“Raising up a generation of Latino and Hispanic leaders to change the world.”

This is the phrase that you see and hear often in Destino. It is our purpose, what we hope for and move towards. I’ve been thinking lately about this phrase and asking some deeper questions related to it. Like, why is it that this vision statement has yet to be fulfilled? In what ways have we tried and seen success? In what ways have we failed? How have we seen the Lord work in the 16 years we’ve been alive as a ministry? How have we not? Why?

But a bigger question surfaced in me as I was reading Reconciling All Things. It is a book about justice and seeking individual, interpersonal, and systemic reconciliation within different cultures and ministries. As I was reading, I realized that our vision in Destino that we are working towards really is, in many ways, a ministry of reconciliation and justice. We are seeking to include the excluded in the works of the Lord in the world around us. We are wanting to see God raise up a marginalized culture to be a part of bringing more of His kingdom to earth. Which brings me to the question I asked related to a quote from the book. In one of the chapters, the author talks about lament and how for true reconciliation to happen we need to “unlearn speed” and seek to listen and enter into story and experiences around us. From there he says :

This raises, once again, the problem of starting with the “what do we do?” question. The problem with this question is that it never interrogates the “we”.

So the question I’m asking now is, “Have we been so eager to get to the ‘what do we do?’ question in our ministry of reconciliation that we haven’t ‘interrogated the we’?” Have we moved too quickly forward, eager to make up for 60 years of missing it with ethnic minorities, that we haven’t stopped to first look at our own brokeness and push into why it is we are where we are now? This seems key to a future of real hope that has deep roots in reality.

Now I realize I’m talking about an organization that loves to act and do. We are practitioners to the core, eager to get things done and make things happen. But what if the way of the kingdom is different for the vision we are seeking to bring to fruition? What if we need to first reflect and answer some harder question directed at our own hearts? Have we done that? Have we really unlearned speed in this? I’m not confident we have.

So, as we fight for a greater future of Latinos being mobilized and sent, let us be the kind of people that can be self-critical and “interrogate the we”. Where has our own blindness, broken character, or marred identity been compliant in a system that has excluded Latinos from this picture? Where do we need to come along side the experiences of those we thought we came to “save” in order for we ourselves to be the ones rescued? Where do we need transformation before we can see a whole injustice transformed and restored to how God intended?

I pray for this to be true of us.

photo courtesy: warzauwynn

And the wolf will dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard will lie down with the young goat,
And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little boy will lead them.
Also the cow and the bear will graze,
Their young will lie down together,
And the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra,
And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
As the waters cover the sea.
– Isaiah 11:6-9

Have you ever wondered what it means to be a peacemaker? I found it interesting to reflect on the passage above as it relates to peace while reading The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb by Eric Law. In the book he uses the above passage to talk about what he calls “the peaceable realm or kingdom”. He shares about how different cultures are perceived differently and often have a different amount of power associated with their group. Because some have more power than others, to bring about true peace between those cultures we need to work towards evening the power dynamics at play, just like in the image painted for us in Isaiah. It is a beautiful picture of what could be as it relates to living “at peace” with one another.

When I think about peace from the lens of power, it changes what I expect when I pursue such peace. Because I often hear the word “peace” associated with a lack of conflict, I can assume that the end goal of creating a peaceable realm is for everything to be calm and not disruptive. But, in reality, when we pursue this picture in Isaiah, the status quo often has to change and that is never quiet and comfortable for those that have the most to lose. People with power have the most to lose.

So, when we talk about a person being a peacemaker, I want to start to include a person who fights for this picture in Isaiah to become a reality. And if that person is fighting in meaningful and relevant ways, there will be tension, there will be disruption to the way things have always been, and there will be what looks like a lack of “peace” — if we define peace and a lack of controversy and conflict.

We as believers too often sell a shallow form of peace and harmony because we assume it only means keeping things happy and quiet. True peace and true harmony take a real work of entering into difference and mess. Because this makes people uncomfortable we settle for sweeping all differences under the rug and keeping things as they are. But as the picture in Isaiah displays, and Law’s book illustrates, peace doesn’t come from keeping things as they are. True justice comes when the peaceable kingdom of Isaiah is fought for relentlessly.

So next time you think about seeking to bring peace to a situation, I want to challenge you to look at the context through the lens of power. Who has the most power in the relationship? Who has the least? What is God wanting you to do in light of seeking and striving for the peaceable kingdom? Let us be people willing to make waves for the sake of peace with integrity.

photo courtesy: Delphine

It was my senior year of college and I was heading to campus to pick up a student I was discipling in my bible study that year. Cory was a young believer when we met at the start of the fall semester and we had been meeting almost every week all year. As I drove up next to her that afternoon, I could see her Bible was open and she was visibly upset by what she was reading. A few seconds later she hopped into my car, threw her bible on the floor and announced, “Paul is one arrogant, egotistical man!”

Without much context to what she was saying, I had to get her to walk me through how she ended up there. She picked up her Bible and firmly turned to 1 Corinthians where Paul says, “I urge you, then, be imitators of me”. It was then that it started to make some sense to me, but I still couldn’t quite understand all her frustration. She was really upset over this verse despite my assurance to her that Paul was encouraging them to imitate him while he imitated Christ. I told her repeatedly that the phrasing was Paul’s way of encouraging the Corinthians to live Godly lives. He wasn’t asking them to imitate him just because he was convinced that he was so awesome.

I’ve thought about this strange discipleship meeting often as it was a turning point in our relationship. Recently, the memory of it surfaced again as I was sitting in church this past Sunday.

We were all praying as a community for a few people in the body that were traveling to Central Asia. Our pastor, Gideon, along with a handful of others were going to a closed country to minister to people there that are connected to us and to see if there were ways to partner together to mutually bless one another. In light of this commissioning, Gideon invited his mentor for the last 10 years to come and pray over the group. As they walked to the front of the room, this elderly man and his wife seemed totally out of place in the church but also incredibly thrilled to be there. They seemed to beam with pride as they prayed for Gideon and for the people of his church to be sent ones to the world.

What struck me most about the whole experience was that even though my pastor’s mentor was of the majority culture (my pastor is not), in his years of mentoring my pastor it was evident that he hadn’t just turned Gideon into a replica of himself. Even the fact that our church didn’t look like a church that was reaching people just like this mentor was a sign to me that Gideon was probably encouraged to plant a church that fit God’s specific calling on his life.

After this experience at church, I started reflecting back on Cory’s story that I shared at the beginnning of this post. I started to question if maybe the reason Cory was so emotional about that verse she read that day wasn’t because of Paul at all, but maybe because of me.

Cory and I were really different people. For one, she was a different ethnicity than me. She was Asian American and grew up in Alaska. She had a bent towards the arts and creativity and loved spending time with people that were on the margins of any community. In hindsight I see these things about her, but I can honestly say that in our whole mentoring relationship I’m not sure I ever acknowledged or affirmed any of these unique things about her. I’m not saying I didn’t care deeply for her, but my actions rarely reflected a real desire to see her grow into the woman God had intentionally designed her to be. If I’m truthful with myself, I think I mostly affirmed the parts of her that mirrored myself and the Christian culture we were a part of at the time. Even typing this brings up deep regret in me and makes me grieve how I missed really seeing her in some very signifcant ways.

That definitely is not how I want my discipleship relatinoships to look. I’m broken over the myriad of stories I can think back on now that point to the truth that this is probably how I lived out many of the relationships I had with students that I discipled.

Now, I don’t want to sound like I don’t think I did anything good in these women’s lives. Nor do I think it is a bad thing for people to imitate their mentors in ways that lead them towards deeper walks with God. But in my own life, I do regret not entering into the stories of the women I discipled in ways that drew out their own uniqueness. Instead, I merely encouraged them to live out a Christian life that looked like mine and others around me. I think this falls short of what God would want for them and for me as their mentor.

I have noticed in mentorship and discipleship relationships that it is common to shape and mold people into following Christ just like we do and not out of the uniqueness of who they are or what God is calling them to do with their life. Again, while I do think there is a place for Paul’s words of “imitate me as I imitate Christ”, he does also talk in Ephesians about how we are all God’s workmanship with good works that God has prepared for each of us to walk in. What was most beautiful and striking about my pastor’s mentor was that as he took Gideon under his wing in their mentoring relationship, it didn’t appear that he had created a carbon copy of himself. Rather, his joy that day as he prayed for us was in seeing Gideon and the church he shepherds following Christ in new and different ways. He seemed to love that it was a church that was different than him, and I loved how that was reflected in the warmth of his words as he shared with us how excited he was about what God was doing in our midst.

As I look at Destino in this season, I see a lot of cross-cultural mentorship taking place in light of how many majority culture staff we have right now. I think this can be a very redemptive and restoring picture of God’s body. But I also think there is a danger when you are coming from a culture that historically has more power than another, to squelch the “workmanship” right in front of you. As a staff person coming in from majority culture, there needs to be a deep awareness of the power you steward in the relationships you begin with Latino students. The tendency will be to miss the beauty God distinctly desires to see lived out in each of his children because of this lack of awareness of power dynamics. It is a high responsibility to be a discipler that seeks to have the people you lead emerge into the people God so passionately desires them to be.

So what about you? Regardless of ethnicity, in your mentorship relationships do you see yourself replicating too much of you in another, or are you drawing out the masterpiece that is God’s ultimate purpose for that specific person’s life? My guess is that if you haven’t thought about it much, then the default is probably that you are unintentionally reproducing more of yourself than is helpful. This distinction is one that I think makes all the difference in whether we in Destino are reproducing our own image or the image of Christ in each individual. The latter is the one that will ultimately raise up a generation of Latino leaders who will change the world.

I do pray we learn to live this out, for the sake of the students that we shepherd and the vision of the future that we long for together. May God help us to be people that genuinely empower Latino men and women grow into the leaders he has called them each to be.

photo courtesy: pennstatelive

This is the fourth post in our series: Contextualization and the Gospel.

The Destino Movement was birthed out of the ministry of Cru (formerly known as Campus Crusade for Christ). We have been blessed tremendously by our relationship with Cru over the years. Sometimes, though, there can be confusion whenever both a Cru and a Destino movement exist on the same campus. A natural question many people ask is, “Why do we need both Cru and Destino?” 

The standard response is strategic: students need a culturally relevant place to hear the gospel. While this is true, I believe the full answer goes much deeper. To answer this effectively, let’s first start with what we’ve already covered in our contextualization series: Everyone has a culture and it affects everything we do. Therefore, all ministry is contextualized, either by default or by design. In Destino, we’ve chosen to contextualize by design, but what does that have to do with our relationship to Cru?

Destino is for Everyone

A common misconception about ministries that have been contextualized by design is that they are only limited to one particular audience. For Destino this couldn’t be further from the truth. We are a movement that is for everyone. We believe that God wants to use Destino to bless the entire campus, our community, and ultimately the world. As Destino staff member Mark Vera is fond of saying, “Destino is not a ministry to the Latino community, but a ministry through the Latino community to the world.”

So how can Destino be a contextualized movement through Latino values but also be for everyone?

In Destino we want to begin to move the conversation about contextualization away from primarily being centered on the ethnicity of the members who are involved and instead toward a discussion about the values around which the movement is formed. This is a significant shift because it deepens the dialog about contextualization.

Iceberg Model of Culture

A culture consists of two parts: that which is observable (customs, dress, food) and that which is hidden (values, worldview). In this way culture is similar to an iceberg. A portion of an iceberg is visible on the surface of the water. Just like with an iceberg though, the portion of a culture that is visible to is much smaller than what is below the surface (90% of an iceberg’s mass is below the water line).

Our conversation about contextualization must move below the water line. Styles of music, types of food, even the dominant language of a ministry are a part of the culture. They are the easiest parts to see and define. They are also the easiest to begin to contextualize to.

To truly intentionally contextualize, a ministry needs to begin to explore below the surface to see the attitudes and values that drive a particular culture. If the ministry only adapts to what is visible about a culture but keeps the values and attitudes the same, then they aren’t truly contextualizing to that audience. Would changing the visible part of an iceberg really be affecting the entire iceberg?

Viewing contextualization simplistically would mean only looking at the ethnicity of the members who are involved (i.e. what is visible). It is no longer adequate to only ask, “Are lots of ethnicities represented? Then we are a multi-ethnic movement.” We must begin to ask the question, “What are the values of this ministry? How are they being culturally expressed?”

It is only when this conversation is being held at the values level can we really be speaking of the whole iceberg. At that point it becomes much easier to describe why both Destino and Cru should exist on the same campus.

Destino and Cru

As we said before, on many campuses around the country there will be both a Cru movement and a Destino movement present. Many times this can cause confusion for both Cru and Destino staff and students as they seek to describe the two movements. We’ve come up with a way to describe each of the movements that many have found helpful:

Cru is for everyone. Destino is for everyone. Cru is a movement living out Anglo expressions of Christian values. Destino is a movement living out Hispanic and Latino expressions of Christian values.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the conversation is no longer about the ethnicity of the students involved in each movement. With this description, you could have Hispanic students in Cru and Anglo students involved in Destino (this happens often). We are now talking at a values level, the part of the iceberg below the water.

This description also gives dignity to both movements. Both are seeking to live out Christian values. Both value the Spirit-filled life and spiritual multiplication. But because culture affects everything we do (whether by default or design), both express those Christian values in culturally specific ways.

Rather than being a negative thing, there is profound beauty in how God has designed the Christian faith to be lived out through cultural expressions. Richard Mouw, current president of Fuller Seminary, has written powerfully on the connection between culture and the image of God:

One of the more fascinating proposals which has been made in theological discussions of the biblical notion of “the image of God” is that this image has a “corporate” dimension. That is, there is no one human individual or group who can fully bear or manifest all that is involved in the image of God so that there is a sense in which that image is collectively possessed. The image of God is, as it were, parceled out among the peoples of the earth. By looking at different individuals and groups we get glimpses of different aspects of the full image of God.
– When the Kings Come Marching In

Why do we need both Cru and Destino on campuses in the U.S.? There are aspects to God’s character than can only be displayed to a lost world if both Destino and Cru are present. While Destino and Cru are movements open to everyone, neither fully encompasses all of who God is. This is why on some campuses Destino has already begun to launch Cru movements, and vice versa.

Aspects of the way majority U.S. culture lives out the Christian faith are needed by all believers around the world. As an Anglo myself, I believe my culture has great things to offer. Because of our value for individualism, we have an emphasis on our personal relationship with God. Our value for assertiveness and taking the initiative in life helps us to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling, because it is God who is at work in us.”

The same is true for Latino culture. Destino can express biblical community in a unique way because of the Hispanic value for familia. Leadership in Destino is heavily weighted on group dynamics, something that benefits believers around the world.

So why do we need both Cru and Destino on campuses in the U.S.? God is bigger than any one culture, but He chooses to express His divine image through each. Having both Cru and Destino on a campus ensures that both Anglo and Hispanic expressions of Christian values are represented to a lost and dying world.

In Destino we’re proud to walk beside our brothers and sisters in Cru shining out Christ’s light to the world.

photo courtesy: mahat64

“Deje el mundo cambiarle y usted puede cambiar el mundo.” (Let the world change you, and you can change the world) -The Motorcycle Diaries

I heard this quote several years ago and have always loved it. I think why it resonates with me so much is because there is a sense of mutuality about it and that makes it different than the similar famous slogan we use so often in our ministry. Being on staff with Destino and viewing this quote through the lens of cross-cultural ministry, I see this perspective as very significant and valuable.

When Eric and I were first raising support to move to Central Asia, I would often tell people the statistics of how few believers there were in the country and how dark and opppressive things were there. Basically, I would say, “We need to go change this lost Central Asian country for Christ.” Now I’m not saying that wasn’t true, but in reflecting back I realize that there was far more God had purposed for me in that season of our life. I was profoundly changed by that time among that body of believers and in that country. It altered my view of God in beautiful and needed ways. I saw Christianity differently than I did before, and I am still so forever grateful for how the world changed me while we lived there.

As I’ve been processing this idea of mutuality in being transformed and changed in mission, I’ve also been thinking a lot about the word conversion through different things I’ve been reading. Carl Medearis, in his book Speaking of Jesus, tells a story about sharing the gospel with a person from the starting place of defining conversion. I also just read a great article by D.L.M., a missionary to Somali people, where she talks too about how while she is trying to convert Somalis to Christianity, she realizes that, in truth, we are all being converted all the time to different ways of living and believing. She ends the article talking about how she herself needs to continually experience greater and greater conversion to the way of Jesus, and in that she is also inviting others into the same conversion right alongside her.

As I think about Destino, the reality of where we are as a ministry and what opportunities are before us, I think this word may have a good home among us. For one, we are trying to convert lost Latino college students to Christ. We are longing to win, build, heal, and send Hispanic students to their communities and across the globe to change the world for Christ.

But what I’ve been processing lately is that while we as a community are striving for many of these conversions, there is another conversion that needs to be taking place among us that I think is happening and is significant for our future.

This conversion is related to the privilege that comes from crossing cultures. One of the beautiful pieces of cross-cultural ministry is that as you enter into the story of another group of people different than you, your opportunity for a grander vision of God increases. We believe in Destino that no one culture can fully embody the character of God so we all as different people groups carry in us a marred image of the Father. Because of this reality, we all are being converted to a greater understanding of who He is when we step out and seek to learn and know another culture. In the process of moving towards another ethnicity, we can experience healing in the areas of our own cultural brokeness, blindness, and ethnocentrism. This is a profound blessing and one that we shouldn’t quickly move past.

I’m beginning to see Destino as a place where, for this season in our history, people can come to experience mutual conversion. For many Latino college students that don’t have a relationship with God, we desire that they will be converted and drawn into the family of believers. And for many of our staff, as we live out our calling on multi-ethnic teams and as cross-cultural ministers, there is a conversion for us too that broadens our view of God as a result.

We’ve been talking lately at our church about how the story of God from the beginning was and always has been beautifully invitational. We are invited into the kingdom of God through belief in his Son which is transformational and powerful. What great news! I see this truth being lived out in our ministry.

But there is another invitation that I believe we are being offered as cross-cultural ministers in Destino and that is the invitation into the incarnational nature of Jesus. We have the opportunity to step into another’s shoes, see the world from their starting point, and learn to love them as we love ourselves. This is a powerful invitation too. Because, at the end of the day, all cultures are broken and none carry a perfect reflection of our Savior. But together, living out our true identities in Christ with different ethnicities and stories, there is greater beauty to be displayed of His face to the world around us.

So will you embrace with me this vision of the future of Destino? A future where we all, whether Caucasian or Latino, are moving towards conversion. Because it is true that the story of God is beautifully invitational. We all in Destino want to say yes to that invitation in every way.

picture courtesy: robynejay

Fresh off the U.S. Census report showing that with 50 million members strong Hispanics are the largest minority group in America, comes a report that they are also the largest minority group on college campuses. As we start the school year in 2012 there are more than 2 million Latino college students studying in our nation’s universities. There is truly a fundamental shift taking place in the demographics of our country.

Not only are there more Hispanic students than ever, but they are also more spiritually open than ever before. A recent article on NBCLatino shares:

Hosffman Ospino, Director of Graduate Programs in Hispanic Ministry at Boston College, explains that the access to the media and contemporary trends in education are exposing Latinos more and more to non-traditional religious experiences.  Moreover, college is for many an opportunity to “explore” beyond one’s religious tradition.

That was the case for Martinez. “College opened my eyes. Learning about the experiences from other students finding themselves ‘spiritually’ inspired me to do the same.

There are more Latinos on campus than ever before. They are more open to spiritual things than ever before. What more motivation do you need to start Destino on your campus?

photo courtesy: Jorge Quinteros

This is the third post in our series Contextualization and the Gospel.

There is no such thing as an uncontextualized ministry.

Contextualization is the process of adapting a message, method, or ministry to a particular cultural context. As we discussed in our previous post, everyone has a culture and it affects everything we do. Because of this, everything we do in ministry will be adapted to a particular context. Sometimes contextualization will happen intentionally, other times it will simply be a result of everything we do being influenced by culture.

It is impossible for you to live your Christian life outside of cultural influences. You will live a contextualized life, either unknowingly to your own culture, or imperfectly as you seek to incarnate the gospel into another culture. Destino missional team leader Tom Allen refers to this as “Default vs. Design”.

Default vs. Design

Some ministries are contextualized by Design. They decode a particular context and intentionally decide to adapt the gospel message to make sense in that context. Good examples of this could include missionaries going overseas, churches planted to reach the creative class, or ethnic minority specific ministries.

Most ministries/churches, however, are contextualized by default. Since the leaders and members are influenced by their own culture (often unknowingly), they naturally contextualize the gospel and expressions of the kingdom into their own context. This is a good thing and a natural expression of the Gospel message (and what an overseas missionary hopes will happen eventually by the local believers). Examples of this would probably include most ministries, churches, or denominations in the world.

Contextualization is a Good Thing

For some reason many times when people think about contextualization in ministry they view it as a negative thing. They can think that there is one true Godly ministry that is the standard and all “contextualized” ministries are just a poor copy of that standard. While few people express this thought verbally, many act as if that perspective is true. There are at least two problems with viewing ministry this way.

Jesus Led a Contextualized Ministry

Think about it. When the God of the universe decided to save the world, He could have done it any way He wanted. If anyone could have lived an acultural (without a culture) or non-contextualized life, it was Jesus. But the way He deemed best was to contextualize Himself in the form of a human. Not an acultural human. A man. A Jewish man. From Galilee. From Nazareth. And He did such a good job of it that people never questioned whether He was human. That wasn’t up for debate. He was killed because He, being a man, claimed to be God.

If contextualization was bad, why did God view it as so critical to His plan to save the world?

Ethnocentrism in Ministry

The second problem that comes up when viewing contextualization as less than ideal is that it can border on ethnocentrism. This rarely happens intentionally, but it is a natural outflow of that perspective.

Okay. That was radical contextualization for others to contend with in other lands. However, as I thought about this, for me anyway, it became ominous and even suspicious that our own form of Christianity has been unthinkingly assumed to be the main balanced, Biblical, total, properly contextualized thing. Think about it. Do we need to know how to decontextualize our own Christianity before we can ever very successfully contextualize the Bible for somebody else? – Ralph Winter

The danger in viewing contextualization as a bad thing is that it often leads people to think that their own ministry is not contextualized. When someone starts to think this way, it changes how they related to other ministries that are “contextualized by design”. They can begin to say, “Our ministry is Biblical, yours is contextualized.” Which is not far from, “Our ministry is normal, yours is contextualized.” And the next logical step is, “Our ministry is normal. Yours is abnormal.”

This is where ethnocentrism can creep in among the most well-meaning believers (and yes, I used to think this way myself). Because we don’t recognize we have a culture, we fail to see that our own ministry is contextualized to our reality. Then when we call other ministries “contextualized” but fail to say the same thing about our own, we unintentionally are saying that ours is Biblical and the other ministry is not.

For Further Thought

• This may be the first time you’ve ever though about the ministry or church you are in as being contextualized. What is your first reaction?
• Do you view contextualization as a good thing or a bad thing? Why?
• Is your ministry contextualized by default or design?
• If you used to describe some ministries in your organization as “contextualized”, how would you update that terminology after reading this post?

photo courtesy: Jorge Quinteros

This is the second post in our series on contextualization and the gospel. You can read more posts here: Contextualization and the Gospel.

The first step in a conversation about contextualization and the Gospel is to talk about culture. What is it? How does it shape us? How does it affect how we live out our lives and our faith? Only after we have come to a common understanding on what exactly culture is will we be able to to talk further.

A Definition of Culture

Surprisingly, the word culture is a hard word to define. Instinctively we all seem to know what we mean when we use it, but rarely will you find scholars or anthropologists who agree on an exact meaning. A search from around the web and sociological literature reveals the following definitions:

• A culture is a way of life of a group of people–the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next. – Ifte Choudhury
•  The distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. – Wikipedia
• “Culture is the conceptual design, the definitions by which people order their lives, interpret their experiences, and evaluate the behavior of others.” – Sherwood Lingenfelter (Ministering Cross-Culturally, p. 18)

While no one definition of culture can be agreed on, certain themes begin to emerge. Culture is related to groups of people, has to do with their behaviors, involves the way they conceptualize and understand their world, and to some degree defines individuals as members of a larger group.

Everyone Has a Culture

No one is born with a culture, it is something we learn as we grow up. By the time we are only a few years old we have become fully emerged in our home culture. We begin to act in certain ways that are similar to those around us, we see the world through the same lenses as those like us, and we start to identify as being similar to those around us. In a sense, our culture helps shape the lenses through which we see the world. It affects everything we do.

Culture shapes our worldview.

Hani Amir via Compfight

While this may seem simple and a no-brainer, it has been surprising for me to meet people who think that they have no culture. I think this may result from a confusion in America between the words culture and heritage. For many people their ancestors immigrated to the United States so long ago that they no longer feel a connection to that heritage. They then wrongly assume that they don’t have a culture.

Instead, what they need to realize is that they do have a culture. Most likely they have acculturated to the dominant majority culture in the United States. They have taken on values, behaviors, and worldviews similar to most people who make up the majority culture.

Culture Blindness

Another reason that many people can assume they don’t have a culture is due to culture blindness. “We become certain that our way of doing things is the proper way, and we are blinded to the possibilities of doing things differently or of engaging in new behaviors that might be beneficial to our community.” (Ministering Cross-Culturally, p. 23) This certainty in our own way can lead us to view ourselves as normal, and everyone else is different. We’re normal, they’re ethnic. In reality, everyone is ethnic! We all have an ethnicity and a culture, we are all shaped by culture.

Culture and the Gospel

In the coming posts we’ll talk more about how culture affects ministry. For now it is important to recognize that everyone has a culture, and our culture affects everything we do. We’ll flesh out how that influences everything we do in our next post.

If you are interested in learning more about culture, especially as it relates to ministry, I recommend the video we created that goes into more detail on the topic:

photo courtesy: Jorge Quinteros

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:37-39

I’ve been thinking about these verses continuously the last few days as we’ve moved to Austin this week. Several months ago that my husband and I had prayed and asked the Lord where we should live. We finally walked through with the decision to live in East Austin this past Monday as we packed it all up and left behind the familiar College Station after years of life there.

It was only days after moving in, shortly after putting the kids to bed, that we heard a bang on our door. It was a neighbor from down the street that came to tell us she had chased off some man from our driveway that had broken into our car. She had seen him walking back and forth in front of our place, and she finally got up and walked towards our driveway when she saw him walk through our open gate. By the time she arrived at our home she yelled at him as he took off running.

As she was recounting the story, I could tell she was angry for us, as was her husband and her grandson who was living with them for the summer. We all hung out on our porch as we waited for the police to show up. As they sat with us as a family they kept saying over and over again, “This just isn’t right. I hate that this happend.”

Their grandson, who had grown up in the neighborhood, said that the guy they saw in our yard wasn’t from around here, but he knew some other people down the road that knew him. He asked us at one point, ” you want me to walk down and see if the guy is there to make him give you back your stuff?” It was such a thoughtful gesture. And such a ludicrous one in my opinion. We politely declined the offer, but I appreciated the sentiment. They cared for us even though they barely knew us. We’d met them only days before yet here they were keeping us company and looking out for us. We were strangers to them yet they were treating us like family.

I’ve been thinking about that night, replaying how intrusive it felt to have someone steal from us right in our front yard and also how our neighbors responded in genuine, compassionate ways. They felt the injustice for us and were acting in ways that looked like what I think Jesus meant when he told us all to “love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

It was actually those verses that initially motivated us to move into this poorer part of the city in the first place. We felt like moving to Austin needed to mean a move towards the city and not just the outskirts of it. If God had called us to minister to Latinos we both felt moved by the Spirit to live where many lived and enter into community there. This place seemed like a good fit for that.

What I hadn’t anticipated was that before we could ever even make a move towards our neighbors without tripping over our own unpacked boxes, they would be the ones to move towards us. To love us. To reflect the kingdom to us. We came to bring light to this street in East Austin yet our neighbors were bringing it to us and my heart was being moved to ask some deeper questions in the process. “Do I love like they loved my family that night? Do I feel injustice on behalf of others I barely know like they did towards us? Am I even able to really see people that look and seem different than me? Can I step into their shoes and experience empathy for them or do I only see what I want to see?”

Sometimes I wonder if that is what ministry is really like for us. We come with the intention of bringing transformation to a community and yet we end up being transformed in equally significant ways. Could it possibly be that maybe our move to East Austin was really a move for God to change us, not soley for us to change it?

This whole experience has reminded me of so many conversations I’ve had with different majority culture staff that have recently stepped into ethnic minority ministry with Destino. Some have come with similar goals and visions much like Eric and I had as we moved to this part of Austin. They come with good hearts to serve and minister to people different than them yet not fully aware of what all that will mean for them either. For some maybe they’re even stepping in a little naive not totally grasping the complexity and anxiety that they have signed up for.

But I’ve also seen it over and over again how God has restored, transformed, healed their own lives in ways they hadn’t anticipated. It is so very hard to break the “mirror eyes” through which we have been conditioned to view the world. We see things as we want to in ways that best fit with our own perspectives and conclusions. We only see our own reflections when we look at others because it is all we’ve been taught to see. But God desires to break us of the narcissism so that we can truly see others as He does. And so we can truly feel compassion and mercy for those that don’t have our story. Isn’t that what it really means to love others as ourselves?

So, I’d love to know and hear in what ways you’ve been changed by the place you felt God calling you to serve. How have you and your communities been mutually transformed and blessed? For me, I can tell my eyes are being opened in new ways. Important ways. Irreversable ways. God’s kingdom is coming more and more in me as I seek to see it more and more in my new neighborhood. May that continually be true.

photo courtesy: cameliatwu

I once heard a seminary professor tell a story about a conversation he had with his son. They had lived as missionaries in Poland for a number of years and had recently moved back in America when he asked his son one day which culture felt most like home to him. The answer his son gave in response was, “I feel most at home in an airplane.”

There was no more explanation given that day as to why his son responded that way, but the comment stuck with me. I was reflecting on this memory last week when I made a comment to my husband about how I often feel most at home when I’m living out of a suitcase. That sense of displacement, where you know life isn’t meant to be eternally lived in a certain place, that’s where I feel most “at home”. The space of airplanes. At the deepest levels of me that feels like where I belong.

The word we often use in Destino to describe this is liminality — the place of “in between”. We talk a lot about this in the context of culture and how bicultural people live and find their identity to be in this place of living in between two cultural worlds. Neither our parent culture or majority culture fully encompasses all of who we are, but we can identify with some of both. The tendency is to always choose one culture over the other in an attempt to get rid of the ambiguity or complexity, but what we encourage our students to do (and what I encourage myself to do) is to embrace the place in between because it is there that I find wholeness in who God created me to be.

Nothing good or creative emerges from business as usual. This is why much of the work of God is to get people into liminal space, and to keep them there long enough so they can learn something essential. It is the ultimate teachable space.. maybe the only one. Most spiritual giants try to live lives of “chronic liminality” in some sense. They know it is the only position that insures ongoing wisdom, broader perspective and ever-deeper compassion.
– Richard Rohr

As a bicultural person I live in a place of chronic liminality. It is in this place that God meets me and reveals more of himself to me. I’ve really grown to love this space. To cherish this space. While painful, it also feels sacred to me now because, like Rohr said, I’ve been here long enough to learn something essential and fundamental to the core of me. I now know in deep and profound ways that I am his and that in him is where I belong.

There is so much beauty in this place for bicultural people like me because it also gives me an accute awareness of a very real truth that all believers live in. The truth that our life right now here on earth truly IS a life of liminality. The “now and not yet” life of the Christian is knowing that the kingdom has come but that the fullness of it is still yet to come. We are living in between the ascension and the second coming of the Savior and we have a purpose to live out in this in between space.

Recently I began reading Faith of Leap by Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost. In the first couple chapters the authors use the word liminality to describe the place where they believe the church as a whole needs to move towards in order to live out the “now and not yet” life. They talk about how the church is so comfortable and eager to avoid risk and ambiguity that it has become complacent in mission and kingdom work. The way out of this static life as a community of faith from their perspective is to step into the tension filled space of liminality.

As I read those chapters I couldn’t help but think about my own story and how living in the liminal spaces is really where I have found home to be for me. It is in that space where God wants me to be for the sake of living life whole and full. I know that space so well.

So maybe God wants to use bicultural people like me to invite the church into this space too. To teach the church how to grow in learning to love the in between life where things are less certain and less settled. It is a place of uncomfortability but it is also where I find God. Could it be that he is raising up bicultural people for such a time as this when the Church is in a season of needing to step out of what is comfortable to re-engage the story God has been writing since the creation of the world?

That’s my prayer for myself and for Destino. I pray that the Lord would take the way he has created us as bicultural people and use it to bring more of the kingdom to earth. I pray that the church would step into liminality with those of us that have found our home here. I really do invite you all to come. It is a richer life than you now know. This space of airplanes.

Photo courtesy: Vox Efx