Abstract:
What should people do with their old cultural ways when they become
Christians, and how should the missionary respond to these traditional
beliefs and practises? (Hiebert 1985: 17).
Most missionaries in the past generation answered that converts should reject all their old cultural ways because they were pagan.
Anthropologists on their part answered that every culture and its customs
are valuable systems and should be preserved. The former option had the
weakness of malting Christianity look foreign and to cause social dislocation
in converts while the second compromises sinful practices and easily leads to
syncretism.
This study acknowledges both the beauty and sinfulness of cultural
practices, for which reason they should neither be rejected nor accepted at
face value. Instead, they should be studied with regard to the meanings and
places they have within their cultural setting and then evaluated in the light
of biblical norms.
In this study, four Lelan Pokot enculturative rites, birth, initiation,
marriage and burial, are studied and evaluated against biblical teachings to
decide what Pokot Christians can retain and what they must avoid thus
contextualizing the gospel for them in the area of those four rites and
making it culturally relevant.
