What is CLA?

CLA is a thread of classes that we begin when arriving here at the training and it continues on through the entire course. CLA stands for Culture Language Acquisition; the title is pretty self-explanatory, there are so many facets to these subjects that fill libraries but we do not want to bore you 🙂

People and languages are always changing, that is why we are learning “principles” that will try to cover “most” aspects of life. We as English speakers say the word “knife”, and we understand that the “k” is silent. The “k” was not always silent; our language has changed drastically in the past couple hundred years in that one small example. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago the word “god” had a different ascription to it, and now we understand its ascription to the God of the Bible. And what about more recently??? With all of the slang, jargon, and shorthand “text-talk”, you wonder why foreigners struggle with our language so much!

What I have described, are just a few examples of complexity within our language but to understand the culture goes to yet another level. A language is merely the words used “with-in” a culture. In our culture it is very normal to see a man and a woman holding hands and we would equate that to be normal and even “affectionate”. In most other cultures if you were to see a man and woman holding hands that would be “inappropriate”, and yet it is “normal” and even a sign of friendship for a man to hold another man’s hand in another culture. How many of you just cringed at that thought?

So lets talk family…everyone knows what a dad, mom, and siblings are right? Well let me give you a scenario… a woman gives birth to a boy, she calls him mother. The woman’s husband calls his boy “mother-in-law”… and this boy when he gets older calls his mother “daughter” and his father “son-in-law”. Confusing yet? Good! It was confusing till we had more information. This is not even the “in’s and out’s” of the topic known as “kinship”. There are 7 kinship systems in the world. The Europeans and Americans go by the Eskimo System. We have one mom, one dad, etc.… and did you know only 33% of the cultures in the world go by that system. The Hawaiian system of kinship considers all aunts and uncles as “mom and dad” and all cousins as “brothers and sisters”, with it being the gift-giving season, things could become quite expensive if that was the case.

Kinship systems along with many other cultural “norms” are key to understand before ever teaching God’s Word. The Jewish cultures have the same system as ours and are also a patriarchal family (following the fathers lineage). Principles are so important to understand before you ever teach; the genealogies, a husbands responsibility, what is the Bible saying when Jesus is God the Son, and God is our Father… there are so many things we have to understand if we want to be effective communicators of God’s Word. This reminds us of Nehemiah 8 when it says that the people “had understood the words that were declared unto them”. When engaging in ministry, the words we communicate must be spoken in the heart language of the people. Thus, culture language acquisition is a vital part of missions.