Indian mission has successfully penetrated the Dalit sphere and that is a wonderful thing. You would have thought they would start with the top people - and they did try to - but it was their servants that they won to Christ by their examples. Somehow God takes the weak things to confound the wise; that is His way of doing things.
He took a young man from Nazareth of all places - in northern Palestine - when you would think He would have chosen someone from Jerusalem. He took a man named William Carey from Northern England, from a little town, to change the whole world.
So God has chosen the Dalits to prove to the rest of the caste system the transforming power of Christ, but that doesn't mean the rest of the system is going to become Dalit to become Christian.
So the question is 'Can we give this treasure over into a different earthen vessel?' and that has not been done.
In Islam and Hinduism, we insisted people come out of their culture, which is not biblical. It is a misunderstanding of the Bible. It has not been successful, never will be, and shouldn't be. It is not what God wants. God doesn't want to destroy their languages or other cultures. He wants to refine them not destroy them.
India has thousands of Hindu gods, a multitude of languages and cultures. How can we approach such a fluid mission field?
Winter: Well, stop and think. We already have a thousand words for 'god' and a thousand missionary translations all over the world. Hinduism is diverse but still these very diverse Hindus are more like each other than are the tribes in New Guinea. Tribal societies in New Guinea, which number close to one thousand, are radically different from each other.
So we are not unfamiliar with diversity; we just haven't been willing to face up to it. We would just prefer to classify all the Hindu things as one.
It is like this: you hear people say they have a friend that is learning Chinese. Well that is just as silly, technically, as saying you have a friend learning to speak European. What is European? Well, European includes a lot of languages; Chinese includes a lot of languages. There are over 100 significantly different dialects of Mandarin alone and 600 if you take into account the other subfamilies of Chinese such as Cantonese, Swatow, etc. Sometimes we are reluctant to face up to that complexity.
