I remember a day five years ago that I sat in my apartment. Picking my kids up from school that day was all about the mind game.
Because what I longed for? Anonymity. To blend in. To slip unnoticed through the crowd.
Category: cultural sensitivity
Just Different? Right, Wrong, and Flexibility in Crossing Cultures
Cultural Iceberg: Collectivist vs. Individualistic Societies
Reading Time: 8 minutes
We’re excited to welcome back Sheri of Engineering Ministries International for her final post of her invaluable three-part series on “cultural icebergs”–this time, evaluating collectivist vs. individualist societies.
EMI mobilizes architects, engineers, construction managers, and other design professionals–including those through an incredible internship program–to provide design services for those helping the poor. We’re talking water projects, hospitals, schools, orphanages, you name it. Meanwhile, they raise up disciples and trained professionals in-country.
The Cultural Iceberg: What You Need to Know about Cross-cultural Communication
Reading Time: 7 minutes
We’re excited to welcome back Sheri of Engineering Ministries International. EMI mobilizes architects, engineers, construction managers, and other design professionals–including those through an incredible internship program–to provide design services for those helping the poor. We’re talking water projects, hospitals, schools, orphanages, you name it. Meanwhile, they raise up disciples and trained professionals in-country.
Sheri applies these cross-cultural points poignantly to the elements of designing cross-culturally–but we believe you’ll find inescapable parallels to any cross-cultural work. Hopefully it will help jumpstart real solutions for cross-cultural sensitivities, and help any culture manifest Jesus Christ according to its own cultural icebergs.
What Lies Beneath: Recognizing Cultural “Icebergs”
Reading Time: 6 minutes
We’re excited to welcome Sheri of Engineering Ministries International. EMI mobilizes architects, engineers, construction managers, and other design professionals–including those through an incredible internship program–to provide design services for those helping the poor. We’re talking water projects, hospitals, schools, orphanages, you name it. Meanwhile, they raise up disciples and trained professionals in-country.
Sheri applies these cross-cultural points poignantly to the elements of designing cross-culturally–but we believe you’ll find inescapable parallels to any cross-cultural work. Hopefully it will help jumpstart real solutions for cross-cultural sensitivities, and help any culture manifest Jesus Christ according to its own cultural icebergs.
Thoughts on a Friday: The DNA We Share
Reading Time: < 1 minute
This morning I walked into a hotel lobby. Two tables were set up on opposite sides of the walkway. The empty chairs at one table huddled beneath CNN’s scrolling feed. The empty chairs at the other clustered around FOX News.
I thought, This is a picture of America.
These are stratifying, polarizing times. And as you consider going overseas, it becomes imperative that you become aware of your own biases and angles. (Your host country, the further you immerse, will help you.) Your host country will have them as well. And perhaps you, too, will absorb a lesson we seem to learn over and over again interacting with other cultures and at times, blatant racism:
Entering into a Cultural “Marriage”: Do I Need to Like the People I Serve?
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Photo credit: Imb.org
Question. How important is it to be physically attracted to the person you want to marry?
Obviously a person can be attracted to other qualities about a person. But then there’s the Song of Solomon, where a husband and wife are exclaiming over the beauty the see in each other’s bodies.
Best Posts of 2018
Does Evangelism = Superiority?
Reading Time: 5 minutes
You’ve probably had that moment–the one I’ll call The Freeze.
Someone’s talking about something incredibly difficult in his or her life. Your heart is caught up in compassion. And you can see that knowing Christ–walking with him, being gradually healed by him–would make the difference not only in their now, but indefinitely.
John Chau & Missions Martyrdom: What have we learned?
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I confess I was finishing up my Christmas list in a perfect fashion for a busy mom in a little mountain town: online only on Black Friday, while my kids shouted around the house. But when I went to check my email account, it was a headline that caused my heart to fall: A 26-year-old missionary from Vancouver, Washington, John Allen Chau, killed by bow and arrow on India’s Andaman islands in the Bay of Bengal.
“I hollered, ‘My name is John, I love you and Jesus loves you’…You guys might think I’m crazy and all this, but I think it is worth it to declare Jesus to these people,” Chau wrote in his journal of his previous attempts, the UK Mirror and ABC News report. In one of his first attempts, one of the native children shot at Mr. Chau’s heart. The arrow skewered his waterproof Bible there instead.