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Teaching Cross-Culturally
by Judith and Sherwood Lingenfelter and God Our Teacher by Robert W.
Pazmino compliment one another and it would be helpful and important to read
them with that in mind. The first book by the Lingenfelters deals with teaching
in a cross-cultural setting. Your first reaction may be, I am not going to be a
world missionary so this book is not for me. On the contrary! I would like to
recommend this as required reading for seminary students, pastor teachers, and
any who teaches.
One of the reasons this book is
important is because the authors remind us, and rightly so, that we are people
of a culture. We carry that culture with us in everything we do, in how we view
life, relationships, ideas, etc. We cannot leave our culture outside the door
when we enter church, preach a sermon or teach a lesson. Therefore this books
challenges us to understand the culture that impacts how and what we preach and
teach. If we do not know our own culture and how it influences our worldview,
then we will never be able to effectively help those we want to serve.
As preachers and teachers, we
are not to preach and teach the Bible as our objective but rather we are to
teach people the Bible. The Bible already knows what it says and means, the
people do not and our role is to help them incarnate the truths of the Word.
Understanding the principles of teaching cross-culturally will remind us that
people learn and process things differently, even within a monolithic culture.
We need to know how to recognize where the students are because God would have
us connect them with his living Word.
Those of us in education have
realized that providing the best content in our lessons or sermons does not
guarantee the connection of that truth with our people. We can cop out and say,
“Well, that’s the Holy Spirit’s job to help them understand.” While we will
never be effective without the working of the Spirit, he expects us to teach the
Word to our students in a life connecting way. One of the best ways to do that
is to provide situations where what we teach can be turned into a structure
experience. For example: a group in Korea was studying leadership. As the
content was set forth, the teacher blindfolded the entire class except one
woman. She led them out into the streets and walked around, leading them with
their blindfolds in place. Later, they shared their experience and it related to
their topic of leadership. Many things surfaced that would not have without that
structured experience. The same could be true of teaching about prayer,
evangelism or teaching the Bible.
This book contains a wealth of
research in the area of teaching and learning. It is important to know ourselves
and our cultural conditioning. It is also important to know that as we teach a
particular curriculum or Bible study or sermon, there is also a hidden
curriculum being taught. We are often teaching our cultural understanding of a
curriculum and that could distort the entire message. In one sense, the authors
are correct in saying that education is the transmission of culture.
The book also emphasizes that
real education results in the transformation of a person’s life. They write,
“Teaching for transformation of character and ministry is the most difficult of
all teaching challenges.” Like the authors, I have maintained that our colleges
and seminaries excel in teaching information but do not do as well in teaching
how to communicate that information in a life transforming way. Knowing
something of a person’s learning styles, which generally requires knowing the
people, is a key to effective transformation. Knowing how to communicate
abstract concepts in a concrete manner is a challenge. That is why most opt for
lecture and passing on a certain package of information. It is far easier to
lecture a class than to teach them.
The question is are we teaching
and preaching in a manner that leads to life transformation? Do our people know
how to connect with what we are teaching? “If people have only cognitive
information, they are unprepared for situations that differ from the text or
their understanding of it,”(page 94).
This book and the next would be
good to use in a teacher training or homiletics class. Several years ago a
seminary search committee approached me about teaching homiletics. I replied I
would not want to teach homiletics but I would instead teach communication. This
book will help us know how to communicate God’s truth in a life transforming
way.
The second book by Pazmino is a
good compliment to the Lingenfelters’ book. In this book, this professor of
Christian education underscores the essential role of theology in our
educational approach, content, context, and persons. Pazmino has done and is
doing what the above book challenges us to do—to know people in their cultural
contexts, to know God and his truth, and see his role in bringing those two
together.
Pazmino clearly reminds us that
our educational theory and practice are not first about us but about God. Yet
how we educate is to reflect the understanding and application of those
theological principles. His formula is simply this: We teach this content
to these people in this context— content, persons, context (the
educational trinity, as Pazmino refers to it).
Pazmino challenges us to
realize that Christian education starts with God’s revelation, the content. We
teach persons, and we teach the truth in the context of the people. Pazmino
examines some of the Lord’s own examples of how to practice the educational
trinity. We are to be people-focused in our teaching and Pazmino uses the
relational aspect of the covenant to underscore that emphasis. He writes,
“Teaching, like other practices of the Christian church, requires celebrating
the already of God’s fulfilled purposes while awaiting the not yet.” And his
challenge is to follow the Lord’s example in our teaching in keeping together
orthodoxy (right beliefs) and orthopraxy (right practices). “Christian education
strives to bring persons ‘face to face with God’ revealed as Trinity in the
person of Jesus Christ through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.”
-Charles Dunahoo
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