Ken Anderson shares his thoughts and experience to encourage workers in their efforts to minister cross-culturally. He reflects on important topics, including the opportunities and challenges of the Chinese mission context, ways to approach indigenization, worldview transformation, and cultural flexibility. He tells lots of real-world stories, illustrating his ideas with compassion and humor.
We can work toward becoming what Sherwood Lingenfelter described as a 150 percent person, a person who retains 75 percent of their birth culture and adopts 75 percent of their new culture. Such a person becomes more than they used to, able to minister cross-culturally with greater empathy and impact.
The Lord builds his church, and the church he constructs will look a bit different in each climate and landscape. It is the seed that has power to grow roots down into deeply buried cultural expressions and expectations, roots that will produce fruit fitting the context, fruit that is both beautiful and empowering.
In 1973, I left my rural Christian childhood home and became a university student. I experienced the dissonance of a world that was much…
When our own cultural perspective is extremely limited, our capacity for ministering cross-culturally will likewise be significantly constrained. A perspective growing out of spiritual maturity—more and more of us and fewer and fewer of them—will go a long way toward effective ministering cross-culturally.
The God of mission has a church, a people he shapes and sends in collaboration with missio dei. God himself accomplishes missionary formation through a series of shaping events that unfold over a lifetime.
Their critical contextualization of who belonged in Jesus’s kingdom, who were the real Christians, freed the gospel from ethnic cultural imprisonment, and opened the door to for an all-peoples Church.
Worldviews are extraordinarily resistant to change, and archetypical cultural and gospel metaphors shape how missionaries convey the gospel across cultural boundaries. That is why it is so important for Chinese missiologists to “understand and critically integrate” imported cultural and metaphor worldview presuppositions lest what they “staunchly affirmed as biblical may have had more to do with nurturing cultural mores…than with God’s eternal truth,” as Brent Fulton writes.
As with Abram, so with us: we are the beneficiaries of that promise and blessing. We are invited to leave, to go, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with Jesus Christ, the living image of our living God. Going includes learning to minister cross-culturally. That is our blessing, our calling, our mission.
![Starbucks and McDonalds franchises next door to each other in Shanghai, China. Nothing succeeds like success, and many Christian ministries have adopted a franchise-like pattern based on a founder’s compelling vision facilitated by a highly structured and quality-controlled delivery system…[But] can the gospel be franchised? I think not.](https://media.chinasource.org/uploads/2024/04/BL230426-header-ChinaSource-cross-cultural-ministry-Christianity-in-China-Lamin-Sanneh-300x150.jpg)
Nothing succeeds like success, and many Christian ministries have adopted a franchise-like pattern based on a founder’s compelling vision facilitated by a highly structured and quality-controlled delivery system…[But] can the gospel be franchised? I think not.
Expectations for new missionaries as well as for their sending bodies should include a long-term developmental perspective that recognizes on-field difficulties as expected and as the normative shaping events God intentionally uses to develop cross-cultural ministry capacity.
The Apostle Peter’s ethnocentric conversion exploded into fullness through an unanticipated personal interaction with Cornelius, a gentile military officer who lived out his fear of God in household leadership, generosity, and constant prayer (Acts 10:1–2).
Ministering cross-culturally is critical for fruitful missionary engagement. As the Chinese missionary movement matures and expands and goes where no man or woman of the gospel has gone before, cross-cultural ministry praxis will become increasingly critical.