Literacy & Christian Missions

Think about missions work. What comes to mind? Probably preaching the gospel and meeting the physical needs of the poor. Promoting literacy through education likely fails to register as very important.

But education has remained a vital strand of Christian missions for centuries. Even the Dalai Lama said he thought that “Christian missionaries make the greatest contribution in education and improving healthcare in remote corners of the world,” Christianity Today reported in 2014.

Indeed, increasing global literacy through education must remain a top priority. That’s because literacy makes God’s Word accessible, Christianity’s most powerful weapon for evangelism and discipleship.

Scripture has tremendous spiritual power. Organizations like Wycliffe Bible Translators thus work to make the Bible available in a growing number of languages. “When people finally get the Bible in their own language, lives often change in amazing ways,” Wycliffe says online. “People are transformed as they are led to Jesus Christ and a right relationship with God.”

However, translation efforts will do minimal good if native speakers of the language can’t read it. This barrier renders personal study of the Scriptures virtually impossible.

This became evident to me when I recently travelled to India. In this country of more than 1.25 billion people, nearly 30 percent are illiterate, according to the CIA World Factbook. That means more than 350 million people in India alone – more than the population of the United States – remain unable to read.

That closely parallels the percentage of the population living in poverty. Poor families, especially those led by fathers struggling with addiction or widowed mothers, often put their children to work instead of paying for them to attend school.

So often, poverty and illiteracy occur together. Yet the situation in India would be far worse without the help of faithful Christians. “Christian missionaries have played a major role in taking education to the poor and the downtrodden in the country,” India’s education minister reportedly acknowledged in 2006.

Christian missions must continue striving to break both cycles. They must strive to educate the poor and raise them out of poverty around the world. Following in the rich tradition so many Christian missionaries, we must work to demonstrate God’s love by meeting unbelievers’ physical needs, and simultaneously enabling them to interact with the Word of God personally and regularly.