Training for Cross-Cultural Skills: Preparing for Overseas Missions Part 3

Editor’s Note: You can read Part 1 of this series here and Part 2 here.

I could probably write a book about all of the cross-cultural mistakes I’ve made–everything from standing on top of a holy site to take a better picture to getting our electric trike stolen because I parked it in the wrong place. I’ve been cheated, tricked, and nearly had my passport stolen, all due to a lack of understanding about what was going on around me. 

Entering into a new culture is like walking blindfolded through an obstacle course while someone shouts a flurry of unintelligible syllables in your ear to guide you. The rules are not the same, expectations are not the same, and the way you’ve always done things is no longer sufficient to help you successfully navigate the world around you.

How do you prepare to operate cross-culturally? How do you begin to remove the blindfold from your eyes so you can enjoy the challenge of the obstacle course in front of you? And more importantly, how do you share the life-changing knowledge of the hope of Jesus Christ with a culture that may not have even heard the name of Jesus?

The Scaffolding of Cross-Cultural Skills

In order to do this, you have to build a scaffolding on which you will learn and hang these cross-cultural skills. You will spend a lifetime fully developing these skills, and I find that most people who work overseas never fully feel like they have perfected them. There’s always room for improvement, but with intentional practice you can get much better at navigating the cross-cultural waters of overseas life. By the grace of God, through the power of the Holy Spirit, you can be successful in a task that would otherwise be impossible.

Attitude 

Attitude of Humility

The first rung of scaffolding in cross-cultural training is your attitude. Even though you are going there to proclaim a message and to teach them something, you have to begin with the attitude of a learner. You have to begin with a humble spirit—and I promise that you will be humbled because living overseas is an exercise in humility. You go from being a college-educated person who communicates clearly and understands what’s going on around them, to a person who can barely speak as well as a toddler. You go from being literate to illiterate. With the exception of the knowledge of Jesus, you become the dumbest person in the room. The fool will walk forward in pride and never realize their ignorance, but the wise will walk in humility and learn from the new culture around them.

Philippians 2:3-8 says, 

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Stop and think about this for a minute. You were born in the most powerful country in the world, at the time when it was the most powerful country in the world. You were able to go to college and position yourself to be successful in the world. When you go overseas, you must lay those things aside and embrace humility. You must become a learner again. If Christ can lay aside His divinity and position in heaven, then surely we can lay aside our “Americanness,” including some of our rights, and embrace the spirit of humility found in Christ.

Attitude of Appreciation

Another way you must adjust your attitude before going overseas is to seek to appreciate the culture you are going to. You will encounter things that feel incorrect, are not understandable, and frankly, feel wrong. While there are things that God may want to change in that culture, there are also things that are beautiful and might be better than our own. Just like in American culture, there are good aspects of every culture that glorify God, and there are broken parts that God needs to redeem.

OneLink’s President once pointed out that in Revelation 7:9-10 at the end of time, God does not revert us all back into one culture and one language. Rather, He enjoys being worshiped and glorified from a variety of tribes, languages, peoples, and nations. He unifies us under the gospel, but He doesn’t uniform us.

Revelation 7:9-10 says,

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

Hosts

The second rung of scaffolding in cross-cultural training is your hosts—the missionary partners you will be serving with or the local church you will be working for. They are a rich source to learn from about the people you are there to reach. They have spent years learning the language, culture, and preparing and practicing to share the hope of the gospel with them. The very purpose of your trip is to add energy and work into the strategy God has led them to use to reach the people. Your hosts will be able to tell you the best way to share the gospel, make friends, connect with people, and much more. 

The way you present the hope of Jesus to a Muslim is different than how you’d present to a Hindu, which is different from a Buddhist, which differs between a Mahayana (Tibetan) Buddhist and a Theravada (Thailand) Buddhist. Follow your host’s lead and allow them to guide you. They will put you many steps ahead.

One of the most comical things long-term workers experience overseas is when a short-term team member who doesn’t speak the language comes and tries to tell them about the culture and how to best reach them. If you spend your time learning from the host now, you never know, someday you might be the one in their shoes, sharing with a short-term team how best to reach your people.

Gospel Communication

The third rung of scaffolding in cross-cultural learning is communicating the gospel to someone without your language and cultural background. There are several ways you can learn to do this. We train our students in the Three Stories model: Their Story, Our Story, God’s Story.²

Learn Their Story

We want to learn their story by asking them questions. The more we try to hear and understand their story and truly listen, the better we’ll be at understanding how the hope of the gospel intersects in their life. There are many questions you can use, so it is best to go in with a plan of questions that will lead you from casual to significant to spiritual conversations.¹ 

All relationships start with some basic facts: name, age, where you live, where you are from, etc. You could remember the acronym FORD, which stands for:

• Family
• Occupation (or major)
• Recreation (hobbies)
• Dreams. 

This acronym will take you through the casual and maybe into some significant conversations. Then, you might have some questions that would lead into spiritual ones. This can be very simple, from “What do you believe in?” to “What’s important in your life?” or “What do you think will happen to you when you die?”

One of the beauties of sharing cross-culturally is that it is often very easy to bring up spiritual conversations. However, we need to be careful and thoughtful about how we present Jesus. Your host should be able to give you insights about how to do this effectively with their specific people.

Share Your Story

After learning their story, it’s time to share your own story, which means sharing how God has worked and is working in your life. This is not just a testimony of your salvation, but an ongoing story of what God is doing in your life today.

When communicating your story overseas, it’s important to avoid using “Christianese” (overly spiritual words that someone learning a second language won’t understand) or examples that only make sense to Americans. We need to use examples that make sense to someone who may not have a background in Christianity and may be operating in their second language.

Consider these two examples:

1. “When I was a kid, I always went to Sunday school and the preacher would tell us that we needed to ask Jesus into our heart, but I was always goofing off. I also went to VBS, which was a lot of fun, but I didn’t take it seriously. Then, when I was a sophomore, I went to Super Summer, and the speaker said that Jesus’ blood was the propitiation for my sins. It really impacted me, and I asked Jesus into my heart. Would you like to know more about how Jesus’ blood can cover you and pay for your sins?”
2. When I was a child, I often heard that the God who created the world loved me and would forgive me for all the wrong things that I had done. But I didn’t really understand that I needed Him or that I was that bad. Then, when I was in high school, I made some big mistakes, and I realized that I did wrong things, thought wrong things, and said wrong things. I knew that I was in need of forgiveness. An older man shared with me that God had made a way for me to be forgiven. He told me about God sending His Son Jesus to come and take the punishment for my wrongs. When I believed in Jesus, I found peace, and I knew that God loved me and had accepted me. Would you like to know more about God’s love for you and His ability to forgive the wrong things that you have done, or said, or thought?

Which one of these is more understandable? Clearly, the second one is. Learning to share our story with someone whose second language is English is an essential cross-cultural skill. One of the best ways you can practice this skill and make an impact for Christ on your campus is by making friends with some international students.

Sharing God’s Story

The third story you want to share is God’s story. Sometimes, there will be something in their life story that directly relates to the gospel. 

One time, I was sitting on a sand dune in a desert area, and I watched a lady bring her sheep in. She rode off on a camel and came back with one sheep. I naturally thought of the story where Jesus left the 99 to find the one sheep. I quickly grabbed my local friend, and we told her that part of God’s story.

Sometimes, we are able to jump directly in and tell people about Jesus or a specific story. Other times, we have to start much farther back in God’s story. We have to start with “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” and build an understanding of the story of humanity so that when we get to Jesus, they understand who He is and why we need Him. 

A Scaffolding for Lifelong Ministry

Adjusting your attitude and adopting the posture of a life-long learner filled with humility will launch you on a successful journey of learning to live and communicate cross-culturally. Learning to hear others’ story, share your story, and ultimately God’s story in culturally and contextually understandable ways will be a valuable skill that you can use wherever God takes you, even in your home culture.

With these three rungs in your scaffold—a humble and appreciative attitude, accessing the wisdom of those more experienced than you, and learning to communicate the gospel in a different culture—you’ll have the framework needed to build the rest of the skills, big and small, that you need to effectively minister cross-culturally. This process will open up your eyes to many things going on in the world that you never realized, and it will allow you to communicate the greatest truth in the existence of humanity–the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Notes

1. The phrase “casual to significant to spiritual conversations” comes from David Watson’s book, Contagious Disciple Making.  
2. There are shorter forms of telling God’s story from beginning to end, such as “Creation to Christ,” (https://www.imb.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/go-impact-creation-to-christ.pdf ) that is a great way to begin learning to tell the story. But one of the things we are guilty of as Americans is always trying to be efficient, and sometimes the gospel isn’t efficient. It’s effective.
3. We’ve found that a great way to communicate the big story of the world is to use a story cloth. The one we like tells 42 stories from the Bible chronologically, starting in the beginning and ending with the resurrection. You can get the one we have here. Sometimes we tell all 42 stories at once and other times more slowly, such as one a week. This lets the people have a week to soak that story in and think about it. If you haven’t ever seen the “Ee Taow” video on YouTube, it is an example of someone using stories, and it’s definitely worth watching: 

Image credit: IMDB’s Bible Storying Cloth