Description
I arrived in Venezuela fully prepared to be their teacher. I had nine years of post high school education: a good measure of Bible, theology, Hebrew, Greek, Spanish, psychology, sociology, Latin
American history, pedagogy, and communications. I tailor-made my education to fit the work that I would be doing in Venezuela.
I learned rural life by working on my parents’ farm. I was trained in frugality during the Great Depression. There was firsthand experience in city life in the machine shop at Toro Manufacturing Company in Minneapolis. In addition, I learned to live and work 24/7 with a variety of nationalities while serving in the US Army Air Force for 43 months during WWII.
I walked down the gangplank in La Guaira,Venezuela, in 1954, at 33 years of age, ready for action as a cross-cultural missionary.
It was not as simple as Julius Caesar saying, “I came, I saw, I conquered.” The most important ingredient for doing missions was missing: an adequate knowledge of the people and their culture.
Educational preparation is important, but if knowledge of the people and culture is not foundational there is little chance a missionary will be successful in building an indigenous church.
This document is my journey as an Evangelical Free Church missionary attempting to help the Latin Americans build their church based on the Scripture and on their culture, not on mine.
