Funny how sometimes we think our life is about one thing, but it really turns out to be more about something else … but it’s okay that way. I’ve realized – once again – that, despite battling chronic illness for over three-fourths of my life, I can still do something personally meaningful and redemptive with my time. It struck me in May that I’d reached a critical turning point in the huge project I’ve been working on since 1995. Basically, I think that I can finish – within two more years! - my curriculum to train Christians who are interested in understanding how cultures form and transform, how to deal with cross-cultural conflict, and how to adapt ministries and churches within their local setting without compromising biblical commands. Now, that’s exciting … at least, I think it is!

And oddly enough, being ill helped me focus what available energy I had in persevering on this project. I could at least think while I was resting, and then type out what was in the “buffer zone” when I had a bit of oomph. And so, through dribs and drabs, by the end of 2008 I’ll have written 1 million words on topics related to culture. Shocking, eh? But that just means most of a mountain of “clay” has been produced, and now it will take the next few years to shape, scrape, and fire this into its final form. (Perhaps I can focus on making it far less dense than my blog! Hmmm … keep praying …) Anyway, I am also hoping to begin beta-testing some of the modules and facilitating several series of film studies locally by 2010, if not before.

I really am delighted that this project is so far along! So, I thought I would create a new page on my blog that I can post updates to periodically, in case people are interested in the ongoing progress. The Cultural Curriculum Project page shares the background of how I landed in the middle of such a huge and unusual project. It also shares about its components, milestones along the way, and tentative plans for forthcoming studies, projects, and presentations related to its completion.

For those who want it, there is detailed information to show the extensive nature of the work already done, and what it encompasses in terms of paradigm analysis, cultural interpretation systems, ministry contextualization systems, and related components. If the details are not of particular interest, perhaps you’ll at least find yourself joining me in celebrating God’s faithfulness. The testimony is in the details, as to how He’s kept me going for lo, these many years. I am grateful to Him, and to those amazing and supportive friends who have journeyed along with me in this fascinating, frustrating, and life-focusing project. May He use it all for His Kingdom purposes …

Check it out when you get a chance. And meanwhile, here’s a taste of some of the sections on this new page.

BACKGROUND

Aptitude tests I took in high school indicated that my strongest career possibilities should come from pursuits in these areas in this order: engineering, physical sciences, biological sciences, business, social sciences, and arts and humanities. Huh … well, there is no accounting at times for God’s providential intervention. If I’d stayed more with the science side of things, I suspect I’d still be involved in something holistic now, like urban planning and sustainability. Instead, what I ended up passionate about – studies of paradigm and cultural systems, studies of the future, and church planting strategy – basically turned that pyramid of career prognostications on its head! [...]

COMPONENTS IN THE PROJECT

[...] All along the way, I kept writing historical documentation and articles and strategy reports and futurist analyses and ministry profiles of whatever I was involved with. I came to see that there were significant gaps in how we typically train church leaders in North America. So, I began turning my writings toward “immersion learning curriculum” that could help leaders with both conceptual and practitioner skills in interpreting culture, contextualizing ministry, and transforming society. The “immersion learning” part meant creating a range of activity-based tools and experiences that contribute to the training process – such things as:

  • Original assessment tools to help people identify and understand their learning styles, cultural background, potential for cultural fluidity, best roles in ministry teamwork that involves cross-cultural work, etc.
  • Case studies with their real-world scenarios and decide-for-yourself strategy issues, to help develop discernment and decision-making skills in both individual and group leadership environments.
  • Group activities that force to the surface people’s differences in information processing styles/learning styles, critical values, theological assumptions, strategy and structure preferences, methodological models, and cultural lifestyles – and then facilitate reflection on discerning what differences are biblically critical and which are not, and what to do about them.
  • Film studies that offer armchair opportunities to observe, analyze, and interpret realistic situations of personal and cultural conflict, and consider potential for providential “redemptive purposes” beyond the conflict.
  • Original visual media (e.g., film, video games, 3-D and 4-D graphics presentations, posters, graphic novels), concrete media (e.g., board games, trading cards, toys), multimedia (e.g., completely searchable document system with hyperlinked glossary, wiki, graphics, PowerPoints, etc.), and simulation games – each with their appeals to people with different dominant learning styles, but all giving an opportunity to understand how “culture” is transmitted through everyday objects and experiences.
  • Field work exercises and experiences to increase learning readiness by showing how much more we need to learn, and to give apprentices the chance to apply their conceptual frameworks and culturologist skills at increasing levels of sophistication.

This illustrates the main reason why I have not yet sought to publish this material. This is an entire system for culture and contextualization, not just a book (or two or five or eight!). Also, to publish certain parts of it spoils the possibilities for learning. Students from certain backgrounds and learning styles will be prone to mistakenly assume they can “get it” about culture and contextualization simply by reading about it. But cultural conflict and its resolution cannot be figured out strictly by exposure to concepts; the culture shock and emotional frustration it causes needs to be experienced to be truly understood.

For the sake of maintaining the integrity of this material as a learning system, I have foregone publishing at this time, other than what is in my blog. [...]

MILESTONES

2002 – Developed the primary conceptual framework for analyzing and interpreting cultural systems, using four “pure type” cultures based on information processing styles: analytic, synthetic, symbiotic, and analogic. This system allows assessment of a given individual’s or social group’s relative position in a three-dimensional representation of all cultural spaces. And the underlying theory then allows for determining probable issues of cultural bridges and barriers between any two points in that three-dimensional space. This means people who desire to work cross-culturally could identify the “cultural distance” between themselves and their culture of interest, discern accordingly how suited they are/are not for working in that setting, explore the specific issues of culture shock they can expect, and make an informed decision on whether or not they choose to enter that culture. Since this cultural theory includes the target goal of “Kingdom culture” (what God intends as universal principles for every culture that is transformed by Christ while still maintaining a unique and distinctive cultural fingerprint of where they came from), that means you could “triangulate a trajectory” among an individual who serves in an indigenous or cross-cultural situation, the culture he or she works within, and Kingdom culture. And, when you take this three-dimensional model into a fourth-dimension, you can simulate the effects of global culture change over time as to which underlying pure type cultures are in the ascendancy and which are in decline internationally.

UPDATES 2008

2008 – Working on the geometric and mathematical modeling required to translate my cultural analysis system and related theories into something that can be turned into three-dimensional digital models, show how various combinations of cultures could conflict or composite, and demonstrate how the entire system of cultures globally is changing over time.

Thanks for your interest in the Cultural Curriculum Project! Please pray for its completion …