“…the goal of every missionary,
and possibly every Christian,
should be to become at least
a 150 percent person.”1
Jesus Christ was perfectly formed for ministering cross-culturally. He was 200 percent person, 100 percent God, and 100 percent human, fully attuned to God his Father and fully aligned with his native culture.
John’s transcendent language in his gospel prologue described Jesus’ divine nature as the eternally present Word, the living agency of creation as well as the illuminator of missio Dei, an ever-shining light overcoming all darkness, the light that brings all creation to life for all peoples for all time. Jesus was 100 percent God.
That Word, that Light, became flesh, dwelt among us, and demonstrated glory, a glory like that of God himself. Apostle Paul, in Philippians 2:5-11, described the dynamics of Jesus’s incarnation as volitional determination to let go of all rights to his divine heritage and instead become 100 percent human, fully giving himself as an obedient servant, even to the extreme of embracing his own death as a helpless slave.
His incarnation, becoming flesh, was a fully human experience. He was formed in his mother’s womb and entered life utterly helpless and dependent on his mother, who was herself fully obedient to God’s intentions for her. Mary and Jesus were dependent on Joseph, who had himself bowed his knee to God’s intentions for him. Jesus was 100 percent human.
There is nothing quite like watching your wife deliver her first (and second and third and fourth) child. Holding your newborn baby is one of life’s peak moments. I have experienced that joy for each of our four children. I was there at each birth and am still shocked and amazed by how each human enters the world. The cabbage patch and the stork still make more sense to me than what really happens. How the Lord thought that one up is a mystery to me. Jesus, the Word by whom all things exist, submitted himself to the same birth process. He was 100 percent human.
Like all children, Jesus was a learner. That learning included enculturation, becoming a 100 percent first century rural Jewish boy with all the expectations and values of his people, having the innate deep level identification with his birth culture’s language, lifestyle preferences, and embedded worldview expectations. Jesus learned to work and became a craftsman. He embraced his peoples’ religious rituals. He had a human personality with his own preferred friends and food. He was 100 percent human living in a specific time and place and within a specific ethnicity.
Jesus was a 200 percent person, fully human and fully God with the capacity to simultaneously navigate two distinctly unique cultures as an insider to both contexts.
You and I will never be a 200 percent person. But there are enough shared values and beliefs in divergent cultures for us to appreciate and begin to understand another culture, always as an outsider, but with a growing capacity to respond to new expectations and values in culturally appropriate ways.
While we painlessly absorb our native culture as part of our childhood development, learning to interpret and align with new cultural cues requires intentionally becoming a child again and re-learning almost everything we take as given. That reorientation process goes by the name of culture shock and is characterized by social and emotional trauma, not unlike being born all over again. Darrell Whiteman described the different stages of culture shock as an inverted bell-shaped curve, a deep dive into transformation where you feel yourself dying, perhaps even hoping you will die, and eventually moving upward as an essentially different person attuned to a new way of perceiving and thinking, able to navigate your new culture.2
We can work toward becoming what Sherwood Lingenfelter described as a 150 percent person, a person who retains 75 percent of their birth culture and adopts 75 percent of their new culture. The 150 percent is essentially a new person with a blended cultural perception, able to understand and critique both their native and their new culture, able to set aside some of their birth culture, and able to adopt parts of their new culture.
Such a person becomes more than they used to, able to minister cross-culturally with greater empathy and impact. May the Lord grant us his mind to set aside our birth culture and become 150 percent people.
It has been a joy and a privilege this past year to be part of ChinaSource ministry through a monthly Ministering Cross-Culturally blog series. I would like to express my gratitude to ChinaSource and to Content Editor Andrea Lee for allowing me this opportunity. Thank you!
Endnotes
- Sherwood G. Lingenfelter and Marvin K. Mayers, Ministering Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Personal Relationships, 2nd ed. (Grand Mich: Baker Academic, 2003), 121. See Chapters 1 and 9 for Lingenfelter’s insights into becoming a 150 percent person.
- Darrell Whiteman, Crossing Cultures with the Gospel: Anthropological Wisdom for Effective Christian Witness (Kindle ed., Baker Academic, 2024), 154.
Image credit: creativefamily via Adobe Stock
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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