Limitations of Cross-Cultural Missions

One of the goals of cross-cultural missions – in some traditions – has to generate a more nearly universal Christian witness, one that has pan-human validity, thus to attain a universally applicable theology and Christian ethic; its primary goal is to engage another culture so as to import Christianity. 

Cross-cultural missions does not – primarily – try to represent the distinctive cultural psychology of particular peoples nor is it primarily concerned with pursuing research focused on differences in the way members of differing communities perceive, categorize, feel, want, choose, evaluate and communicate that can be traced back to difference in community-based goals, values, and pictures of the world, rather cross-cultural missions seek to make sure that the hoped-for universal witness, is truly universal and to throw out any claim that only holds in the Anglo-American world.  Further cross-cultural missions seeks to establish compatibly or equivalence across different populations.  Often the point is to show that people in different cultures are alike, in its focus on independent variables of the cultural environment, like the nucleation of the family, literacy versus nonliterary that are thought to promote or retard the spread of the gospel.

By contrast discovering a more indigenous way;

1. Honors and gives priority to the study of culturally unique religious and ethical behavioral phenomena.
2. Explores both the specific content and the involved process of the phenomenon.
3. Makes it a goal to begin any engagement with a thorough immersion into the natural, concrete and details of the phenomenon.
4. Lets the gospel be born of the Holy Spirit within the indigenous faith/intellectual tradition rather than the Western intellectual tradition. (See the work of indigenous psychologist, Kuo-shu Yang 1997).

Peace, dwight