Ministry Marketing CoachMinistry Branding and Marketing that Works

As a missionary, I learned that my job was to understand my people group’s culture, not engage in trying to compare the value of theirs to mine. When I tried to compare, I was really reacting in shock to the variance of their cultural views to mine.

Much of the discussion in the church about “emerging” or “reformed” ministry can be explained as culture shock. I used to see it when International students came to the USA to go to college. I have seen it in missionary colleagues on the field—I have lived it myself! When a person goes in to culture shock, they usually start making comparisons between their familiar background and the new environment. This is usually expressed in two extremes.

• These People are Nuts! The person sees their own culture as the “normal” right culture. The person shuts himself off from the new culture and builds a missionary compound with high walls around it to live in.
• These People are really cool! The person in shock sees the new culture idealistically and thinks their old culture is backward and wrong. The person “goes native” and drops affiliation with the old ways.

The truth is that you can’t compare cultures and good ministry often happens somewhere in the middle of the extremes. I see a lot of ministries built on comparing and compensating for the differences wasting their energy trying to fix things that don’t need fixed.

Some things are just different. I was surprised in my language study that you can’t say everything you can say in French or Spanish, in English. You can get the idea, but it loses a lot in the translation. Be careful not to compare too much.

Many people have become trapped in culture shock while engaging in the great dialogues going on in the church. Some have gone native, some are building walls. In all the activity, the unchurched are not being reached because we haven’t been engaged in evangelism.

Could your ministry be driven too much by culture shock?