Crossing Cultures with the Gospel: Anthropological Wisdom for Effective Christian Witness
Crossing Cultures with the Gospel is about just that, and its wisdom and insight easily extends into Christian college and university classrooms of all subjects. Miriam Adeney’s foreword sums up the book perfectly: Whiteman’s charisma and vitality distilled into wisdom that can be put into practice. Drawing from nearly a half-century of missionary experience, including years of teaching and training, Whiteman casts a vision for the missionary endeavor in five parts.
The book begins with a seemingly paradoxical chapter: “Conversion of the Missionary.” Whiteman believes that every missionary needs two conversions. The first is a spiritual conversion to Jesus as Lord and Savior. The second is a conversion of awareness, learning to deeply understand their own culture and the one in which they serve, including an ever-growing capacity to discern where the Holy Spirit is and has already been at work in both cultures (8-9). For those of us who are not missionaries, we can take up this curious invitation as well, exploring our own vocations and experiences in the academy and in the classroom.
The book’s five parts explicate missiological anthropology. Part One explains the culture concept and connects it to mission. Here, Whiteman ties this newly published book back to early twentieth-century anthropologists and to the rich lineage of Christian anthropologists, both those who contribute to missiology and those who work in cultural anthropology more broadly. Christian anthropologists may be few in number, but they have contributed powerfully to the church for more than a century, faithfully instructing and guiding shifts in Christian engagement with global cultures away from colonizing and patronizing approaches toward richly contextual modes of engagement that embrace mutuality, service, and humility.
Part Two offers “incarnational ministry” as a model for missionary service. Whiteman sees the incarnation as both doctrine (idea) and as a model for the church’s witness in the world. Jesus didn’t reach out to Jewish culture from a distance; he was socialized into it, spoke its language and learned its ways, relating with others as a member of the culture.
Part Three describes communication problems that commonly afflict missionaries seeking to share the Gospel across language and culture differences. Professors of all disciplines can benefit here, as we seek to share information and wisdom across differences between ourselves and our students. Anthropological linguistics offers helpful concepts for understanding communication challenges, perhaps most fundamentally the notion that language is more than words. When we communicate, we engage worldview differences, send and receive paramessages conveyed with body language, tone, verbal pacing, styles of interrupting, and more. Even our way of being and moving in space sends a message. Understanding language more fully can help us adapt in the midst of communication encounters and to interpret differences and disagreements in ways that support ongoing relationships that include both successes and misunderstandings.
Part Four addresses culture shock, a very familiar concept for missionaries, and on our campuses as well, for international students, third culture kids, and students who study abroad. Whiteman offers precious stories from his family’s experience and that of others with clear and useful advice for recognizing culture shock and moving through it without lasting damage.
Part Five encourages growth toward effective communication, giving fullest expression to the incarnational model. Again using stories from his and his wife’s experiences in the Solomon Islands, Whiteman encourages missionaries to really put their faith into practice, starting with their own lives. Whiteman’s concern is that “without the capacity for resilience and a deeply rooted sense of being called by God, many people abandon their commitment to cross-cultural ministry and seek a different vocation” (211-212). In response, he offers two strategies. The first is short-term: “bonding as a way of belonging” (212). He compares the infant bonding process with that of an adult engaging a new culture. The adult entering a new culture should, ideally, live in a host family’s home for a few months. This facilitates language learning and also establishes the missionary in a humble posture of learning. Host families can become true friends as well, so the missionary may begin life in the new culture with relationships of trust and mutuality.
The second strategy is long-term: “becoming bicultural” (217). Whiteman recommends that missionaries become “two-culture people” (217). It is possible to live in another culture for decades and never achieve this, or even want to. He describes models for mission in which the missionaries live far from the people they serve and maintain fellow missionaries or their home church as their primary points of reference. This may position the missionary in a power position of patron, teacher, or judge. The incarnational model encourages us to do as Jesus did, fully entering into a culture to the point of being shaped by it through enculturation. This tends to position the missionary more as leaders, traders, and storytellers, roles within a culture that support deeper relationships over time (217). The bicultural missionary may toggle between two cultures, fully belonging to both and at the same time detached from both, seeing room for God’s transformation in both the culture they serve and the one from which they were sent.
The invitation rings true for professors as well as for missionaries: “in order to have an effective and long-lasting ministry we have to develop meaningful relationships with people, and this takes time and intentionality” (224). Along the way we must learn to understand and engage differences, reflect on our own baggage, and deepen our piety and spiritual disciplines.
Crossing Cultures with the Gospel surely will be assigned in anthropology and missiology courses far and wide in Christian colleges and universities, seminaries, and mission training programs. It extends a century of wisdom carefully cultivated by Christian anthropologists. Beyond this, it will benefit all professors and educators who work with international students, missionary kids, and domestic students from diverse backgrounds. It will support faculty efforts toward inclusion in the classroom as well as campus offices devoted to diversity, global engagement, and community service.
I came away encouraged in my vocation as a professor, and I hope others read it in this broader light. Daily I face challenges of differences between myself and my students. Daily I encounter misunderstandings and am tempted toward keeping a prideful distance instead of drawing close with humility. Daily I am immersed in opportunities for incarnational ministry in the American academy, a culture with a very particular worldview, language, habits, and values, only some of which comport with the kingdom of God. Daily we are each challenged to recognize and renew our vocations, for God’s glory and for the well-being of our students and our communities.
I finished reading this book and said a prayer of blessing for all future readers, that they will come away resourced and encouraged to cross cultures, loving God and neighbor.
