In light of the ongoing controversy over the arrest of African American Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., many of you have asked to hear more about my views on intercultural (multicultural) ministry.

Goals of a Christ-Centered TEAM Approach



The primary goal of Cultivating Christlike Intercultural Relational Competency: A Christ-Centered TEAM Approach is to equip people to develop four championship TEAM skills that empower them to function effectively in our culturally diverse society. People can learn how to relate harmoniously by building bridges of understanding across diverse cultures.

The TEAM approach is based upon the biblical conviction that God in Christ is moving all of history toward an eternity where “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language” will stand before the Lamb in united worship (Revelation 7:9-10). Thus the eternal goal is to equip people to relate interculturally now in light of their eternal future so that God is glorified and others are attracted to Christ by their love.



Learning Outcomes of A Christ-Centered TEAM Approach



After successful participation in Cultivating Christlike Intercultural Relational Competency: A Christ-Centered TEAM Approach, people will be able to implement the TEAM intercultural relational competencies of:

T: Taking another person’s earthly perspective through empathy and culturally-informed listening.

This is the ability to empathize with someone whose patterns of relating, thinking, acting, and feeling developed out of a diverse culture. It is the ability to walk in the shoes of another person from another culture. It requires culturally-informed listening, among many other “skills.”



E: Engaging in bridge-building spiritual conversations through focusing on God’s eternal perspective.

This is the ability to encourage another person to assess their own individual, cultural, and universal experience through the lens of God’s eternal Person, perspective, purposes, and plans. It includes the both/and “skill” of listening to the earthly story while jointly weaving in God’s eternal, heavenly story.

A: Abolishing barriers through forgiveness and reconciliation.

This is the ability to apply Christ’s forgiveness of us to our intercultural relationships. It highlights the fact that “racism” is not a skin issue but a sin issue. It recognizes that integration alone is a legislative/law issue, while reconciliation is a heart issue, a spiritual issue. This includes the “skill” of being an ambassador of intercultural reconciliation.

M: Making intercultural peace through spiritual renewal.

This is the ability to move beyond the absence of hostility to the presence of biblical unity in diversity. It highlights biblical shalom which only comes from Christ’s supernatural resurrection power among His redeemed people. It includes the “skill” or relational competency of applying personal spiritual renewal to individual and group interpersonal relationships.

Just How Biblical Is Intercultural Ministry?

Consider just a few examples of how central intercultural ministry is to the eternal plan of God.

1. Intercultural Ministry Is a God Thing: James 2:1-13; Romans 2:4-11. For God so loved the world. God is no respecter of persons. He is calling people from all nations to His forever family. He calls us to godly living that shows no favoritism.

2. Intercultural Ministry Is a Christ Thing: Matthew 28:19-20; John 4:1-42. Christ calls us to make disciples of all nations. Christ models intercultural ministry in breaking social barriers to witness to the Samaritan women, resulting in the people proclaiming that He is indeed the Savior of the world.

3. Intercultural Ministry Is a Spirit Thing: 1 Corinthians 12:12-27. We are all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks. The Spirit purposefully combined the diverse members into one Body so that there would be no division.

4. Intercultural Ministry Is a Salvation Thing: Ephesians 2:11-22; Revelation 5:9. Christ’s salvation purpose is to reconcile, make peace, and create in Himself one new people who have full and equal access to the Father by the Spirit, making us all fellow citizens and joint members of God’s household. The Lamb purchased for God people from every tribe, language, people, and nation.

5. Intercultural Ministry Is a Church Thing: Acts 2:14-47; Acts 10:1-48. The first Church and the Church throughout Acts integrated believers from diverse cultures.

6. Intercultural Ministry Is a Sanctification Thing: Colossians 3:1-11. As we put off the old and put on the new person in Christ we are renewed not only individually, but also corporately where there is no Greek or Jew, barbarian or Scythian, but Christ is all and is in all.

7. Intercultural Ministry Is an Eternal Thing: Revelation 7:9-10. As John peers into eternity, he witnesses a great multitude that no one can count from every nation, tribe, people, and language worshipping God together forever.

Toward a Description of Intercultural Ministry/Relating



In the old game show, Name That Tune, contestants would say, “I can name that tune in ____ notes” (the lower the number of notes, the better). Well, I canNOT name the “tune” of intercultural (or multicultural or cross-cultural) ministry/relating in just a few notes. In fact, one specialist in this area lists more than a dozen different names for the concept related to intercultural/multiculturalism. That’s a dozen names—each with its own set of scores of definitions.

Still, we can at least suggest some beginning descriptions.

What Is Culture?

Let’s start with a supposedly simple word like “culture.” This word itself has a myriad of definitions. My working definition of culture is based upon a biblical theology/psychology of how God designed us.

Here are two similar ways I would word my description of culture:

*Culture is the shared relational, rational, volitional, and emotional patterns for living that people use in social interactions and learn through social interactions.

*Culture is the system of shared patterns of relating, thinking, acting, and feeling that members of society use to relate to one another and to others, and that are learned through social interactions.

What Is Intercultural Relational Competency?

First, I use intercultural relational competency interchangeably with multicultural skillfulness. Here are a few ways I describe these terms:

*Intercultural relational competency is the ability to relate like Christ with people from other cultures.

*Intercultural relational competency is the ability to relate like Christ when interacting with people whose patterns of relating, thinking, acting, and feeling are culturally different (diverse) from yours.

Speaking



I have spoken on this topic across the country in diverse settings. My presentation includes a five-page outline, a 60-slide PowerPoint presentation, and an engaging, interactive lecture/discussion. If you are interested in having me speak to your group, feel free to contact me: rpm.ministries@gmail.com.

Resources

My book Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction offers insights for all people into the great contributions to ministry made by our African American brothers and sisters. For more information on Beyond the Suffering visit: http://tinyurl.com/d7bwnv.

Racial Identity in American Life

Here’s an interesting article by Jesse Washington of the AP.

Here’s the original link:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081213/ap_on_re_us/obama_s_not_black

Obama’s True Colors: Black, White … or Neither?

By JESSE WASHINGTON, AP National Writer Jesse Washington, Ap National Writer – Sat Dec 13, 2008

A perplexing new chapter is unfolding in Barack Obama’s racial saga: Many people insist that “the first black president” is actually not black.

Debate over whether to call this son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan biracial, African-American, mixed-race, half-and-half, multiracial — or, in Obama’s own words, a “mutt” — has reached a crescendo since Obama’s election shattered assumptions about race.

Obama has said, “I identify as African-American — that’s how I’m treated and that’s how I’m viewed. I’m proud of it.” In other words, the world gave Obama no choice but to be black, and he was happy to oblige.

But the world has changed since the young Obama found his place in it.

Intermarriage and the decline of racism are dissolving ancient definitions. The candidate Obama, in achieving what many thought impossible, was treated differently from previous black generations. And many white and mixed-race people now view President-elect Obama as something other than black.

So what now for racial categories born of a time when those from far-off lands were property rather than people, or enemy instead of family?

“They’re falling apart,” said Marty Favor, a Dartmouth professor of African and African-American studies and author of the book “Authentic Blackness.”

“In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois said the question of the 20th century is the question of the color line, which is a simplistic black-white thing,” said Favor, who is biracial. “This is the moment in the 21st century when we’re stepping across that.”

Rebecca Walker, a 38-year-old writer with light brown skin who is of Russian, African, Irish, Scottish and Native American descent, said she used to identify herself as “human,” which upset people of all backgrounds. So she went back to multiracial or biracial, “but only because there has yet to be a way of breaking through the need to racially identify and be identified by the culture at large.”

“Of course Obama is black. And he’s not black, too,” Walker said. “He’s white, and he’s not white, too. Obama is whatever people project onto him … he’s a lot of things, and neither of them necessarily exclude the other.”

But U.S. Rep. G. K. Butterfield, a black man who by all appearances is white, feels differently.

Butterfield, 61, grew up in a prominent black family in Wilson, N.C. Both of his parents had white forebears, “and those genes came together to produce me.” He grew up on the black side of town, led civil rights marches as a young man, and to this day goes out of his way to inform people that he is certainly not white.
Butterfield has made his choice; he says let Obama do the same.

“Obama has chosen the heritage he feels comfortable with,” he said. “His physical appearance is black. I don’t know how he could have chosen to be any other race. Let’s just say he decided to be white — people would have laughed at him.”

“You are a product of your experience. I’m a U.S. congressman, and I feel some degree of discomfort when I’m in an all-white group. We don’t have the same view of the world, our experiences have been different.”

The entire issue balances precariously on the “one-drop” rule, which sprang from the slaveowner habit of dropping by the slave quarters and producing brown babies. One drop of black blood meant that person, and his or her descendants, could never be a full citizen.

Today, the spectrum of skin tones among African-Americans — even those with two black parents — is evidence of widespread white ancestry. Also, since blacks were often light enough to pass for white, unknown numbers of white Americans today have blacks hidden in their family trees.

One book, “Black People and their Place in World History,” by Dr. Leroy Vaughn, even claims that five past presidents — Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge — had black ancestors, which would make Obama the sixth of his kind.

Mix in a few centuries’ worth of Central, South and Native Americans, plus Asians, and untold millions of today’s U.S. citizens need a DNA test to decipher their true colors. The melting pot is working.

Yet the world has never been confronted with such powerful evidence as Obama. So as soon as he was elected, the seeds of confusion began putting down roots.

“Let’s not forget that he is not only the first African-American president, but the first biracial candidate. He was raised by a single white mother,” a Fox News commentator said seven minutes after Obama was declared the winner.

“We do not have our first black president,” the author Christopher Hitchens said on the BBC program “Newsnight.” “He is not black. He is as black as he is white.”

A Doonesbury comic strip that ran the day after the election showed several soldiers celebrating.

“He’s half-white, you know,” says a white soldier.

“You must be so proud,” responds another.

Pride is the center of racial identity, and some white people seem insulted by a perception that Obama is rejecting his white mother (even though her family was a centerpiece of his campaign image-making) or baffled by the notion that someone would choose to be black instead of half-white.

“He can’t be African-American. With race, white claims 50 percent of him and black 50 percent of him. Half a loaf is better than no loaf at all,” Ron Wilson of Plantation, Fla., wrote in a letter to the Sun-Sentinel newspaper.

Attempts to whiten Obama leave a bitter taste for many African-Americans, who feel that at their moment of triumph, the rules are being changed to steal what once was deemed worthless — blackness itself.

“For some people it’s honestly confusion,” said Favor, the Dartmouth professor. “For others it’s a ploy to sort of reclaim the presidency for whiteness, as though Obama’s blackness is somehow mitigated by being biracial.”

Then there are the questions remaining from Obama’s entry into national politics, when some blacks were leery of this Hawaiian-born newcomer who did not share their history.

Linda Bob, a black schoolteacher from Eustis, Fla., said that calling Obama black when he was raised in a white family and none of his ancestors experienced slavery could cause some to ignore or forget the history of racial injustice.

“It just seems unfair to totally label him African-American without acknowledging that he was born to a white mother,” she said. “It makes you feel like he doesn’t have a class, a group.”

There is at least one group eagerly waiting for Obama to embrace them. “To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president … a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go,” Marie Arana wrote in the Washington Post.

He’s a bridge between eras as well. The multiracial category “wasn’t there when I was growing up,” said John McWhorter, a 43-year-old fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Race and Ethnicity, who is black. “In the ’70s and the ’80s, if somebody had one white parent and one black parent, the idea was they were black and had better get used to it and develop this black identity. That’s now changing.”

Latinos, whom the census identifies as an ethnic group and not a race, were not counted separately by the government until the 1970s. After the 1990 census, many people complained that the four racial categories — white, black, Asian, and American Indian/Alaska native — did not fit them. The government then allowed people to check more than one box. (It also added a fifth category, for Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders.)

Six million people, or 2 percent of the population, now say they belong to more than one race, according to the most recent census figures. Another 19 million people, or 6 percent of the population, identify themselves as “some other race” than the five available choices.

The White House Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the census, specifically decided not to add a “multiracial” category, deeming it not a race in and of itself.

“We are in a transitional period” regarding these labels, McWhorter said. “I think that in only 20 years, the notion that there are white people and there are black people and anyone in between has some explaining to do and an identity to come up with, that will all seem very old-fashioned.”

The debate over Obama’s identity is just the latest step in a journey he unflinchingly chronicled in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father.”

As a teenager, grappling with the social separation of his white classmates, “I had no idea who my own self was,” Obama wrote.

In college in the 1970s, like millions of other dark-skinned Americans searching for self respect in a discriminatory nation, Obama found refuge in blackness. Classmates who sidestepped the label “black” in favor of “multiracial” chafed at Obama’s newfound pride: “They avoided black people,” he wrote. “It wasn’t a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around.”

Fast-forward 30 years, to the early stages of Obama’s presidential campaign. Minorities are on track to outnumber whites, to redefine the dominant American culture. And the black political establishment, firmly rooted in the civil rights movement, questioned whether the outsider Obama was “black enough.”

Then came the primary and general elections, when white voters were essential for victory. “Now I’m too black,” Obama joked in July before an audience of minority journalists. “There is this sense of going back and forth depending on the time of day in terms of making assessments about my candidacy.”

Today, it seems no single definition does justice to Obama — or to a nation where the revelation that Obama’s eighth cousin is Dick Cheney, the white vice president from Wyoming, caused barely a ripple in the campaign.

In his memoir, Obama says he was deeply affected by reading that Malcolm X, the black nationalist-turned-humanist, once wished his white blood could be expunged. “Traveling down the road to self-respect my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction,” Obama wrote. “I was left to wonder what else I would be severing if I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border.”

Author Mark Noll is one of the preeminent historians of religion in American history. That designation is sure to grow with his timely release of “God and Race in American Politics: A Short History.”

Could there possibly be a better time for the release of this work then weeks before our nation elected its first African American President? Race, religion, and politics in American history have always alternated between great triumphs and shameful failure. Noll outlines this contradictory history and provides theological and cultural insights into the reasons.

As the sub-title suggests, Noll writes a short history (200 pages). That is not to be confused with an incomplete history. Noll moves through the issues of race, religion, and politics from the origins of American slavery, to the start of the Black Church Movement, to the Jim Crow years, through the Civil Rights years, and onto the present. In doing so, he provides a panoramic view of what he accurately describes as “spectacular liberation alongside spectacular oppression.” And he does so not in a dry-as-dust historical style, but in an engaging, appealing, captivating narrative style. Surely this is one of the most important books on religion, race, and politics written to date.

Reviewer: Robert W. Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of “Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction.”

All the buzz in Chicago is about “Da Bears!” The Chicago Bears are headed to the Super Bowl headed by Coach Lovie Smith. There are so many intriguing story lines in this match-up of the Bears and the Colts.

One of the most intriguing is the solid relationship that Smith shares with the Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy. Best friends, they are now pitted against each other: the Windy City versus the Indy City.

Making History in Black History Month: “It Means a Lot”

As many have noted, with both men being African American, history will be made in Black History month in February. And historic it is. In the bigger picture of life, Smith and Dungy form a social triumph of major proportion.

”It means quite a bit for me being the coach of the Chicago Bears and being able to lead our team to another Super Bowl,” Smith said. ”But being the first black coach to lead his team to the Super Bowl, of course our players knew about it and they wanted to help us make history today. So I feel blessed to be in that position.”

”It means a lot,” Dungy said after the Colts’ 38-34 victory. ”I’m very proud to represent African American coaches, but more than that, it’s about the Indianapolis Colts.”

The Bigger Picture of Life: Christian Faith

What has been conspicuously missing in the national media attention is the main element in each man’s life. In fact, in their own words, it is ultimately what makes them who they are—their Christian faith.

At a Chicago news conference on Monday, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama noted that Smith and Dungy present “a good lesson for all of us. To see two African-American coaches go to the Super Bowl when it has been historically difficult for black coaches to break into the NFL is terrific,” Obama said. “But what makes it even better is that they are both men of humility, they are both men of God. They never trash talk. They are not yellers and screamers on the sidelines. They are a couple of class individuals.”

Indeed, they are both men of God, men of Christ.

Dungy recalls one of his first interviews for a head coaching position. “One guy did ask me, ‘If you get this job, is this going to be the most important thing in your life? Are you going to treat my team as the most important thing?’ “No, I’m not,” Dungy said. “I didn’t think I was going to get that job and I didn’t. But for faith to be more important than your job, for family to be more important, we all know that’s the way it should be, but we’re all afraid to say that sometimes. Lovie isn’t afraid to say it, and I’m not afraid to say it.”

“I know the type of person Lovie is,” Dungy said. “He has the same Christian convictions I have. He runs his team the same way. I know how those guys are treated in Chicago and how they play—tough, disciplined football without a lot of profanity from coaches or a win-at-all-costs atmosphere.”

Dungy told an audience of more than 1,200 at the Convention Center last year that his Christian walk is even more important than sports. “That is really the main element in my life. Athletics is important, but without the Christian part it is kind of empty,” the famed coach said.

Lovie Smith is a Christian and has made no attempt to hide his beliefs. Smith says that he relies on his Christian faith, which was cultivated in him during his childhood. “Everything that I am is based on my faith. It has been a big part of me,” he says. “At a young age, I called on God to help me, and He was there as a comfort for me. That is something that I have leaned on ever since.”

Faith Active in Life: “Staying with It Through the Storms”

In an era when many often ridicule men of faith as weak and incapable of making it successfully in the “real world,” it is empowering to understand how Smith and Dungy have been energized and guided by their faith. Their Christianity impacts everything they do as coaches and has enabled them to treat their players with a respect that has produced loyalty and productivity.

For years Dungy couldn’t get a coaching job, not only because there were so few blacks in the NFL but also because conventional football wisdom considered him too nice, too polite, too “laid-back” to be successful in a cutthroat, demanding business.

Dungy said he shares more similarities than differences with Smith, adding, “Lovie’s probably a little smarter than I am.”

Said Smith: “I would not use ‘laid-back.’ I think our styles are similar. We try to treat our players as men and we expect them to behave that way. We have certain standards.”

“As you look at young coaches coming through the ranks, a lot of them have a mental picture of how a coach is supposed to act, and I think what Tony Dungy showed me was that you didn’t have to act that way. Be yourself and just believe in what you know and stay with that through the storms and you can get the job accomplished.”

Super Bowl Champions: Winners in the Game of Life

As a “Chicago kid,” I have to root for the Bears in this one. But as a “Christian man,” I’m rooting for both Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy. They have what it takes to be winners in the game of life. They have Christ, and He has them.

One will come away a Super Bowl Champion. However, both will come away winners in the game of life.

Tags: Biblical Counseling, Christian Counseling, Church, Discipleship, Equipping, Kellemen, Ministry, Pastors, RPM Ministries, Soul Care, Spiritual Direction, Spiritual Formation