Missions Textbook 41
Culture Shock

We Never Saw It Coming: An Introduction to Christian Missions (textbook)

Every person who leaves his home culture and goes to live in a different one will experience some culture shock. This seldom applies to tourists, since they are not in the new culture long enough to experience negative reactions to the differences between the cultures.

Enculturation is what happens to children to make them functional in their own culture. Children simply absorb how to behave because they are surrounded by the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and behaviors of their culture. Then they imitate those behaviors so they can fit in.

Acculturation is the process of a person deliberately becoming functional in a different culture. For this, a “foreigner” must observe and learn. He or she will first notice outward differences of clothing and behavior and adapt as much as their own self allows. Inward adaptation takes longer, and includes learning the language, learning how the host people think, and why they think that way.

Crossing a culture to live in a different culture will draw different responses from the missionary. Three things will determine how we respond.

First, some visitors to a new culture arrive with the attitude that the culture from which they came is superior. In many cases, the country from which missionaries came is wealthy and well educated. Does this engender feelings of superiority and pride, and disgust for a culture that is poor and can’t afford education? Or is the response one of compassion and service, with a good dose of humility to learn all one can from them, including their language?

Second, the people in the host country also have viewpoints about the incoming missionary. They are influenced by others they have known previously. They may have dealt with tourists who are loud and obnoxious and dishonest. Their country may have suffered from political decisions involving your home country. And their media and the media of the world can draw very unflattering caricatures of people from your homeland. How do they expect you to act around them? Do you know how to act?

Third, when we cross cultures, we lose our normal reinforcements. These are things that contribute to our identity. In many cases, everything will be topsy-turvy. Shopping habits, meal schedules, traffic laws, even the family dynamic may be different and require adjustment. Many of the things that made one “feel at home” are gone – clothing, tools, briefcase, coffee cup, physical landmarks, favorite fast food restaurant, and special people who remained at home.

Culture shock comes in four stages that will overlap each other. Briefly these are: I Love It Here; It’s Dumb Here and I Hate It; It’s Hard Work to Live Here; and finally, hopefully, I Really Love It Here.

The Honeymoon Stage: When missionaries arrive on the field, after all the preparation and a long trip, they are seeing the realization of a dream. Often, the new missionaries love everything about the new culture and are infatuated by the sights, smells, tastes, and sounds of the country they have planned to love. They can use this time to bolster that feeling by experiencing all the things to which they have been looking forward. Practicing what little language the missionary knows, enthusing over the food and music, and buying little things are all ways of meeting the people of this new culture.

The Rejection Stage: New and different are nice, but only in small doses. The missionary begins to realize that he doesn’t understand why people are doing the things they do. Things don’t make sense. Things begin to seem dumb and ridiculous, not just different. Daily living can be complicated and inconvenient and inefficient. Internal irritability and hostility may arise.

When the missionary tries to bond with a national, often the national doesn’t respond the way the missionary is used to in his own culture. The missionary can’t get people to laugh at his jokes nor can he understand theirs. The normal relational supports that make the missionary feel good about himself have disappeared. Confusion has replaced the order of an ordinary day. This is a crucial time, and how the missionary responds to this surprise will have a great impact on future ministry. It’s important here to remember that “It’s not stupid, it’s just different.”

At this point, some missionaries go home. That’s not a sin, but it is sad. The missionary will probably feel like he has failed to fulfill his calling, leading to feelings of guilt. The mission agency might not be as supportive as the missionary would like. The missionary’s donors will have many questions.

Some missionaries will remain on the field but withdraw from the nationals and seek refuge among expatriates, from whom they can receive understandable reactions to their actions. Some ex-pats will be only too glad to tell the missionary even more reasons to hate the country. This move will not have an immediate effect on everyone, but if continued, long-term relationships with nationals will not be formed, bonding will not take place, and the missionary may eventually develop a very negative attitude toward the host culture. He may shift his “ministry” to something that has little contact with people in the host culture.

Some missionaries “go native.” They reject their own culture and glamorize everything about their host culture. Some nationals may not be flattered but will think this is weird. Most people expect foreigners to remain somewhat faithful to their own culture.

The Adaptation Stage: No missionary begins his career expecting to respond to culture shock in any of the above three ways. Every missionary wants to adapt eventually to the new culture. Sometimes, just realizing that a person has culture shock is a help. If the missionary chooses to stay and fight through culture shock, he or she will begin the process of gradual adjustment that will morph into adaptation. It’s hard work, and it involves acting differently than one is feeling.

So how does one gradually adjust as quickly as possible thus avoiding the other three responses? Some suggest reading lots of books on culture shock before going overseas; however, putting into practice everything you read will be difficult. The answer is easy to understand but not easy to carry out. Here’s the answer.

Keep. Learning. The language. Whatever you’ve been doing to learn the language, keep doing that and more. Keep learning the language. Keep talking to people in that language. The sooner you learn the language, the shorter the time you will suffer from culture shock. Seriously. Keep learning the language. Never assume that what the nationals are doing is dumb. Everything they are doing makes sense to them! Just keep learning the language. Someday you will understand.

Ian Rajas, a young missionary pilot and friend, recently sent us his newsletter, and it began with the cry of every new missionary committed to learning the language. “Learning another language is difficult! It can be frustrating needing to look up a word for the seventh time in a week because I just cannot keep it in my head, or forgetting a word I use all the time. Or trying to phrase something in a way that makes sense in English but falls apart when trying to translate it directly. The worst is when I know the meaning of each individual word that someone just said, but cannot, for the life of me, understand what the whole sentence means.” Language learning demands, discipline, determination, and a dose of good humor. You need to be willing to look foolish, say foolish things, and humbly accept correction for almost every word that you force from your mouth. Your head will hurt, your eyes will hurt if you are learning a new alphabet, and your mouth and jaws will hurt from practicing new sounds.

The Identification Stage: If the missionary keeps learning the language, however, he will eventually reach a point where he feels relatively comfortable in the new culture. He can converse with the nationals, provide for himself and his family as the nationals do, and enjoy friendships with nationals that began with letting them teach him the language. Survival is no longer a problem. It’s time to really begin the ministry in earnest. Because language is no longer a hurdle, the missionary can work on making the Gospel relevant to the culture he now understands. This is called contextualization, and we have another article about that.

We Never Saw It Coming: An Introduction to Christian Missions (textbook)

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