Serving with Eyes Wide Open - Part VI
I hope everyone had a good weekend. We’re going to get right down to brass tacks, continuing the series on the book Serving with Eyes Wide Open: Doing Short-Term Missions with Cultural Intelligence by David A. Livermore. The section of the book we’re discussing is “Conflicting Images: Americans’ vs. Nationals’ Perspectives on Short-Term Missions” and the chapter today is “The Bible: Just Stick to the Bible and You Can’t Go Wrong!” Here are some highlights:
- - “Culture shapes the way we think; it alters how and what we learn. Two individuals can receive the same information and their respective cultures can lead them to arrive at two entirely different conclusions.”
- “In our obsession with making the Bible the end-all rather than a means to the end, [which is to teach us about God's story and our life with him,] we’ve imported far too much Western culture into understanding the purpose of the Scriptures.”
- “Part of seeing the Bible differently means moving away from being predominantly interested in what the Bible means for us and moving toward a growing interest about what the Bible meant in its original context.”
- “Ironically, the one who’s made to feel like a heretic is often the person who questions whether a ministry strategy is truly ‘the biblical model.’ We must beware of arrogantly thinking we can organize the global church around some strategy we’re convinced is ‘biblical,’ when it might be in fact yet another cultural model.”
- “Christ developed his ministry priorities in light of his cultural context. He didn’t import a ministry strategy from another culture and force it into the first-century world of Palestine. He didn’t take principles developed in one place and try to implement them in another.”
- “…our cultural perspectives both limit and enhance our understanding of who God is.”
- “…cross-cultural trainers often attempt to overcome the cultural bias in their teaching by avoiding all use of illustrations. Recipients ask for the opposite. They don’t find purely conceptual material devoid of any examples very helpful. teaching our culturally based models of ministry can be helpful as long as we’re careful not to ‘overbiblicize’ them as being the only way to minister.”
- “…our understanding of God’s Word is always skewed by our cultural context, and at the very least, our cultural biases need to be acknowledged up front when teaching from the Word at any time, but especially overseas. My perceptions of Jesus are filled with twenty-first century Western assumptions. I need to grow in gaining a more accurate first-century picture of Jesus so I can do the hard work of understanding how to embody him in the twenty-first century.”
Unfortunately, I’ve seen this cross-cultural faux pa play out in short-term missions. The results? Americans leave feeling satisfied, thinking their ministry strategy, once implemented, will really make a difference in this new culture. But the nationals (in my case Latin Americans) feel unsatisfied, knowing the ministry strategy will not work in their cultural context. Even worse, they may feel offended by the “American way is the right way / biblical way / only way” label on that strategy.
I have a few examples from my experiences, but I want to hear from you. When and where have you seen a ministry strategy presented as “the biblical method,” whether in a cross-culture context or in the U.S.? What’s your take on culture shaping the way we think, even the way we interpret the Bible? And how can we evaluate biblical ministry strategies from cultural ones? (By the way, there’s nothing wrong with cultural strategies; the problem is labeling them as the be-all and end-all!)
Tomorrow’s topic: money. I hope you’ll join me. Thanks for reading and chiming in!
