Radius Curriculum

You will develop the mindset, the understanding and the skills for entering a new community (albeit from a very non-flattering starting point) and for moving on to becoming a relevant participant and communicator in that community. From strategies for striking up conversations by using memorized expressions, to methodologies designed to generate a rapidly expanding core of comprehended vocabulary in a variety of sentence patterns, you will experience some of the challenges and rewards of real-time culture and language acquisition, in the context of real-life, cross-cultural friendships. You will develop a clearer picture of how to apply specific methodologies to move towards a high level of proficiency during the later stages of culture and language acquisition. You will also receive practical resources for planning, implementing and evaluating your learning during those later stages of culture and language acquisition.

You will learn to identify and reproduce the sounds of the language of your target people so that you can speak without an accent. You will learn the articulatory and acoustic characteristics of consonants and vowels, the differences of tone and stress, aspiration, fricativization, nasalization, glottalization. As a language learner these skills are vitally important for several reasons, so that:

• You can identify, write down, and reproduce sounds in normal speech at normal speeds
• You can comprehend the subtle differences in sounds that make significant differences is meaning
• You sound like a person who can speak with authority (and not like a little child)
• You sound like you belong, not sound like a foreigner
• Your message sounds like it belongs, not like something foreign

You will learn how to break down the sound system of a language so that if you are dealing with an unwritten language, you will be able to develop a reliable alphabet and thus be able to translate Scripture into that language.

In all languages, sounds must be put together in consistent, predictable patterns in order to communicate meaning correctly. Your new language will likely have a very different grammatical structure than your own language, which will require a reprogramming of your brain in the areas of morphology (constructing words) and syntax (constructing phrases and sentences). During this course, you will understand and practice some of the basic concepts and procedures for analysis which will enable you to address grammatical obstacles in your pursuit of language fluency.

You will learn how to develop a working vocabulary in your target language and how to determine the domain of meaning of individual words so that you will know the right words to choose (and to avoid) to communicate biblical themes clearly. Too often missionaries use “something close” and they unwittingly sound either crass, juvenile, “old school”, or trendy. Proper vocabulary, not just workable alternatives, takes time to investigate and land on.

You will learn how to distinguish between different types of communication in your target culture. Exhortation/preaching, storytelling, poetry, teaching, humor, etc., all have unique stylistic tendencies in each language. You must navigate those areas well so as to give the gospel an accurate hearing. As you communicate the gospel, you don’t want it to sound like a fairy tale, but like extremely important truth. The way you communicate can be as important as what you communicate!

You will learn to do self-assessments in order to gauge your progress in language learning, and then to develop strategies to shore up the weak areas.

You will learn how to teach illiterate and marginally literate people to read and write their own language. Having access to God’s Word in written form is a critical element in the survival and growth of a local church.

You may need to provide a new or a revised translation of the Word of God for your target people. You will be given the tools to assess that need and then to know how to approach the process of Bible translation. Again, having the written Word of God in their language is essential to ensure the ongoing health, growth and survival of each and every local church.

Based in the example of our Lord Jesus Christ, you will learn about the commitment to become relevant in a new context, and about the crucial attitudes of humility and eagerness-to-learn that will allow you to make good progress. Upon the foundation of proper attitudes, we will teach you how to strategically and actively pursue the relationships that will be key to acquiring an accurate understanding of the worldview that shapes the people you plan to impact.

You will learn the principles of applied anthropology in order to observe, process and categorize each of the components of your host culture. In the context of your growing circle of trusted friends in the community, you will move yourself from complete outsider, to a person who actually understands what’s happening around you and why it’s happening. You will learn to work from the basics of material culture (houses, pets, cars, pots, utensils, weapons, toys, tools, clothing, etc.) to social culture (family, clan, tribe, outsiders, random insiders, old age, responsibilities to and from all those relationships, who has honor, ways to lose and gain honor), to economics (buying, selling, trading, types of employment, ideas of wealth/poverty, prestige within various disciplines, valid and invalid expectations in all these areas) to aesthetics (beauty, poetry, art, craftsmanship) to recreation (acceptable relaxation, different types and status of each). You will learn to keep a cultural journal covering each of these areas as well as to identify beliefs and values behind observed behaviors and to identify integrating themes across the culture.

The 20 hours per week spent in Culture and Language Acquisition outside of the classroom allows you to work through the beginning stages of forming friendships with people of a different language and culture. It is through active pursuit of people, developing relationships, and learning to see life through their eyes that you will be able to apply the Culture Acquisition principles and methods being taught in the classroom.

You will learn what a worldview is, how it is formed, and how strongly it shapes the way you (and everyone else!) thinks. We will equip you to become aware of the worldview of those you’re intending to communicate with, and to find the areas of tension between their worldview and a biblical worldview. This understanding is crucial in making the truth about God understandable.

In the context of trusted relationships, built over time, and communicating at a proficient level in the heart language, you will learn how to uncover the core beliefs and values that form the worldview of the target community. You’ll investigate beliefs about creation, the creator(s), spirits (good and evil), and about the afterlife (Where do the dead go? When do they go there? For how long do they stay?). We’ll equip you to gain deep understanding of both formal (Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism) and informal (animism) religious influences. You will learn to uncover what people really believe about the gods and spirits that control their world, what areas of life they control and how they are appeased. You’ll be taught to investigate the local concept of “sin”, and how it is dealt with. Is there a judgment? Is there a judge? Is there anything I can do about it?

These and countless other worldview questions must have solid answers before you ever think of speaking meaningfully of what Christ has done. The message of the gospel must be understood at a worldview level. You do not want your message to provoke behavioral changes that are not rooted in a clear understanding of who Christ is, and the significance of what He has done. Only when your language proficiency is adequate, and your cultural and worldview understanding is solid, will you be able to tailor your teaching to strike at the heart level with relevance and power.

When you begin opening your mouth to speak about eternal truth and worldview level belief, you cannot be guessing about what mental images your words and examples are triggering. Without specific, pointed, detailed investigation of important worldview areas, you can — and will — speak only in generalities within a small arena of what you think you “know”, and your message will be terribly susceptible to syncretism.

Ethnographic interviewing is a routine practice in cultural anthropology, but we will push it to a deeper level, for we will carry it out in the context of trusted relationships. You will learn how to strategically work through the different areas of culture and worldview, gaining an insider’s perspective on values, beliefs and perspectives. This is the way we methodically insure that, through the dynamic of trusted friendships, we’re actually getting a good grasp of the people and the community where we want to plant the church.

In all areas communication, the difference between “form” and “meaning” is hugely significant. When functioning in our own language and culture, we intuitively manage that difference, and we depend upon it constantly! But what we do intuitively in our own culture can really hinder clear communication across cultural and linguistic boundaries. We want you to avoid the common communication errors that take place when we assume that similar “forms” shared by two cultures have similar “meanings”. We’ll equip you to become aware of the form-meaning challenge and teach you how to successfully manage it.

Three core values drive the discussion of Entry Strategy: integrity, impact and longevity. No matter what context you’re targeting for a church plant, we want to equip you to manage well your identity issues as a worker for God’s kingdom. You must enter, become a community member, and remain for the long-haul, and this will require some careful thinking and planning. Longevity alone is not enough! Just having a job and living somewhere is not accomplishing the church planting objective. You must also acheive impact in that community which will depend upon becoming a proficient and relevant communicator.

You will be taught to ask the right questions about having legitimacy and a sustainable identity in the country of your target people and within your host culture. We will help you design a strategy for answering the difficult question that arise, especially in restricted contexts where many unreached peoples reside.

You will learn the respective stages of church planting and how to implement each stage of the process. Those stages are:

Pre-evangelism. What is your identity in the community?

• What relationships are you developing?
• What are the best contexts and means for communicating the Truth?
• What are the belief systems already present among your target people?
• What kinds of conversations are you having that will help your friends notice the gaps in their worldview and prepare them to discuss Truth with you?

Evangelism. You will learn how to present the gospel in a contextual, concrete narrative approach (see below under “Biblical Foundations”). You will learn how to implement the conclusions of your culture study in order to properly contextualize the presentation of the gospel, while avoiding syncretism.

Nurturing new believers. You will learn to develop biblically and culturally appropriate styles of discipling new believers that will lay the foundation for a healthy church.

Gathering new believers. You will learn the principles involved in giving individual followers of Jesus a corporate identity within their own context. You will be introduced to the C-scale discussion and begin formulating a missiology of appropriate contextualization. The discipleship process that you and I have experienced has often lacked intentionality, and has consequently taken us way too many years to obtain clarity and maturity. We can do better in our target people groups!

Leadership training. You will learn to consciously equip believers in your host culture to be the spiritual leaders of their own congregations. This is kept in mind from the very beginning, and prepares the community of believers for your eventual departure.

Exit strategy. Your role as a church planter among unreached people is an important one, but not a permanent one. You will be taught to create and implement a specific strategy leading to your own departure… to the complete turning over of the church to local leadership.

You will develop a biblically-based understanding and theology of the Church (ecclesiology). What is the church? If our job is to start them, we have to have a very clear idea of what we are starting. Limiting ourselves to the Western forms we’re accustomed to will not be helpful! Radius will help you define the essential New Testament principles and the biblical heart of church life and practice. Having a strong grasp of these foundations will allow you to partner effectively with the new believers as they develop forms of expression that are both biblical and meaningful for believers in their context.

You will learn how to develop a working vocabulary in your target language and how to determine the domain of meaning of individual words so that you will know the right words to choose (and to avoid) to communicate biblical themes clearly. Too often missionaries use “something close” and they unwittingly sound either crass, juvenile, “old school,” or trendy. Proper vocabulary, not just workable alternatives, takes time to investigate and land on.

Hinduism. You will be introduced to a Hindu worldview and to the unique issues involved in planting churches in a Hindu setting.

Islam. You will be introduced to a Muslim worldview and to the unique issues involved in planting churches in a Muslim setting, including determining the appropriate level of contextualization, and dealing with restrictive governments and societies.

Buddhism. You will be introduced to a Buddhist worldview and to the unique issues involved in planting churches in a Buddhist setting.

Urban church planting. You will learn to identify and apply the principles that are unique to, and that contribute to success in planting churches in an urban context.

Radius will introduce you to current practices and popular trends in the missions world in general and in church planting in particular. Some of these methods acknowledge the need for a long-term, incarnational approach to cross-cultural ministry, and others do not. We will look at the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches, evaluate their alignment with biblical principles and discuss ways to work alongside church planters who embrace the different methods.

Foundational Bible Teaching is the label we assign to an approach that is comprehensive, concrete-narrative, contextually tailored and chronologically sequenced. Drawing from many years of cross-cultural church planting experience worldwide, we will prepare you to teach God’s Word effectively in contexts where the Scriptures have not been previously accessible.

Westerners are very comfortable speaking, teaching and learning in a conceptual (non-concrete) fashion. Many people groups where you are planning to serve prefer a more concrete and narrative (storying) approach to sharing information and forming values. The principles taught at Radius are geared to help you become a much more effective communicator of God’s Word in a wide variety of contexts.

Especially in the Evangelism phase, Foundational Teaching is very effective in preparing people to understand their need for the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and for understanding God in His holiness, love and dominion.

Jesus is not the answer… until the right question is being asked.

But don’t think that this is just a “technique for those people over there”! This is the way God Himself chose to reveal Himself to us, and through which many important truths become much more clear to all of us.

You will learn to understand the theocentric unfolding of the biblical drama in order to:

• Live your life in terms of the big picture be overwhelmed by the person and purposes of God and serve Him as a love response to the initiative He has already taken
• Identify the consistent, core themes in Scripture that help expose our faulty worldviews, and point us to a biblical worldview
• Select narrative portions that will be most effective in helping your target audience grasp their helplessness and their desperate need for a deliverer
• Teach others in a way that is much easier for them to understand and natural for them to imitate

Comprehensive. Rather than starting with stories about Jesus, we begin where God began: revealing Himself as the Creator of the universe. We avoid tossing out stories that lack necessary background, but rather establish the necessary understanding as we move through the narrative portions of God’s Word in a sequenced presentation. When people have an adequate grasp of God’s love, His holiness, their lostness, their inability to approach God on their own merits, and God’s commitment to provide what He Himself has demanded, then they are ready to truly understand and highly value the gift of Jesus Christ to die on our behalf and restore us to a proper relationship with God.

Concrete Narrative. Foundational Bible Teaching employs concrete narrative communication rather than abstract conceptual teaching. Although we in the West are accustomed to discussing abstract concepts like “God’s Holiness”, such discussions are terribly vulnerable to misunderstanding and syncretism when taken into contexts where the Scriptures have not been accessible. So instead of saying, “God is Holy”, and trying to define the words, we teach the story of God’s judgment of Lucifer, His expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden, and His rejection of Cain and Cain’s offering.

Contextually Tailored. Effective bible teaching requires a teacher who has become a proficient speaker of the target language, with a variety of personal relationships and a solid grasp of the worldview values and deeply-held beliefs of the target community. With this kind of proficiency the church planter will be able to (1) select biblical narrative portions that highlight areas of Truth that need to be understood among those being taught, and (2) predict the aspects inside of those narratives that need to be focused on and clearly explained so as to avoid syncretism and to clearly show the magnificence of God and His work. We don’t arrive with a pre-packaged set of lessons to teach, for we fully expect our growing understanding of the people and their worldview to drive us in shaping our teaching to fit the context.

Chronologically Sequenced. Although chronology is not the prime driver, the true historical sequencing of what God has revealed is often a key feature in making the truth clear, concrete and understandable. Foundational Bible Teaching seeks to honor God’s way of progressively revealing Himself to mankind.

You will learn to think critically and practically about the essential themes and doctrines that have been presented through the unfolding of the Biblical narrative and to order those doctrines in a systematic way. You will also learn to be particularly aware of your own theological bias and personal Christian experience, distinguishing your familiar forms from the biblical principles in which they are rooted.

This will give you the ability to:

• Identify and correct any departures from sound doctrine in your church planting context
• Allow and encourage appropriate local, contextualized expressions of theological themes

You will be given the tools to know how to accurately interpret and apply Scripture, and to lead others to do the same.

Emotional and spiritual stamina are very closely tied to physical stamina. Radius will help you recognize that connection and develop a habit of physical exercise. Recognizing that those who quit easily will not withstand the rigors of cross-cultural living and church planting, we want you to develop a toughness and a willingness to push through difficulty.

You will be tested to see if you have the undistracted focus necessary to learn language and culture, and to see a reproducing church planted in a difficult environment. You will learn to make decisions based on how they contribute to the accomplishing of the end goal, of how they contribute to the big picture. You will also learn to adopt a long-haul mentality that continues to press on until the job is done.

You will be taught the importance of, as well as tested in your ability to, put your nose to the grindstone and do the work that needs to be done in a disciplined way. In learning language and culture there is simply no substitute for disciplined, focused, monotonous, hard work.

How do you handle victory? How do you handle defeat? This simple process of the exposure of those character issues and developing the practice of winning well and losing well have huge ramifications for long-term success on the field.

How sensitive are you? How often do you get your feelings hurt? Can you have the direct, grown-up discussions that are necessary between team members discussing life and death issues (as well as mundane matters) in stressful contexts? Or do your team members always have to put on kid gloves whenever you are part of the discussions? Learning to be thick-skinned is essential not only for your survival, but for the effectiveness of your team.

Radius will help you assess your ability to live in a high-stress environment. You will be asked to live with strategically designed stress that is intended to approximate real-field situations. Some of those will be:

• Loss of personal “rights” (privacy, space, etc.)
• Going “off the grid” and allowing very limited “virtual” relationships or on-line interaction
• Providing few conveniences or luxuries, including no vehicle
• Requiring bare-bones living conditions
• Putting you in an environment of 24/7 access to one another’s lives and time

Marriages and families are exceptionally vulnerable on the field. The enemy knows that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, so he goes after the weakest link in the family to break the whole chain. Though “risks” are real, it is much more often the day-to-day grind that becomes the point of contention that discourages individuals, that divides family focus and that undermines ministry success. This will be addressed by:

• Defining biblical expectations for our marriages, our families, our parenting, etc.
• Developing strategies for dealing with the day-to-day grind as an entire family

Close to one third of the global missions force is single, and most of these are women. Some of the concerns for singles and some of the skills you will learn at Radius are:

• How to “protect” single women and give them proper “coverage” in a team setting
• The importance of “living above reproach” for singles and how to always maintain that and avoid inappropriate communication or relationships in your cultural setting
• The importance of “contentment” for singles and how to recognize and deal with the signs of discontent

Team relationships are vitally important to the success of a church planting team. We have structured our entire program around addressing interpersonal relationships and team dynamics. Both in and out of the classroom we will address:

• Team decision-making. You will learn to make plans, implement them and carry them to their conclusion as part of a team. This will include working with personality types that significantly differ from yours.
• Conflict resolution. You will learn biblical strategies for resolving conflict and for making decisions when there are serious disagreements.
• Shared responsibilities. There will be routine chores assigned to the student body, and those will be managed by dividing up the responsibilities among you.

For both your emotional and your spiritual well-being you will be introduced to the practice of some of the classic spiritual disciplines. This is a key component in surviving spiritual hostilities in territory that the enemy thinks is his.

You will be introduced to the prayer tools and will practice daily prayer for the unreached people groups around the world, as well as for the workers who are working among them.

You will do extensive reading in all areas related to pioneer church planting and will interact with other students and instructors on a regular basis about the principles found in those readings. We’ll point you to excellent resources for missiology, cross-cultural communication, worldview, syncretism, folk religion, etc. You will learn the value of maintaining an on-going, life-long practice of learning from others and being challenged by what experienced people have written.

During the second semester, we invite various sending agencies to visit Radius so that you can learn about about their ministry values, the locations where they work, and the goals they have in their outreach efforts. We will also help you develop the kinds of questions you’ll need in order to learn the most important things about the many options out there.

We will discuss the importance of good communication with your home church, and coach you in the “how-to” of doing it. A proper relationship to your sending church and to your various supporters brings glory to God and is vital to your long-term impact.

You will learn the importance of having a designated sending team and how to develop and educate such a team from your sending church so that they will understand what it means to be good senders and so that you will have the support from your home church that you need.