Sermon quotes on cross-cultural experience
Kofi Annan
We can love what we are, without hating what- and who we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings.
African Proverb
The stranger sees only what he knows.
Joshua Bogunjoko
Cross Cultural leadership is a school from which you never graduate.
D. A. Carson
No truth which human beings may articulate can ever be articulated in a culture-transcending way-but that does not mean that the truth thus articulated does not transcend culture.
“Maintaining Scientific and Christian Truths in a Postmodern World,” Science & Christian Belief H, no. 2 (2002): 107-22.
Jeff Daly
Two monologues do not make a dialogue.
Elisabeth Elliot
A missionary friend of mine once said, “Things were simple before I went to Africa. I knew what the African’s problem was, and I knew the answer. When I got there and began to know him as a person, things were no longer simple.”
Duane Elmer
Many missionaries may be like me: well intentioned, dedicated and wanting to serve, but also naive and in some denial about what it means to serve in another culture. The reality is that many of us want to serve from our own cultural context.
Cross-Cultural Servanthood: Serving the World in Christlike Humility, InterVarsity Press.
Duane Elmer
God’s grace is present in all people and cultures. As we submit ourselves to learning from other cultures, we catch glimpses of God’s grace that would be unavailable in our own culture.
Cross-Cultural Servanthood: Serving the World in Christlike Humility, InterVarsity Press.
Marcus Garvey
A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.
Edward T. Hall
One of the most effective ways to learn about yourself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.
Edward T. Hall
Beneath the clearly perceived, highly explicit surface culture, there lies a whole other world.
Beyond Culture
Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon
We are not called to help people. We are called to follow Jesus, in whose service we learn who we are and how we are to help and be helped.
Paul Hiebert
No task is more important in the first years of ministry in a new culture than the building of trusting relationships with the people.
Geert Hofstede
Our natural tendency is to watch the world from behind the windows of [our] cultural home and to act as if people from other countries, ethnicities, or categories have something special about them, . . . but [our] home is normal. Awareness means the discovery that there is no normal position in cultural matters.
Leadership in a Diverse and Multicultural Environment
Timothy Keller
Nearly every racial minority in the US understands Euro-white culture pretty well, but we whites are far more ignorant of how the cultures of others operate.
Taken from The Beautiful Community: Unity, Diversity, and the Church at Its Best by Irwyn L. Ince Jr Copyright (c) 2021by Irwyn L. Ince Jr. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Clyde Kluckhon
Every human is like all other humans, some other humans, and no other human.
Sherwood Lingenfelter and Marvin Mayers
If we do not accept as good, God’s shaping of our person and life in our own culture, we will never be able to accept his work in the lives of others who are culturally different from us.
Sherwood G. Lingenfelter and Marvin K. Mayers
The key for successful personal relationships and ministry is to understand and accept others as having a viewpoint as worthy of consideration as our own.
Marvin K. Mayers
The most important step in entering a new culture is to build trust. Only when people trust us will they listen to what we have to say.
Brenda Salter McNeil
It was the reception of the Holy Spirit that first offered the church hope of a social and spiritual community composed of people from “every tribe and nation” and unified by the centrality of Christ.
Taken from Roadmap to Reconciliation 2.0: Moving Communities into Unity, Wholeness and Justice by Brenda Salter McNeil (c) 2020 by Brenda Salter McNeil. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Brenda Salter McNeil
The development of different cultures didn’t take God by surprise! This is what the triune God intended from the beginning. Cultural difference and diversity was always a part of God’s original plan for human beings. When God commanded the first human beings to “fill the earth,” it was a decree to create cultures, because no one culture, people or language can adequately reflect the splendor of God.
Taken from Roadmap to Reconciliation 2.0: Moving Communities into Unity, Wholeness and Justice by Brenda Salter McNeil (c) 2020 by Brenda Salter McNeil. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
W.G. Sumner
Ethnocentrism is the technical name for the view in which one’s own group is the center of everything and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it.
Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores and Morals (Boston: Ginn, 1941), p. 13
Ciore Taylor
Differences simply act as a yarn of curiosity unraveling until we get to the other side.
Mark E. Van Houten
No matter how adept an exegete a theologian is, . . . it is all for naught if he does not understand his contemporary audience.
Paul Watzlawick
Everybody believes that their reality is the real real reality.
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