the scourge of cultural Christianity

I've been home for almost a month and almost all of me is back.  I want to write just one more piece about my experiences.

Very early on, I met the assistant pastor of the English language church.  He is a Korean missionary named Revered Kim and he came to Aizawl 20 years ago at the prompting of the Lord. He was planning to start a church.  He not only didn't speak any Mizo; he didn't speak any English.  He studied English at the college and says that after all these years, he know 'market' Mizo, in other words, not very much.  His youngest daughter was born there and is thoroughly 'Mizo'ized.

Kim found Mizoram so evangelized that no more churches were needed. Everyone goes to church on Sunday, and some on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Friday as well.  There is at least one church in every neighborhood and driving through town on Sunday is like driving through Jerusalem on Shabbat.  Everyone is walking to or from church.

Kim looked around to see what was needed.  He found drug addicts, alcoholics, single parent homes.  He said that almost every family is effected by at least one of those societal ills.  He began by going out into the streets and ministering to these lost ‘Christians’.

This was the first I heard of the problem.  Later I was sitting in town waiting for the ride back to campus and I looked up and saw a sign "Association of Positive People".  I asked Nutei what it was.  She said it meant HIV positive.  I asked if that was a problem and she said, yes, since people have started traveling more.  All I could say was, it takes more than traveling to spread HIV.

Later in my stay, it was India Day and school was cancelled (again).  The head of state made a speech which was later quoted by one of the faculty members at morning devotions.  Mizoram has the highest percentage rate of cancer, drug abuse, tobacco use, and HIV in all of India.  Everywhere I went I saw many people chewing betel nut.  This in an area with a 90%+ literacy rate.  You see, it takes more than education to prevent self-destructive behavior.

On one of my rides with Rami, I asked her if people were serious about their faith.  She said she thought they were.  I mentioned the disease rate, just even on campus, and the disconnect was obvious.  I talked to several people about this, but please remember about the non-judgmental nature of the Mizo people.

It looks like there is a cultural Christianity which pervades this area, similar to the US.  Yes, if you go to the market and give a large bill, you will always get the correct change.  You could probably drop your wallet in the middle of the street and within a few hours, someone would have found it, figured out exactly where you were and returned it to you.  However, cultural religion will not change your life or lead you to live your life differently than the rest of the world.  If your dog has puppies in the garage, they aren't cars.  One can feel the potential rebellion floating just below the surface of the city life of the young people.  They are enamored of Korean culture, also a very "Christian" country but at the top of the pop culture of the world.  Many people believe and many people pray, but without the teaching of holiness, eventually the ways of this world, which is dark and getting darker day by day, will swallow up the general goodness passed down for the past three generations.

I thank everyone who has followed these episodes and to all who wrote to encourage me.  If you think of me, please remember to pray for the people of Mizoram, who are so close, and yet ignorant of so much of the economy of God.

Blessings to all and happy Passover.
                                                                        -30-

is it Hebrew?

One of the clues to the reputed lost tribe identity I was searching for would have been language similarities, both in vocabulary and grammar.  The day after my arrival, the Principal selected two students and a driver to accompany me into town to buy any necessities.  We went to the main produce market, an underground sort of affair, and to one store, one street vendor, and one desk in the back of a snack shop to purchase a phone, sim card, and minutes, respectively.

In general, Mizos have only one very long name.  The syllables mean things like 'heaven' or 'lord' or 'desire' and they are strung together.  Many folks I met had a last name that started with Vanlal (meaning 'heaven' and 'Lord').....followed by several more syllables.  Everyone also has a nickname derived from their longer names, which makes it all the more confusing, because sometimes the nicknames are not exactly a part of the longer name.  Rather they are some of the syllables elided together.  So even though Lalnunzira is called Zira and Vanlalruata is called Ruata, Lallumzwala is called Lawma.  It took me a while to get the professors that I had regular contact with sorted out and, to my shame, I learned only the names of my students who had western first names.  The ones with single, long Mizo names, I knew by face, personality, and number.

The young lady who accompanied me on my first shopping trip was a first year student who was also in my Hebrew class.  Her name was Shalom.  Hebrew names are not unusual in Mizoram.  Everywhere you go you see stores named Jehovah Jireh this or Moriah that or Jerusalem the other thing.  What was unusual in Shalom's case was that her father related that God told him to name her Shalom and they only in the past few weeks found out what it means.  The Sunday school teacher had recently taught them this Hebrew word.

The young man who came on the initial expedition was named Hnema.  I really thought he said Nehemiah, but later in the car, Shalom spelled it for me.  Then she said it was a Mizo word and it has some meaning like 'comfort.'  Aha!  That is also the root idea of Nehemiah.

As time went on, I accumulated a few other cognates.  To make a sentence negative in Mizo, in some cases, you add a 'lo' to the end of the sentence, a bit like לא There is a question word which is 'maw', a bit like מה  The number 'one' is pa-khat like אחת , but that is where that story ends.

Mizo sentence order is object-verb-subject but Hebrew is more fluid, tending toward verb-subject-object.  Mizo speakers put their adjectives after nouns as is done in Hebrew, but they have almost no prepositions, which you can clearly hear when they speak English ("I look you").  On the other hand, they have a locational ending which is -a-, similar the the Hebrew locative ה .   

However, the word for 'love' is 'hmangaihna' which seems like a very long word for an very important concept, and the word for 'tea' is 'thingpui' which I was told means 'big tree'.  It sounds nothing like the word for tea in the rest of the world, and it doesn't even grow on a tree.

And Mizo is a tonal language, so 'in' can mean 'house', 'you', or 'drink', depending on the tone. This fact contributed to my not having learned more of it.

Does all that add up to anything?  I don't think so.  It would take a lot more in depth study to come to a rigorous academic conclusion.

In almost every language, you will find similarities to Hebrew.  Some people say that is because =all= languages descend from it.  If you are interested in learning more about that, you can go here: http://edenics.net/


What is  more compelling to me is the inclusion of pre-Babel Biblical concepts in Chinese writing.  You can read more about that here: http://www.icr.org/article/genesis-chinese-pictographs/