Flourishing and Language Michel Kenmogne

0. Introduction:

In 2019, the SIL Board reframed its vision statement as follows: “we long to see people flourishing in community using the languages they value most”. In this, the Board sought to recapture the ultimate impact that SIL aims for through its various activities. Three key words stand out in this statement: flourishing, community and languages. While these concepts meaningfully relate to SIL’s core commitments over the past century, they still beg for an explanation about how these fit into the overall context of what God does to accomplish his plans and purposes in the world. Put diferently, there is a need to articulate the missional content of these concepts in order to provide a solid foundation to our language related pursuits as a valid part of God’s mission. This is a daunting goal that can hardly be achieved within the limits of this paper. However, building on two vignettes that depict issues and consequences of language use among minority speaking communities, the paper briefly examines language as an attribute of God, a distinctive of human beings, and a defining marker of the communities that use it. Moreover, it portrays flourishing as part of God’s missional intent for humanity as depicted through the grand narrative of the Bible. Therefore, the concept of flourishing is likened to blessing, shalom, justice and reconciliation. It argues that, in pursuing these, God centrally uses language, thereby providing a missional basis for SIL’s engagement with language.

1. Two stories of the denial of language use

Never again use your mother tongue in the church! It was barely the first milestone in the Bakoko language development project in . Afer months of working with the speakers of the various dialects of the language, a preliminary alphabet of the Bakoko was available for the first time. Several community members gathered to launch and celebrate the creation of their writing system. Obviously, the advent of this alphabet gave people the hope that some of their deepest yearnings might soon come true. As a people group, they would be able to preserve in writing their ancestral knowledge and wisdom in order to transmit it to other generations. They would create the needed literature to afirm themselves as a people, and increase and own any relevant knowledge that would further their thriving as individuals and community. When the alphabet was launched and the first demonstration of its use made in public, an old man named Dinjeke burst into tears. When asked later on why he got so emotional, he told the story of the humiliation that he and his Bakoko people had sufered for decades. While the other two major languages of the region had been written and had the Scriptures translated therein, Bakoko1 had never

1 In 1989, as a postgraduate student, I was part of a major survey that one of our professors carried out on the Coastal of Cameroon. In the course of this, it occurred to me that Bakoko, with its many

1 deserved any attention. As a result, the evangelisation among the Bakoko people was done in the neighboring Bassa language. One day when he was a young adult, Dinjeke was asked to pray during the church service. He stood up, decided to break the church tradition and pray in his native Bakoko language. While he was standing and praying, somebody rebuked him from the back, ‘pulled his cloth downward’, thereby requesting that he shut up and sit down. Following that, the church leadership warned him to never use his mother tongue again in the context of worship and church service. Dinjeke was hurt in his innermost being. He lived the remaining decades of his life with the shame and feeling that the Bakoko people were undeserving of the same dignity as other people. For this reason, the development of a writing system for his language was more than a scientific achievement. It was a symbolic afirmation that speakers of this language are not second-class citizens of the world. It was also the seeds of the hope that his people might some day enjoy the same prestige as others, using their God-given language.

A traumatic schooling experience Eken spoke only his mother tongue until he reached school age. Like all children in the community, he was pretty fluent, could count and tell the stories that he had heard in his family context. As such, he was pretty confident because he had a clear frame of reference in life. But entering the classroom, Eken, like all other children in the community, were exposed to a foreign language that they neither spoke nor understood. Worse still, speaking the mother tongue on the school campus was forbidden. This was a traumatic experience for many children who had to learn both the skill of reading and writing, and the language of instruction itself at the same time. To these children, education was not a process of going from what they knew to a gradual discovery of the unknown. It was rather a radical and abrupt disruption of their daily reality that made education a painful and sudden adjustment to a foreign and mysterious reality. As such, education violently disconnected the child from his community. As a result, he was obliged to exchange his identity throughout the education process. It is not surprising that many children were thought to be dull, and the majority dropped out of the school system over the years. It remains a miracle that a few in the community did go through such an arduous system and eventually learned to read and write. However, the majority missed the possibility to achieve their full potential in life. Such people constitute the critical mass of the population who are reduced to menial jobs and see themselves as second-class citizens with respect to the minority of those who were able to make it through the arduous system.

dialects, had never been given any attention since the early missionary days. Inquiring about the reason behind the neglect of this language and its speakers, I was told that, in the early days of mission in Cameroon, the Bakoko people strongly opposed the missionaries eforts to develop their language and introduce Christianity. They claimed that their language was one that would be used to keep their ancestral practices and safeguard their magical rites and witchcraf against any corruption. It was this discovery that led to my decision to study the Bakoko language for my doctoral research, resulting in The Lexical Phonology of Bakoko. To date, a Bakoko language and Bible translation project is nearing completion, under the auspices of CABTAL.

2 The stories of the Bakoko alphabet and the traumatic schooling experience point to one basic fact: the language that has framed someone’s early encounter with the world needs to be taken into account in any process that requires the deepest levels of one's personality. The failure to do this results in a profound alteration of the self-image, disrupts the group’s sense of community, furthers an unethical discrimination among human beings, and thwarts the ability to have a healthy relationship with God. The end result is a deep injustice.

1. Language and Minority language communities

Many controversies surround language and its use. Language diversity is ofen viewed as a curse or a blessing, a unifying or dividing factor among communities and nations. Over the past five centuries, the processes of colonisation (imposition of colonial languages), nationalisation (choice and enforcement of oficial languages to further a national integration) and todays’ globalization (rush towards languages that ofer more socio-political and economic power) have had a remarkable efect on the condition of the world’s languages. As people approach language issues from a pragmatic perspective, they tend to pay little attention to its intrinsic nature, its relationship to life and its centrality in all human undertakings. In hindsight, human beings and the communities they form cannot be dissociated from their languages. Language is so essential to human beings that it would be fitting to refer to people as ‘linguistic beings’ because language uniquely defines and distinguishes them.

Language: an extraordinary endowment

When we use the word ‘language’ in English, we constantly refer to two realities: 1) the faculty that humans have to speak or sign languages and 2) the actual system of sounds and symbols that people use to make meaning and communicate among themselves. This unique ability to use language is inherent to human beings and has been a matter of wonderment for various observers and thinkers. In a festschrif in honour of Sherwood Lingenfelter, John Watters wrote a contribution entitled ‘The State of Minority Languages in the 21st Century: In praise of language, in search of compassion’ (Watters, 2019, 30-49). This paper provides an accurate appraisal of the condition of minority languages and explores original considerations relative to the nature and centrality of language in human life. Much has been written about the theory of language. But in the interest of the further development in this paper, I will hold the following tenets about language:

● Origin of language: While many opinions have surrounded the origin of language, it is evident that it has no plausible evolutionary origin. It has a transcendent nature that is asserted in various ways. For Noam Chomsky, it is an ‘innate’ reality, while Soren Kierkegaard construes it as ‘something originally given and partly which develops freely’. Ben Elson’s Linguistic Creed (1987) clearly holds that language is “one of God’s most important gifs to man”.

3 ● Language is a distinctly human attribute: While communication systems exist among animals, human language is unique in its complexity and generative capacity. Drawing from the rich creativity that is possible in syntactic structures, Stephen Anderson (2004, 220) concludes that “human language makes it possible to express a vast range of notions that have no analogue in animal communication systems”. In this, language distinguishes humans among other animal species. Further asserting the ‘human-ness’ of language, Bickerton (2009, 4) writes that “language is what makes us human. Maybe it’s the only thing that makes us human.”

● Language is essential to human life: Language is so essential to human life and existence. It enables us to express our emotions and volition, our interactions and observations about the environment in which we live; we organise our world temporally (by classifying actions in a successive order), logically (according to various implicational relationships). As Walter Benjamin (1916,1) admits, “there is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake ”. Put diferently, language is more than a mere instrument that humans use. In fact, every expression of life is a kind of language, speaking “without a sound or word2”. In essence, language allows us to understand the world and how we fit in it, thereby giving us a sense of personal and social identity.

● Language is a reflection of God’s image in human beings: Reviewing and dismissing the various speculations about the origin of language, Longacre (1983, 348) convincingly argued that “the Judeo-Christian God revealed in the Scriptures ...must be central to a satisfactory worldview” about language. We hold from Scriptures that God uses language to communicate within the trinity (Gen. 1:26, more) and to communicate with humans (Gen. 3 and more), to create reality (Gen. 1), to intimately reveal himself (Acts 2). In this regard, language is a bona fide theological category with a deep missional and strategic value. It enables God to reach out to human beings within their respective and particular cultural contexts in ways that are relevant and appropriate to all.

● Language as a social reality: There is no community without a language that defines and identifies it. The use of a common language provides a shared identity which is the foundation of a community. Once a community loses its language and shifs to use another one, it gradually ceases to exist as a distinct social entity. As important as it is to individuals’ identity, language is essentially a social construct, a collective possession of all those who use it. Each user carries a bit or piece of the language and it takes the entire community of the speakers to manifest the full expression of the language. This underscores another aspect of God’s image in human beings: they are relational creatures who exist and thrive in communities. In this regard, language plays a vital and irreplaceable unifying role beyond its ability to enable a deeper communication and understanding. It represents the collective experience of the community’s engagement with reality and conceptualises its worldview and unique

2 Psalm 19: 3 NLT.

4 perspectives about life. In this regard, language can be likened to a treasure chest that stores a community’s experiences, memories, wisdom, knowledge, images and thereby expresses their sense of uniqueness in the world.

These key statements about language are essential to understanding the condition of the people who speak the minority languages of the world.

Minority language communities

About 1.8 billion people on the earth speak 92 per cent of the world’s languages. Most of these languages have a relatively small number of speakers, are ofen unwritten, and lack the institutions and infrastructure to sustain their use. The following general attributes identified by John Watters (2013, 11-12) characterize minority language communities. They are

Economically – most ofen among the poorest Medically – most ofen in the bottom 20% of those receiving service Politically – most ofen among the most disenfranchised Socially – most ofen among the least valued Educationally – most ofen among the least educated Justice-wise – most ofen among the least informed of their rights and privileges Human dignity – most ofen the least honored or considered worthy..

As he goes on to rightly observe, they live in a context dominated by another language and culture, are in contact with other language communities, and must be multilingual to survive daily. As a result, they have varying needs. Any engagement in meeting those needs should enlist their authentic participation to ensure in the first place respect for their dignity and afirm their sense of worth.

Javier Pérez de Cuellar , a previous Director-General of UNESCO, makes a case for investing to preserve or enable the continuing use of minority languages. He argues that: “... a people’s language is perhaps its most fundamental cultural attribute. Indeed the very nature of language is emblematic of the whole pluralistic premise – every single language spoken in the world represents a unique way of viewing human experience and the world itself … the question of how to accommodate minorities is not of academic interest only but is a central challenge to any human politics … Indigenous languages continue to be the main medium of expression of aspirations, intimate desires, feelings and local life. They are indeed the living repositories of cultures.” (de Cuellar, 1996, 59). Therefore, he adds that primary school should be the place where these minority languages are integrated into the educational system.

Looking specifically at Africa as the continent with a large concentration of minority languages, the report from the UNESCO-sponsored Intergovernmental Conference on Language Policies noted that language policies in Africa should be guided by an “African dream” which involves a set of at least twelve values (Chimhundu 2002:28). A number among those values have a direct bearing with language:

5 ● “retention of the African identity”, and “development of a confident and proud personality”. ● “a flexible general policy which allows each community to use its language while integrating into a wider society,” ● “linguistically empowered citizens to operate at all levels, i.e. regional, national and international.” These values were framed within the perspective of the development of the continent and saw the issues of ‘justice, fairness, equal right to monetary aid, human rights’ as inherently tied to the ‘ideal African’. Many suggest that this ‘ideal African’ would be necessarily trilingual. Maurice Tadadjeu proposed a model of ‘extensive trilingualism’ by which each native speaker of a minority language should be able to use the language of his or her local community in early education, use the language of the wider society such as a national language or language of wider communication, and able to use an international language to connect with the international community. (Tadadjeu, 1977). The African’s functionality in these languages would include both oral and written forms of the given language. This ideal is expressed primarily in the African context. However, I suggest that it is valid for most of the minority language speaking communities of the earth. The importance of language as a critical part of human beings and a necessary ingredient to the wellbeing of minority language communities in particular, therefore, helps one to understand the significance of denying Dinjeke and Eken the use of their languages in the earlier vignettes.

2. Significance of the refusal to use one’s first language

As language is so inherently connected to life, it is obvious that the denial of people's right to use their languages has important consequences in their identity and carries the potential to seriously afect their ability to experience flourishing. In hindsight, it appears that Dinjeke and Eken’s trauma afects their self image, their community wholeness and ultimately their relationship with God.

Alteration of self-image The refusal to allow Dinjeke and Eken to use their native languages in church or in school conveys a profound, albeit unstated, message: ‘your language is irrelevant; it doesn’t count here’. Since this is the language that has forged and shaped their early encounters with the world, there is a connection between this language and who they think they are and what they think they are worth. As such, the denial of their languages is not just a tactical choice of one language over another, it communicates to Dinjeke and Eken a loud message about their identity and dignity. Put diferently, it tells them: ‘just as your languages are irrelevant, you are inferior people’.

Over the centuries and all around the world, wherever people’s ability to use their languages has been denied or suppressed, the resulting efect has been a deep identity issue. Algerian writer Sidahmed Sahla reveals the identity plight of his people when he produces dramas in his native Magribi (Algerian ) language, claiming that it conveys an unequalled level of intimacy, spontaneity, truth and naturalness. (Skandar, 2020, 1) Similarly, the First nations in North America continue to struggle with their sense of self as a result of the violent policies that were enforced against their languages and

6 cultures in the process of nation-building. Recounting their sufering, Bishop Larry Beardy (native Swampy Cree of Canada) states that: “... his generation lost their language, they lost their identity and they lost their way. A lot of his brothers are on the streets. They use drugs and alcohol in an attempt to relieve the pain they carry... their trauma is passed down into the next generation. Indigenous youth today are still struggling with their identity.”3 Similar traumatic behaviors were observed among the Breton people of France when they lost their language. When a policy was enforced in the 70’s to reinstate their language, Serota Cote observed that the rate of drugs, violence and alcohol subsided as people recovered their lost identity through language revitalisation.

Alteration of the relationship with others: in the community and beyond

Eken’s traumatic schooling experience is that of millions of children around the world. Specialists of language and education have ofen examined the question to denounce the negative consequences of this linguistic violence or abuse. They have convincingly demonstrated that a child’s linguistic, cognitive and academic development happen in parallel. Therefore, ‘learning is facilitated when there is a concord between the language of instruction and the proficiency in that language’. (Steve Walter, 2020, personal communication).4

In south Cameroon for example, the imposition of the Bulu language for church and education purposes stirred the revolt of the Ngumba people. Salvador Eyezo’o (2010, 102) writes that the Ngumba saw in the introduction of education in a foreign language something tantamount to ‘enslavement’. The Ngumba children wasted five to six years learning the foreign language; many dropped out of school and returned to illiteracy. Learning in a foreign language therefore compromised the ability for the majority of these children to achieve their full potential in life. The people claimed that the adoption of their native Ngumba language would be both eficient and fulfilling for their children’s education.

There is more to Eken’s trauma than the learning issue. The denial of the use of his native language in the education context subverts and unsettles the perspectives that give the community its sense of uniqueness and allows it to actively contribute to the world’s knowledge. More so, it disrupts the education system that Eken was already connected to, with its values and orientations, and sets him on a completely diferent path. Walther Rodney (1982, 239) notes the following features of African indigenous education: “its close links with social life; both in a material and spiritual sense; its collective nature; its many-sidedness; and its progressive development in conformity with the successive stages of physical, emotional and mental development of the child. There was no separation of education and productive activity or any division between manual and intellectual education.” Viewed in this way, the denial of the native language disconnects the child from his community values and perspectives and sets him to gradually morph into a diferent system with its

3 Source: Roy Eyre in an email to Wyclife Canada on August 7, 2020. 4 In Steve Walter’s paper he cites Heugh and Benson, 2007; Walter and Chuo, 2013; Thomas and Collier 1997; Walter, 2016; Taylor and Coetze, 2015; Laitin et al., 2019.

7 own assumptions about life and reality. Cheik Hamidou Kane (1960, 125) writes that “...very ofen, the metamorphosis is not complete; it sets and leaves us in a hybrid situation. Hence, we hide because we are deeply ashamed.” In the same line, Mongo Beti (1957, 97-98) paints the drama of Medza who returns to his village afer a successful completion of his high school education. But he is completely disconnected, unable to share in his native language about his learnings.

In summary, it appears that the denial of the native language in the schooling context is a covert start of an assimilation process that gradually turns the child into a semi-native of the target language. He admires and embraces the values and assumptions of the latter. Yet they are incompatible with those that prevail in his own community. The end-result is cultural alienation and inability to become an active participant and contributor to the wellbeing of his community. Put diferently, the denial of the language disrupts the community’s harmony and sense of togetherness, unsettles its unique perspectives, and compromises their ability to be active contributors to the development of their own communities. At the Akrofi-Christaller theological seminary in Ghana, every student presenting a postgraduate degree is required to make a summary of their dissertation in their mother tongue. Through this, the students demonstrate if they truly understand their topic and are able to engage them in their community context.

Alteration of the relationship with God

Dinjeke and Eken’s traumatic experiences go a long way to afect their perception of God. They are creatures of a God who has sovereignly decided to create them within a specific linguistic and cultural setting. The denial of their right to access education or worship God in their own language is a violent and abusive act that stirs existential questions. The following unstated questions linger in their minds. Are we second-class creatures of God? Why has God endowed us with this language if we can’t use it even for his worship? Are we ‘God-forsaken’ ? Such existential questions caused the Ghomala’ people to refuse taking communion in the church for several years until the adoption of their language was decided by the early missionaries.

Today, about 75% of the world population speaks approximately 8% of the world’s languages. These languages, numbering approximately 580 are highly stable and have a guaranteed future use because they are endowed with institutions and infrastructures that protect them and promote their sustained use through education, literature production and other language modernisation strategies. Conversely, 25% of the world’s population speaks the remaining 92% of the world’s languages. This represents about 1.8 billion people who speak lesser known languages. From what precedes, it appears that these people have their worldview fractured by the lack of consideration given to their own languages. This has the potential to deeply afect their relationship with self, with others and with God.

Townsend’s understanding of the plight of these people was the stimulus to the creation of what would become SIL and Wyclife. In the words of Francisco Diaz, they lived under three-oppressors.

8 “There are three kinds of oppressors who keep the Indians down. The witch doctors teach superstitions, telling the Indians that the sun is their father and the moon their grandmother, and that every hill and volcano has its spirit-owner who demands worship and sacrifices. The clergy try to impose the Spanish religion upon us...Even then they use a language the people do not understand...They (ladinos) cooperate with the finca owners who let the Indians drink on credit enough to keep them in the forced labor systems. My people have little hope.” (Hefley, 2008, 50-51) The hope that Diaz seeks in this way represents the aspiration of speakers of minority languages to human flourishing.

3. Human Flourishing

The Merriam and Webster online dictionary defines flourishing as what is “marked by vigorous and healthy growth” or whatever is “very active and successful”. Flourishing is therefore synonymous to prosperous, successful, thriving, triumphant. When applied to humans, it expresses the state of well-being, of normality where everything functions as it should, allowing people to achieve their full potential and to sustain it. The wellbeing, as a philosophical notion, can have various understandings embedded in it depending on the perspective from which it is approached. In 2019, three Harvard University scholars published a well-researched cross-cultural study on human flourishing in Frontiers in Psychology. (Wȩziak-Białowolsk, McNeely, VanderWeele, Tyler J, 2019). In this article, the researchers define a Flourishing Index with the following six domains for human flourishing: happiness and life satisfaction; physical and mental health; meaning and purpose; character and virtue; close social relationships; and financial and material stability domain. This index depicts the complexity of the notion of flourishing. It is concerned with all dimensions of the person (physical, mental, psychological, spiritual), his social relations, economic condition and life aspirations. The multiple facets of the flourishing index clearly point to the challenge of supplying it with philosophical foundations that would be intelligible and acceptable to all, believers and unbelievers alike.

However, I suggest that the grand narrative of the Bible provides an ontological perspective on human flourishing, which can be construed as one of the overarching aims that God pursues through his many acts throughout history. In Genesis 1 God creates heaven and earth. A series of days are referenced in which God introduces greater and greater diferentiation in what was originally formless and void chaos, turning it into filled and formed cosmos. In each step of the process of diferentiation God sees that the result is “good”. Lastly, God creates ‘the human’ (ha.adam) who is placed in this good created environment (Gen.1:26-27). Humans, male and female, are placed in a context created for their flourishing, where they are able to thrive in all aspects of their lives. God blesses them (vs. 28-30) with the responsibility of multiplying and filling the earth, thereby giving meaning and purpose to their lives. He also blesses them with authority and an accountability relationship with him. He assigns them the care and administration of all life forms, plants and animals. God had prepared a relationship and an environment in which humans, male and female, would flourish. But the interaction recorded between God, Adam and Eve in Genesis 3.8 follows the rebellion of the humans against God’s

9 limitations on their lives. They wanted to be gods of their own lives rather than submit to God their Creator. As a result, their self image, their relationship with God, and with one another are distorted, causing them to flee away from God’s presence and become hostile to each other. The originally ‘good’ creation in which they were placed is corrupted, and the culmination of these factors disable their ability to experience flourishing.

Despite the human rebellion, God does not give up on his intent to bless mankind and pursue its flourishing. He calls Abraham out of his nation to bless him and through him to bless all the families or nations of the earth. This promise obviously repeats and summarizes God’s missional intent and statement.

Ultimately, the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ achieves and enables the full realisation of this blessing. Jesus is our supreme example and model of a flourishing life. People recognized his love for others including those on the margins and the ways he demonstrated God’s righteousness and justice in caring for the vulnerable. In John 10:10b Jesus said, in the context of saying he is the gate for the sheep, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full/abundantly.” Jesus promises an abundant, flourishing life to those who follow him, a life not limited by measures of wealth, power, and status. This context harkens back to Psalm 23 where “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want/lack anything good”. At the end of his earthly life, he commissions his disciples to take the same good news to all the peoples and nations of the world. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost inaugurated the Church and reafirmed God's commitment to extend God's blessing and flourishing to all the ethno-linguistic communities of the earth. Finally, the new creation as pictured in Revelations is a flourishing multicultural and plurilingual community of people who experience the fullness of God’s presence. Coupled with this is the absence of any sorrows because “...he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death,or sorrow or crying or pain. (Rev. 21:4 NLT) Therefore, flourishing appears to be a key missional concept that should inform and guide our engagement in God’s mission.

Moreover, we can note the importance of language and how it is used throughout this pursuit of human flourishing. Even though God is spirit and not inherently a physical reality, the metaphor used to represent God’s creative activity is the expression “And God said”. It occurs multiple times in the first chapter of Genesis. Later on, the incarnated God in Christ will be referred to as the ‘Logos” or Word made flesh. The best way of representing God’s creative activity was to enlist the human action of speaking. God also saw that man needed a helper so he brought “all the beasts of the fields and all the birds of the air” for man to name. God respected the names that Adam gave each of the beasts and birds. So God relates to man through language, with each using language to communicate to the other. Unlike all the other creatures God created, it is the human who relates to God through and with language. Other animate creatures have communication systems, some quite complex, but only humans have language. Language is part of the human capacity for abstraction, cognition, and imagination that seems to be significantly lacking in other creatures.

10 In the Incarnation, the coming of the Messiah, Emmanuel, God came and lived among us. He submitted himself to human institutions and the particularity of culture and language. He was a Hebrew, learning the Torah, respecting the Temple and the Sabbath as he grew. He spoke Aramaic, the language of his day in first century Israel, but he probably also knew Hebrew and at least some Greek, having grown up in the Galilean region. He knew what it was to be part of a minority culture, speaking a minority language, being dominated by trade language, Greek, and oppressed by the colonial power, Rome. In introducing the Kingdom of God that unveils God’s blessing to these people in the margins, Jesus chose to speak their ordinary language.

Also, on Pentecost (Acts 2), the Spirit of God made it possible for everyone present to hear the disciples speaking in their own languages. The Spirit respected each person and the language with which they identified. The Spirit spoke directly to each person without an interpreter but directly from the mouths of the disciples. So Jesus' command to make disciples in every ethnic group converges with the Spirit’s respect for and use of the “each person’s own language in which they were born”. (Acts 2:8) The end result of this command is a gathering of a crowd that nobody could count, of people from every ‘tribe and tongue’ standing before the Lamb and worshipping God eternally. If God’s blessing which results in human flourishing is so central to what God seeks to achieve within the creation, then flourishing becomes a missional concept. Therefore it can be understood in terms of some of the overarching themes of God’s mission i.e. blessing, shalom and justice, and reconciliation. (See the parallel statement in the last line of the next paragraph.)

Flourishing as a missional concept Through the sufering of Dinjeke in a church context and Eken in an educational context, it is easy to perceive all the markers of the fall of mankind among the minority languages speaking communities. The Bible declares in Matthew 9 that “Jesus traveled through all the towns and villages of that area, teaching in the synagogues and announcing the Good News about the Kingdom. And he healed every kind of disease and illness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were confused and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. He said to his disciples, “The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields.” If Jesus went through the towns and villages in this 21st Century, he would certainly have compassion over these speakers of minority languages who are ofen ‘confused and helpless’. With the acute rise of globalisation, many of them would be found in their homelands where land and nature conservation issues continue to threaten their very existence; others would be migrant workers in diaspora and urban settings; others again would be refugees in other countries or regions of the world where they negotiate their integration, ofen losing their own identity in the process. Unlocking to them what God does to restore his intent for the lives of his creatures represents the best response to their deepest hope and aspirations. The concept of flourishing in its essence captures this intent. In this way, it can be understood through biblical themes and images such as blessing, shalom/justice and reconciliation.

11 Flourishing as blessing

In the account of Genesis, God speaks to create a fully formed and filled cosmos out of a formless and empty chaos. He declares all that he created as ‘good’. He creates man and blesses him to expand the human race, to take care of the creation, and rule over it. God’s blessing is therefore understood as the pronouncement of a future of goodness and the fulfillment of the person or entity on which the blessing is bestowed. The concept also describes the end result of God’s act of blessing. When the blessing is fulfilled in a person, community or nation, it enables them to flourish, to attain the full realisation of what God intended for them. God blessed Abraham and called him to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. (Gen. 12:2-3) Gallagher and Hawthorne (2011, 11) depict three broad categories or manifestations of blessing in the Genesis story. First, we see blessing as material wealth and fruitfulness (Gen. 24:35, 30:27, 30). Second, we see blessing as a favored relationship with God and the experience of His presence (Gen. 14:19-20, 21:22, 26:22). And third, we see blessings bringing about a measure of peace amidst families and peoples (Gen. 21:22-23, 26:18-29). God called Abraham and his descendants to be the agents of this three-fold blessing upon all the peoples. Ultimately, the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ achieves and enables the full realisation of this blessing. He declares that his ‘purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life’. (John 10:10) The Church is instituted to participate in this blessing and to enable its experience by all the individuals, communities and nations of the world. The concept of flourishing understood as blessing is therefore a deep expression of the aspiration of the speakers of the minority languages of the earth who long for the right relationship with God, with their fellow human beings so that the cycle of material poverty, political and spiritual alienation that enslaves them can be broken.

Flourishing as shalom

The notion of shalom is a key and prevalent biblical concept. John R. Kohlenberger (2015, 863-864) identifies 252 occurrences in the Bible with 155 in the Old and 96 in the New Testaments. The English rendering of shalom as peace rather limits the semantic field of the word. The original Hebrew meaning is far richer and conveys the ideas of wholeness, completeness, soundness, well-being, health, prosperity and salvation. As Paul Hiebert writes, “it is based on three fundamental principles: this world and all in it belongs to God; all humans share equally in God’s loving concern; and the reign of God in creation and in human communities leads to peace, justice and truly fulfilled lives.” (Moreau, 2000, 868) Hiebert’s second principle touches on the most fundamental issue of exclusion that mars the condition of the speakers of minority languages as highlighted by Eken and Dinjeke. All human beings are equal in dignity and God shows no favoritism to any people groups. Therefore, the same Good News that invites people into God’s Kingdom is available to all human beings, irrespective of their languages, socio-economic or racial status. As such, there can’t be a real shalom without justice. Perry Yoder (1987,14) writes that shalom is God’s word for salvation, justice and peace, and states that “...injustice is the measure of the absence of shalom in a society”.

12 In highly individualistic cultures, the idea of the social well being tends to be construed as a matter of each individual achieving their full potential. As such, the group thriving is the sum of its individual members thriving. Most ofen, the speakers of minority languages share an opposite worldview. The individual’s worth does not depend primarily on individual achievement but is a matter of the group status or prestige. Therefore, the communal harmony takes precedence over the individual right. In fact, the individual’s wellbeing flows out of his community’s wellbeing. The worldview orientation of these communities is that of ‘ubuntu’5 which emphasizes inter-connectedness. The right behaviour is defined by a person’s relations with other people or by acts that benefit the entire community. The pursuit of true shalom involves harnessing all initiatives (economic, political, spiritual, cultural,etc.) and using all resources to promote the moral fibre of the community. In this regard, language becomes a critical component of the group wellbeing because it is an intrinsically social group issue. Hence, as a marker that identifies the group, it becomes essential to the wholeness of the group that speaks it. Viewed in this way, the shalom needs to be construed in its fuller breadth rather than in the reductionist scope of peace. Limiting the meaning of shalom to peace ofen equates it to non-violence or passive avoidance of violence. As such, it can inadvertently become support for the injustice that might exist in the prevailing social order. The pursuit of flourishing, understood as shalom, among minority speaking communities implies active engagement in activities that further the presence and reign of God. This includes building a positive context for people to use the languages they value to expand their possibilities through adequate access to and engagement with God’s Word, education, and integration within the socio-economic life of their nations.

Flourishing as reconciliation

As argued before, minority languages speakers, like Dinjeke and Eken, live with a marred identity. As a result, they don’t experience the fullness of life that God intended for them because their relationship with self, with the other, and with God have been distorted. The restoration of these relationships back to God’s original order is indispensable for them to flourish. Reconciliation is the process through which God works to restore those relationships. In the book of Colossians, Paul writes that “God in Jesus Christ reconciled all things to himself, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”(Colossians 1:20) In this way, Paul points to the cross as God’s solution to whatever enslaves human beings and distorts God’s plans. The scope of what the cross addresses in order to bring about a full reconciliation with God is far beyond what we can understand from a human perspective. It is about destroying all that enslaves and separates human beings and the creation from the experience of God’s intent for them. Looking specifically at the condition of the minority speakers, there is a need to reappraise our understanding of the cross afresh in order to discern the kinds of missional activities that would bring about efective reconciliation. Why is language so important to

5 “Ubuntu is a Nguni Bantu term meaning "humanity." It is ofen translated as "I am because we are," or "humanity towards others," or in Xhosa, "umntu ngumntu ngabantu" but is ofen used in a more philosophical sense to mean "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity." "About the Name". Official Ubuntu Documentation. Canonical. Archived from the original on 23 February 2013. Retrieved 2 February 2017.

13 flourishing? With regards to the significance of language in the definition of people’s identity and ability to efectively engage with God and with their fellow human beings, it is evident that adequate attention must be given to the role of language in efective reconciliation. This is a necessary condition for the flourishing which is about people thriving and living in harmony with each other, acknowledging their individual identities and afirming the richness of diversity that brings glory to God. In summary, we understand the concept of human flourishing to mean the restoration of the condition that God intended for his creatures. Therefore, human flourishing is central in God's mission. Dinjeke and Eken’s stories clearly indicate that language issues have the potential to enable or inhibit people’s experience of that fullness of life because “...language and human life are ultimately inseparable,” as Longacre claimed. (1976, 319).

4. Conclusion: Implications for SIL’s missional engagement

In his book entitled “Imagined Communities”, Benedict Anderson (1983) reflects on the process of nation-building that seeks to merge various micro-communities within a national community that is given an oficial/national language. He notes that such an imagined community is fake because people seldom recognize others who are part of it. In the same ways, the process of globalisation tends to merge people and nations within a global community that is dominated by a few languages. This fragile community construct has always proven to be problematic, especially in contexts where people seek to achieve the harmony and balance between their ethno-linguistic identity and their given or imagined one. The issue of the minority language speakers flourishing ofen arises at the intersection of that identity problem. Undeniably, language is central and essential to the issue, warranting that we clarify our missional engagement with language.

● The basis of our engagement: From what precedes, we understand that language unquestionably is a unique attribute of God, humans and communities; it also entertains an inextricable relationship with God’s mission. Therefore, issues of language have a potential to deeply afect humans and their communities, and thereby compromise their ability to flourish. In consequence, it is important to build our engagement on the solid foundation of both the great commission (making disciples of all nations) and the great commandment (loving God and loving neighbour). The ethics of love in the great commandment is required to painstakingly engage in the subtle and complex realities of the minority speaking communities, especially in the 21st Century.

● Scope of engagement: If flourishing is indeed about the experience of blessing, reconciliation and shalom by the minority language communities, then it is important to re-envision the full scope of what Jesus’ death on the cross is meant to achieve in order to realize God’s aims for them. Two extreme views of the gospel continue to create tensions within the worldwide Christian community: a vertical interpretation as essentially concerned with God’s saving action in the life of individuals and a horizontal one that is preoccupied with the human relationships in the world. As Visser t’Hoof states, “... we must get out of that rather primitive

14 oscillating movement of going from one extreme to the other, which is not worthy of a movement which by its nature seeks to embrace the truth of the gospel in its fullness. A Christianity which has lost its vertical dimension has lost its salt and is not only insipid in itself, but useless for the world. But a Christianity which would use the vertical preoccupation as a means to escape from its responsibility for and in the common life of man is a denial of the incarnation of God’s love for the world manifested in Christ”. (Cited in Padilla, 2004, 2) In his own ministry on earth, Jesus models adequate integration between both perspectives by clearly addressing human and physical needs, while ineluctably pointing to and converging all his actions to serve the purpose of God’s Kingdom.

● Language and Bible translation: Bible translation has been the driver of the interest in language and its development, especially in the missionary era. Bible translation was even perceived as a tactical linguistic exercise of transferring Scripture categories from one language to another. Such a view can be limiting and even counterproductive. As Bible translation becomes more and more of a theological enterprise and an ecclesial activity in the 21st century, it is important to reappraise the role of language in Bible translation. In the missionary era, analytical perspectives on language prevailed and allowed much emphasis on language description. In a post-missionary era, while language description does not deserve the same significance in Bible translation, it is still important to realize with Ghanaian theologian John Pobee that “language is more than morphology and syntax; it is the vehicle to assume the weight of a culture”(cited in Bediako, 2001). Therefore, if Bible translation is about God’s engagement with a people group to redirect its worldview, values, beliefs and systems that are marred by the fall, then language still deserves specific attention to allow for that deep engagement.

● Language beyond Bible translation: The importance of language in God’s nature and activity and for the identity of human beings and the communities they constitute warrants a consideration of the value of language beyond Bible translation. The psycho-sociological impact of language and culture loss resulting in ill-behaviours , the ethnic strife that endangers peace and democracy in Third World nations, and the overall justice issues in a fast globalising world all point to the relevance of language in the quest to achieve efective flourishing of the communities. Such realities provide a wider basis for the interest in language development, language preservation, language promotion, and language use in the various domains of life.

In conclusion, I see the need for a deep engagement that will allow language to further the flourishing of their speakers and nations. In a fast globalising world that tends to merge people into an ‘imagined’ global space, there is an urgent necessity for a missional engagement with language in order to advocate for the pursuit of God’s diverse, plurilingual and multicultural kingdom as described in Revelations. This missional engagement with language must extend into the academic realm to explore and firm up a theology of language, sow and advocate for perspectives that will inform public policies in favour of the flourishing of the speakers of the minority languages. In this, we assert that, it

15 is not a concern about language for language's sake, but a concern for the flourishing of God’s people and His plans and purposes in the world.

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Wȩziak-Białowolsk, Dorota; McNeely, Eileen and VanderWeele, Tyler J. “Human Flourishing in Cross Cultural Settings: Evidence From the United States, China, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Mexico”. Frontiers in Psychology. 29 May 2019. Accessed Sept.11, 2020. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01269/full

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