Muddy River Media

A recent article from CNN listed 5 surefire ways to offend the locals. It proceeded to explain that certain physical gestures, while harmless enough here in North America, may result in you getting your head kicked in while traveling abroad.

I think the one that jumped out at me most was the advice to avoid giving a thumbs up gesture while in Bangladesh and Iran. Here in our culture giving a thumbs up is a sign of agreement... a signal that everything is good to go. However, flashing the thumbs up in those countries is the same as flippin' somebody the bird here. And for those of you who don't know what flippin' the bird means... it's giving somebody the finger... the highway salute... the middle finger discount.

I'm not one to go around giving people the finger, but I do have a tendency to throw out an occasional thumbs up, accompanied with a cheesy grin. I can just well imagine how that would be received on the streets of Iran. I wouldn't have meant anything wrong by it... but my ignorance of the local cultural and language (both spoken and body) wouldn't have diluted the unintentional message which I sent while acting like the Fonz.

The reality is the world's filled with many unique cultures, languages and alternative forms of communication... and I'm not just talking about different countries around the world. Every country... every community... every school has many different internal cultures with their own forms of communication. It takes effort to learn and understand the culture in order to effectively minister to it (it is even more effective to be born from that culture so you already know it's language, it's traditions, it's values). We see this illustrated in the Bible by the Apostle Paul who, before preaching to the citizens of Athens (Acts 17:17), first walked around the city to gain an understanding of the religious culture he was ministering to (Acts 17:16, 22 & 23).

During my time at Bible School I spend the weekends working at the Capital City Rescue Mission in Albany, New York. It was soon apparent I knew nothing of the culture of the homeless, the drug addicted, and the prostitute. I was continually learning how to communicate with them. It was work, it was frustrating, and at times it was dangerous. I marveled at the ability of the Mission's permanent staff to be in tune with, and sensitive to the realities of the life these men faced on a daily basis. I still remember one particularly cold winter evening when a staffer informed me we were going out for a walk through some of the deserted buildings in the city to ensure that no homeless people were freezing to death.

First off, I didn't even think of that potential problem let alone have any two clues as to where to find the homeless who hadn't found proper shelter for the evening. That is why they were so effective at ministering to that specific culture. It behooves us, as ministers of the gospel, to understand the culture of the group we are trying to minister to. To be out of touch with your target audience's culture is to run the risk of looking foolish and miss out on an opportunity to impact them.

Like last evening when I was preaching at a church and happened to make a humourous (at least in opinion) reference to Obi-Wan Kenobi... you should have heard the crickets. The awkward silence was deafening. I feebly tried to explain my words which only resulted in more blank stares. I then asked how many people had ever seen the first Star Wars movie... one hand went up.

Seriously!!??!! Only one of you have seen the first Star Wars movie? My witty comparison went over about as well as my obscure (at least for some of you) reference to Arthur Fonzarelli in the third paragraph of this pathetic blog post. Our goal is to take people from the known (that which they already know and understand), to the unknown (that which we want to share with them... the good new of Jesus Christ). What good is it to use words, illustrations and metaphors which they don't even understand.

And to make matters even more challenging is the fact that we live in a world experiencing a continual, rapid evolution of culture. The culture of your audience is a quickly moving target, with what is cool and not cool changing so rapidly. With today's thousand channel universe and the internet at our beck and call, there are fewer and fewer society-wide common connections.

I remember when I was in grade 11 going door to door selling light bulbs as a fundraiser for our basketball team (yeah... that's right... I said light bulbs). It happened to be on the day the series finale of M*A*S*H was going to be aired, so at every house I would start off with something like this:

I know you're going to be watching the last show of M*A*S*H tonight but before that comes on I thought you might be interested in buying some light bulbs to help support our basketball team."

Every single house I went to planned on watching that show, and having that knowledge allowed me to break the ice, chat a bit about our favorite characters and episodes, and sell light bulbs to them. It would be pretty tough today to find another event which would unite the masses like that. For all those who were desperately excited about the series finale of LOST, it was a drop in the bucket compared to those who knew nothing whatsoever about the show. In fact the finales of ALF, The Facts of Life and Mr. Belvedere got substantially more viewers than LOST.

Because of the fragmented cultures in our society, ministries have to adjust their style of ministry... their language... their methods... to be more effective with their target audience. Recently I read what I felt was a smug tweet basically saying that Jesus never used sports metaphors to describe what a relationship with Him could be like, choosing rather to use seeds and people. I'm not sure why the tweeter posted this... 140 characters only allows for so much context... but what he failed to mention was that the Apostle Paul often used sports metaphors in his ministry. The big difference was what? The culture they were ministering to.

Jesus was ministering to the Jews, a largely agrarian society, while Paul was ministering to the Greeks and Romans, a society with many deeply held sporting traditions and knowledge. Jesus' rural based audience understood seeds, planting, fishing, livestock, while Paul's city based audience was less connected to those concepts. Hence the different metaphors.

The crucial thing here is, to be successful at clearly communicating your message, you must be a careful student of the culture of your target audience, and leverage that culture in a way that helps your message to be heard more clearly.

Oh yeah... and don't give a thumbs up to a street vendor while visiting Iran... especially if he's selling semi-automatic rifles.