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ALEJANDRO Santos Barbaran, an Asheninka Indian, tells others about his faith through "storying," a technique in which the Bible is broken into succinct stories accompanied by illustrations, this one showing how Jesus commanded a storm to cease. Barbaran was mentored by Southern Baptist missionaries Chris and Pam Ammons. (RNS photo)
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WE'VE A STORY TO TELL:
New techniques in missions
___By Mark O'Keefe
___Religion News Service
___BELEN, Peru (RNS)--It's time for the Sunday church service in this remote village of the Amazon, and at 6-foot-1, a full head above the native Asheninka Indians, the white man with the scraggly beard can't be missed.
___Yet in the context of missionaries' long history of storming the ends of the Earth to convert
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SOUTHERN BAPTIST missionary Pam Ammons radiates enthusiasm about the response she sees when Asheninka Indians tell and retell Bible stories through simple words and pictures in a technique known as "storying." (RNS photo by Tyrone Turner)
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indigenous people, Chris Ammons' restraint--he's sitting on a corner bench, listening--says more than his presence.
___An Asheninka leader, Alejandro Santos Barbaran, tells the simple story of how Jesus calmed the wind during a storm at sea.
___"Tsikama okenakeka pawentaane?" Santos says, echoing in Asheninka (ah-SHIN-uh-kah) the words of Jesus found in Luke 8:25, when he asks his disciples, "Where is your faith?"
___The scene represents a quiet revolution in the way many Christian missionaries spread their faith.
___A Southern Baptist, Ammons is in the vanguard of a more sensitive approach, one that counters the worst stereotypes of preachers forcing Western values on vulnerable peoples. If it takes hold, the new methodology could reshape the exporting of Christianity, which has more than 118,000 American missionaries in foreign lands.
___Ammons' message is still the gospel--a story that has contributed to the change of entire cultures, the rise and fall of empires and, most recently, to the fatal shooting of an American missionary and her baby, mistaken for drug smugglers in the skies of Peru.
___But unlike missionaries of the past and of popular culture, Ammons and his wife, Pam, don't make themselves the center of attention. They don't push a Bible that few in this illiterate culture could read. They don't preach sermons on spiritual laws in a pedantic style the Indians would find as puzzling as MTV. And they don't ask for Billy Graham-like altar calls.
___"We could go into every Asheninka community and preach something they don't all understand," said Ammons, 44, who has a doctoral degree. "We could ask them to raise their hands if they accept Jesus Christ, and every single hand would go up."
___"Then," added Mrs. Ammons, "we could write down that we have seen 400 confessions of faith on the Apurucayali River. But how many disciples would we have?"
___"We will measure by future generations," Ammons said, repeating one of his favorite lines. "Our fruit can be real or imaginary."
___Chris Ammons is an evangelical, one of an estimated 98 million in the United States who hail from a variety of backgrounds including Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox,
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THESE ASHENINKA believers were brought to the faith by hearing stories.
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according to the World Christian Encyclopedia. Evangelicals believe Christ is the way to heaven and that it's a moral imperative to share this conviction.
___But Ammons has concluded that in places like this jungle, Jesus shouldn't be portrayed as a fair-skinned messiah. If Christianity is to advance on new turf, people from other cultures must make it their own, building their churches, singing their songs and living their lives in their style--unless that flatly contradicts the Bible.
___Ammons also contends that Jesus was a storyteller, romancing his audiences with parables that touched their hearts rather than pounding them with fundamentals aimed at their heads. He calls the technique "storying." It works anywhere, advocates say, but particularly in oral cultures.
___Growing up in Carteret, N.J., Ammons' passion was baseball, not missions. He adored Mickey Mantle from the cheap seats of Yankee Stadium's upper deck, "where you almost need oxygen," and played catcher for Carteret High School.
___His father was an electrical contractor, his mother a homemaker who read Bible stories at bedtime. Together, they helped start five Southern Baptist churches in New Jersey and New York, hardly hot spots for the country's largest Protestant denomination.
___"I just thought that's what Christians did, plant churches," Ammons explained. "That's the way I was raised."
___Then he went to college. At Gardner-Webb University, a Baptist school in Boiling Springs, N.C., two significant things happened--Ammons met and married a vivacious
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| JONATHAN RAMOS, 4, an Asheninka Indian in Belen, Peru, sits on the floor of the village church beside a chalkboard referring to the last chapter in the Bible's book of Revelation, called "Apocalipsis" in Spanish. (RNS photo by Tyrone Turner) |
coed from Portsmouth, Va., and took a class in missions.
___Mrs. Ammons recalls her young husband coming home for dinner one night and asking, "What do you think about foreign missions?"
___"Sure, I'd do it," she replied.
___And that was that, their life course set.
___With her musical ability and outgoing personality teaming with his quiet leadership and determination, they formed a dynamic duo, singing and preaching in Spanish to those who hadn't heard the message.
___They worked assignments in Spain; in Lima, the Peruvian capital; then Cajamarca, in Peru's high Andes.
___But as their own two children left for college, Ammons conducted a mid-life review. His sobering conclusion: Despite the blood, sweat and prayers, he and his wife had fallen short.
___They had done their jobs as most missionaries had, drawing crowds with fliers, three-points-and-an-example preaching and razzle-dazzle music.
___"That approach would usually give us about 250 people at first, enough to start a church," Ammons said. "But in six months, even with us still there, that would dwindle to about 60. When we pulled out, maybe a year later, it might be down to 25.
___"So we're ending up with little more than 10 percent of what we started with after a lot of work and time spent with the people. That was demoralizing, but it was pretty much the same story for all missionaries in Peru."
___He decided to experiment with a technique first developed by New Tribes Mission of Florida, a non-denominational group whose work is increasingly discussed in missionary circles--telling stories instead of preaching sermons. Then stationed in the Andes, Ammons trained Peruvians making trips to a regional market to take Bible stories and retell them to others in their rural communities.
___Not only did the stories go out, the storytellers enthusiastically returned for more.
___Excited, Ammons pursued a doctorate in missions at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., to learn all he could about storying. His thesis focused on storytelling possibilities in a place where previous, sporadic missionary attempts had failed--the Amazon region of Peru, home of the geographically remote Asheninka.
___Flying south in a pontoon plane from Pucallpa, his base town, Ammons looks down on an endless carpet of green, the world's largest rain forest. The Apurucayali River curls in hairpin curves, as if it were a long brown snake. Every river eventually connects to the river, the mighty Amazon, for which the entire region of more than 2 million square miles is named.
___"You get a whole different perspective from up here," Ammons said. "There's some Asheninka villages we travel two days by boat to get to, whereas in a direct plane line it would be just a few minutes."
___There are many times Ammons still prefers the boat, however.
___The journey to Belen, for example, begins with a comfortable flight but continues by boat--taking six hours to two days, depending on river conditions and the reliability of motors. Ammons could charter the pontoon plane to land at Belen, where the spectacle would attract a curious crowd. But he insists on arriving as every Asheninka does--by canoe.
___The Asheninka--50,000, by Ammons' estimate--had no written language until Bible translators recently created one for them. Their history is sketchy. But they are said to predate the most famous of Peruvian civilizations, the Incas, who ruled much of South America during the 16th century.
___Catholic missionaries tried to evangelize the Asheninka centuries ago, but several were killed in the attempt. Protestant missionaries made another try beginning in the 1900s, using Spanish, by then the Indians' trade language. Little stuck.
___Without fanfare, Ammons docks at Belen. Asheninka children scurry to the shore.
___Ammons greets them in their Apurucayali dialect: "Kitaitirivi, ajininka, ari nopoki." Roughly translated, it means, "Hello, my people, we've arrived."
___He has been here nearly a dozen times already. His team for this trip includes his wife; a Pentecostal pastor and his son from Puerto Bermudez, a town upriver; and two short-term volunteers from Ammons' "partner church," Valley Baptist in Bakersfield, Calif.
___They make their way up a steep riverbank and plop their gear in huts built by the Asheninka for such visits. There are no Cokes, no electricity, no plumbing and no roads.
___The church catches Ammons' eye. Like nearly all the village structures, it has a thatched roof and a wooden floor several feet from the ground for protection from snakes and other animals. There are few walls. The Asheninka are so communal they want no barriers dividing them.
___Tomorrow is Sunday, a day for worship, for new beginnings.
___Morning arrives in a pounding rain that raises the river several feet. When the downpour slows, around 11 a.m., barefooted villagers begin sloshing through muddy paths to the church.
___Alejandro Santos Barbaran, 42, arrives from Davis, his home village. It took him an hour and a half to get here by dugout canoe; returning will take three hours against the current. Like most Asheninka men, Santos makes no wages. He provides for his family by hunting with bow and arrow, fishing with a spear and growing the yucca plant that provides 90 percent of the Asheninka diet and, fermented, makes a mean moonshine.
___"Belen" means "Bethlehem" in Spanish. If this village is to be the birthplace of Asheninka Christianity, it will happen through this man.
___Santos describes his conversion this way: While visiting Puerto Bermudez in a drunken stupor 15 years ago, he heard music coming from a building. Thinking it was a bar, he stepped in. It was a church.
___Brigido Ramirez, the Pentecostal pastor, persuaded Santos to become a Christian. Santos says he eventually quit drinking, but struggled in the faith until three years ago when he received a vision: There was a dried, fruitless tree. God watered it, and it bore tangerines.
___Santos says the tree represents the Asheninka, the fruit the new life God wants to give them.
___Ammons met Santos a few months later. Previous missionaries might have sent a potential leader to seminary to learn theology and Western ways. If he returned in a few years--and many would not--he would have changed so much, the villagers would barely recognize him, much less understand his teachings.
___Ammons takes a different approach. No seminary, just storytelling.
___If there's anything the Asheninka can do, it's pass on a story. To Ammons, their spiritual future depends on it.
___With Santos traveling to this and five other villages, and others making storytelling trips elsewhere, Ammons' projections show the gospel spreading slowly at first, then exponentially. It's the same mathematical formula used by multi-level marketing companies and chain letters.
___Only 1 percent of the Asheninka are Christians, Ammons said. But he sees these 500 or so mushrooming to 10,000 before his team pulls out in three years. That should be enough to consider this people group not only "reached," but self-sufficient.
___With the help of the main linguist who wrote the Asheninka language, Ammons has finished 53 stories to be presented in chronological order, beginning with Adam and Eve. They are enhanced by 105 illustrations--of a brown-skinned Moses, Jesus and other Bible characters.
___The Sunday service begins with songs. It climaxes not with the usual Baptist sermon, but with Santos' story of Jesus calming the storm.
___Women nursing babies suddenly look up. Men transfix on Santos, even as his wife, Irma, sitting on the floor, loudly elaborates during pauses and even while her husband speaks.
___Cladis Shareba, 24, holding her 2-year-old daughter, Merta, turns to Mrs. Ammons and says, "Now we know it's God!"
___Like many animistic cultures, the Asheninka explain natural phenomena with tales of spirits. Shareba whispers that they thought strong gusts meant the owner of the wind was angry. In fearful response, they would have planted the wooden handle of a hatchet in the ground, the stone edge of the blade facing the wind as if to cut it. They might have shot arrows at the wind or burned a turtle shell so the pungent smoke would send the spirit away.
___Now, Shareba says, they know God controls the wind. They will ask Jesus to stop it.
___The response illustrates an Ammons maxim: "The only way to replace a story is with another story."
___It also shows what Santos says he now knows of his people: "The stories, combined with the pictures, this is how the Asheninka understand."
___When this story ends and the gathering quiets, the missionary stands for the first time. He asks a series of questions.
___"Who is more powerful, the storm or Jesus?"
___"Jesus," they all shout.
___"Yes, Jesus," Ammons says. "Was Jesus scared?"
___"No," comes the response.
___"Why?" Ammons asks.
___"Because," answers a villager in Asheninka, "it was he who made the wind anyway."
___As if for added effect, the morning storm has completely ended, and the sun begins to appear.
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