“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.”  Ephesians 2:19

Due to the changing nature of our American demographic, rare is the congregation these days that is entirely of one ethnic background, at least here on the West Coast. In my case, I serve as a Teaching Pastor for a congregation that represents three distinct languages and cultures. It’s true that the solid majority of our core congregation members are American-born and share the same background, but we have two sister congregations that are entirely made up of immigrant Christians. This makes for a real challenge when we seek to draw the three congregations together in order to do strategic ministry.

The biggest reason for the challenge is simply that cultures “listen” to leaders differently. Some people, like those from Western American culture, like to be invested in the process of leadership analysis and decisions. Western leaders therefore learn early on  to be participative leaders. On the other hand, some culture groups from the Asian domain of our globe are extremely deferential to formal leaders, don’t feel comfortable giving them feedback, and most of the time seek to be aggressively led by their superiors, sometimes almost in a dictatorial fashion. Now at our particular church, we have to blend both sides of this cultural response of leadership into our working style with people. This can threaten to make you schizophrenic as an organizational leader, because your golden touch with one cultural group actually works directly against you when you use that same leadership style with the other group.

So what do you do? Do you try and teach one culture to be like the other culture? Well, I wouldn’t suggest it, because I have found out in my time in this ministry that all culture is essentially relative. No culture can really be said to be superior to any other culture, except in some extreme moral cases. That’s because culture simply develops out of the shared history of any group of people. In fact, my simplest definition of culture is this: culture is history. It’s simply the gathered experience of a group of people, a history that’s now an unconsciously told story among the people group, aquired simply because they have all lived through it together. Given this, who is to say that one group’s history is more valuable or less valuable than that of another?

But what you do when  one people group’s cultural preferences lead them away from the pathway of Scripture? How do you convince them to change, and not have it all devolve into a simple argument of your culture being preferred over theirs?

Well, I think that you need to understand that for the Christian leader, Scripture trumps culture, including your very own. What I mean by this is that the Bible is very clear that when we came to Christ, we became citizens of another Kingdom. We left the kingdom of darkness and were transferred into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. We became the servants of another King, and we became members of a different household, the household of faith. That means that we now have a relationship in the spirit that is far more important than any past or present relationship by blood or by culture. It also means that we answer now not simply to a personal history, but to a personal Lord, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, when you are called as a leader to challenge someone from a different culture to change their behavior, I urge you to do it from the basis of Scripture and not from the basis of your own cultural preferences. The Word of God has been designed to pierce through to the thoughts and intentions of the heart. The Word of God abides upon someone’s soul when it is preached and as they listen closely to it, they experience revelatory truth. I mean by that that the Word of God is the only truth-source on the planet that is able to reveal itself to the inner heart of a redeemed soul. All other truth is received on a purely intellectual level;  the Word of God is received at a deeply spiritual level. Therefore it’s able to break open the prejudices and mental habits that culture creates within all of us, and we experience the power of conviction and the urging to change, all authored by the Holy Spirit.

So, in my leadership life in the very challenging congregation in which I currently minister, I’m learning not to place one culture over another, and certainly not to place my own cultural viewpoints over other people’s. I’m learning instead to gather us all together under the shared teaching of the Word of God about whatever issue it is that I am seeking to lead and teach about. I don’t allow my preferences to do the talking… I let the Scripture do the talking. And I wait until the Holy Spirit allows the truth of his Word to germinate in hearts and to generate changed attitudes. Some people might say that’s a rather slow way to do ministry. Well, maybe so, but it keeps me out of the arena of personal pride, and when we do make progress as a gathered people in this ministry, we get there with an understanding that the only One who could have brought us together for all of this is the Lord,  who united us at the cross first.