David Livermore's Serving with Eyes Wide Open is blazingly focused on crucial (mis)understandings and (mis)behaviors of (un)successful short-term missions people.
It's a disruptive read, challenging traditions of we-know-best, let's-go-do-a-project and even aren't-short-term-missions-cool while providing disturbing insights about how easily and breezily we miss and mess up love opportunities.
His solutions-based thinking: Loving God and loving others cross-culturally will be done well when we develop four elements of high cultural intelligence (CQ): Knowledge, interpretive, perseverance, and behavioral.
His solutions-based thinking: Loving God and loving others cross-culturally will be done well when we develop four elements of high cultural intelligence (CQ): Knowledge, interpretive, perseverance, and behavioral.
Key counsel:
- "The goal is to grow in our cross-cultural understanding and then combine that with a thoughful, reflective spirit."
- Four factors of cultural intelligence (CQ) will help short termers interact effectively: Knowledge CQ, understanding cross-cultural differences; Interpretive CQ, accurately decipher cues as we engage; Perseverance CQ, processing through conflict; and Behavioral CQ, acting appropriately
- Starting points for being a short termer with cultural intelligence: "God's a lot bigger than your short term missions trip; stop petting the poor; be yourself, seek to understand; think, again; try, try again; actions speak louder than words; give up trying to see who's in [a Christian] and who's out; love God, love others.
- "As we learn to interpret, reflect, and reframe our observations, we create a link between our cross-cultural understanding and the actual behavior we're after in our mission work."
- "Serving with eyes wide open goes against the grain of our fast-paced, urgent culture by pausing to reflect on and question our assumptions."
- "If we think of people as 'poor,' we demean them."
- "The people of the world in great financial need possess amazing wealth in other areas. Rather than demeaning them as tragic objects to be rescued, what does it look like to see them as our equals so that we walk with them and learn from them, each benefitting from one anothers 'wealth' and sacrifice?"
- "What might it look like if nationals helped us open our eyes to the real needs? Not only is it colonialist to invite national's input on the back end of planning, but we often end up doing irrelevant and costly work."
- "Local ownership...means letting the local churches actually direct and shape what we do in our cross cultural efforts; they ask us if we want to be involved rather than vice versa."
- "Our financial wealth, and all the amenities that accompany that, easily inclines us to think we know what these people need."
- "By failing to look at deeper issues, we come to false conclusions."
- "'Short-term mission groups almost always do work that could be done (and usually done better) by people of the country they visit.'"
Highly recommended.
