Developing Spiritual & Cultural Competencies through Relationship
Most of us are busy. We go to work. We volunteer. We go to school. We do yard work. We have family and bills and church activities. We sleep, eat, and then the next day, we get up and do it all over again. We naturally develop a set of norms that help give us a sense of stability and comfort in our lives. Some of us could map out most of our own cultural norms by looking in our refrigerators, our bank statements, or in our daily schedules. But how do you learn about someone else’s cultural norms and why would you want to?
In our ministry updates, we’ve looked at simple ways to begin thinking about multi-ethnic and cross-cultural ministry. God is relational and through conversation with God, both in prayer and spending time in the Bible, our lives are transformed to reflect more of Christ and less of ourselves.
What do Christ-like competencies look like? Colossians 3:12-14 answers, “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”
What about cultural competencies? How do we love our neighbor as ourselves (Luke 10:27), when our neighbor is outside our cultural norms? Loving our neighborhood is relational work, but the more we spend time getting to know people, the more competent we become, both in word and deed, at building bridges that bring glory to God.
Here are more thoughts to consider….
