Cultural Awareness

About a week ago I was able to attend a week long workshop entitled  "Biblical Multicultural Teams".  It was sponsored by SIL and the course was designed to help participants discover how their particular cultural upcoming can cause misunderstanding when working with people from another culture.  We then learned how to apply Biblical truth (instead of our own judgements based on how we grew up) to cultural differences.

Diagram used to show one model  (Mary Douglas) of culture

There were 25 participants and they were from Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, missionary kids from various countries and of course people who were born and grew up in the U.S.  As we soon found out, we had examples from each of the above cultures in the workshop.

An individuating culture is full of people who are self starters, want things "their way", value independence and initiative, and follow the "rules are made to be broken" belief.

An institutionalizing culture is full of people who focus on rules, believe that people in authority are right, and have a top down standard of right and wrong.

A hierarching culture is full of people who have levels of society, value tradition, feel the needs of the community are more important than the individual and those higher up feel responsibility for those lower.

A interrrelating culture is full of people who make decisions by consensus, whose social responsibility is defined by the community, and who validate bonding insiders together against outsiders

Can you guess which culture most Americans belong to?

A small group made up of someone from the U.S., Germany, mountains of Oaxaca and Puerto Rico

Each day we were broken up into small groups and we were always with people from another culture.  Discussions were based on various aspects of how we grew up such as discipline, house layout, meals, work and rest.

Each day we shared a lunch made by a wonderful Oaxacan cook.

The last day's lunch was a typical Costa Rican meal.

The sponsors of the workshop were Wycliffe Bible Translators and the workshop took place at their center near my home in Oaxaca.  On display were copies of the many Bibles that Wycliffe has translated into indigenous languages.  Many of these Bibles took twenty five years or more of a person's career to translate.  It was awesome to see these Bibles and know that the Word of God is being read by people all over Mexico (and the world) in their native language.

Just a few of the many translated Bibles on display at the center.