Written by: Telile Fikru Badecha on February 15, 2014

Our readings for this week, especially the articles under the category of Practical and Contextual theology resonate with me a lot. I was reminded of my personal faith journey; the ways the Christian culture I was raised in informed my perspectives about my own identity, my place in my community and the world around me. Growing up in the church that teaches Christians to denounce their culture in order to be a good follower of Jesus, it took me many years to learn how to connect my faith and culture. What is so different about the version of protestant faith in my country is there are lots of dos and don’ts that I don’t usually find here in the US. Many of those restrictions are a combination of cultural values of those who brought us the gospel and the mistranslation of some Bible passages. One simple example is Christians do not listen to non-gospel music because our Bible says in Galatians 5:21 music (non-gospel) and even the act of singing is one of the acts of the flesh. It is in the Bible and we believe it. As a gospel songwriter myself, I strongly believed and argued that Christians shouldn’t listen to any non-gospel music. As Setven Bevans in his article Models of Contextual Theoloy Bevans said,“ … our cultural and historical context plays a part in the construction of the reality in which we live, so our context influences our understanding of God and the expression of our faith ” (p.3). The truth is nothing stays the same. Similar to what Bevan said about the dissatisfaction regarding the traditional approach in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, my coworkers and I in our small town in south Ethiopia, in 2000, we became convinced that we need to worship and preach the gospel in the culture and language people currently understand. My ministry organized many seminars to help church leaders understand why preaching the gospel in Oromo and creating the song in their folk melodies was very important, rather than forcing everyone to follow the traditional worship style. Personally, I was all about making Jesus known in every way, but the idea of using folk melodies to create gospel song took me almost nine years to comprehend. Thank God! It was 2008, after I attended a two-day conference led by Rev. Harold Kurtz, Oregonian and a long time missionary in Ethiopia, I completely began to see faith and culture in a new a way. I always felt Rev. Kurtz’s coming was God’s plan to open the eyes of my heart. He shared with us about Peter’s dream from the gospel Acts 10-11, reminded us that Peter’s dream was not about the food but about the culture, which includes our language, music, and cultural dress. Having lived in Ethiopia for more than twenty years he knew all about the old oppressive traditional theologies. Throughout his sermon, he told us again and again that God has no favorite culture and our culture is clean and accepted by God. It was a very simply, but the most powerful message I had ever heard.  The Holy Spirit really helped me to embrace his teaching and I began to evaluate the melodies I had used to create gospel songs.  I realized that most of the gospel songs I wrote were written in church melodies (not to say bad or good) and they do not speak well to the heart of my people out side the Christian circle. Then I said to myself, if God could use these melodies to bless the people in the church why not my Arsi Oromo melodies?  That was a significant spiritual turning point in my life which I remember quite often.  Right after this event, I organized a group of young women and men from my staff and we began to create gospel songs using cultural melodies and put them on cds/dvd for others to listen to. They have been well received especially among the Arsi Oromo people. The melodies we used were not new to their ears but the lyrics were!  There is nothing more powerful than having a joy of celebrating God with the music of your heart. Therefore, I do agree with Bevans that contextualization,“… therefore, is not something on the fringes of the theological enterprise. It is at the center of what it means to do theology in today’s world. Contextualization, in other words, is a theological imperative” (p.10 ).

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Telile Fikru Badecha