communicating

It is much more comfortable, of course, to go on speaking the gospel only in familiar phrases to the middle classes. But that would be as wrong as if, for example, Hudson Taylor had sent missionaries to China and then told them to learn only one of three separate dialects that the people spoke. In such a case, only one group out of three could hear the gospel. We cannot imagine Hudson Taylor being so hard-hearted. Of course he knew that men do not believe without a work of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, and his life was a life of prayer for this to happen, but he also know that men cannot believe without hearing the gospel. Each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.

by Francis A. Schaeffer