How to talk to black people?

Disclaimer: This a tongue in cheek title! A more accurate title might have said something about communicating with those who are different from you or perhaps cross-cultural communication.

Friends and colleagues have for years been telling me “you have a real gift for building cross cultural relationships.”  This has always seemed to me somewhat ridiculous

I don’t do anything special, and like most people I struggle with all kinds of relational issues most of the time. But these somewhat regular comments did pique my curiosity.  I began watching other people (particularly white people) interacting across cultural barriers. And that was an eye-opener!  What I regarded as common sense, what I did unthinkingly, people really struggled with. And often just opted out of trying because it was so confusing and difficult for them.  I also noticed a similar, although often not as pronounced struggle among black people.

So in a similar to asking my wife to teach me how to cook (she is an instinctive, brilliant cook for whom recipes are inspiration not rule!) I am going to attempt to share “my secret” to cross-cultural communication:

1. Black people are people: Lurking behind skin colour, or cultural barriers is surprise, surprise a person. And most people worry about the same things – money, food, family, work etc. Most people long for love and acceptance. Most people are hurt by rejection and long for significance. Most people like to laugh often at much the same things. Most people like to talk about themselves or their family. For most people their home langauge is special to them – ask them to teach you a basic greeting, and the next time you meet use it.

Look past the differences, the skin colour, the dress, the language and engage with a person – you may be surprised at how easy it is.

2. Don’t pretend: In my experience too many white people are embarrassed to admit they know nothing about rap or kwaito or local football or the history of South Africa. And so they fake it… they try to pretend that they know more than they do. It’s mostly not hard to spot a fake! And this kind of attitude is self-defeating. If the aim of relational engagement is understanding and a new relationship, pretence can never achieve that and can only add to the superficial veneer of racial integration that is so often painted in our country.

3. Engage as a learner: This is key to cultural engagement. Humility is the recognition that this is not your culture & you are ignorant. Engaging with other cultures requires being willing to set cultural presuppositions aside. It will require you to recognise that many things about your (and their) cultural way of doing things are not right or wrong, but merely different. Be willing to learn why other cultures do things differently.

People can overlook a great deal of ignorance when humility is present. When you are genuinely prepared to ask questions, look stupid (remember even a child probably knows these cultural things in another culture) and seek understanding – people are prepared to both teach you and enter into relationship with you. For many of us this is difficult as our pride will not allow us to be anything but an expert, perceived or real. But true cross-cultural relationship building demands you give up this right. Like God and money – pride and cross-cultural relationships cannot be equally served.

4. Be patient: We want instant results but relationship do not work like that. Relationships across colour and cultural boundaries even less so. A persevering heart can be a great breaker of cultural walls. There are no short cuts, no quick fixes, just time, humility and willingness to persevere.

5. The gospel helps: Cross-cultural engagement without the gospel may well break you. Turning you into a cynic rather than a friend. It is the model of Jesus who laid down his life for those who are not like him that inspires us to do the same. But the gospel is not only our model, it is our motivation.

It is the gospel that has redeemed us, broken down the walls that exist between races and cultures and called his people into one new humanity. It is the gospel that is at work in the world renewing all things, making them whole through the death and resurrection of Jesus. We love because he first loved us. We try to break down the barriers because he has broken them down. We work for reconciliation because he has reconciled us first. We give up our rights because he first gave up his.

And in the cauldron of building relationships across racial and cultural boundaries we remember that it is the gospel that justifies us. It is not being liked or accepted by black people (or any other people) that grounds our identity. It is neither cultural savvy nor mastery of language that gives us worth but the gospel of grace that justifies us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

(PS: you could simply change the word “black” in this post for any other cultural group or “people not like you”  - and the same principles apply)

Gospel thoughts from Scotland to Cape Town?

I have been thinking a lot lately about evangelical ministry in a (generally) lower-income area of Cape Town known as the Cape Flats and the Townships surrounding it.  This a vast area in our city, and there is little gospel depth here.  Whilst the middle-class areas closer to the mountains have a surfeit of good gospel work – we very often have few ideas of how to minister in the “cape flats area”.  The gospel strategies that are so effective in educated, middle-class communities largely fail to connect with poorer, less educated contexts but us evangelicals plod on as if there is no real contextual difference.  How then do we do real gospel ministry in a significantly different context just a few kilometres down the road?

I found some helpful insights (of course not all of these are true for our contexts nor to the same degree or expression) from a strange source:

Mez McConnell is a pastor working on a Scottish housing estate here are excerpts from his post on “Understanding the Housing Scheme Mentality”

“One of my points this weekend was, in my opinion, that for much of the middle class of ‘Post Christian Europe’ the church is irrelevant largely because God is irrelevant. However, that’s not generally true for people in schemes: For them God is irrelevant because the Church is irrelevant”

Here are some pointers concerning people who live on schemes:

1. They, largely, believe in a God of some sort.  But they don’t see what good church is outside of marriages, funerals and baptisms. There aren’t too many atheists on housing schemes!

2. They are extremely ‘supernaturalistic’ in their outlook on life. A massive proportion of women, particularly, have a real interest in mediums, spiritists, tarot card etc. It is seen to work therefore it is seen to be ‘good’.

3. They commune but not generally in homes (birthdays, wakes etc). In pubs, clubs, street corners, centres.

4. They prefer events that are participatory rather than merely sitting back and being entertained.

5. They will read if it is interesting.

6. They will listen to your life story.

7. They are less hung up about church practice than Christians.They expect certain things in a church: hymns, prayers, preaching.”

You can read the whole thing here

What is the relationship between church and kingdom?

Tim Keller on the relationship between the church and the kingdom:

What is the relationship of the church to the kingdom? On the one hand, the church is a “pilot plant” of the kingdom of God. It is not simply a collection of individuals who are forgiven. It is a “royal nation” (1 Peter 2:9), in other words, a counterculture. The church is to be a new society in which the world can see what family dynamics, business practices, race relations, and all of life can be under the kingship of Jesus Christ. God is out to heal all the effects of sin: psychological, social, and physical.

On the other hand, the church is to be an agent of the kingdom. It is not only to model the healing of God’s rule but it is to spread it. “You are . . . a royal priesthood, a holy nation . . . that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Peter 2:9). Christians go into the world as witnesses of the kingdom (Acts 1:6-8). To spread the kingdom of God is more than simply winning people to Christ. It is also working for the healing of persons, families, relationships, and nations; it is doing deeds of mercy and seeking justice. It is ordering lives and relationships and institutions and communities according to God’s authority to bring in the blessedness of the kingdom.

Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road, p54.

(HT: Robert Sagers)

RELATED: How Tim Keller Found Manhattan

Engage primarily with people then with culture

Tim Chester has just posted another excerpt from his new book, “A Meal with Jesus”.  This quote caught my eye:

“Much is said of engaging with culture. Much that’s right and helpful. But we must never let engaging culture eclipse engaging with people. People are infinitely variable and rarely susceptible to our sociological categories. If you want to understand a person’s worldview, don’t read a book. Talk to them, hang out with them, eat with them.”

You can read the whole thing here.

The kind of man I want to be

In the light of my previous post,  I came across this story on the Evangelical Times website.  The last line resounded with me!

“In 1966 I joined Operation Mobilization for a year of ministry in France, but spent two years in India instead. While in London that summer, at the one-month OM orientation, I volunteered to work on a clean-up crew late one night.

Around 12:30am I was sweeping the front steps of the Conference Centre when an older gentleman approached and asked if this was the OM conference. I told him it was, but almost everyone was in bed.

He had a small bag with him and was dressed very simply. He said he was attending the conference, so I said, ‘Let me see if I can find you a place to sleep’. Since there were many different age groups at OM, I thought he was an older OMer.

I took him to the room where I had been sleeping on the floor with about fifty others and, seeing that he had nothing to sleep on, laid some padding and a blanket on the floor and used a towel for a pillow. He said it would be fine and he appreciated it very much.

As he was preparing for bed, I asked him if he had eaten. He had not as he had been travelling all day. I took him to the dining room but it was locked. So after picking the lock I found cornflakes, milk, bread, butter and jam — all of which he appreciated very much.

As he ate and we began to fellowship, I asked where he was from. He said he and his wife had been working in Switzerland for several years in a ministry mainly to hippies and travellers. It was wonderful to talk with him and hear about his work and those who had come to Christ. When he finished eating, we turned in for the night.

However, the next day I was in trouble! The leaders of OM really ‘got on my case’. ‘Don’t you know who that man is on the floor next to you?’ they asked. ‘It is Dr Francis Schaeffer, the speaker for the conference!’

I did not know they were going to have a speaker, nor did I know who Francis Schaeffer was, nor did I know they had a special room prepared for him!

After Francis Schaeffer became well known because of his books, and I had read more about him, I thought about this occasion many times — this gracious, kind, humble man of God sleeping on the floor with OM recruits! This was the kind of man I wanted to be.”

(HT: Paul Levy)

If you are interested Carl Trueman has been causing some interesting debate about “celebrity pastors” here, here and here.

Thabiti Anyabwile responds here and here.

The Slimmer’s Gospel

Everybody has a gospel that they believe, a way of interpreting the world. A cultural story that shapes and defines their life.  We can call it a gospel because it contains

1. Creation – this is how the world/my life ought to be.  What gives people identity?

2. Fall – this is what is wrong with the world/my community/me. How do they account for wrong in the world?

3. Redemption – this is what we need in order to fix what is wrong with the world.  What is their solution?

4. Consumation – this is what it will look like when everything is fixed. What are their hopes?

Jonny Woodrow helps us to see how this works out in the gospel according to “Slimmer’s World.

Tim offers a few more thoughts on this here.