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becoming a 75 percent person in another culture will be a trial by fire, a test of inner strength and of personal faith, and most of all a test of the veracity of one’s love. An individual who is not ready to give up aspects of one’s personal culture for a time and to begin learning as a child is not ready for the challenge of cross-cultural ministry. Even short-term mission ministry requires cultural learning and adding new patterns of behavior to effectively serve
my only hope was to keep on learning.
unless I accepted the role of listening and learning as a child, I was doomed to remain an outsider.
We must be willing to continually add to our cultural repertoire and become at least culturally sensitive and responsive as “world” rather than “national” Christians.
Usually the first step for adding to one’s cultural repertoire is learning the language.
language is but one of ten primary message systems found in every culture (1973, 38–59). The others are temporality (attitude toward time, routine, and schedule), territoriality (attitude toward space and property), exploitation (methods of control, attitude toward the use and sharing of resources), association (family, kin, and community), subsistence (attitude toward work and division of labor), bisexuality (differing modes of speech, dress, and conduct between males and females), learning (by observation, modeling, or instruction), play (humor and games), and defense (health procedures,
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prayerfully ask the Holy Spirit to show you how to add to your cultural repertoire
When local people have very different food habits, and when they have no understanding of our ideas about privacy, that often precipitates deep emotional stress for us.
Americans and Germans, on the contrary, have a very short time fuse and experience anxiety when there is a delay of five or more minutes.
time-oriented cultures,
event oriented.
Time-oriented persons and cultures exhibit a high concern about schedule and punctuality within that schedule,
Another aspect of time orientation involves scheduling toward a goal.
specific objectives they want to accomplish within a given period.
In time-oriented cultures, a careful utilization of time is often associated with reward.
event-oriented people are concerned more about the details of what is going to happen than about when it begins and when it ends.
For event-oriented people, it is more important to complete an activity than to observe arbitrary constraints of time.
Event orientation produces a “let come what may” outlook unbound by schedules.
meetings begin when the last person arrives and end when the last person leaves.
event-oriented people will exhaustively consider a problem, hearing all issues and deliberating until they reach unanimous agreement.
for event-oriented people, the present is more important than either the past or the future.
While Americans seek change and new experiences, Chadians are accustomed to monotony and routine.
monochronism, or single-minded use of time.
They feel no pressure to get things done.
there are individuals in every culture who are at variance with the pattern of the whole.
The point is that individuals vary greatly within a culture, and there are no simple explanations for those differences.
our way with time is not God’s way. In fact, no culture has God’s priorities, for in God’s scheme the emphases on time and event exist together in complete harmony.
An important key to effective cross-cultural ministry is an attitude of love and submission toward people with different values about time and event—we must add to our repertoire and adapt to the time and event priorities of the people with whom we work.
to line everything up in rows. I want to have everything sorted, systematically organized, and fitted into its proper place. I like to divide everything into constituent parts and then re-sort them into a clear pattern. American culture generally rewards this type of thinking.
they communicated in a narrative or holistic style.
They did not worry about sorting everything into a comprehensive system; each point was part of a distinctive and separate whole.
concerned about the integrity of each story and the social and political lessons and arguments that it contained.
two distinct orientations in thinking patterns: dichotomistic and holistic.
Dichotomistic thinking is a pattern of segmental thinking in which people exhibit great concern for the particulars of a problem or situation and tend to reduce them to right and wrong options.
Holistic thinking is a pattern of thinking in which particulars are not separated from the context of the larger picture. A holistic thinker insists that the whole is greater than the parts and reasons on the basis of perceived relationships within the whole.
The dichotomist may reject a person because of a particular mistake, while a holist may say that all people are flawed because of any number of mistakes. Both
Cultures and individuals with this orientation are concerned primarily with a person’s birth and social rank.
In other cultures, prestige is not ascribed on the basis of social rank but is achieved.
an individual’s identity and self-worth are bound up with personal performance. The dominant question is what the individual
has accomp...
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People with this value orientation scoff at titles and formal rituals of recognition. For them, success ...
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To be too good was much worse than being not quite good enough.
One must be concerned about the vulnerability of others.
culture that perceives vulnerability as weakness. Individuals and cultures with this perspective try to avoid failure and error at all cost. The
The achiever is a threat to those who are less competent.
Persons who feel that failure and vulnerability are weaknesses also strongly defend their positions and behavior.
It is essential for them to be right about an issue and to point out that others are wrong.
unknown context does not allow them to control their performance and thus to conceal their vulnerability.
Americans, by contrast, often demand that people expose their vulnerability and risk failure.
The important thing in American competition is completion of an event—did
