Som do Céu

I had the opportunity to celebrate my Easter weekend with 300 of my closest Brasilian friends (and if you're Brasilian, that's how many close friends you have) in Minas Gerais. Every year, Easter weekend (here it's a holiday weekend lasting from Thursday to Sunday), Youth for Christ (Mocidade para Cristo) in Belo Horizonte hosts a music festival. This was year number 24, and the music was, as always, of excellent quality.

Christian (Evangelical) music here in Brasil has had sort of a sordid past. Missionaries came here with their hymns and didn't bother to put them into a style that the Brasilian people would understand or enjoy. As long as they did that (and sometimes still do), evangelical music would never be Brasilian. It would always be music that the foreign missionaries brought. If we are so concerned about getting the gospel into every language, spoken or written, so that people can hear it in their own language, shouldn't we be encouraging them to write hymns and choruses that fit their culture? I don't know about you, but I quite enjoy the updated tunes of Indelible Grace. A nordestino (a Brasilian in the northeast) hearing the gospel in their own dialect and storytelling style and songs in their own cultural context is much more likely to listen to the person who is talking or singing. The people in Goiânia are likely to listen to evangelical music if it's música caipira (sort of a Brasilian style of bluegrass music). And so forth. Yet the local evangelical church for so long has snubbed culture as a means to communicate the gospel. I think we are scared that the culture will infiltrate the church. That just goes to show that we have it wrong. We, the church, should be infiltrating the culture, using what people know to share the gospel. Jesus did it. Paul did it. We should do the same.