Sherwood Lingenfelter - that's a great name, eh? His book on cross-cultural ministry is good too.
How's that for a snazzy introduction to a review? If I've not scared you off with my less-than-impressive prose, read on...
Lingenfelter mixes his extensive personal experience ministering among the Yapese in the 1970s with sound missiological and anthropological studies to come up with a helpful book on ministering across cultural boundaries.
His fundamental thesis is that we, as Christians wishing to minister across the boundaries of culture, must utilize "an incarnational model for personal relationships" (the subtitle of the book) to be most effective. This means that we must try to embody the local culture as best we can. We don't try to "go native" - everyone recognizes the shallowness of such an attempt. We simply try to become what Lingenfelter calls 150% people - giving up some of your own culture and adding as much of the other as you can for the purpose of relating well. In fact, he argues that this is precisely what Jesus did in His earthly ministry.
Much of the book is devoted to raising awareness of some classic categories of culture. For example, some cultures are "crisis oriented" (think: insurance, long-range planning, contingencies, etc...) and other are "non-crisis oriented" (think: take life as it happens). Neither system is necessarily better than the other - just different. That's an important point - we absolutely cannot come to another culture with the presupposition that ours is right and better in every way! We're doomed to fail if we think this way.
One of the most insightful comments he makes relates to a change in his own view. Near the end of the book (p.114), Lingenfelter says "In the first edition of this book, I suggested that the system of culture was in itself neutral [read: amoral, as discussed on this blog here], but the people within the culture were moral or immoral. I no longer hold this position. I believe that the system of culture, like the people within the culture, is both moral and immoral". This is a very welcome change from what is usually assumed.
The challenge, then, is to figure out how much of a given culture we can ethically and morally adopt in our efforts to communicate cross-culturally. By making people aware of some of the common pitfalls, and by vividly illustrating these cultural differences with stories of the Yapese, Lingenfelter offers sound advice to anyone seeking to minister to people unlike themselves - whether across national boundaries or even within our own cities.
Hatushili
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Book Review: Ministering Cross Culturally
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1 comment:
Having read this book a couple of years ago as a prerequisite for ministering in Northern Ireland, I would give a hardy Amen to your review of it. It had a very profound impact on my own life and how I view the culture around me.
The people in the culture which he (the author) was ministering to would not prepare themselves for any natural disasters that faced them. Obviously this drove the efficient American missionary insane. Most of us would assume they were all bums. However, through communicating with the tribe he was able to better see the tribe’s point of view, in other words he began to understand their culture. Once he understood their culture he realized it wasn’t so bad, just different. The reasons the villagers didn’t prepare in any way for the natural disasters was not because they were lazy or worthless, it was because they would rather not spend their whole lives in preparation for a disaster that usually never came about. In our American culture, which is crisis-oriented, we spend a huge amount of our time preparing for events and scenarios that in most cases never happen. The tribal culture sees the folly of this and goes in the opposite end of the spectrum, noncrisis-oriented, they seldom prepare for anything. Once I was able to see how easy it is to pass judgment on culture in this way it helped me to open my eyes to other areas of culture that I may be erroneously judging. After I read the book I found myself realizing that America’s culture and core values (even a perfected, idealized version of them) are not in perfect harmony with the Bible. A few years ago it certainly gave me a lot to chew on…and yes I’m still chewing.
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