When presenting the gospel to a people group, it is important to understand their worldview. This is necessary because people’s belief systems are reflected in their worldview. A peoples’ worldview determines how much they can appreciate the gospel and how much change it can cause. Worldview is the most encompassing framework of thought that relate belief systems to one another.
Hiebert says, “Worldviews are the fundamental given with which people in a community think, not what they think about.” Adventist missionaries to Zambia were not aware of the people’s worldview. Worldview assumptions are taken for granted, and are largely unexamined. Worldview is reinforced by the deepest of feelings, and anyone who challenges them challenges the very
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Thus, both Christianity and African religions have been running side by side. The African worldview is more concerned with obeying the demands of the traditional religion. People believe that non-conformity to the traditional ways bring sickness, death, and crop failure. This belief, therefore, strengthens the keeping of the moral and traditional religious norms even after people become Adventist Christians.
Looking at death at the traditional religion level, the problem of death often has less to do with what have happened to the person who has died than with the pain and meaninglessness that death brings for the living. On this level the question people ask is not about how death occurred. The real questions have to do with why and why now? And how will this affect me and my family?
Even though death is believed to be a natural event in life, Africans believe the dead are not really dead. Many members in Mtendere community where the church is situated, hold the belief that the dead have “eyes,” and are able to see events taking place in the world of the living. The dead therefore, can communicate with their family members usually through dreams. Their words or directives are revered and treated with caution, lest they cause punishment. The traditional belief that the dead are not dead is held by many tribes in Zambia and continues even after people become Seventh-day Adventist
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Death was a consequence of sin (Gen 3:19), yet every time a person dies many say the death was ‘caused.’ They believe that death is a result of cultural deviance.
Many believe there are causes and circumstances surrounding every death. It is surprising that even Adventists hold such beliefs. The circumstances involved include sickness, disease, old age, accident, lightning, drowning, animal attack, and many others. But African people believe that such circumstances are caused by a human or other agent who has caused it by means of a curse, witchcraft, magic, and so on. This is what Mbiti calls mystical causes of death. People go to a lot of trouble to establish the mystical causes by consulting diviners and medicine men, or through suspicion and