discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 102
102 How Culture Affects Mission
So, when culture fatigue or shock wells up, new missionaries should be encouraged
to hang in there, redouble efforts to learn the language, deepen relationships
with people in the target culture, and strictly ration time they spend
on instant messaging, e-mail, and blogging. People in various stages of cultural
adjustment need to know that what they are feeling is natural. Generations of
cross-cultural workers have experienced those same feelings and have gone on
to thrive in incarnational cross-cultural ministry.
If missionaries can survive the shock, they will get to the fourth stage of recovery
and adjustment. As new missionaries persevere in the bonding process,
they will begin to appreciate many of the things that are different from what
they grew up with. An embracing of new patterns of living will gradually displace
homesickness. One day a once-rookie missionary will think, “Hey, this
place no longer feels foreign to me; it’s become ‘home.’” That realization is a
sign that cultural adjustment is well underway. Some have labeled this process
of adjustment with an alliteration: fun, fight, flight, and fit with the stages culminating
when it is obvious that the expatriate finally fits into the culture. To
be sure, culture shock is not something that happens and then it is over. Cultural
adjustment can take a very long time, as Linda Louw, missionary to Senegal,
noted when she said, “I thought culture shock was something that you got
through and it was done, but it just keeps coming.”
Over the years, missionaries will get so acclimated to the new culture that
when they return home, they may experience a package of reactions and feelings
called reverse culture shock or reentry shock. Things in their mother culture
that used to seem normal are now bothersome. Once again, the missionary
feels disoriented and frustrated—only this time it is because of the way
things are in the place thought of as home. Samuel Zwemer, missionary to the
Muslim world, spoke approvingly of missionaries who had so “wedded their
hearts” to the places where they served that when they returned to their countries
of origin, they felt homesick for the mission field they served in. That feeling,
said Zwemer, was inverted homesickness. 14
As missionaries move back and forth from their home country and their
country of ministry, they sometimes get beyond the settling-in stage to being
comfortable with both ways of life. The people who are able to move from one
culture to another and be seen as insiders rather than outsiders are called bicultural.
Not all missionaries get to that point, but some will.
A Balance
In the opening of this chapter, the words of a classic hymn were quoted
and the question was asked: Is there truly no east or west in Christ? The sense
of oneness and unity proclaimed in Galatians 3 and other biblical passages