Cultural Sensitivity and Gospel Outreach

TL;DR:
This page emphasizes that understanding culture is essential to effective global evangelism. Ignoring culture means ignoring the incarnational model of Jesus, who entered a specific culture as a Jew and ministered within it. To be Christlike in global mission work means learning, honoring, and working through culture—so that we communicate the gospel in every heart language without compromising its eternal truth.

Understanding and respecting culture is important for incarnational ministry and fruitful global evangelism.
Culture is a socially shared design for living, including verbal and nonverbal communication, food, music, decision-making processes, gender roles, and relationships.
Celebrating and respecting culture is biblical. The Bible itself was written and transmitted within particular cultural settings. To imitate Jesus in incarnational ministry, we must "tabernacle" with the people we are trying to reach.
Missionaries must allow the Holy Spirit to lead in the development of polity, ministry, worship, and community life in other countries.

Week Three: Missions and Culture

"For us to disregard culture is to disregard the practice of being incarnational, since being incarnational involves awareness of the culture around us."
— Jeff W., Nazarene Bible College student

A lecture for students taking Global Evangelism online on the connections between missions and culture

Are you a visual learner? If so, you'll like this week's reading about culture. This section of our textbook is chock-full of diagrams!

Wait a minute. Culture? Doesn't that have something to do with opera, multiple forks next to your plate, and struggling to read thick, almost incomprehensible books?

Well, refinement is one idea of what "culture" means. In fact, Southern Nazarene University's motto is: "Character, Culture, Christ." The middle word of that motto can mean refinement, manners, and learning (including reading lots of thick books).

However, "culture" also has a broader meaning. That broader meaning carries tremendous significance for global evangelism.

In its broader sense, culture has been called by Louis Luzbetak "a socially shared design for living." It includes those learned patterns of life and the material culture that supports them. Among the items in this box called culture, we find verbal and nonverbal communication, food, music, and the other arts, decision-making processes, gender roles, use of time, making a living, transportation systems, and the ways we initiate and develop relationships.

"Culture," anthropologist Philip Bock has written, "is what makes you a stranger when you are far from home." [ see PowerPoint slide ]

"Whoa!" you may be saying. "Hold your horses. I signed up for a course in Global Evangelism. Why are we spending time on this? Shouldn't we be out there preaching Jesus and calling people to repent of their sins?"

I wanted to identify ten reasons for studying culture. So far, I have five. Help me add more:

The Bible celebrates culture, often giving elaborate descriptions. God's creative genius is reflected in the tremendous cultural variations of our world.
The Bible itself came to us through cultural forms. We would not have the Bible were it not for languages, writing materials, preserved genealogies, oral traditions, and other cultural developments.
Paul was very conscious of culture as an issue in evangelism and even church structure.
The Incarnation: Jesus was not an anonymous person detached from culture. He was born as a Jew, lived as a Jew, died as a Jew, and was buried as a Jew.
Heaven will celebrate culture (e.g., Revelation 7:9—"every nation, tribe, people and language").

If we are to imitate Jesus through incarnational ministry, we must recognize culture as an important factor.

If we are to bond with the people to whom God sends us, we must "tabernacle" with them in the phraseology of John 1:14. As Doug Samples used to remind ministerial students at Southern Nazarene University: "People act in ways that make sense to them."

One of the readings for week 2 mentioned Roland Allen and his book Missionary Methods: St. Paul's or Ours? The writer urged us to follow Allen's counsel and allow the Holy Spirit to lead the churches we help plant "to develop their own forms of polity, ministry, worship, and life." Does this mean a totally hands-off work in which anything goes?

Let's look at some practical things:

Buildings for worship: One example involves building construction. Some early Protestant missionaries to China built buildings that looked like their church buildings back home. In China, those buildings gave Christianity a foreign flavor. It would have been far better to have done what Adoniram Judson did in Burma: use Burmese-style architecture with Burmese seating patterns and other cultural practices.
Worship events—music: For many years, Nazarene general superintendents insisted on using Mrs. C. H. Morris' gospel song "Holiness Unto the Lord" in ministerial ordination services worldwide.

As impressive as the desire is to establish some uniformity and sense of a global Nazarene family, the use of a 100-year-old American gospel song ignores the fact that music is very culture-specific.

For example, the song is rooted in a Western musical tradition and may sound foreign in cultures shaped by different tonal systems, rhythms, instruments, and musical forms.

Its march-like character may resonate in some settings but not in others. Italian listeners, for example, may be more accustomed to musical traditions quite different from this American gospel-song style.

So, while "Holiness Unto the Lord" may have made Western missionaries and American general superintendents feel at home, it could sound foreign in other cultural settings—even when listeners appreciated it.
Worship events—sacraments: Charles Kraft has talked about believers in other countries being taken aback that baptism was just a 10-minute ceremony when, in their culture, it took three days to celebrate anything significant. To them, completing the sacrament of baptism in 10 minutes suggested that it did not mark anything particularly meaningful.
Decision-making: In U.S. culture, the call for someone to forget what friends and family would say and step out boldly for Christ is acceptable. In many cultures, however, major decisions are commonly made with close attention to the family or community. If a visiting evangelist insists exclusively on individual decisions, those who respond may become alienated from their social groups. In such settings, an invitation to accept Christ may need to address families or other groups. Missiologists sometimes call these mutually interdependent decisions.
Social ills: The cultural mosaic of our globe is causing us as an international denomination to take a look at our Manual. Early in our history, General Assemblies began pinpointing some key moral issues on which the church should take a stand. These included addictions to things like alcohol, nicotine, and pornography, and the social problems associated with alcohol consumption. The Manual does not address what is a major problem for new converts in many areas of the world: polygamy. It also doesn't address betel-nut chewing. As we become a global church, what do we do about responding to the social ills of various corners of the globe? Do we load up the Manual by trying to speak to every problem of every culture?

I'm not pointing out the architecture, music, or social ills examples to criticize. I use them to illustrate how easy it is for the gospel message to show up in foreign garb. We don't want that to happen. We want to be communicating with people in their heart language.

For that reason, Hudson Taylor adopted Chinese dress and hairstyle (Chinese males in the 19th century wore long gowns and wore their hair in long queues). Taylor was ridiculed by Westerners, including other missionaries, but the Chinese did not receive from him a gospel clothed in foreign dress.

When I talk about culture and the gospel, I'm not calling for us to back away from anything we hold dear. I'm not calling for us to start sliding down a slippery slope of compromise on basic values. Instead, I'm calling for us to be engaged in calling people everywhere to be reconciled with Christ and to live a holy lifestyle.

Certainly, every culture contains elements that conflict with gospel principles. Therefore, Christians are called to be agents of transformation within every culture. At the same time, we proclaim that people can become reconciled to their Creator through Jesus Christ without abandoning their cultural identity.

So, if we embrace the idea of cultural diversity, do we wind up with a kind of relativism in which what is wrong in one culture is not wrong in another?

By no means. There are values in every culture that will be supported by the coming of Christianity. There are also things in every culture that will be condemned when the gospel message arrives. We cannot be ethnocentric (judging elements of another culture by the yardstick of our own). At the same time, some moral absolutes transcend culture and help us understand how God's design for humanity should be lived out in every cultural setting.

Note: Occasionally, someone will argue that each individual is a "culture" since each person is a unique combination of behaviors, norms, values, and ways of thinking and speaking. While it can be said that each individual is unique, to say that every person has created their own culture ignores the fact that, by definition, culture is shared and passed on.

In a sense, culture works "behind the scenes" to define and organize society. The various components of culture allow individuals to communicate, interact, and cooperate with one another. Culture provides people with a shared identity and even purpose. While people have individual quirks and mannerisms, they do not each have their own separate culture.

Reflection Questions on Culture

What is the broader meaning of culture, and why is it important for global evangelism?
How does the Bible celebrate culture? Why is this consequential for understanding the importance of culture in evangelism?
What role does the Holy Spirit play in developing polity, ministry, worship, and community life in other countries? Why is this important for missionaries to consider?
What might be some very practical ways in which global missionaries can show cultural sensitivity and appreciation?
How can understanding and respecting culture be considered part of incarnational ministry?

— Howard Culbertson, hculbert@snu.edu

"The resources we are reading are fantastic. I am learning things that I can implement immediately in my ministry." — Allison White, Nazarene Bible College student

Acrostic using the word "culture"

C — Customs and traditions passed down through generations,
U — Uniting people with shared values and beliefs,
L — Language that expresses identity and connection,
T — Technology and arts shaping daily life and creativity,
U — Understanding of status, roles, and authority,
R — Rituals and celebrations that bind people together,
E — Ethos of order, harmony, and coexistence.

Like acrostics? Here are more of them.

Afterword: The Importance of Cultural Sensitivity

Cultural sensitivity must be a priority for church leaders. It can help them navigate the diverse beliefs, values, and traditions found in the communities they serve. Understanding and respecting different cultures can foster empathy, connection, and trust, thereby strengthening relationships. A culturally sensitive approach also enables church leaders to better contextualize their message, making it more relevant and accessible.

"Not everything is either right or wrong. Sometimes things are simply different." — Michael Sitler, Nazarene Bible College student

Other weekly lectures for this class

Assignment instruction videos for this course

How useful is cultural anthropology?

What kind of online student are you? Do others think of you as Busy, Wordy, or Disconnected Dan? Do you sometimes come across to others as Oblivious, Trite-ly, or even End-times Edith? … — [more]