When I pastored near Flint, Michigan, where blue-collar employees made up 75 percent of the work force, I made it a practice to visit the men in our church on their jobs. As we walked around the auto factory talking about their work, I realized how different their lives and backgrounds were from mine.
I grew up in a white-collar neighborhood of Washington D.C. and became a Christian through the ministry of a campus group at an eastern university. I went to seminary in a populous southern city directly after graduating.
When I moved to Flint, I never imagined myself as a “foreigner” to these people. We were Christians, and we were Americans! But the longer I was there, the more I realized how different their culture was from mine. And then it struck me: to minister effectively in Flint, I needed to have the mindset of a missionary.
I needed to think of church ministry as a cross-cultural experience. I had to assume I was a complete stranger to the cultural values and mores of the people, just as if I were a missionary sent to Irian Jaya.
We buy into the culture of our upbringing more fully than we realize. My experience with churches and pastors confirms a personal theory that pastor/church conflicts are 25 percent personality-driven and 75 percent cultural. I shared my theory with one well-known church consultant, and he replied, “From my experience, I think it’s closer to 90 percent culture and 10 percent personality.”
When pastors conflict with churches, a pastor often feels the church wants to change his personality-a task comparable to breaking up a driveway with one’s teeth. I believe they are often requesting a change in cultural orientation.
“To the Jew,” Paul said in Corinthians, “I became as a Jew that I might win the Jews. … I have become all things to all men that I might by all means win some.” This describes not only a strategy for foreign missionaries but also a bedrock philosophy for pastoral ministry.
The Symptoms of Cultural Conflict
In my ministry at Flint, the symptoms of cultural conflict appeared where any missionary knows they always appear: (1) tastes in music, dress, worship style, (2) value-systems, and (3) leadership dynamics.
Different tastes. I grew up on classical music and enjoy Christian artists with classical styles. In my first years at the midwestern church ministry, I brought in Van Cliburn-type Christian musicians for “sacred concerts.” Attendance was slim. Those who did attend looked as though they would have rather been elsewhere.
What’s wrong with these people? I wondered. Don’t they know good music when they hear it?
Finally, after being badgered by members of the congregation, I let a banjo-pickin’ group come for a Sunday night. Every song was about pearly gates, golden streets, and “seein’ Mama there.” The sanctuary overflowed with people fully enjoying themselves. To them, this was a sacred concert; to me, it was a parody.
What a snob! I was blind to the cultural nature of worship. I thought the things that lifted my heart to God should lift theirs.
Though I like high-brow music, in dress I prefer to be casual-a holdover from my hang-loose, college days. This fit well in the blue-collar church, where one seldom saw a tie, but now in sophisticated Toronto, I have found people strongly expect formality.
I struggled with just-how-important-is-this-to-God-anyway questions while laying out significant dollars to redo my wardrobe. I found that I could be just as snobbish about cultural informality as formality.
Music, worship style, and clothes were not the real issues. They were symptoms of cultures in conflict. When Hudson Taylor first arrived in China, huge barriers stood between him and his audience. His western dress and use of an interpreter made the barriers visible and obvious. The Chinese knew Taylor was not like them.
But for an American ministering to Americans or even English-speaking Canadians, the barriers are seldom visible and only slightly audible. As a result, the real reasons for many pastoral struggles to relate and minister effectively are often concealed, though they are the same as Taylor’s in China.
Since pastors don’t anticipate cultural conflicts within their own country, they sneak up and wallop us unawares. They can be particularly nasty, too. A pastor I knew accepted a call to an area where make-up on women was a significant issue in the Christian subculture. His wife being a model (she didn’t accompany him in the candidating process), the conflict of cultures was quickly and painfully apparent, though it took months for people to express their disapproval. The pastor’s wife was unwilling to change, and neither were the people, so the pastor was forced to resign.
Different value systems. Value system conflicts affect deeper issues than matters of taste. A culture’s value system is known by the way money, time, and energy are spent, in the ordering of priorities, and in the way people within the culture determine their life goals.
Factory work forged the value system in my midwestern church. Men and women would spend 8-12 hours a day bolting bumpers on cars. They didn’t go to work to experience Maslow’s self-actualization. For fulfillment they went to bars, bought recreational vehicles, talked of “going up north” every weekend, and lived for deer hunting season. Most homes had an RV or boat parked in the driveway.
I have never worked in a factory. I buy my cars after a thorough reading of Consumer Reports. While at that midwestern church, I bought a foreign car. That was a bad move for a missionary to that culture. I came out of church one Sunday to find a BUY AMERICAN sticker eternally bonded to my car windshield.
Around Toronto, a different value system operates. Career and financial success lay claim to the exalted place. Here I find people struggling with different issues: God and family versus job, money, and position; finding fulfillment through work versus through discipleship.
Here people are stressed out and emotionally exhausted. Having lived in this urban hothouse for a while, I wonder whether factory workers aren’t better off. I never counseled anyone for stress in my previous church.
My new culture means I can’t preach the way I did in the Midwest. Since the issues and values differ, I cannot recycle old messages without changing my approach, illustrations, and applications.
For instance, I learned that my midwestern audience gained far more from messages if I included numerous stories that involved them emotionally. My Canadian audience prefers information over emotion. And when I do illustrate, I am careful not to use Americana. Over and over I hear guest speakers from the U.S. use American football to illustrate their points, and they don’t realize that Canadian football is different.
Different leadership dynamics. Cultural differences affect the most crucial dimension of pastoral ministry: leadership. Church cultures vary in their attitude toward authority.
One night I hung up the phone, smiled, and shook my head, thinking, This has to be the craziest method for getting something through a church board I ever heard of!
I had been talking with a board member’s wife. I gave her an idea I wanted to present to my board, hoping she would in turn tell her husband, who would bring it up at the meeting as his idea, which the board would then wholeheartedly approve.
I had discovered the effectiveness of this conduit after five years of frustration. For those first five years, every ministry initiative I personally brought to my board was greeted with initial silence, then Gibraltar-like resistance.
I tried not to take it personally. Maybe I need to give them some time, not push them. I’ll bring these initiatives up again in six months, I thought. I didn’t have to wait that long. Three months later each idea for change I had presented earlier was raised by one of them as if brand new. The other board members’ eyes lit up. Electricity and excitement crackled as they discussed it-and they wondered why I looked so depressed!
For years I battered against their stonewall attitude toward my leadership without loosening a brick. I would come home from board meetings ready to scream. Board members came and went. Many were close friends. No matter. Pastoral initiatives were anathema. Not wanting to wait months for my ideas to percolate and come back as their ideas, plain old pragmatism made me ultimately look for a quicker conduit: the board member’s wife.
This was not my idea of high-class leadership! Being green at pastoral ministry, I knew I must be overlooking something. But what? Did they presume me ignorant of what could help them? Did the new kid on the block simply have to learn the ropes of back-room church politics?
Only later did I learn that their resistance was not personal but cultural. Most of the board members belonged to a union. In their union experience, pronouncements from “the management” were suspect. According to their culture, management could not be trusted. When management said they had your best interests in mind in some new program, union workers were leery.
In the church, this pervasive cultural attitude poisoned their response to my initiatives. On the other hand, a union worker implicitly trusted the rank and file. Months after I had made a proposal, when one of them would suggest the same idea, they responded enthusiastically, trusting fellow rank-and-file members.
Interestingly, these board members saw a reversal of this attitude when they brought their initiatives to the congregation. The board became “management,” and the congregation reacted as the rank and file. Business meetings sometimes grew stormy, and in my bad moments I’d think, You’re getting exactly what you deserve.
In my present ministry, people hold a high view of pastoral authority due to Canada’s British roots. While the pastor enjoys an exalted status, any leadership initiatives are greeted with the cultural norm of “extreme caution and the desire to keep peace.”
People assume a pastor will respect these norms. Pastors in Canada get in trouble for asserting strong initiatives, not because they distrust management (as in the blue-collar ministry), but because the culture frowns on aggressive leadership. A Canadian friend of mine recently had to leave his church because the church accused him of being too “American” (read, aggressive).
My present church called me explicitly to help them develop a strategy to expand their outreach. In the first two months, I went out separately with seven men who each said, “What we need is strong direction. You lead, and we’ll follow.”
They were wrong. I’ve met resistance in my initiatives. With rare exception, strong, authoritative direction is the path to destruction in a Canadian church. I have learned to negotiate leadership carefully, applying patient, gentle guidance toward consensus. As in my previous church, I have learned to adapt myself as a missionary does to the dynamics of the church culture to accomplish ministry goals.
How to Think Like a Missionary
Here are some of the things I’ve learned about adapting to a “foreign” church culture.
Make no assumptions (except to assume the culture probably differs). Just because the church members speak English, watch baseball, and eat turkey on the fourth Thursday in November doesn’t mean these people are at all like me. I focus on learning what makes them culturally unique. What music do they listen to for pleasure? How do they spend their free time? What television programs go over big, and what shows are disdained?
Examine the ethnic background of the area. Before I moved north of the border, I read several books on Canada and Toronto.
One book, Why We Act Like Canadians, written by a Canadian to an American friend, pointed out the root of one Canadian cultural value. Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejected the Revolution. As a result, loyalty stands as a much more important word in the culture than liberty. Instead of the individualistic “Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness,” their motto is “Peace, Order, and Strong Government.”
Canadians want what makes for peace and order within society and within church. That often means compromising or giving in to anyone who is disruptive, a key factor for my understanding the cultural dynamics of church leadership and conflict.
Adapt to language differences. As the Old Testament shibboleth story portrays, language highlights cultural differences. Like any missionary I have learned to pay attention to the language and idioms of my new culture. People notice different accents of English.
In Canada they pronounce project and process with a long o. I have adopted that pronunciation. Why do Canadians say “eh?” at the end of every rhetorical question, eh? Who knows, but I waved an American flag in their face every time I said “Huh?” or “Say what?”
Learn the culture where church members work. Work reflects culture and vice versa. In my first year at a church, I have tried to meet with leaders at their workplace and treat them to lunch. Talking with them about what is required to succeed and be productive at their occupation and their particular company reveals a great deal about the values and customs of the culture.
After only a few weeks in Toronto, I went out for lunch with a caterer in my congregation. As he described his company, he mentioned how important it was to look good in his industry, that he and his employees had to pay attention to style and appearance.
Then he said, “By the way, your sideburns are too long. I can’t help but notice that whenever you’re preaching.” In reality, they were just right by American standards at the time but long for Toronto. I shortened them.
Some cultural differences may not be rational. Most obstacles are not as easily explained as my rank-and-file-versus-management problem. When you ask people why they do things the way they do, they simply stare at you. No one asks why. If there was a reason, they long ago forgot it.
Why, in the Christian subculture of Toronto, do churchgoers resist padding pews? I brought it up several times to my board, but the idea always met irrational resistance. Other Toronto pastors affirm the same. Some form of spiritual masochism keeps people sitting on implements of spinal torture. They will suffer for Jesus in this way even if money is available to ease their pain. I have yet to figure it out, and no one can explain it to me.
Cultural change in the church is limited at best and traumatic at least. A leader’s ability to change a church’s cultural tastes is minimal. Cultural shifts require either time or trauma. Unless I learn to tolerate cultural differences, we’re all in for major frustration.
How often do pastors traumatize churches by trying to change “worship style,” when in reality they are attempting to get the church to embrace their cultural tastes? I know now that my attempt to force classical music on my country-western congregation was nothing less than cultural arrogance.
The church culture provides avenues to accomplish ministry goals. Missionaries pray that God will show them how to overcome cultural obstacles and provide avenues within the culture for getting things done. I now do the same.
Toronto is ethnically diverse. As our church leaders considered ways to reach the culturally diverse groups in our area, we didn’t think we could best reach the community by forcing people to change their cultural preferences. Canadians value mosaic over melting pot. So we decided to “matrix,” beginning a number of congregations with their own pastor and board under the umbrella of our church.
There’s a difference between flexibility and faking it. I have learned to try new things. To gain acceptance into the world of the blue-collar Midwest, I learned to bowl, to bake bread, to shovel fertilizer, and to play the guitar. In Canada I am learning to speak with a new accent, to honor a new set of traditions, and to negotiate with high-powered businessmen. I want to become one with my people and my new culture the way Jesus in the incarnation became one with his culture. Whatever it takes to win some.
People see us working to adapt to their culture, and they appreciate it. One person in my Canadian congregation recently said, “We don’t think of you as an American anymore.” I received that as one of the greatest compliments of my ministry, not because I’m anything but proud of being an American, but because my goal of ministering effectively to my present culture was being achieved.
80 SUMMER/93
Copyright © 1993 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
