a figure of speech that compares two things using words such as like or as.

A socio-cultural institution is any system (pattern, practice, and/or relationship) that is organized and reinforced by a local community.

Story is a sequence of events that entails characters, setting, and plot.

A symbol is a material object that culturally represents something immaterial or abstract.

Values are the ways things ought to be done or thought about by the people of a particular community or culture.

A worldview is a fundamental commitment of the whole being to a culturally-formed grand story along with its set of primarily tacit assumptions about reality by which one interprets and interacts with all of life.

Backstory

There is More to the Story is a series of books created by consultants from Worldview Resource Group, a service organization that equips mission leaders and practitioners in a story-based worldview approach to cross-cultural ministry. The content in the series investigates how storytelling has been incorporated into the global mission, develops the place and power of story in the hermeneutical enterprise, and challenges some of the prevalent thoughts and current methodologies employed in evangelism and discipleship around the world.

Too often the gospel story is presented before the evangelist is adequately aware of the hearer’s story. In fact, frequently such awareness is considered quite superfluous. Added to this naivety is an all-too-often truncated presentation of the Bible’s story. Betty Crocker could not have come up with a better recipe for syncretism.² This series attempts to preempt the microwaved, Band-Aid versions of telling the Bible Story.

With relevant academic backgrounds, extensive cross-cultural involvement, and years of experience as consultants, the authors in the series observe that the cross-cultural communicator needs to be adequately aware of the hearers’ grand story that supplies their core assumptions about reality. The series reflects on the past, analyzes the current state of affairs, and offers new pathways forward