Mission To Oz Excerpt:

I Saw the Potato

When Coca-Cola entered the mainland Chinese market in the 1920’s they didn’t know what to call their product. They knew choosing Mandarin characters that phonetically matched ko-ka-ko-la might result in some nonsensical or embarrassing phrase. No one in their Atlanta headquarters wanted to take that chance. But they also didn’t want to delay filling shelves across China with the “Real Thing” while they sifted through the 40,000 characters that make up the Chinese alphabet looking for the perfect name. As the old saying goes, money talks, so Coke decided not to. They introduced Coca Cola without giving it a Chinese name as they continued to look for an alternative.

But it is hard to sell a nameless product, and a bottle covered with English letters doesn’t speak to a Mandarin speaking country. The corporate guys back in the United States might have been able to take their time trying to come up with the perfect combination of four Chinese characters, but the people trying to peddle a new soft drink on the street couldn’t. Chinese shopkeepers took matters in their own hands and picked four letters that sounded like the English name Coca Cola. They put the name on signs all over the marketplace. Coke was a hit in China. Thirsty shoppers loved it, although more than one wondered why anyone would call a carbonated beverage “Bite the wax tadpole.”

Coke wasn’t the only product to have a translation problem in China. Pepsi’s catch phrase from the Sixties, “Come alive with the Pepsi generation” came across as “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.” Chinese Stephen King fans probably loved it. Kentucky Fried Chicken didn’t do much better. Their slogan, “finger lickin’ good” was translated, “Eat your fingers off.” Apparently eating KFC in China makes you hungry for more than chicken.

Big businesses aren’t the only ones to find their products lose a little something in translation. When the Pope visited Miami in the mid 80’s one local entrepreneur decided to make some money the old fashioned way, selling t-shirts. He had a few hundred shirts printed up, shirts that were supposed to say in Spanish, “I saw the Pope.” Unfortunately, he didn’t speak Spanish himself, and he didn’t check with anyone who did before he sent his design to the printers. Instead of selling “I saw the Pope” shirts, he ended up hawking “I saw the potato” shirts. If he had lived in Idaho, he might have broken even.

Information versus image

When Christians try to communicate their faith in Jesus Christ to a postmodern world we often end up saying something akin to “I saw the potato” without realizing it. After all, we speak English. And last time we checked people in America still speak English whether they consider themselves postmodern or not. But that’s not the source of the problem. English words may fall from our lips as we tell people in Oz about Jesus Christ, but we might as well be selling “I saw the Potato” t-shirts or “Bite the wax tadpole” in a bottle. Our words make just as much sense.

The problem doesn’t lie in our dialect but in the way we use language. We may live in a postmodern world, but when it comes to Jesus and the Bible and believing in God, our thinking is stuck in the modern. There’s a key difference. The modern world elevated science and logic and reason. We learned to break things down to their smallest components, to listen to facts and reason and proofs, and then form conclusions. That’s why we dissected frogs in biology and why preachers dissect Bible verses in sermons. Everything has to be broken down to its smallest detail to fully understand what it means. And meaning is everything. Meaning and truth lead to proof which leads to belief. We believe because the evidence for Christ demands a verdict. When all the facts are known, believing in Jesus makes sense, it is the only reasonable choice any thinking person can make.

No one in Oz thinks like this. When people don’t believe in the existence of absolute truth, appeals to logic and reason don’t make any sense. But that’s only the beginning. The language we use reflects the way our brains are wired. And in the postmodern world people’s brains are wired for pictures, not information. Trying to communicate using nothing but information in a land where people communicate in images leaves us trying to sell pens that won’t make you pregnant. No one understands what we’re trying to say because they can’t see it.

That was the problem Marcia Clark and the other Los Angeles county prosecutors faced in the most famous trial of the 1990’s. Clark and her associates had the unenviable task of trying to prove one of the most popular athletes of all time was in fact a cold blooded, double murderer. The case seemed like a slam dunk. National polls showed an overwhelming majority of Americans assumed O.J. Simpson was guilty, especially after watching him run from police on national television during the infamous White Bronco incident. Then there were the notes he wrote. And the bloody footprint. And the bloody glove. All the evidence appeared to point toward one inevitable conclusion: the Hall of Fame running back must be guilty.

During the trial the prosecution team poured on the information. They brought in witnesses and forensic experts and psychologists as they built their case. The evidence was clear, they said. O.J. did it. The defense used a different tact. The centerpiece of their defense wasn’t information, but an image of O.J. Simpson trying on the bloody gloves. In the background you could hear his lawyer say over and over, “If the gloves don’t fit, you must acquit.” The gloves didn’t and the jury did. They found O.J. not guilty of all charges. Images, not evidence or information, carried the day.

Learning to speak the language

Missionaries who pack up all their belongings in a crate and sail to the other side of the globe can do one of two things. They can wait for the people they’re trying to reach to learn English in order that they might understand the gospel, or the missionaries can learn the native language. You and I face the same choice if we’re going to be missionaries to a postmodern Oz. We can wait for everyone who lives here to revert to information based learning, or we can learn their language. I think the choice we have to make is obvious.

People in the postmodern world think in terms of images, and they communicate using stories. A steady stream of information makes their eyelids heavy and causes their minds to wander. But tell them stories of real people in the real world and you have their full and undivided attention. When I went to high school history was always the most boring subject of all. Too many dates. Too many places. Too much information. Yet Stephen Ambrose wrote history books which consistently topped the best seller lists. How? He didn’t rattle off statistics from the Second World War. Instead he told the stories of the men and women who served there. He planted his readers in fox holes as planes dropped bombs over their heads. History might be boring, but the real stories of young men trying to stay alive as a nightmare unfolded around them captivated readers.

Ambrose spoke the language of the postmodern era. He told stories. And he created pictures with his words. Postmoderns love pictures. Home computer sales took off when users stopped having to learn strange computer languages like Fortran and MS-Dos and could instead point a little arrow at a picture on the screen to start a program. When I was a pastor I found my sermons improved 1,000 per cent in the minds of my parishioners the day the church bought a video projector and I started using pictures and movies as illustrations. My thoughts didn’t suddenly become more profound, but images flashing on a screen communicated my ideas better the avalanche of words spilling from my mouth. Postmoderns speak the language of pictures and when I learned to speak it I connected with my audience.

Ancient future

The postmodern world isn’t the first society to speak the language of stories and pictures. In a very real sense, the shift from the modern world to the postmodern brought us back to the natural dialect of human beings. For most of human history people communicated with stories and pictures. Before anyone learned how to write the history of their people down with a pen and paper, the stories traveled orally from generation to generation. The earliest forms of writing used pictures for letters. As writing progressed and alphabets formed, people wrote down the stories they’d passed down.

Learning to speak the language of the postmodern world isn’t about learning something new, but something old. More than anything it is a process of unlearning the trappings of an information overloaded modern mindset. When I first learned how to share my faith in Christ I went through a course which taught us to use the acrostic GO-GO. I started off talking about God’s purpose for our lives, followed by explaining Our need for a Savior. The second G stood for God’s provision, which is Jesus, and the last O was our response, which meant turning from sin and placing one’s faith in Christ. I memorized the whole presentation and all the supporting Bible verses. I can still recite it twenty years later. When I was a pastor I encouraged people to use little booklets which gave essentially the same information. These booklets usually had names like “Steps to peace with God,” and “How to have a full and meaningful life.”

Now I find myself standing back and asking if either of these reflects the way the Bible communicates the message of Jesus and God’s desire to reconcile people to himself. And my honest answer is no. God chose to write the Bible as a story. It doesn’t dispense information about God, it tells His story over the course of sixty six books and thousands of years. Jesus didn’t hand out tracts or articulate steps to God or spiritual laws or handy acrostics. Instead he told stories of farmers planting seeds and old ladies sweeping out their houses looking for lost coins and old men waiting anxiously for a lost son to return. And when you step away from the Bible you find certain images indelibly stamped on your brain. You see a manger in a barn and a man hanging on a cross and an empty tomb.

The Bible already speaks the language of Oz with its story and mystery and images. Our greatest need is to learn to speak it as well. The only thing standing between the postmodern world and the living God isn’t an outdated book but a people who forgot how to think and speak like the book we say rules our lives.

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