Multi Cultural Ministry -– Preaching Jesus in Machine Code LanguageAlright so you want amulti cultural youth ministry. How are you going to do it and
what are your criteria for success? What is it based on? Is it based on assumptionsthat you are making from your ethnic background? How do you figure out how tocommunicate Christ’s message when each ethnic group has a different viewpoint asto who he is, as well as what is right and wrong. All this is based on their cultureand how they are raised. This takes some serious thought and prayer. All we can do is discuss it here – wehaven’t figured it out yet, but are might be a little ahead of you in the fact that weare thinking about it. If you have figured it out yourself, please let us know.Some questions for all of us:
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How do you reach each group with the basic message of Christ unfiltered byEthnic background and culture (ours and theirs)?
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How do we move everyone out of sin and into holiness given that everyone has adifferent view of reality?
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How do we strip out our Anglo identification of who Jesus is? sorry, I’m assumingmost of us reading are Anglo – we can just as easily get caught up in our ownidentification no matter what our ethnic background is
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How do we universally make Christ our foundation ?Lets’ use an example from the computer world. Every processor or processor familyhas its own machine code instruction set. Instructions are patterns of bitsthat bydesign correspond to different commands to the machine. This machine code is theactual language that the processor uses, however in order to make it useful to useyou need to add some layers. We add DOS, XP, Vista, or Snow Leopard. Then ontop of that we have languages such as html, java, or SQL. There are other layersbut you get the drift.In much the same way, God’s word is a machine code, however we add our layer of flavor. Anglo. Hispanic. Korean. Northwest. Midwest. Rich. Poor. Middle Class.Male. Female. The list goes on and on. We all have our programming language orfilters. The question is, how do we help our students understand the “machinecode” of Jesus despite all of our other filters? The easy answer is “by showing themthe character of God” right? I mean that is universal, but the hard part is when youare up against a culturally learned behavior that is foreign to your own… How canyou understand?Bottom line question: Can we speak and understand Jesus in a universal language?It’s hard – Our culture is our first language – we just need to strip our filters andbiases out and get down to the Jesus universal “machine language”. We’ll be
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