My ministry organization just wrapped a nation-wide, 3 day cross-cultural initiative in an effort to mobilize a few thousand plus staff here in the U.S. towards cross-cultural learning and ministry.  The ministry as a whole is easily 90% or so Caucasian so this mostly was about mobilizing Caucasians to step into the worlds of ethnic minority groups (though there was immense value for the ethnic minority groups crossing cultures themselves into other ethnic minority contexts!)I was invited to help do some of the training in Denver and here are some of my reflections that I personally walked away with:

1. I was reminded of the main point of “Made to Stick” which was that the primary barrier to effective communication is that we often forget what it was like to not know something so we teach or communicate based on where we are and not based on where people’s starting point is.   Preparing this training was a great lesson for me to think through where others are at and it was a struggle to try to communicate in terms that would resonate with the actual audience.   It was great to take the content I used out for a spin for the first time, but I was learning throughout the time about where a lot of people’s starting points are cross-culturally and how to better teach and communicate.
2. I came away from the time with more of an understanding and gracious posture and attitude towards other parts of the country.  I was with some phenomenal people and some of them were really out of their element, but they really had a heart to connect with people different from them and they went for it.  It’s a reminder that all of us have different backgrounds and some just haven’t had the opportunities for cross-cultural learning that others have.  It’s not something to be judged, but having opportunities to expand the paradigms is very important.
3. Students in some ways are the same regardless of ethnicity – they’re trying to figure out who they are, what their purpose in life is, what they believe.  It makes for a lot of great conversations.
4. Students in other ways are very different depending on their ethnic story or journey.  I met a Latino girl who grew up in a small town in Colorado that experienced brutal racism and cultural rejection by her town.  I met several guys whose parents sacrificed years of years of difficult labor to give them the opportunity to go to college and make for a better life.  Students are very similar, but the stories are very different.  Many of those stories remain invisible to the majority culture, but the cool thing about an event like this is that so many of these stories were shared and they had a transformative impact on so many who had really not entered into these types of relationships before.  Very cool to see.
5. A lot of what we see is informed on what we are trained and conditioned to see.  We don’t see what we’re not used to seeing.  This week was an exercise in training people to see differently.  I was reminded of what it means to keep my eyes open to see who the people are around me and what their stories might be.

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Tagged as: Diversity