ON MISSIONARIES: A PERSONAL VIEW (5)

SIL, our overseas organization that complemented WBT, was not registered as a mission organization with the government of PNG. Rather, we were an educational institution, analyzing languages, teaching people to read and write their languages, and translating the Christian Scriptures. The government asked SIL to engage in three other activities: 1) survey several areas to determine the languages spoken; 2) prepare language learning materials on select languages, and 3) conduct short (6-week) intensive language learning courses for government officers.

SIL was engaged in the activities for several years, with Joice and I teaching at the first language learning course, then heading up the second. We got to know many government officers and missionaries (invited to the second course). The six-week courses were held in Goroka, in the Eastern Highlands, about 100 miles from our center at Ukarumpa.

At the school, we became close friends with a young Australian Educational Officer who was an excellent student. Several years later, he and I would study together at the Australian National University. After the course, we interacted with him several times, and also with his wife, until he died in 2021. Despite our witness and that of others, he never committed himself to the Christian faith, dying as an agnostic. He was a great man and a friend whom I communicated with until his death. Being a missionary does not generate converts. It is always up to God.

Having said something about money, I must also admit that I don’t like to be asked for it. Nevertheless, almost every day I receive information that compels me to give. There are people and agencies that need money—not just my local church or people I know. There are also nationals who work in dangerous situations, some of them translating the Bible or assisting with translation. There are pilots, teachers, doctors, tradesmen, refugee workers, and so on who need support. God gives us many opportunities to be generous and to enjoy it.

Adoniram Judson is one of my missionary heroes. He was born in August, 1788, in Malden, Massachusetts. He later entered Andover Theological Seminary as a special student and, to the consternation of his Congregational denomination, became a Baptist missionary in Burma. Judson suffered from tropical diseases, corrupt officials, prison, and the death (serially) of his three wives, each of whom had been missionaries themselves. Judson learned to speak Burmese fluently, translated the Bible into it, and as he adopted the culture of the Burmese, was careful not to affront the Burmese officials.

I was also inspired by the president of SIL, Kenneth Pike, who taught us linguistics at the University of Oklahoma during the summers of 1956 and 1957. Inspired might not be the right word. Rather, I was awestruck and fascinated by his energy, enthusiasm, and love of linguistics. Here was a man who loved God, gave us chapel talks, wrote books about his Christian faith, and was also a man of intense scholarly wisdom and understanding. 

It was sometime later that Dr Pike directly influenced our lives. We were in PNG (then known as the Territories of Papua and New Guinea) when he took a semester off from his teaching at the University of Michigan to conduct a three-month “workshop” on linguistics at our branch of SIL. Joice and I were studying Kewa, one couple representing one of the 23 languages that Dr. Pike would examine and provide consultations on. 

Joice was to work on Kewa phonology and tone, and I was to work on Kewa morphology and syntax. We met with Pike once a week and heard lectures daily. But we had no idea of what our studies meant for our future.

Joice had prepared several charts, outlining the differences in tone patterns in the Kewa language. In her consultation session one day, Pike remarked, “Joice, you always bring something special to these sessions.” Joice, thinking he had at last seen the complexity of the Kewa tone patterns and was admiring her work, innocently asked, “What?” To her amazement, he answered, “Your perfume.” So much for the tone charts.

Dr. Pike took three weeks off to attend the SIL school in Melbourne. Before leaving, he intoned, “I expect to see a paper from all of you when I return. If you don’t have one, you can always dig ditches,” suggesting that we would no longer be Bible translators. After he left, there were a lot of jokes about digging ditches.

My analysis of Kewa syntax seemed somewhat boring and was going slowly. For some added stimulation, I turned to work I had been doing on the analysis of Kewa body parts. When Pike asked to see my syntax paper, I nervously also showed him my “Ethnolinguistic concepts of Kewa body parts,” expecting some rebuttal because it clearly was not on Kewa grammar. Instead, he was quite enthusiastic and suggested I try to publish it and recommended a well-known anthropologist to whom I might send the paper for comments. I did nervously and got a brief neutral, but not negative reply.

I later submitted it to the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, and it was published. Joice’s work on tone was also published later.

Without realizing it, we were becoming “missionary-scholars.”

Karl Franklin