Crossing Cultures (Series 1)

SYNOPSIS OF MODULES

1. Cultural Intelligence (CQ)

A beginning point of understanding your cross-cultural journey is realizing that you don’t know what you don’t know. Centered around David Livermore’s book, Cultural Intelligence: Improving Your CQ To Engage Our Multicultural World, we will explore how you see your home culture in relation to the one you are about to engage. In this lesson you will test and analyze your own CQ, begin to memorize 12 phrases to help you better adapt as you experience everyday encounters as well as an introduction to some tools to aid in decoding your new environment. The goal of this lesson is to help you fall in love with the people you’re about to call your neighbors and how that attitude will set the stage for your transition into a new paradigm of ministry.

2. Handling Conflict in Cross-Cultural Situations

This module addresses how we can handle conflict better, particularly in multicultural team contexts. We cover the basics of conflict resolution as well as the cultural factors that can lead to misunderstanding and pressure points in the relationship. Healthy team relationships and partnerships are critical to our long-term effectiveness on the field, and the ability to handle disagreements and conflict situations is an important ministry skill.

3. Contexualization

The Gospel message was proclaimed in the cultural environment of the first century Palestine, deeply rooted in the Jewish history and traditions, soon to be communicated to the Greco-Roman world. We are now carrying it to yet another culture. How can we be sure the Gospel we preach is culturally unbiased? How can believers of our ministry field express their faith without appearing “foreign”? Contextualization deals with these issues in such a way that the unchangeable truths should be planted in the target culture, aiming at relevancy to it, seeking its sanctification, avoiding syncretism. This course provides the students with tools and a few theoretical frames by which they would be able to grapple with these issues for life-long ministry.

4. Honor and Shame

A blind spot of most missionaries when they are presenting the gospel to a collective culture that notably gravitates towards face and filial piety.  Without a clear understanding of H/S culture, it can cause misunderstanding and miscommunication and therefore resulting in  an unsuccessful gospel presentation.  This course is suitable for those wanting to reframe the gospel in a suitable and appropriate medium so that the recipient clearly understands without cultural barriers.