Contextualizing the gospel to the Lelan Pokot .

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.