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Have we have elevated the importance of cultural sensitivity in missionary outreach beyond its due?

Any good missionary training program heavily stresses understanding the role of culture. The missionary task at its core is crossing cultural boundaries with the gospel. A person’s culture, while invisible to him, shapes virtually every dimension of his life. To leave one’s culture and penetrate another demands careful preparation and serious reflection without which the missionary’s outreach will become ineffective or even counter-productive.

The absence of sensitivity to cultural realities, for example, can warp the introduction of Christianity into a society. I know a beautiful church building in Siberia known locally as “the German church.” If those who worship there intended to impact the community broadly, they began badly by allowing a foreigner to design the structure which represents their presence to their neighbors.

Of course there are missionaries who have little concern for the relevance of their message. When I was a student at Moody Bible Institute, the saffron-robed Hare Krishna chanters on the city streets seemed curious, exotic and odd. Surely not many everyday Chicagoans were drawn to their ranks or interested in the personal implications of their message.

Few Christian missionary efforts have been so culturally irrelevant, at least in recent years, and that’s good. We can be thankful for the role of cultural and anthropological studies to help us lessen unnecessary cultural barriers which hinder the gospel’s acceptance.

But cultural relevance can become an idol at the altar of which we may sacrifice good judgment or even biblical obedience. In the name of cultural relevance, how often do missionaries fail to disciple, to “teach them to observe everything” Jesus commanded?

Here’s an example. Prior to my first missionary assignment I completed the mandatory 14-week pre-field training program. Designed to get people ready for the cross-cultural ministry ahead, it provided first-rate preparation, with maybe one exception: the stress laid on cultural sensitivity. For my first year of ministry in an aboriginal community I was paralyzed with fear that I would commit some cultural blunder that would shatter my efforts to identify with the people.

Did I over-apply some good material? Probably. But 25 years later, I see plenty of evidence that I’m in good company.

I believe in cultural sensitivity. In fact, I’m part of an organization whose vision is to see “culturally relevant churches.” That’s a big phrase that means churches that fit the community. It means churches where people can hear an understandable gospel and learn to grow in Christ in the world where they live every day.

But cultural sensitivity taken too far becomes a liability. Culture is important, but it isn’t everything. I can think of at least three examples that demonstrate the limits of cultural adjustment.

Exhibit One: I have known missionaries who violated most of the cultural sensitivity rules but still had a highly effective ministry. To paraphrase 1 Cor. 13:2, if I have the gift of cultural sensitivity, and know all ranges of worldviews and values, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I had to choose, I’d take a vigorous and loving discipleship practice over a refined cultural sensitivity any day. (But of course I don’t want to choose and we shouldn’t have to.)

Here’s another example of the limits of culture. The youth of many societies are moving away from their culture toward what Paul Borthwick has called a global youth culture. This trend can give a cultural purist fits, but it’s real and there’s no use denying it. The point is the growth of the church of Jesus Christ, not the perpetuation of a culture. If the children of Punjabi immigrants from India take up baggy jeans and skateboards, no missionary need fret about preserving the culture. Their parents will do that. For us, the task is to find an effective way to show them the Savior.

Finally—and here I may be treading directly on missiologically correct toes—sometimes we need to challenge the culture. My training taught me to challenge my own culture, and rightly so, but the same is true for the host culture (something my training failed to teach me). If such a concept sounds heretical, maybe we have drunk too deeply at the well of cultural sensitivity.

For example, is the absence of a strong work ethic in many tribal societies simply a legitimate difference of values, or is it a harmful gap in the worldview, a gap that hinders their growth and development?

Darrow Miller, in his insightful book Discipling Nations, has pointed out how an allegiance to cultural relativism has actually hurt the growth of the church and of communities around the world. Cultural relativism poses one of the greatest challenges to human development in our generation. As taught in the “soft sciences” of psychology, sociology and anthropology, it holds that the values in one culture are no better (or worse) than those in another.

Let’s not allow cultural sensitivity to trump obedience to Jesus’ command to make disciples of the nations.

Gary Brumbelow serves as general director of InterAct Ministries in Boring, Ore.