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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
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 103 must be balanced with the unity-in-diversity that John describes of people from every “nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9). Questions for Reflection 1. How would you define culture? What are some examples you would use to illustrate that definition? 2. Contrast external and internal levels of culture. In what way can external things of a culture be considered only the tip of the iceberg? 3. What is ethnocentrism? Why is it so difficult for people to recognize their own ethnocentrism? 4. Why can it be said that a missionary is sent to learn as well as to teach? 5. What is the difference between form and function or meaning? 6. What cultural universals are present in every culture on planet earth? 7. Why do many anthropologists say that race is a faulty concept? How Culture Affects Mission 103 8. Are there times you might have experienced something akin to culture shock? What things helped alleviate such shock or could do so in the future? 9. Why should missionaries try to move on beyond settling in to becoming bicultural?
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discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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