“She is just like us,” a lady recently said of me to my friend. Frequently, people comment to me, “You are already Benoise.” I take it as a compliment, but I know it’s not really true. They see that I have lived here 10 years, and I dress like them and speak like them and live much like they do. My mindset has changed a bit, too, I guess. But, inside, I’m still much the same as I’ve always been, and I still think like an American.

As I thought about this recently, I remembered Jeremiah 13:23: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil.”

To people here, the concept of an all-powerful God who wants a close, meaningful relationship with them is very foreign. Many people choose to put on the “clothing” of Christianity and go through the motions, learning to behave as a Christian without experiencing true rebirth in heart and mind.

Some people here learn about God through American Bible studies sent here by Western evangelists. Sadly, they learn very little about Christ. They focus mostly on what to do and what not to do. For example: Go to church on Sabbath, participate in communion, obey God, don’t wear jewelry, don’t steal, don’t want what the others have, confess sins and try not to sin again (or sin as much as you like, just remember to keep confessing).
The Catholic approach is especially popular here because it parallels Otammari culture in many ways. Instead of praying to ancestors, people can pray to Mary and the saints. In Otammari culture, you don’t talk to God directly;
you must go through ancestor spirits, fetish mediators, or Satan. They believe God sent Satan to be our intercessor. In Otammari tradition, wood smoke gives protection from sorcery. It is easy to substitute Catholic incense. Instead of seeing the cross as a reminder of Christ and His death in our place, people here think of the cross only as a charm, painting it on their walls and over their doors to protect them from magic. Even communion is problematic here, because people think of it like traditional sacrifices to fetishes, where the supplicant eats part of the sacrifice. So people take part in communion to win God’s favor. They do it as a way to get God’s favor. By practicing Christian rituals and all the other things Christians do, animists often think they have become Christian when they have only clothed themselves in Christianity and remain unchanged inside.

Second Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation; the old has gone, and the new has come.” Christianity is not a change of clothes, it is a transformation—a new creation. Sadly, this town is full of baptized Adventists who are not new creations. They studied Western Bible studies for a couple of weeks or months, got baptized, and then vanished, feeling they had done their duty to God.

One faithful local evangelist has learned from AFM’s style of ministry and has begun to cultivate people’s spiritual hunger for God’s re-creation, helping them see the failure of the old ways. This evangelist worked with an old man for three months, helping him toward a decision to abandon his family fetish altar. The man finally acknowledged that the useless lump of dirt wasn’t a god, but he was still frightened to stop worshiping it. Fetish worship is all he has known for most of his life. The evangelist is still working with him.

This is the type of work we want to do with Otammari people. We are collecting cultural information to use in making spiritual hunger-development tools and studies aimed at opening Otammari hearts. In turn, believers will be able to use these studies to reach out to others. Our ultimate goal is not to have a church of people wearing the clothes of Christianity, but to bring people to the point of accepting the new creation that God wants to make of them.

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