Missions Minded

It’s Wednesday. That means the blog series on the book Serving with Eyes Wide Open: Doing Short-Term Missions with Cultural Intelligence by David A. Livermore continues! The section of the book is “Sharpening Our Focus and Service with Cultural Intelligence (CQ)” and the focus in this chapter is “perseverance CQ”. Here are the highlights:

- “Perseverance CQ refers to our level of interest, drive, and motivation to adapt cross-culturally. It’s a traveler’s robustness, courage, hardiness, and capability to persevere through cultural differences. A person high in perseverance CQ draws great satisfaction from being in new places and interacting with people from different cultures. A person low in perseverance CQ avoids engagement with the culture as a whole. Short-termers with low perseverance CQ hope to stay in comfortable hotels, interact primarily with their fellow teammates, and eat familiar foods. In contrast, short-termers with high perseverance CQ want to adapt to the new culture not only to do short-term missions well, but also because they’re genuinely interested in learning about life in a different place.”

- “Many teams spend time talking about the importance of their actual behavior on the trip and remind one another about that during the trip. But little attention is given to the aspect of motivation when it comes to short-term missions, or for that matter, as it relates to cross-cultural interactions in general. ‘This component of adaptation is generally neglected or given little serious attention.’”

- “Ironically, perseverance CQ is the most important aspect of selecting people for cross-cultural work, including short-term mission work…Motivation shapes cross-cultural engagement more than anything else.”

- “…Americans typically have lower success rates adjusting to other cultures compared to many other ethnic groups. There are a number of reason for the. One of the primary contribution factors for our poor adaptation cross-culturally comes from our individualistic orientation. We’re programmed to pursue our own interests and ‘do our own thing.’ So the very idea that doing something beyond what we can see might immediately benefit us personally is counterintuitive. Furthermore, despite our espoused desire to learn from others, it’s ingrained in us as Americans that we’re the leaders of the world. With that mind-set comes a set of assumptions that make it more challenging to have a high level of motivation to truly adapt cross-culturally.”

- “…the American pastor might think eating Ghanaian food has little influence on his teaching. The research demonstrates exactly the opposite. Our level of interest in connecting with the culture as a whole will directly shape how well we do our work in subtle but profound ways.”

- “Most short-term participants have low perseverance CQ when it comes to truly engaging in the life of a culture. We have a strong desire to complete the roof project and do it well. We want to reach as many kids as possible through the vacation Bible school program we’re running, or we want to really help the pastors we’re training. Those are noble and worthy forms of motivation, but by themselves, they aren’t enough. In fact, too much interest and motivation to do our tasks well may impede our ability to actually engage with people there. We’re inclined to be so focused upon our task that we miss out on some of the more important conversations and experiences we need. As a result, many of our short-term projects are done with low level of perseverance CQ.”

- “Perseverance CQ goes beyond simply the excitement of traveling to a new place. It’s the perseverance required when the novelty wears off and the differences start to chafe at us.”

In my experience as a short-term mission participant and a long-term missionary, I can say without hesitation that perseverance CQ is the most difficult aspect of cultural intelligence. What do you do when the meeting you planned starts an hour late and runs two hours late? How do you handle yourself when your electricity and water go out and no one seems to be in a big rush to fix it? When all you want to do is go home after a long day, but a national invites you over for coffee or dinner (which you know will take hours), how do you respond? These are the questions and situations I have to work on more than any other aspect of CQ. But Livermore is so right when he says: “perseverance CQ is the most important aspect of selecting people for cross-cultural work…Motivation shapes cross-cultural engagement more than anything else.” Motivation shapes attitude. Attitude is an outpouring of the heart. And our hearts should always reflect Jesus.

Perseverance CQ is the most important component of a flexible, service-focused team, but it’s also the hardest element of CQ (especially for Americans) and perhaps the least discussed aspect of cross-cultural engagement! If a short-term team blows it in a foreign culture, a lack of perseverance CQ is probably the reason why.

So what can we do about it? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Tomorrow we’ll close out cultural intelligence with the last component of CQ: behavior.