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In this sermon, Don Carson discusses strategies for enhancing understanding and effectiveness in cross-cultural contexts, particularly in the service of spreading the Gospel. He offers a series of points drawn from scriptural interpretations and personal ministry experiences, focusing on recognizing and respecting diverse cultural backgrounds and characteristics. He emphasizes the need for Christians to adapt their communication of the Gospel to align with different cultural understandings and values.
I have been asked to address the question.… How should we increase cross-cultural awareness? Of course, the framework in which I am asking that question is not so that we might become better world citizens, though that has some value I am sure, but so that we might become more faithful and effective witnesses to the gospel of Christ. Instead of basing myself on one passage I am going to be referring to a number of passages and thinking topically about the subject. Let me offer five points. They’re of unequal time allotment, so don’t panic if one of them gets very long.
1. Reflect deeply on several factors in the Bible.
Some of them are light but interesting when you think about them.
A) There are national characteristics that are bound up with a strange mix of culture, race, heritage, religion, belief system, economic system, form of government, and so on.
: “One of Crete’s own prophets has said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons.’ He has surely told the truth.” Let us be quite frank, this is not the most politically correct thing the apostle ever wrote.
We all know these things exist; it’s just that we’re not allowed to say them anymore because we’re politically correct. If we do acknowledge them, then we have to praise all of the divergences as if they’re all exactly equal, as if.… We really have to say Pol Pot’s regime and culture was exactly equal to the culture of Australia today in the twenty-first century? One of them was considerably more murderous than the other, managing to wipe out one-third of the population of Cambodia. As far as I know, Australians have never managed anything quite the equivalent.
There are some cultural differences, so even if our own political correctness means we cannot be too direct, we ought to be honest enough to recognize some of those kinds of differences and reflect on them. It’s part of integrity and analysis to realize people are not all the same. They are different with different sensibilities, and winning them for Christ’s sake means understanding these things at a pretty deep level and coping with them.
B) Then you can reflect on the fact that there are four gospels.
It’s such a small point, but as far as I can see, the reason why John wrote John when Matthew, Mark, and Luke were already circulating, thank you, was not because he was trying to correct them, not because he was saying, “They really are quite inadequate; I’ll show them how it’s done properly.” Rather, he has a certain kind of goal.
As far as I can see, the primary goal of John’s gospel is to win Jews and Jewish proselytes to the Messiah in the Diaspora, and because of that, he shapes so many of his arguments a certain kind of way. That’s reflecting a certain kind of cultural sensitivity, but perhaps the most striking thing to observe in the Scripture is …
C) The difference between what Paul says in Acts, chapter 13, in the longest recorded sermon in the book of Acts, and what he says in Acts, chapter 17.
In Act, chapter 13, the apostle finds himself in Pisidian Antioch, and there he preaches. He does so in line with a pretty common mode of Jewish preaching.
You can find it in the Old Testament a thousand years before Christ. You can find it in some of the psalms (we call them historical psalms), where what the preacher does is survey something of the history of Israel but does so in such a way as to make certain points. You can tell a history in a way that skews it toward a certain kind of application. does that, for example.
Stephen does the same thing in Acts, chapter 7. He relates the history of Israel in such a way that he shows how often the people rejected the prophets who came along. So it shouldn’t be all that surprising if, when the Messiah comes along, they reject him too. In that sense, there’s already an assumption in the Old Testament that when the Messiah comes, there will be rejection. Why should that surprise us?
There were so many first-century Jews who found it hard to believe the Messiah would be crucified, but Stephen’s speech is saying, “Look at the pattern of history.” The pattern of history suggests that far from surprising us, this is merely the fulfillment, but that is by working through Jewish history and spinning it in a certain kind of way.
Part of that is what Paul does in Acts, chapter 13. Above all, he does not have to prove to these people (because they are Jews in a synagogue, Jewish proselytes, or at least pagan God-fearers) that there’s only one God. He doesn’t have to talk about creation; that’s common ground. He doesn’t have to talk about the nature of what’s wrong with the world; that’s common ground. He doesn’t have to talk about salvation consisting in being right with God and everything that flows from it; that’s common ground.
Of course, none of those things are common ground if you’re dealing, let’s say, with a Buddhist or a Hindu. Not one of them. Not the oneness of God, not creation, not the nature of human beings, not what’s wrong with the world. None of those things is common ground. So as a result in , because of massive areas of common ground, Paul focuses almost all of his attention on demonstrating from the Scriptures that the Old Testament promised Messiah was also the one who would have to be crucified and die and rise again. That was the biggest point of dispute, of difference.
By contrast, when he comes to Acts, chapter 17, he’s dealing with complete biblical illiterates. When I do university missions today, things I’ve been doing now for more than 35 years.… The world has changed, I observe. If I were dealing with an atheist on a North American campus 35 years ago, he or she was a Christian atheist. That is to say, the God in whom he or she disbelieved was the Christian God, which is another way of saying all the categories were still on my turf.
I can’t assume that today. I’m dealing with people where, if you show them a Bible, you have to explain the big numbers and the little numbers. They don’t know anything about chapters and verses. What they mean by God, spirit, faith, even the most common God words, in every case is different from what I mean.
So those of us who have been Christians for a long time and who are a little bit reticent about sharing our faith, but every once in a while we screw up our courage and we talk to somebody in a shop.… We share something about our faith, and after about four sentences each, you suddenly realize you’re like ships passing in the night with absolutely no signal going between. You’re not even on the same planet. Then it’s easy to begin to think, “What’s the point? I mean, I don’t even know where to start with these people.” Am I the only one who has ever had that experience?
Indeed, there’s a particular danger of feeling like that if you’re freshly out of Bible college, because you’re just steeped in theology. You know about propitiation and Melchizedek. You know about the Great High Priest, and you know about eschatology and a lot of other big words. You can discuss quite powerfully whether the 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes are to be identified with the great multitudes whom no one could number or really are a separate group within that. You can argue about it all.
Then you come to somebody, and you try to make things really simple because that’s what you do in evangelism. You say, “Would you like to have the abundant life?”
“Well, yes. That sounds pretty cool. What do you mean? More sex? A better income? A sense of fulfillment? If your religion can give me the abundant life, that’s pretty nice.”
“Well, no, that’s not exactly what I meant. Jesus promises the abundant life. You see, it’s right here in John, chapter 10.” You read . It’s talking about sheep. For a sheep abundant life means a lot of grass. Are you going to tell the university students what they need is a lot of grass? You realize at every level you’re just missing.
Paul understands that. By the time Paul finds himself in Athens, he’s been church planting for at least 15 years in the pagan areas in Cilicia, around Tarsus and the like. Tarsus was the third greatest intellectual city of the ancient world. So he had worked with hoi polloi, but he had also worked with intellectuals. He had had all of these experiences for quite a long time. Then he had served in the cross-cultural church of Antioch. Then he had done some church planting beyond that. He’s had a lot of experience by the time he gets to Athens.
So we find that in verses 16 and following of , on the one hand, he reasons in the synagogue with Jews and God-fearers (Now he’s going to sound like ) but also in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there, with Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.
Now when you hear the word philosopher today, I guarantee you almost invariably think of an obscure department in our bigger universities where they argue endlessly about very little in order to prove how little we can know about anything. That’s philosophy, but what is meant by philosophy in the ancient world is something like worldview formation.
Philosophers in the ancient world were public lecturers who went from place to place; there was no university system. They argued in market places and in rented halls and tried to give a framework for living. They tried to teach you how to live out of a certain way of looking at creation, the world, the universe, and so on. So when Paul started preaching in the marketplace, he sounded like one of the philosophers around, teaching people how to live in certain kind of way, looking at the universe in a certain kind of way.
Some, listening to him, could make so little sense of what he was saying that they asked, “ ‘What is this babbler trying to say?’ Others remarked, ‘He seems to be advocating foreign gods.’ ” You can hear them talking down their long, self-righteous, nationalistic, culturally-obsessed noses. “They said this because Paul was preaching the gospel. He was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.”
Eventually, he’s hauled aside to the Areopagus. After all, “All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.” Sounds like the senior common room of every university I’ve ever participated in. Then Paul begins his address …
“People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.” There’s no way I’d say that today, absolutely no way, because being religious is not a complement. The equivalent today would be something like this: “People of Melbourne, I see that in many, many ways you are very spiritual.” There would be some rabid philosophical materialists who would be insulted, but most would think that was a pretty interesting complement, actually. “Yes, yes. I have my crystals; I am quite a spiritual person, you know.”
It’s one of those positive words with absolutely no content whatsoever, and Paul understands that about the word religious, because after a while, he is going to undermine the complement. He starts off with as much common ground as he can. The evidence for their spirituality that he adduces is this: “As I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship …” He won’t even call them gods. “… I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.”
Now think about that. At the surface level, it’s very easy to see what’s going on. In a polytheistic world, that is, a world where there are many gods, none of the gods is over everything. They have gods for different domains. Hindus have millions of gods; the ancient Greeks had thousands.
So you want to make a sea voyage, you offer something to Neptune, the god of the sea. If you’re going to offer a speech, then you might offer something to Hermes or, in the Latin world, the corresponding god is Mercury, the god of communication. None of these gods control all the domains. You want the god in the particular domain you’re interested in to offer up some blessing to you, so you offer up some sacrifice to him or her.
These gods all have their needs. They have their fears, their phobias, their loves, their lusts, their joys, their sorrows, their likes, their dislikes; they’re finite. None of them can claim you absolutely, not one of them. Not one of them. That means there might be some god out there who you don’t know about; if there are already thousands of them, you can’t keep track of them. There might be some god out there who is feeling a bit insulted because no one has actually offered a decent sacrifice to him or her recently.
So somebody has erected an altar to the unknown god just in case, which shows it’s a religion of fear. It’s a religion of split domains, but Paul sees that it’s also a way of showing their profound ignorance. You see, he’s thought about what it means, and he says, “So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship, and this is what I’m going to proclaim to you.” Then he begins. “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.”
You can read the Areopagus address in under two minutes, but Areopagus addresses were known to go on for hours. How long Paul was given before he was cut off, I have no idea, but you should take each of these sentences as a point. This is merely a summary. So each of these points, he would have unpacked and expanded at some length. If you know the writings of Paul well and how he alludes to the Old Testament, you can guess pretty closely how he would’ve expanded them too.
What does he establish? There is one God who’s Creator of all and providential sovereign over all things. That is a major clash with the worldview. In other words, he understands the worldview. He shows a certain kind of sympathy, but he understands what in the pagan worldview has to be changed to make sense of Jesus, what has to be challenged in order to make sense of the good news. He has got to establish a different way of looking at reality. You cannot make sense of Jesus until you have the Old Testament heritage way of looking at reality.
He says, “This God is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything.” That was one of the features of the pagan gods. They’re finite, and they have their needs. So inevitably, religion consists in a kind of tit-for-tat mentality. You scratch my back; I scratch your back. The gods have their needs. They get their sacrifices. They get their worship. The priests get to skim off the top. Meanwhile, they give me a fat baby, a new cow, a safe sea voyage, or whatever it is I want. Maybe a happy speech, but religion thus is tit for tat.
Now supposing you’re dealing with a God who has no needs. The Puritans had a word for this. We’ve lost it in the English language today; we need to bring it back. They said this is the God of aseity. He’s the God of aseity, from the Latin a se, which means from himself. That is, this God is so much from himself, so not only self-existent but so much satisfied with himself, bound up entirely in himself, that he does not have any needs from the external world.
In eternity past before there was anything else, God was entirely content. He’s the God of aseity. He doesn’t need us. We’re not supposed to think of God about Thursday afternoon saying, “Man it’s been a while since I heard some praise choruses. I can hardly wait till Sunday. I need to be worshipped.” God was entirely happy. He certainly doesn’t need your guitars. He doesn’t even need an organ. He doesn’t need any of it. He doesn’t need me. He doesn’t need you.
Now this does not mean he’s impersonal and doesn’t interact with us. It doesn’t mean any of that. He does interact, but he does not interact with us out of some personal deficit. It’s not as if we add something to him that he does not have. Of course he interacts with us; he’s a personal God as well as a sovereign God, but he’s not a God who’s finite with whom you can barter because he has needs. You’ve got nothing to barter with. All that you have is already his. That means if he gives you anything, it’s out of grace.
There are entailments to monotheism. There are entailments to sovereign providence. You can’t even begin to make sense of Jesus until you get monotheism, creation, the sovereign God in providence in place in a person’s thinking. You can’t make sense of Jesus without those things in place.
“He is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything.” In fact, it works the other way. Paul says, “He himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.” We’re indebted to him constantly. As Jesus himself taught, not a sparrow falls from the heavens apart from the divine sanction. Every breath you breathe, every heartbeat, every single one of them, is by his sanction, and if he says, “Stop,” it stops. You’ve got nothing to barter with him.
So there’s the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of providence. Then he says, “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth.” Many of the pagan religious philosophies had quite different creation myths with different identifications for different people groups; whereas, Paul insists that the whole human race came from one created being, from one created order: “From one man he made all nations.” No hint of racism there. None.
“He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.” That is, he is not simply a tribal deity, just belonging to the Israelites, just belonging to the Greeks, just belonging to the Romans, or just belonging to the Persians. No, he’s sovereign over the whole lot. “God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him.” Now is the first hint that something is wrong, that they’re alienated. Up to now he hasn’t even talked about their alienation or what’s wrong with the universe.
He sovereignly orders things in the hope, in the purpose, that some will reach out to him, even though “he is not far from any one of us.” That is, this God who is so transcendent, beyond space and time, not needing us, is also immanent, if you’re going to use Christian words. That is, he’s close to us. You can’t escape from him.
That’s the sort of thing the psalmist David would say, “How shall I flee from your presence? If I flee to the wings of the dawn, you’re already there. If I descend to sheol, the abodes of death, you’re there too. I can’t escape from you. You might be transcendent and above space and time, but you’re actually inescapable.” That’s the kind of God we’re talking about. Paul says, “In fact, sometimes your own poets just about see this. Your own prophets, your own muses, just about get this one right. As some of your own have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ ”
Then he introduces what’s wrong: “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill.” He deals with idolatry. He doesn’t introduce law as the fundamental category that human beings have broken down; he introduces idolatry. Idolatry is the de-Godding of God. Idolatry is what happens when we put anything in place of God as that which is paramount in our lives.
That’s why covetousness is idolatry, the apostle elsewhere says, because what you want the most becomes, for you, God. Before you have the Mosaic code with all the laws that you might transgress, there is still idolatry: people alienated from him, wanting to be God instead. Even in the garden of Eden, that’s a big part of it, isn’t it? God says no, and Eve, followed by Adam, sees that “this fruit is good and able to make you wise like God, knowing good and evil” instead of accepting what God says is good and evil; he was all-wise. Now we’re going to establish our own good and evil, which is de-Godding God. That’s idolatry.
So we cut ourselves off from him who alone has life. We spit in his face and sing with Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way,” and fail to see just how ugly this looks to God. Not only stupid but ugly, heinous, insulting. Not only ridiculous but revolting. If he were some far-off being, a deist sort of being, he couldn’t care less, but that wouldn’t make him a very admirable god. He would just be a long-distance god. That’s all. But the God of the Bible cares passionately for his own integrity, for truth, for justice, and for what is good for us.
What is good for us is not everyone manufacturing his or her own gods. All that does is build fences, create wars, guarantee rape, increase greed, and multiply pride. All because we say deep down, “I will be god.” So he not only introduces the nature of sin, cast now not in terms of breaking law but in terms of idolatry, he also introduces a philosophy of history.
That is, there are many, many world religions where time doesn’t go in a straight line, where history has no meaning based on a telos, on an end. It’s not that history’s meaning is found in the end, but rather history goes around in cycles. As it goes around in cycles, you jump on or jump off; that’s called reincarnation. As you jump on again, you cycle up or cycle down. It spins around for another cycle, and you go up or you go down. That’s the way you are to think of history.
That’s not the way the Bible thinks of history. There’s a beginning, a fall, crucial turning points along the line, and finally, there’s an end. So Paul has to establish that too. You can’t make sense of Jesus in the world of reincarnation. You can’t make sense of him at all. It doesn’t make sense at all.
“In the past God overlooked such ignorance.” He talked earlier about creation way back when, then some kind of fall where there’s idolatry everywhere and God overlooking a great deal of it with patience and forbearance, but now, at a certain crucial point in history, he commands all people everywhere to repent in anticipation of what is still to come in the future. “For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice.”
Only then does he introduce Jesus. “He will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” If Paul hadn’t been interrupted, you can guess with certainty where he would have gone from here. He would’ve worked back from the resurrection to the death of Jesus.
After all, in the marketplace with pagans, he was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection, the gospel, which is bound up with Jesus’ death and resurrection, life that comes from him, forgiveness of sins. That’s what he was preaching. You know where he was going with this, but he set a frame of reference in which, alone, the gospel makes sense. Without that frame of reference, talking about Jesus just doesn’t make sense.
Now this is not the only way to get there. There are lots of ways of getting there. You could begin with Jesus going about doing good, and as you describe what he’s doing you eventually talk about his death and what this means, then you work out from there to establish the frame of reference in which you talk meaningfully about his death. You could do it that way. You don’t have to start this way, but you have to get these pieces in place or people don’t hear what the gospel really is.
The words they will hear, but all of their meaning will get slotted into different cubbyholes because their frame of reference is so very different. Otherwise put, Paul understands enough of the pagan culture and the pagan world to adapt his preaching from what he says in a synagogue where everybody has a lot of common shared ground with him.… He adapts his preaching enough that he knows what has to be in place before he explains the gospel fully and richly, if that gospel is to be understood.
He will not flinch from that which is non-negotiable to the gospel. He does not say, “Of course, they’re pagans; they’re not going to like this too much, so I’ll soft tone what I say about God.” No, he’s not going to do that. He knows what is non-negotiable. He could have said, “God has given proof of this to everyone by making one man, Jesus Christ, immortal.” He could’ve said that, and he wouldn’t have shut down the address, because Greeks believed in immortality.
They would’ve assumed by immortal, not an immortal resurrection body but an immortal spirit being. They had categories for immorality. Immortality was good, but it wouldn’t have been the gospel. Many Greeks, not all, but many Greeks thought matter was intrinsically bad and spirit was intrinsically good.
If you got to the place where you shucked off your body and now you’re made immortal, that’s pretty good, but the notion of resurrection, coming back from the dead with a body, is almost a contradiction in terms. It’s an oxymoron. That just cannot be. It doesn’t make any sense at all, but Paul knows that he can’t duck that one, even if he gets a lot of stick for it.
“He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” In other words, sensitivity to cultural variations does not mean we cave into them all. It means we understand them well enough that we know what we have to say, what we have to contradict, what we have to put in place to make the gospel coherent and clear, and how to do it with minimum offense, but at the end of the day, there’s an offence in the gospel itself.
With this experience, it’s not as if Paul has put in a false step. He’s been in this business by this point for 25 years. He’s been beaten. He’s suffered shipwreck. He’s been tormented. He’s been beaten with rods and beaten in Jewish synagogues as well. He’s a mature man. He’s not some character who has just come out of a couple of years of Bible college and is still trying to figure out which way to present the gospel to people. He’s thought it all through, and he knows some things are non-negotiable. He knows he might get shut down because of it, and he preaches Jesus and the resurrection.
What happens? “When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject.’ At that, Paul left the Council. Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed.” This does not mean they were converted on the spot. It means they became followers of Paul. They became disciples of Paul. They were intrigued enough by what he was saying that they listened to him again and again. They became followers of Paul, and in consequence, they believed.
When I was a young man doing university missions, if people got converted, they tended to get converted during the mission. Nowadays, it’s very common in a university mission for nobody to get converted but for quite a number of people to sign up for ongoing Bible studies. Then they get converted over the next six to ten weeks.
I’ll get an email from whoever is in charge of the Bible study: “Remember that Chinese lass? She asked a whole lot of questions on the third night, the fourth night, and the fifth night. She’s become a Christian.” In other words, they became followers of Don and believed. That’s the way it works.
I’m not denying for a moment that God can save anybody from any background in 15 minutes if he chooses to; nevertheless, God is normally a God of means. The reality is when you’re dealing with people with so little understanding of the Bible’s storyline and the pieces all together, then it usually takes a little time for these pieces to come together to make sense of a coherent presentation of Jesus, our Savior.
Reflect deeply on several features in the Bible; I’ve merely listed a few. One could list a whole lot more of them, but when you read these things, think about them deeply and understand what kind of cultural diversity and sensitivities there were already in the first century, with people working these things through, struggling through them to know how to present the gospel fairly as the gospel moved out from the enclave of Jerusalem.
2. Get to know different kinds of people.
Different races, different religions. What different religions they will be will depend on what suburb of Melbourne you’re in, but don’t hesitate to make friends of Muslims, Hindus, atheists, Baptists, or whatever. In other words, the differences should be of race, culture, religion, economic background. You can’t do it all, but in your patch, you can do something.
It is so easy in a church, even in a white suburban church, for you to make friends only of the people who are most like you. Where is the obligation to make some friends with people least like you in the congregation? Then you extend that in your witness to making friends of people who are different from you. We’re back to , “So that by all means, we might win some.” By “get to know people,” I mean in coffee shops, in your home, in a meal. Don’t put on a show. By all means, be yourself, but get to know them.
Trinity, where I teach, has quite a lot of international students. About 27 percent of our students are international. It’s a fairly large school, so we have seen a lot of these students in our home over the years. Most Thanksgiving dinners, which is a big thing in the US, we have 25 to 30 international students around our table. Often we have barbeques where we bring in students from all kinds of backgrounds. Let me tell you, some of the most moving things our kids ever saw growing up were our international students.
I remember a Vietnamese chap who was quietly working away on his PhD in New Testament. He had told me his story in my office, but as we sat around the table together, extended tables everywhere to allow for all the people, he told how he escaped from Vietnam. His father had worked with the Americans. So, of course, he was immediately arrested when the Americans fled. He faced various beatings and torture and was in jail for years and years.
He finally managed to escape and took his family (including this young man who was by that time only 11 or 12; he had been a baby when the father had gone into jail), his wife, this son, and one other boy, and managed to escape with a bunch of others on a fishing smack. They were set upon by pirates. Everything they had was taken. Some of the women were gang-raped. They sailed on. The compass was broken. They got lost. A typhoon came. The captain told them they weren’t going to make it.
The boy’s father, who protested no religion at this point, stood up on deck and screamed heavenward, “God, I defy you. If you exist, save us in this mess. If not, I defy you. Damn you.” The captain said, “I don’t know where we are, but the sound of the wind has changed.” He began to take soundings. They came up to an island he didn’t know was there because they were hundreds of miles off course. They were saved.
Some months later in LA, the father became a Christian. The boy told of his conversion in his later years where he was working through Communism, Asian religion, Western materialism, and Christian claims, thinking them all through. Here he is another 15 years on, trying to do a PhD in New Testament studies so he can write and prepare materials for his brothers and sisters in the flesh, his fellow Vietnamese. Talk about angels unawares.
For 10 years I worked part-time with the World Evangelical Fellowship. My job was to bring people together from the different continents, all of whom had a high view of Scripture, all of whom had evangelical commitments and a fair bit of theological training, to work on various projects together.
I was always in the chair; I always convened these things. I assigned papers in advance; they brought them together. We met somewhere (usually in England), and we worked through one another’s papers. Eventually they were edited down and became a book. We did this five times and produced five books, each one with a two-year cycle.
Let me tell you, just watching these people come into a room.… In comes the Indian, bowing. In comes the Japanese, bowing down with hands at the side, but how far you bow down depends on who’s older, who’s got more money, who’s got more education, who’s got more clout, and so on. I never remember all the rules. Just bow! Then in comes the Arab Christian. Three kisses, usually. I never remember which cheek to begin on, which can get quite embarrassing when you get close! In come the Latins with the bear hugs, the “Brother!” and cheek kisses.
Then I remember when Pablo Perez from Mexico, all 300 pounds of him, was descending on one interesting little Englishman (whose name I dare not tell you; some of you will recognize it) standing there off to one side with his hands behind his back in his immaculate tweed coat. As Pablo descended on him, about to give him a bear of an embrace, the Englishman looked up and said, “Have we been introduced?” That’s before the meeting gets started.
The meeting gets started, and some of the northern European types, they’re really into it. There’s a brother from Norway saying, “Oh no, that’s not what it says. Clearly what the text means is such and such. I mean, after all, anybody can see that the Greeks had such and such.” I’m always in the chair. Eventually I turned to the brother from Japan and said, “I haven’t heard from you yet. What do you think about this matter?”
He bowed with due deference, and he said, “Is it possible that the apostle Paul might conceivably have been suggesting perhaps that such and such,” because you see in that culture, no one must lose face. You don’t want to do anything to make anybody embarrassed and lose face. So the Norwegian brother weighs in, “That’s ridiculous! That’s not what it means at all. Clearly what it means is such and such.” The Japanese brother has been terrorized by this and wonders what sort of group of barbarians he has fallen into. That’s just at the surface level. Wait till it’s time to eat!
If you’re a German, you’re not supposed to cut your potatoes with a knife; that’s insulting the cook. You do it with a fork! There’s the Brit, sniffing. Culture! We’re supposed to love one another? Give me a break. I go to many countries in Asia, and there they’re all eating with their mouth open, talking with food in their mouth. My mummy told me not to do that! Then a glorious belch, which is a way of giving praise to the cook. I’m not supposed to do that either!
It’s all right; what they think of me is something else again. All the rude things I do in Chinese culture. I’m probably unaware of most of them. You don’t actually get to know people unless you eat with them, unless you talk with them, unless you argue with them, unless you have them under your roof, unless you become friends with them. You just don’t. That’s the matrix in which you actually learn how to increase cross-cultural awareness.
By cross-cultural awareness, I don’t just mean difference. You can do that by driving through Sydney. That doesn’t take much work. Then you come back, and you drive through Melbourne. Then you go to Darwin, and you drive through Darwin. Then you go to Perth, and you drive through Perth. All the big cities. You can increase cultural awareness by just looking around your neighborhood.
To increase cultural awareness in a Christian way, such that you really do begin to understand and see what is needed if you are to communicate the gospel of Christ, that takes time, patience, love, shared meals, foot in it, while you say stupid things and then have to apologize because you don’t even know that you’re saying something stupid. It takes laughing at your mistakes, being discerning and reflective in those friendships so that you see differences in eating habits and sense of humor.
It even takes learning to be careful about being too critical or too romantically appreciative of other cultures. There are some people who move to England, and they become more English than the English. They move to Shanghai, and they try to become more Chinese than the Chinese. Every strength in a culture is associated with a corresponding weakness.
There are hundreds of books written every decade in the West about the stupidity of North American and Western (generally) individualism. There are lots and lots of books where all the pundits are criticizing individualism saying we need more communitarianism. I’m sure you’ve read some of them. I could give you a long list.
Let me tell you, after you’ve spent a bit of time in Japan where the communitarian lock is so commendable in some ways, in terms of honor for parents, respect for older people, and that sort of thing. Wonderful things. You also see the difficulty there is for a young Japanese woman or a young Japanese man to break out of the lock to become a Christian when the parents are Shinto. You begin to think, “There might be some advantages to individualism here and there.”
At Trinity, where I teach of course, as here I am sure, students are expected to get involved in local churches and be involved in what we call internships. One of the things we started in the last two years.… We’re still working about whether it’s a good idea or not. Although we want most internships to be prolonged for students to muck in and really get involved in a local church, we’ve now started pulling them out for at least one semester, and ideally two, and putting them in churches where they are not comfortable. That’s now policy.
They have to do at least one semester, and ideally two, in churches where they don’t belong. Metropolitan Chicago has about 12 million people, so there’s a lot of choice. So if you come from an all-white suburb, you’re going to spend some time in a black church. If you come from an all-black suburb you’re going to spend some time in a white church. If you come from a wealthy suburb you’re going to spend some time in a poor church.
At the end of the day, the drift in our cities is toward mixing it up. Christians must be on the front edge of that, not producing little safe communities that are one tone, but where people love each other not because they’re all the same but because of Jesus. In that matrix, more people get converted.
3. Read history, historical theological, mission history.
Most of us can’t live in a lot of different places or spend a lot of time there, where we can absorb different cultures and so on. We can’t increase cultural sensitivity and awareness by that means. On the other hand, if you read wisely (you don’t have to read a lot of it; just read wisely in this area or that area), then you begin to see what the world looked like through the eyes of missionaries first going to Pongo-Pongo or Vanuatu or wherever. Read critical histories. What kinds of cross-cultural barriers do Koreans face when they serve in Africa? That’s just very interesting.
4. Set out intentionally to evangelize.
We come back to what I said earlier about beginning to share your faith. You’re passing like ships in the night, and you wonder if you’re on the same planet and so on. If you really are committed to evangelism, then you keep trying. You keep trying; you keep talking. Then you start talking to somebody who does it with this particular people group better than you do.
Then you pick up a book, maybe a light one to begin with like Tony Payne’s book, Islam in Our Backyard. It just exposes you to a few things you didn’t know about. Then you talk to others who have had a little more experience in this regard, and there’s a certain amount of storytelling back and forth. You try a few things, and you listen a little more.
Then actually you begin to read some of the Qur’an. As you read the Qur’an, you begin to raise some questions. What do Muslims think about Jesus? They confess that Jesus is the Word of God. What could I do with that? And so on. If you are committed to evangelism, more than just sort of a passing comment but you are actually committed to seeking people out, then love finds a way.
5. Ask God to teach you this.
Now he’s not going to do so by dumping a whole lot of data from a hard drive into your brain. If God answers this prayer you have to learn more about cross-cultural communication.… I’ll tell you how he’s going to answer your prayer. He’s going to put you in wonderfully challenging and difficult situations with cross-cultural pressures from all sides. That’s what he’s going to do. If you’re serious about that, ask that the Lord will give this to you. Work at it.
Ask the Lord to teach you by this means, and you will increase in your cross-cultural understanding and begin to think through how to get the gospel across to people who are different from you and me but equally needy, equally image-bearers of the living God, equally sinners, equally in need of grace, equally with all the potential for resurrection existence in the new heaven and the new earth, equally desperate for a Savior, though they know him not. You and I will learn. Let us pray.
In our most sober moments, heavenly Father, we sometimes cannot help but wonder if the astonishing mix of races, languages, and cultures in major cities all over the world is not part of your gracious provision for sharing the gospel cross-culturally, having this forced upon us. When we’re unlikely to go, everybody else comes. Help us not to flee these things in fear. Open our eyes to the fields that are white unto harvest.
Make us bold in small things, faithful in small things. Expand our grasp of the gospel itself and of the understandings, misunderstandings, and blindnesses of those around us. Above all, we pray, give us a heart, a heart of Christ refracted through the apostle, who was willing to become all things to all people so that by all means he might win some. For Jesus’s sake, amen.
