TL;DR: A Sawi peacemaking ceremony in which children were exchanged between opposing villages gave missionaries Don and Carol Richardson a cultural bridge for explaining Jesus as God’s “peace child.” A redemptive analogy uses a familiar story, practice, belief, or symbol to help explain biblical truth. It does not equate Christianity with other religions; it uses what people already understand to introduce what is unfamiliar.
Ideas that affect world mission outreach today
Missionaries Don and Carol Richardson seemed to be making little progress in communicating the Gospel among the Sawi people in what is now Papua, Indonesia. The discouraged young Canadian couple considered moving elsewhere.
Then, during a peacemaking ceremony, they watched as children were exchanged between opposing villages. In one especially significant moment, a father gave his infant son to an enemy as a guarantee of peace. As the Richardsons listened to explanations of the solemn ceremony and its meaning, they recognized parallels with the Gospel story. They realized that this familiar practice might help the Sawi understand Jesus as God’s “peace child,” who made lasting peace possible between humanity and its Creator.
The Richardsons used that peacemaking ceremony to explain the coming of Jesus into the world. The illustration from Sawi culture helped some listeners understand the message. According to accounts of the Richardsons’ ministry, members of the community subsequently began accepting Jesus as Savior and Lord.
Don Richardson wrote a book about the Sawi spiritual awakening. Titled Peace Child, it became a bestseller. The story was later adapted as a dramatic film under the same title.
Richardson began referring to the Sawi peacemaking ritual as a “redemptive analogy.” He encouraged missionaries around the world to look for cultural rituals, folk beliefs, and traditional stories that might parallel or illustrate elements of the Gospel. He proposed that cultures may contain starting points for Gospel proclamation. This approach reflects the time-honored strategy of using the known to teach the unknown.
The use of redemptive analogies does not reduce divine revelation to cultural parallels. Cultural traditions are not on the same level as inspired Scripture. Christian teachers and preachers use them to illuminate God’s unique revelation so that it can be better understood.
Using redemptive analogies does not involve mixing belief systems any more than Paul mixed religions when he began a sermon by referring to an altar erected by the people of Athens to the “Unknown God.” Nor does it mean that all religions and ways of thinking have equal value. It is a way of teaching biblical truth by starting with something familiar to the audience.
Analogies are used throughout the Bible. People in biblical times raised domestic animals, fished, and farmed. Scripture draws on those familiar activities to explain divine truth. Jesus Himself used analogies and parallels, often saying, “The kingdom of God is like …”
Using cultural parallels as illustrations does not mean that we preach a different Gospel in different cultures. It means that some of the most illuminating and memorable metaphors may be culture-specific rather than universal.
—Howard Culbertson, hculbert@snu.edu
This article on a key issue in world missions outreach is part of the Mission Briefing series published in Engage, a monthly online magazine produced by the Church of the Nazarene.
People sometimes think that looking for redemptive analogies means studying the beliefs of another religion to find something similar to a Christian concept or practice. If similarities are treated as proof that different religions teach essentially the same truth, the result can be syncretism rather than faithful communication of the Gospel.
That is not what happened with the “peace child” incident that helped Don Richardson proclaim the Gospel among the Sawi. Based on that experience, Richardson encouraged Christian missionaries to look within cultures for folktales, children’s stories, customs, and other familiar elements that could illustrate facets of the Gospel. Preachers and teachers in the English-speaking world have long used similar approaches. The search for redemptive analogies does not give a green light to syncretism—the merging of beliefs from different sources into one system.
Some have criticized the “peace child” analogy because the child who guaranteed the peace would eventually die, whereas Jesus Christ lives forever. That criticism, however, expects more from an analogy than an analogy can provide. No illustration corresponds perfectly at every point.
For example, Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” Bread gets stale, moldy, and hard as it decomposes. Every analogy Jesus used—and every sermon illustration used by preachers of the Gospel—can be picked apart in that way.
Redemptive analogies used by preachers in the United States and Canada include:
Although these three analogies can be powerful in the United States and Canada, they might not communicate as effectively in other settings. Similarly, Richardson’s use of the “peace child” analogy spoke powerfully to the Sawi people but may have less impact on many North Americans.