Cultural Distance

cultural distance

From Alan Hirsch:

One of the most useful ways of reading our situation comes from a conceptual tool developed by the pioneering missiologist, Ralph Winter. The concept is that of cultural distance. This was developed to try and assess just how far a people group is from a meaningful engagement with the gospel. In order to try and discern this we have to see it on a scale that goes something like this…

Each numeral with the prefix M indicates one significant cultural barrier to the meaningful communication of the gospel. An obvious example of such a barrier would be language. If you have to reach across a language barrier, you have got a problem. But others could be race, history, religion/worldview, culture, etc.. For instance, in Islamic contexts, the gospel has struggled to make any significant inroads because religion, race, and history, make a meaningful engagement with the gospel very difficult indeed. Because of the crusades, the Christendom church seriously damaged the capacity for Muslim people to apprehend Christ. So we might put mission to Islamic people in a m3 to m4 situation (religion, history, language, race, and culture.) The same is true for the Jewish people in the West. It is very hard to ‘speak meaningfully’ in either of these situations. Granted, these are the more extreme examples we might face in our everyday lives, but it is not hard to see how all the people around us fit somewhere along this scale.

Let me bring it closer to home: most of us can evaluate the people around us in these terms. If you see you or your church standing on the m0, here is an exercise here is how we might interpret our contexts:

• m0-m1 Those with some concept of Christianity who speak the same language, have similar interests, probably the same nationality, and are from a similar class grouping as you or your church. Most of your friends would probably fit into this bracket.
• m1–m2 Here we go to the average non-Christian in our context: A person who has little real awareness of, or interest in, Christianity but is suspicious about the church (they have heard bad things). These people might be politically correct, socially aware, and open to spirituality. This category might also include those previously offended by a bad experience of church or Christians. Just go to the average local pub/bar or nightclub to encounter these people.
• m2-m3 People in this group who have absolutely no idea about Christianity. They might be part of some ethnic group with different religious impulses or some fringy sub-culture. This category might include people marginalized by WASPy Christianity e.g. the Gay community. But this group will definitely include people actively antagonistic towards Christianity as they understand it.
• m3-m4 This group might be inhabited by ethnic and religious groupings like Muslims or Jews. The fact that they are in the West might ameliorate some of the distance, but just about everything else gets in the way of a meaningful dialogue. They are highly resistant to the gospel.

Those who have seen that poignant movie The Mission will remember the unforgettable scene where Jeremy Irons appears as Father Gabriel, a Jesuit priest who enters the South American rainforest with the intention of building a Christian mission. His challenging task is the conversion of a small tribe of native Amazonian Indians who had previously killed a number of would-be missionaries to that point. When his first encounter with them takes place, each party is culturally very remote and very wary of the other (i.e. they are ‘culturally distant’ from each other.) They are separated by many cultural obstacles: fear, language, culture, religion, history, etc. The Indians are just about to kill Father Gabriel when he takes out a flute and plays some lyrical tune. Through a universal love for music he establishes a very tentative bridge of communication across the cultural chasm. This was to be the fragile start of a learning process whereby over time Father Gabriel and his small group of Jesuits succeed in befriending the natives, learning about their culture, language, and folklore eventually establishing an effective mission among them. That loving attentiveness to the other that was required in that situation is true for all effective mission across cultural barriers. And the time has come for us in the West to learn that all our attempts to communicate the gospel are now cross cultural. We are not in a dissimilar situation, only one more subtle.