Crossing Cultures: Perspective and Spiritual Maturity

He who does not travel thinks his mother is the world’s best cook.¹

In other words, when our own cultural perspective is extremely limited, our capacity for ministering cross-culturally will likewise be significantly constrained. The difference between mono-cultural ministry and ministering cross-culturally is perspective; the difference between ministering cross-culturally and abundantly fruitful ministering cross-culturally is better perspective. If you want a lifetime of abundantly fruitful cross-cultural ministry, you gotta get perspective. Get perspective!²

Spiritual maturity helps develop cultural perspective by expanding the way we see and understand our own and others’ cultures. Spiritual maturity is analogous to physical and emotional maturity in that it grows over a lifetime through a series of developmental stages. Those stages are sequential and build on previous stage development.

Physical, emotional, and spiritual developmental stages move toward maturity. Physical development moves from conception to birth to infancy to childhood to adolescence to early-mid-late adulthood and on to old age. Physical development is largely autonomous, driven by genetics and physiological processes; with adequate environmental nurture, maturity will eventually come. Individual initiative can capitalize on underlying genetic potential and result in Olympic athletes, Nobel Prize-winning artists, scientists, and philanthropists.

Spiritual maturity also grows over a lifetime through a series of sequential stages that build on previous developmental learning. Scholars suggest as few as two and as many as six spiritual stages. Darrell Whitman succinctly described two spiritual maturity stages, the first characterized by egocentric conversion and the second by ethnocentric conversion.³ Robert Mulholland described a four-stage spiritual journey beginning with awakening and growing into self-emptying followed by enlightenment leading ultimately to spiritual union with Christ.⁴ Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich note six developmental stages, beginning with recognizing God, followed by learning about God, working for God, re-discovering God, surrendering to God, and ultimately reflecting God.⁵

Spiritual development, unlike physical development, is not autonomous. It requires positive responsiveness to the Spirit’s promptings.

Lacking that responsiveness spiritual maturity is all too often arrested at early and immature developmental stages like school-aged children’s concrete and inflexible thinking or highschoolers’ all-encompassing belief system with rigid box-like boundaries.⁶ We can get stuck at those early stages if we become satisfied with our progress toward maturity and choose to stay where we are; we can decline active cooperation with God’s ongoing developmental processing.⁷

God intends and desires a spiritual maturity that moves beyond monocultural myopathy toward a perspective of ministering cross-culturally, one that increasingly grows away from an “us/them” perspective and toward an all-peoples praxis, where there are fewer and fewer of them and more and more of us. Christian anthropologists describe that level of maturity as the ability to understand cultural “values, beliefs, and behaviors of a particular people understood in terms of their cultural context” with a “perspective that helps us suspend judgment, avoid premature assumptions, and combat our ethnocentrism.”⁸

As the opening epigraph suggests, travel can help develop a cross-cultural perspective, but only when coupled with an open-minded, judgement-suspended posture, along with active participation in everyday activities.⁹

My personal cross-cultural posture has become that anytime I think I know what is going on and why, I probably don’t. An early learning experience was joining a board with both Russian and American members. When the Russians spoke to each other in their language, it seemed to me they were yelling at each other and on the edge of a knock-down-drag-out fight. My cross-cultural perspective grew when those culturally aware Russian friends made sure I understood that, for them, that was just a frank and enthusiastic discussion.

A perspective growing out of spiritual maturity—more and more of us and fewer and fewer of them—will go a long way toward effective ministering cross-culturally. A spiritually mature perspective is—yes, my mother is still the world’s best cook—in my hometown. But shashlik and borsht, dal bhat, and dumplings taste pretty good too!

1. Darrell L. Whiteman, Crossing Cultures with the Gospel: Anthropological Wisdom for Effective Christian Witness (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic-Baker Publishing Group, 2024), Kindle edition, loc. 417.
2. This statement is derived from Bobby Clinton’s findings that “The difference between leaders and followers is perspective. The difference between leaders and effective leaders is better perspective… if you want a productive lifetime of ministry you gotta get perspective. Get perspective!!!” See J. Robert Clinton, The Leadership Emergence Theory Reader: Clinton Articles on God’s Shaping Processes with Leaders Written over the Years 1982-2005 (Pasadena, CA: Barnabas Publishers, 2005), 28.
3. Darrell L. Whiteman, “Cross Cultural Communication.” Training Seminar. Asia, 2018.
4. Robert Mullholland, The Deeper Journey: The Spirituality of Discovering Your True Self (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016), Kindle edition, loc. 119, 265.
5. Janet O. Hagberg and Robert A. Guelich, The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith. 2nd edition (Salem, WI: Sheffield Publishing Company, 2005), Kindle edition.
6. James Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco-HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), 135-173.
7. J. Robert Clinton, Leadership Emergence Theory: A Self-Study Manual for Analyzing the Development of a Christian Leader (Pasadena, CA: Barnabas Publishers, 1989), 177.
8. Whiteman 2024, loc. 3869-3897.
9. Anthropologists call this practice “participant observation.” See Whiteman 2024, loc. 3628-3897.

Ken Anderson

Dr. Ken Anderson holds DMiss and MAGL degrees from Fuller Theological Seminary. From 2011–2021 he served as an itinerant extension biblical training missionary in China and Nepal. He is currently leading missiological training in Mark’s Gospel for an indigenous church planting movement in southern Nepal and serves on boards including …View Full Bio

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