"For us to disregard culture is to disregard the practice of being incarnational, since
being incarnational involves awareness of the culture around us."
-- Jeff W., Nazarene Bible College student
Are you a visual learner? If so, you'll like this week's reading about culture. This section of our textbook is chock full of diagrams!
Well, elegance is one idea of what "culture" means. In fact, Southern Nazarene University's motto is: "Character, Culture, Christ." The middle word of that motto does mean refinement and manners and learning (including reading lots of thick books).
However, "culture" also has a broader meaning. It's that broader meaning which carries tremendous significance for global evangelism.
In its broader terms, culture has been called by Louis Luzbetak "a socially shared design for living." It includes those learned patterns of life and the material culture that support them. Among the items in this box called culture we find verbal and non-verbal communication, food, music and the other arts, decision making processes, gender roles, use of time, making a living, transportation systems, and the ways we initiate and cultivate relationships.
"Culture," anthropologist Philip Bock has written, "is what makes you a stranger when you are far from home." [ see PowerPoint slide ]
I wanted to come up with ten distinct reasons to study culture. So far, I have five. Help me out. Add some more:
If we are to imitate Jesus in being involved in incarnational ministry, we must see culture as an important factor.
If we are to bond with the people to whom God sends us, we must "tabernacle" with them in the phraseology of John 1:14. As Doug Samples used to remind ministerial students at Southern Nazarene University: "People act in ways that makes sense to them."
One of the readings for week 2 mentioned Roland Allen and his book Missionary Methods: St. Paul's or Ours? The article writer urged us to follow Allen's urging to allow the Holy Spirit to lead the churches that we may help plant "to develop (their) own forms of polity, ministry, worship, and life." Does this mean a totally hands-off work in which anything goes?
Let's look at some practical things:
I'm not pointing out the architecture, music or social ills examples to criticize. I use them to illustrate how easy it is for the gospel message to show up in foreign garb. We don't want that to happen. We want to be communicating with people in their heart language.
It's for that reason that Hudson Taylor adopted Chinese dress and hair style (Chinese males in the 19th century wore long gowns and had their hair braided in long pig-tails). Taylor was ridiculed by westerners, including other missionaries, but the Chinese did not receive from him a gospel clothed in foreign dress.
When I talk about culture and the gospel I'm not calling for us to back away from anything we hold dear. I'm not calling for us to start sliding down a slippery slope of compromise on basic values. Instead, I'm calling for us to be engaged in calling peoples everywhere to be reconciled with Christ and to live a holy lifestyle.
Certainly, there are things in every culture that run cross-grain to gospel essentials. Cannibalism runs counter to the respect for the brotherhood of humanity to which we are called. So, we are called to be change agents in every culture. However, what we are out to do is to proclaim that one can be most authentically a Haitian or an Italian or a Chinese when one becomes reconciled to his or her Creator through Jesus Christ.
By no means. There are values in every culture which will be enhanced by the coming of Christianity. There are also things in every culture which will be condemned when the gospel message arrives. We cannot be ethnocentric (judging elements of another culture by the yardstick of our own). By the same token, there are some absolutes in culture which help us see how God's design for human beings should be lived out in every culture.
-- Howard Culbertson
"The resources we are reading are fantastic. Communicatson from the professor is very clear and thorough. I am learning things that I can implement immediately in my ministry." - - Allison White, Nazarene Bible College student
Global evangelism course
resources: Course home page
Attendance policy
Connection problems
Incomplete work Time
requirements Learning
habits
Lectures: 1. Biblical foundations
2. History 3. Culture
4. Strategy, part
I 5. Strategy, part
II 6. Nazarene
missions Time requirements
Cultural Anthropology course resources:
Cultural Bingo icebreaker
Bwanda Fusa game
Case studies
Christianity and culture
Course home page
Culture shock
Ethnocentrism and monoculturalism
Exam study guides
Iceberg and concentric circles models of culture
Light bulb illustration: What do you
see? My own
culture shock PowerPoint
presentations used in class Reading
report Reentry: Coming
home Research paper topic
suggestions
Readings
Communication
"Contextualization"
Enculturation/Acculturation
"Ethics of change"
"Mission" "Points of
view" "Responsibility"
"Value"
Harvesters needed
Are the "heathen" lost? Answers to an
oft-asked question Do you have a missions
call?