Part 1: Everybody in the Pool | Part 2: But First … | Part 3: More than Good Intentions

Missions is for people who are flexible, in several specific ways.

When you’re ministering cross-culturally, you’re dealing with people who are different from you all day long. They think differently, they do things differently; they’re offended by different things, they laugh at different things. In that kind of environment, it’s possible for you to be highly offensive, even with the best of intentions. So you need to adjust your thinking.

Pay Attention

The first thing you need to do is notice things; actively think about what you’re seeing. You can’t expect to notice things accidentally; you have to just pay attention, and do things the way the locals do.

I was sitting in front of a group of people with my legs crossed, and I noticed that everyone else in the room had both feet on the floor. So I immediately uncrossed my legs and kept them that way. Afterwards I asked someone and was told that it is the prerogative of the oldest man to decide whether crossing the legs is OK. Since I was the oldest man in the room at that time, my action was not offensive. But again, in Muslim-influenced cultures, showing someone the bottom of your foot is a sign of disrespect. So no crossing of the legs. Sometimes.

Be Curious

Most people are happy to explain their cultural practices to you. I asked about leg-crossing, and no one was offended by my question, because I was genuinely curious and wanted to know how things were done. Your best asset in cross-cultural situations is someone who knows the culture well—preferably indigenous—and who speaks English. Ask about everything.

Be Respectful

Nothing at all wrong with asking questions, so long as there’s no tone of incredulity or snobbishness about it. People have reasons for what they do.

My favorite illustration of this concept is the question of whether you empty your plate. In our culture, we do, because emptying your plate communicates to the host that you liked what he served. In China, the same act communicates that the host didn’t give you enough—he’s stingy. So you must leave a little on your plate, or he’ll fill it again. With a smile.

Two cultures, who interpret the same act in completely opposite ways—and both of them make perfect sense.

I love that.

Similarly, Americans tend to think that chopsticks are clumsy and inefficient. But the Chinese think that butchering at the table is barbaric. When the food arrives at the table, it is consummately prepared, in bite-sized pieces, and all you need to eat it is a couple of sticks. Not clumsy; civilized.

Learn new ways of doing things, and thinking about things, and delight in the variety of ways that humans in the image of God create cultures.

Be Persistent

Working in an unfamiliar culture can be exhausting. You have to think about everything all the time, and you feel as though you’re the one making all the sacrifices and expending all the effort. (Let me assure you that you’re not; the locals are dealing with your cultural clumsiness and ineptitude all day long, and they’re being kind to you anyway.)

You have to just stick to it. If you’re there for just a few weeks, you’ll never get acclimated, and the relief at getting home will be significant. But it’s worth the effort in the meantime.

Again, an illustration of the importance of putting forth the effort. And thus another longer-than-usual post.

I was with a team at a church service in Africa. Afterwards we had a greeting line, a common practice. Everyone lines up single file, and the line doubles back on itself, so everybody shakes hands with everybody else. Often we’re all singing throughout the process.

Afterwards the pastor announced that we would now have communion.

I’m thinking, uh-oh. We’ve just shaken hands with a whole bunch of people, many of them small children, who have used the choo (latrine) outside at some point, where there’s no toilet paper. I’m all but certain that I have fecal material all over my right hand.

What do I do? I have hand sanitizer in my pocket, but everyone will be able to smell it—how would you feel if someone used hand sanitizer right after shaking hands with you? There’s no place to wash my hands. And we can’t abstain from the communion elements; that act sends a theological message that we must not send. We are one with these people.

I quietly went to each student and told them to be sure to take the bread with their left hand, for safety.

This was a Muslim area.

Very bad choice. In Muslim-influenced cultures, the left hand is the dirty hand. The entire team engaged in a very public act of disrespect toward the Lord’s Table. Even though we were in fact using the clean hand.

With the best of intentions.

What should I have done?

I should have told them to use their right hand, handle the bread as little as possible, and pray for divine protection.

Which brings me to the topic of the next post.

Part 5: Dependence | Part 6: Closing Thoughts I | Part 7: Closing Thoughts II | Part 8: Closing Thoughts III

Photo by Jeremy Dorrough on Unsplash

Part 1: Everybody in the Pool | Part 2: But First …

Missions is for people who are prepared to do something that the locals cannot do for themselves.

Good intentions are not enough to justify going.

In the first place, there’s something fundamentally unbiblical about seeing a people group, one that God created and for whom his intentions have always been redemptive, as “those poor people” whom I, with my superior knowledge and cultural values, am going to go help. In many cases, that’s just plain racism, a holdover from the colonial era, where “western empires own their Lord, and savage tribes attend his word.” (Those are not the only two choices, you know.) One of the first things that students on my teams would learn is that the African Christians with whom they were working 1) were their spiritual superiors in nearly every way, and 2) were absolutely necessary to their ministry success. We weren’t there to “help the poor Africans”; we were there to labor alongside them and learn a lot in the process. In places like China and Africa, the Church has been doing just fine without our constant nursemaiding, thank you, and they frankly don’t need our help in the ways that we tend to think they do.

Second, sometimes “helping” is worse than not helping. This is a complex topic, one that has been developed well elsewhere; let me recommend a couple of books: Toxic Charity, by Robert Lupton, and When Helping Hurts, by Steve Corbett et al. Americans tend to react strongly against poverty when they see it, and they tend to think that throwing money at problems will solve them. Again, good intentions, but bad outcomes. A well-known case a few years ago was the generous offer by the manufacturers of Toms shoes to send a pair of shoes to Africa for every pair sold in the US. One unintended consequence was that they put a bunch of African shoemakers out of business.

That’s one reason why I always tried to have my student teams bring something to the table that their African colleagues didn’t. Why should my team build a fence or paint a church when the Africans could do that just as well as they could—and in fact probably better? What does a busload of American college students add to the work in the way of ministry effectiveness?

Perhaps an example will help illustrate. (And thus this post will be longer than usual.) Several summers we worked with West Africa Bible College in Wa, Ghana. This college, whose president is a Ghanaian former student of mine, graduates a handful of Bible students every year who then go out and plant churches in the surrounding villages. How can my students help with that? Out in the bush relatively few people speak English; what can we do that’s profitable?

Well, out there a busload of white folks will attract a crowd. We drove out to the village of Gbacha, pulled up at the football field (that’s “soccer” to you gringos) with a couple of footballs, and started kicking them around. Here came all the children in the village, and soon they’re all in the game. The younger children we organized into smaller, safer games. The parents showed up to see what all the excitement was about. Nasalas! Nasalas! (“White people! White people!”)

I walked over to speak to the adults who had gathered. One man told me, in broken English, “Thank you for doing this. The imams don’t play with our children.”

In the meantime the young people from the Wa church were translating my students’ Bible lessons into Waali so the children would understand. Equal partners, working together, doing what they were good at, to make a ministry.

Timothy, the college president, said, “Come with me.” We walked up a path to a small house with a large shade tree in front. Several men were sitting there. Timothy introduced me to the village chief. I greeted him and told him that Timothy had been my student, a good student, in university in America. The chief said simply, “You are welcome.”

I thought that was odd; I hadn’t thanked him for anything.

As we walked back to the field, Timothy said, “Let me explain what just happened. We need the chief’s permission to buy land in the village to build a church. Some in the village have been opposing that effort. Based on what happened here today, the chief has said that we are welcome here in the village.”

That was the summer of 2013, 10 years ago. This summer I was back in Wa, teaching at the college, without a team this time. Timothy and I drove out west of the town to see a new church building going up, and on the way back we drove right by Gbacha. I asked if we could stop.

We drove out to the field, and I took a picture to send to the 2013 team. Then Timothy said, “Let me show you something.” We drove a little further and pulled up at a church building. “This is the church we built here, on prime land the chief allowed us to purchase. The building is full every Sunday, and we’re planning to enlarge it; we have plenty of land to grow here. And when the enlargement is finished, we’re going to constitute this as an independent church, with their indigenous pastor.”

American teenagers, doing what they could, in partnership with their African brothers and sisters. Taking the good news to the end of the earth. With a couple of soccer balls on a weekday afternoon in the bush.

Part 4: Semper Gumby | Part 5: Dependence | Part 6: Closing Thoughts I | Part 7: Closing Thoughts II | Part 8: Closing Thoughts III

Photo by Jeremy Dorrough on Unsplash

Part 1: Everybody in the Pool

As we noted in the previous post, missions is every believer’s business. We live out grace and peace and carry the message of good news every day, regardless of our location.

But I would suggest that the Great Commission includes taking the message to the end of the earth, and this Commission is not given to just a select few. Nothing in the text implies a limitation as to personnel or geography.

Now, of course we can’t all go to Latvia, or who would serve the rest of the planet? I would suggest that the fact that in God’s providence you were born where you were would certainly indicate that God intends you to take the message to your own people.

But still. We need to go.

It has become common these days for us to subcontract cross-cultural missions to “professionals,” who live full-time in Latvia, or wherever, and focus on taking the message to that particular culture. That’s a great idea, and it seems to work with reasonable efficiency—though I’m inclined to think that it’s better for Americans to train indigenous pastors than to try to carry the burden of church planting themselves, given the amount of resources and time required for an American to plant just one church overseas.

But I don’t think that paying someone else to go absolves us from our responsibility to go as well. Sure, it’s expensive to go, and we can stay for only so long, and we’re not as effective in an unfamiliar culture as an indigenous believer would be, but there are things we can do effectively, and there are things we can learn that will increase our effectiveness in our own day-to-day outreach at home.

That said, it is possible to do overseas outreach very, very badly. In my experience, Americans seem to be especially clumsy working in unfamiliar cultures. The expression “the ugly American” didn’t come from nowhere, and the stories are abundant. I can recall an experience in China at a Buddhist temple where my family was observing quietly and appreciating the architecture. The priest had indicated to us “no photos,” and of course we respected his wishes. After a few minutes a couple of American twenty-something girls came in, wearing halter tops and short shorts, chewing gum and talking loudly, with no apparent awareness of the sort of place this was. “Oh, look at that! Cool! OMG!” The look of dismay on the face of the priest was hard to miss.

Sure, it’s a false religion, and he’s a false teacher, but he’s also a human being in the image of God who needs to hear the message, and this kind of thing can only make the task more difficult. I was horrified—and embarrassed for my country.

I wish that I was just cherry-picking, but this sort of thing seems to happen all the time. I suppose we could speculate on why. The USA is a big country, insulated from the rest of the world by oceans on both sides, with the result that many Americans never visit a different country their whole lives. Europeans and Africans, on the other hand, cross national borders and work in multiple languages fairly routinely. And despite all the talk of polarization and regionalism in our country, the culture is relatively homogeneous; you can travel from Atlanta to Wenatchee and still understand the regional accent, conduct business smoothly, and manage not to be offensive in daily customs such as greetings.

So yes, I would suggest that all believers need to get some experience in taking the gospel to another culture. But I would also suggest that we should take that responsibility seriously enough to prepare properly, so that we don’t make things worse by going. That means we’re going to have to learn some things about the culture—they do things differently there—so as not to fulfill the American stereotype of being offensive all day long with absolutely no awareness that we’re doing so.

We’ll get to some specifics next time.

Part 3: More than Good Intentions | Part 4: Semper Gumby | Part 5: Dependence | Part 6: Closing Thoughts I | Part 7: Closing Thoughts II | Part 8: Closing Thoughts III

Photo by Jeremy Dorrough on Unsplash

Over the years it’s been my pleasure to experience several short-term mission trips. My first was almost 30 years ago, when my wife and I joined up with another couple in our church to take a group of teens to Mexico for a couple of weeks. A few years later I was asked to teach for a month in a little Bible college near Cape Town—and quickly fell in love with the place. (It’s still my favorite city in the world.) The next year the request came from a ministry in Saipan, for another month. Then Hermosillo, Mexico; then Shanghai, China; and then St. Vincent in the Caribbean.

A couple of years after that, the faculty couple that had led a student mission team to Africa most summers asked me if I’d like to take over the operation, and with some trepidation I agreed. What followed was 10 teams in 9 summers over the span of 12 years, some of the most delightful experiences of my life. I still think of those students as special.

During those 12 years there were other overseas adventures sprinkled in: Haiti, Mexico, India. This past summer I taught in Ghana, at a school I had taken several teams to, and in Togo, a new one for me.

I love these trips, but they’re hard, for a great many reasons. I found myself committing most of the mistakes we Americans can make in cross-cultural work, and to my dismay, I often haven’t learned from those mistakes with just one boneheaded incident.

I know people who have a lot more experience than what’s listed here. One of my closest colleagues at my university oversees the missions programs there, and his wisdom—prompted, I’m sure, by the sheer number of astonishing stories he can tell—continually provokes my respect.

But I have learned a few things along the way—often by experiences that I’m ashamed of—and perhaps a few thoughts can be of service to other believers, particularly those who are planning short-term mission work in the future.

So let’s spend a few posts knocking some of these ideas around.

To start with, let me observe that

Missions Is for Everyone

As he was about to return to his Father, Christ gave his disciples an order that we have come to call “The Great Commission” (Mt 28.19-20; Mk 16.15; Lk 24.46-48; Ac 1.7-8). It’s simple enough: Go—everywhere—and make disciples. Tell the story.

Church history contains a great many inspiring stories of those who have obeyed their Master well—from the 12 disciples themselves (I’m thinking, obviously, of Matthias and Paul, not Judas Iscariot) to the many martyrs under intermittent eras of Roman persecution, and through the modern missions movement, starting with William Carey and including such lights as Adoniram Judson, John Paton, John Eliot, CT Studd, David Livingstone, Gladys Aylward, Amy Carmichael, and many, many others perhaps less famous but not at all less noteworthy.

Perhaps as a result of these stories, modern Christians have tended to think of “missions” as something that happens far away, in strange and perhaps dangerous cultures. Hence the passport photo at the top of this post.

But the commission was to go—surely, to the ends of the world, but starting in Jerusalem, which to the first hearers was home, the local neighborhood. Missions isn’t something we pay subcontractors to do; it’s something we all do, naturally, daily, as we live our lives. It’s living out grace and peace, and talking about it, wherever you are. Last week I had a chance to do that in the drive-through at a fast-food joint, prompted by a question the fellow in the window asked me. Just a couple of minutes, and I wish it had been more, but it’s the normal way a follower of Jesus lives.

At the same time, however, in other senses missions is most certainly not for everyone. We’ll look into that next time.

Part 2: But First … | Part 3: More than Good Intentions | Part 4: Semper Gumby | Part 5: Dependence | Part 6: Closing Thoughts I | Part 7: Closing Thoughts II | Part 8: Closing Thoughts III

Photo by Jeremy Dorrough on Unsplash