Walking Through ‘Samaria’: Incarnational Gospel Witness in Mexico

by Anne Thiessen

When Jesus gave his disciples the Great Commission, he told them they would be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. The Book of Acts narrates the progression of the Early Church from Jerusalem to the surrounding towns of Judea and Samaria and later to the outer reaches of the Roman Empire. 

When Jesus gave his disciples the Great Commission, he told them they would be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. The Book of Acts narrates the progression of the Early Church from Jerusalem to the surrounding towns of Judea and Samaria and later to the outer reaches of the Roman Empire. 

As the gospel spread from Jews to Gentiles, Acts relates details of cultural conflicts between the Jewish believers and their brothers and sisters in Gentile towns. The account emphasizes the conversions of Gentiles, showing how they received the same Holy Spirit as the Jews, and reports how the Jerusalem Church finally agreed to welcome Gentile believers without first demanding a conversion to Judaism. The entire Book of Acts shows a process of learning how to do cross-cultural evangelism and church planting. 

When Jesus included Samaria specifically in his list of destinations for his message, he was intentionally sending his followers to the Gentiles. Although Samaria had once been Israelite territory, at the time of Christ it was a mix of Hebrews and other peoples resettled in Israel by their Assyrian conquerors. 

To be sent to Samaria meant to be sent to people who were no longer properly Jewish and did not follow the Jewish religion. If the sectarian wars of today are any indication, the Jewish prejudice toward those who ‘perverted’ true religion would have been harsher than what they felt toward utter pagans. (Is this why the Samaritan woman’s story plays such a prominent role in John’s account?) Acts describes the learning curve of Jews accepting God’s plan to make the Church an intercultural body. This included Samaritans.

How Does This Work in Mexico?

As a missions mobilizer in Mexico over the past twenty-five years, I have watched the Latino Church grow in its response to the Great Commission and also watched it wrestle with Jesus’ call to reach its own Samaria. (Throughout this article I am using the more familiar term Latino to indicate mestizo race and culture.) 

It seems to me that the Indian populations of Mexico have a lot in common with the Samaria of Jesus’ day. They are neighbors to the Latino populations and share a racial history, but they are culturally different. They are also different in their religious worldview. The Indian communities were baptized into Catholicism five hundred years ago, mostly by force and en masse, but rarely were they truly converted. 

While Latino Catholics here may understand that they follow a risen Christ, the Indians I have known have largely understood Jesus to be a particular statue imbued with spiritual power as are certain springs, caves, and holy sites. They have been primarily syncretists: animists overlaid with a thin veneer of Catholic practice.

In the Mixtec town where I lived for several years, a Catholic priest visited once a year for baptisms and weddings. He did not attend the annual town procession up the mountainside where the stone altar of the rain god, St Mark, stood. He did not participate with the local shamans in the sacrifices of chickens and turkeys that took place there, or in the dialogues with the dead through mirrors and other special objects. On the other hand, he viewed such syncretism as harmless. “If these people want to worship a pile of rocks on a mountainside, what is that to you?” he asked us. 

The Mixtecs’ placation of local spirits did not bother him as long as they kept up the Catholic rites he oversaw. The Mixtecs of this town, like twenty million other Indians from some sixty other groups embedded among Latino communities in Mexico, were (and are) mostly animists, believing that the environment surrounding them is alive with spiritual forces. Catholicism is often but a thin veneer.

To the Latino population, Indians in southern Mexico where I live are compatriots, but with a difference. They have their own languages, their own traditional dress, their own food, and their own religious rites. They even have their own governments and laws, making their communities semi-autonomous. But they are often viewed as an inferior race. To call someone an Indian (indio) carries the same connotation as the “n” word in America. 

Their languages are referred to as “dialects,” because they are considered inferior, “having no grammar,” referring to the fact that they are oral languages not set down in writing. I have heard Indians referred to as barbarians, as uncivilized, as dirty, and as “those poor little people.” They often have trouble getting adequate medical care because the Latino doctors doing their tour of duty in Indian villages clinics consider them incapable of understanding modern medicine. 

I think Jews might have had some of the same feelings toward the Samaritans of their day. From a Jewish perspective, the Samaritans ate unclean food. They refused to worship at God’s temple in Jerusalem. They were not pure in their race or their religious rites. Yet, Jesus visited their villages, and after his resurrection, purposefully sent his followers there with the gospel.

Learning along the Way

In my experience, Latinos have been reluctant to tackle their Samaria with the good news of Jesus, and when they do go to Indian communities, they tend to go as unconscious “Judaizers,” fully assuming that the Indians will adopt the cultural norms of their own Latino churches. It is hard for them to expect God to raise up local Indian leaders, using their own language, their own orality, and their own resources to develop their own local churches. Instead, many of the Indian churches pray, sing, preach, and read scripture in Spanish, and their churches follow the ways of the Latino churches they’ve known to the tiniest detail. 

In the Mixtec community where I lived, a preacher from a Latino town was invited as the guest speaker at the evangelical church’s first anniversary celebration. He was Mixtec, but he had moved into town and become a cultural Latino, “forgetting,” as he claimed, the Mixtec language. The church festival was a three-day affair, with everyone camping out at the church. The women made meals in giant pots on fires next to the building. The singing and preaching went on all day. 

At night, the men gathered around the fires for warmth, singing, laughing, sharing testimonies, and sipping weak coffee, while the women and children slept nearby on mats under thick, woven blankets. It was a grand event. But at the very end, the guest speaker said this, “It has been good. But next year, invite me here earlier. I will show you how it’s supposed to be done.” This Nasavi-turned-Latino leader assumed that Latino ways were always better. 

I was disappointed. What this pastor did not acknowledge was the inspiring faith of this new Christian community. They were just over two years old in the faith and had lost their founder to martyrdom the year before. Even though most of them had never read a Bible and had never been taught even to pray in their own language, their faith in Christ’s power to protect them from evil spirits, to raise them from the dead to live with him forever, and to heal them from alcoholism and other ills was unshakeable. 

Like the Samaritans of Acts, they proved they were full of the same Spirit of Christ as the Latinos. But they were not given the same freedom. 

This is a story from Mexico. I have experienced and heard many like it and have also witnessed similar attitudes in other Latin American countries that have their own Samarias. Evangelism happens, but it does not often naturally incarnationally, at least not naturally. The Latinos I have seen working among Indinas have not always learned to approach them as the Jerusalem Jews learned to approach their Gentile Samaritan brothers and sisters, releasing them from having to adopt Jewish culture.

After mobilizing Latinos toward mission in Mexico, I have come to the conclusion that part of the reason for their reluctance to engage indigenous populations in incarnational church planting is that we as mobilizers have been relatively blind to the need. 

Since the impetus toward cross-cultural mission has come largely from North America, so has the focus. At the large mission conferences, and in the literature of the majority of the mission agencies based in Latin America, the focus is on reaching the unreached in the 10/40 Window. Granted, we all hope more and more Latin Americans will join the mission effort there. It is so greatly needed. 

But at the same time, while they push toward the more daunting task of sending missionary teams across the ocean, Latinos miss the more accessible task of sending missionary teams to the unreached people in their own backyard. Rarely do mission mobilizers, often working off of stories and statistics sent from North American agencies, paint this picture well. 

But would Paul’s ministry to the Gentiles have been as effective if the Jerusalem Church had not cut its teeth on ministry to the Samaritans? Could there be a step missing in the process that Latinos must go through to become a powerful missionary force in the world? Have they neglected Samaria?

It is not as if there were only a few unreached indigenous in Latin America. Some statistics belie the predominance of animism, accepting at face value the claim of most New World Indians to be Catholic. However, in my experience in Mexico, many Indians lack even a rudimentary understanding of Catholic doctrine. And many Catholic priests would agree with me. 

As a result, in Mexico, over fifteen million indigenous people are living with little culturally relevant Christian witness, whether Catholic or Protestant. There are at least five million with no witness of any sort, and many of the rest have churches that struggle with purely Latino forms.

Helpful Takeaways

There is much to do in the Latino Samaria here. At the same time, few Mexican churches have the resources to equip, launch, and support missionary teams to the Eastern hemisphere. Of course they are doing what they can, often relying on support from North Americans, but I believe they could do so much more if they concentrated their efforts on reaching their Samaria. There are many advantages to such a shift in focus. 

First, Mexican churches could start mobilizing missionaries almost immediately. The cost would be a fraction of what it would take to send a team overseas. The missionaries would not need visas, work permits, or expensive transportation. They could bus or boat to an Indian community. They would be able to open businesses or find work in the area if need be, and become tent-making missionaries. This would not only augment their support, but give them easier access to Indian communities who resist the entry of outsiders. 

Second, the Latino churches would be able to learn what it takes to support long-term work. Visits would be much easier, and if support dropped, it would be easier for the missionaries to return home to reconnect with the congregations that support them. Few Mexican churches are used to pledging and maintaining long-term support for missionaries whom they rarely see.

Third, and most importantly, the Latino Church would learn what it means to be incarnational through the experiences of its missionaries working among Indian groups that are relatively close by, and so often viewed with prejudice by the dominant culture. How can the Latino Church be fruitful among the unreached of another hemisphere when it has not learned to be fruitful in its own Samaria? Until it has its own rooftop visions of God accepting what it might perceive as Indian ‘uncleanness’, can it hope to incarnate the gospel effectively elsewhere? 

One wonders: Might there someday be church councils in Mexico which agree to place concerning relieving the Indians of Latino burdens (see Acts 15) —such as the use of the Reina Valera (Spanish equivalent to the King James), the training of pastors in Spanish-speaking institutions, the invalidation of Indian marriages, or the reluctance to let Indian leaders baptize? Despite the hard work of SIL to develop Bible translations in native tongues, the Latino Church is only beginning to promote them because they have yet to fully recognize the Indian communities as a cross-cultural mission field. 

Mission mobilizers could help change this perception, but as several Mexican mobilizers have warned me, many churches don’t consider sending missionaries to the Indian villages to be ‘real missions.’ One explained, “Inviting people to work in some poor, remote village in your own country just isn’t attractive to young people. It’s just not as ‘sexy’ as getting on a plane and landing in some exotic land like India or Mozambique.” 

Mexicans also expect that the gospel will spread easily without cross-cultural ministry from Latinos to their Indian neighbors, though as time passes, we see it does not. Most churches among the Indian populations are planted by migrants moving back home, but their churches are often quite Latino in style.

There are, however, bright spots in Samaria. In the state of Chiapas, there are entire presbyteries using Indian languages, although other church practices may be set by denominational leaders from other cultures. There are also Mexican missionaries choosing to live among Indian people, trying to take the gospel to them in their own context, although that’s not yet the norm. 

Sin Fronteras: An Example of Incarnational Gospel Witness

One of the agencies I believe worthy of note is Sin Fronteras. The director of this agency is from central Mexico, where there are few Indians. As a practicum for Bible school, he bused to Oaxaca in the 1990s and asked an American missionary to place him in an Indian village. The missionary dropped him off and said, “See you in six months,” adopting a sink-or-swim approach. Even with such inadequate preparation, it worked. The director has never looked back. After a year, he went back to his supporting churches, married, and began recruiting others to work beside him. After trying this approach unsuccessfully on a few of the first candidates, he realized his recruits required a minimum of preparation before throwing them off the deep end. He developed a grueling, three-month training program, hosting his missionary recruits in an Indian market city, where he now lives, and teaching them in cross-cultural practices that would prepare them to live in an Indian village for their own six month practicums. 

The recruits must learn the language. Eat the food. Keep a low profile. They are to serve under local Indian pastors, not teaching or taking over leadership, but just observing and learning and helping as they are directed. Only about one in five of his apprentices returns for long-term service, but the ones that do are eager to engage Indians incarnationally. They know what they face and have come to love the people they serve.

Some twenty years later, Sin Fronteras now has eleven Mexican teams serving in unreached Indian communities. All of these communities are difficult to enter, some as difficult as countries in the 10/40 Window with restricted access, which is why no names are mentioned here. No one can simply move in and set up house. The teams have had to present requests to the local councils of their targeted communities, outlining their reasons for wanting to live there. They have developed relationships, earning trust, and started development projects approved by the communities. 

One team runs a bakery shop that provides all the bread for the town festivals and teaches young people the trade. Another rents a store front and sells paper supplies to school children, providing tutoring to them in the afternoons. Another has opened a carpentry shop that trains community members in the trade. Another missionary works as a psychologist at a local school, while others have gained access as social workers advocating for monolingual Indians requiring medical care from Latinos. 

Some team members live in Indian market towns, and there they help Latino church leaders evangelize in ways respectful of Indian culture. In the end, this may be as helpful as direct church-planting efforts.

The Mexican missionaries from Sin Fronteras are from all over Mexico. Some are Indian, while others must tackle the difficult local languages as best they can, since there are no language schools, and often Indians are reluctant to teach their languages for fear of being taken advantage of by outsiders (an all-too-often occurrence). 

Their common goal is to start healthy, indigenous churches with local leaders and local languages, without imposing Latino culture. They avoid methods that can trigger dependence: give-away programs, mass evangelism, reliance on short-term teams, Spanish training institutions, foreign funding, etc. All of this sets them apart as a rare and important experiment in Mexico. 

Today, Sin Fronteras is expanding its vision. It hopes to apply what it has learned in reaching the animists of Mexico to help Latino missionaries focusing on marginalized, animist cultures in other countries. Their faithfulness in reaching out to their ‘Samaritan’ neighbors is laying the groundwork for reaching places further afield. 

Time will tell if this low-profile, incarnational strategy will work well. Is it worth the time and effort to enter an Indian community incarnationally? The teams have not planted many churches yet, although they have started home Bible studies. They struggle to learn the Indian languages, especially since they can get by in Spanish. And a number of the original families have left the agency, finding village life overwhelming. Some of the missionaries wrestle with unrealistic expectations from their home congregations or lose their funding. 

The learning curve for both missionaries and their congregations is still steep.

But I’ve noted that the attitudes and efforts of these Mexican missionaries toward a sidelined population in their own country is a witness to the power of Christ to break ethnocentrism.  Whether they succeed in planting many churches or not, they have shown the attitude of Christ in emptying themselves of Latino culture as best they can and taking on the role of servants to some of the most marginalized people on the continent. 

It is a day of Pentecost, with people laying down their possessions and picking up the languages of strangers to share good news. It is a walk though Samaria that might open doors for Latin Americans to reach the ends of the earth.

. . . .

Anne Thiessen and her husband, Robert, work under MBMission to apprentice and mentor missionaries, helping them set up just-in-time training for local leaders of healthy, indigenous churches. They focus chiefly on reaching the indigenous communities of southern Mexico.

EMQ, Vol. 53, No. 4. Copyright  © 2017 Billy Graham Center for Evangelism.  All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMQ editors.