Cross-Cultural Conversations: A Conversation With Patty Lane

VUSA: For some pastors and leaders, it might be a new idea that cross-cultural issues could even be a problem in conversations. Talk a bit about why we should really be aware of somebody’s ethnic or cultural background when we’re having conversations.

Patty Lane: Basically, our culture is a filter by which we understand what’s being said to us. So if we’re not aware of cultural differences, we could really misunderstand the conversation. That’s the simple answer.

From there, I think your concept of misattribution becomes the key. Could you talk a little bit about misattribution and how it might play out in a ministry-type conversation?

Misattribution is ascribing a meaning or a motive to a behavior that’s based upon one’s own culture or experience. It happens all the time, between genders, between generations. But we see it in the most pronounced ways when we’re working with people of other cultures.

For example, in my culture, I know I want to appear confident and respectful and a good communicator. So I look someone in the eye. But in another culture, especially if I’m talking to a person of an opposite gender, if I look them in the eye, they might think I’m flirting with them. That’s a very different meaning than I intended!

Or in another culture, looking an older person in the eye when there’s quite a big age difference may seem very disrespectful. Again, disrespect is not what I meant by that behavior.

Misattribution can cause lots of problems in communications, because cultures tell us what certain behaviors mean, but the meaning is different in another culture. It makes for a big gap in communication.

You spelled out some of those differences in talking about the different “lenses” of communication. One of the most helpful ones – and also most complex – was high-context versus low-context culture. Could you unpack that one a little? It’s an interesting distinction.

Right. It’s a very broad concept. We’re kind of lumping the world in two very big groups: high-context and low-context.

Let’s take verbal communication. In a high-context culture, the listener is assumed to have the responsibility for the communication. However, a low-context culture says the speaker has the responsibility instead. So a high-context person might hear somebody asking them, “Do you understand this? Does that make sense? Is that clear?” This person is going to perceive those questions as saying, “Are you paying attention? Are you smart enough to follow along with this?”

A person operating from a low-context culture might ask questions like that because they want to make sure they’re communicating well. It’s not a reflection on the listener at all, but a listener from a high-context culture might not realize that.

So, that’s one way in which that plays out. Here’s another idea: Church settings, which are probably going to be predominantly Anglo churches, are going to be pretty low-context. They don’t place the same kind of meaning on the context or the environment of a meeting. But from a high-context perspective, that specific context and environment is as important as the event itself. If people in a low-context culture minimize or dismiss it, or don’t even think about it, they’ve set up a situation that could be very ambiguous. It could communicate a message very different than what they intended.

Other distinctions between these high and low contexts are just the way in which a person thinks about life. High-context thinkers are going to think very holistically. They’re going to think about the big picture, with everything kind of integrated together. But, most low-context thinkers think in a very analytical process. They think of all the parts and try to put them together into a whole.

Say two pastors are working together. One’s a low-context thinker and the other’s a high-context thinker, and they’re trying to do some sort of strategy plan. It’s an amazing process if both groups understand the strengths that the other brings to that process, with both holistic and analytical thinking taking place. But it’s a disaster if they don’t understand that, because they’re not even going to approach strategy from the same perspective. You’re just going to be missing each other right and left, with both groups becoming frustrated, or one group just giving up and accommodating the other group, which is not what anybody wants to happen.

There’s one particular way this concept is playing out in our movement. The Vineyard was founded in Southern California 30 years ago. It was casual – one of the first church movements to say you could wear blue jeans to church. Now we’re trying to become a more multiethnic movement. But for classic Vineyardites, it’s very hard to say you should dress up for church or that you should have a really fancy building. And yet, from what you’re saying, if you’re trying to reach across to a high-context culture, some of those things like dress and how nice things are become a lot more important.

That tension’s not unique to the Vineyard. Could you speak a little bit to that issue of formality and dress, and how that plays out across high- or low-context culture?

You’re right. In high-context cultures, if you want to communicate something that’s important that has value and meaning to you, you might need to do that in a more formal way. How you’re dressed and the setting that you’re in are going to convey a lot of the meaning the person gets from it.

With a low context, that’s not going to be an issue at all. I remember a pastor once who was very high-context going to look at possibly sharing a building with someone. The low-context pastor was saying, “Look at this great place. It’s a big room. There’s a speaker stand. There’s plenty of space. There’s a sound system. It’s got a keyboard over here … everything you need.

And the other pastor, the high-context pastor, said, “Are you kidding? This won’t work.” What he saw in the room were posters of these Christian rock bands, a foosball table, a beanbag chair. He’s thinking, “I can’t have something as important as a worship service in this environment.” But the low-context person wasn’t even paying attention to that. He just saw the very practical things. There were kind of the nuts and bolts of what he thought they needed.

I think we do need to be careful. As a low-context culture reaching out to cultures with high context, we must set an environment to enhance our message and not conflict with it.

Just for the record, white American culture tends to be lower-context than more other cultures?

That’s generally true. Now, some people might tell you that as our culture becomes more and more influenced by postmodern worldviews, they’re seeing a rise in some high-context features. But that’s not significant enough, especially in the church community, to really be changing that much. So I would still say the predominant U.S. Anglo culture is a low-context culture.

Could you summarize some of your thoughts from the book about cross-cultural conflict resolution? Specifically, what do white church leaders need to keep in mind as they’re working through conflicts that can happen between people of different cultures?

Well, unfortunately, the white Anglo group can be very entrenched in their own ideas that their ways are right and biblical. But they don’t have openness about it. Maybe they’ve picked some passages that match their culture. Then they kind of proof-text their approach with those passages and don’t leave any room for anybody to handle conflict in other ways.

On the other hand, other cultures can also pull passages of Scripture and proof-text their preferred method of resolving conflict.

One of the best ways to get at that issue is to practice hearing. I’ll have discussions about what I consider to be biblical truths with people of other cultures. In those discussions, I allow myself to hear how those passages speak to them and other passages that they think relate to that same topic that I might not have even thought were connected at all. Their perspectives sharpen me.

[bctt tweet=”We show each other our blind spots in terms of hearing the whole message of the gospel. – Patty Lane” quote=”But with other cultures, we show each other our blind spots in terms of hearing the whole message of the gospel.”]

In a homogeneous setting, we all have the same blind spots. But with other cultures, we show each other our blind spots in terms of hearing the whole message of the gospel.

So, step one is even just the willingness to be open to different ways of resolving conflict?

Right, to be willing to see the conflict differently. The passage that people always pull out in terms of conflict resolution is Matthew 18, where it says that if someone sinned against you, you go to them privately. You try to work it out. Then, if that doesn’t work, you go back to someone else.

I learned that passage is about how you have the responsibility to go to your fellow believer and tell them how they’ve offended you. That’s an extremely direct approach. What people in other cultures hear from that passage is not so much the direct confrontation, but that this is something private. Their focus of that passage is that it’s done in a way that doesn’t embarrass or cause the person to lose face. So for them, the way to honor that passage is actually to use a mediator, because it’s more private.

Or take the story of Nathan confronting David about Bathsheba. Nathan didn’t approach David by going in and saying, “Hey, buddy, this is what you’ve done. I’m here to call you on the carpet for it, because you’ve done wrong.” He could have, but it probably wouldn’t have been very effective.

Nathan used an approach that worked in the specific context. He was a prophet. David was king. Nathan used a way to reach him which was a more indirect approach. He told him a story. He got him hooked in before he said, “But that person’s you.”

Even Jesus didn’t always hit people over the head with direct confrontations. He did sometimes, like with the moneychangers in the temple. But he also looked down and drew in the dirt and said, “He who has no sin cast the first stone.” He took a less direct approach many times to accomplish what he needed to accomplish.

So Anglos, especially, could stand to see the importance of adapting their message instead of assuming other people think Matthew 18 is unimportant. There are other ways to accomplish Matthew 18 than this in-your-face approach.

If people can enter into a conflict resolution without the idea that their approach to the situation is right and the other person’s is wrong – if they can free themselves of that as much as possible – they’ll have a much better chance of actually resolving the problem.

When you’re working with a group that says they have to resolve a conflict in a certain way, like, “We have to come together in a room, and you need to lay it out and put your cards on the table,” this very direct, confrontational approach could be seen by us as the biblical instruction. But it’s going to be very hard to work with cultures who just cannot do that. It’s anathema to them to cause someone to “lose face.” We need to understand the real meaning of losing face for so many cultures around the world and how it’s significantly different than simply being embarrassed.

What is “losing face,” and how does that play out in these settings?

Losing face is often misunderstood as being when someone “gets embarrassed.” People who don’t have that within their cultural background often make light of it. But actually, the idea of losing face is about a person losing part of their identity. It’s not about embarrassment. It’s about identity!

It varies for different people, depending on their cultural background and the amount they’ve been exposed to U.S. culture. But really for some people, just putting them in a competitive situation where someone wins and someone loses is a loss of face. Asking a person a direct question that causes them to state that they didn’t meet your expectations can cause them to lose face.

So to have good relationship with people of cultures where losing face is an issue, you want to make sure that you avoid triggering those kinds of situations. Something really interesting to me is that people will sometimes be as protective of my face as of their own. For example, sometimes you invite people to an event, and they say they’ll come and then don’t. Part of that is they don’t want to cause you to lose face by them telling you no. Low-context people ask, “Why won’t they just be honest?” Well, to them it’s not about being honest, it’s about protecting your face. To many high-context people, saying no is so rude and impolite, they just wouldn’t think of doing it.

To build and keep good relationships, we need to be aware of how we protect our own face and other’s faces, the specific things we do. If we can see through that lens, a lot of behaviors that don’t make sense to us otherwise begin to make sense.

This is one of the hardest things. In the book you said that this is the one thing that was hard to find an analogy of in Anglo culture.

Well, what I ended up doing was comparing it to the idea of autonomy. Maybe people’s intrinsic sense of face is similar to how intrinsic it is within us that we have personal autonomy. We don’t even call our sense of autonomy into question. We do a lot of things and understand behavior based on how we don’t want to take away other people’s autonomy or make them feel like they don’t have the right to choose. But that was really the best analogy I could think of.

[bctt tweet=”Are we willing to let go of some assumptions about what’s normal and right? – Patty Lane” quote=”So it comes back to this: Are we willing to let go of some assumptions about what’s normal and right? “]

So it comes back to this: Are we willing to let go of some assumptions about what’s normal and right? Are we going to acknowledge that other behaviors and ways of thinking make just as much sense to people from other cultures as our way makes sense to us?

If people can’t step through that doorway, it’s probably going to be difficult for them to have really meaningful relationships cross-culturally. Lots of people are willing to have kind of a pseudo-relationship with someone if there’s a benefit to them in that relationship. So then they think, “I have good relationships with people of other cultures. Look how they love me. They say these nice things to me.” But they don’t recognize that it’s not a real relationship as far as the other person is concerned. It’s about getting something else.

Could you talk a little about developing a church community cross-culturally?

It’s important that churches begin to understand their own culture. I think that’s key. A church needs to understand its own culture and how it’s influenced by that, and also how culture influences our worldview and the way we read Scripture. In homogeneous settings, people are never really challenged to do that.

There’s a lot to be learned from being in multicultural settings if we allow those other cultures to speak to us and if we give them a venue to share, “What does that mean to you?” or “How do you see that?” A lot of growth can happen in those environments.

The other thing would be just to pray and plan. Ask, “Where does God want us to be in the future? What does he want our church to look like or be like or be involved in?” Once you have an idea of the mission, then you can work backwards and say, “If that’s where we’re headed, what are the kinds of things we need to do to start making that a reality?”

I think a lot of churches generally say, “We want to be multiethnic,” but you can’t just say that broadside. You also have to say, “Who are we now, and what do we want to become?” And without answering those questions more specifically, you’re really just saying a truism.

Churches have to consider the biblical principle about building a farm without counting the cost. They need to recognize that to become more multicultural, it’s not about everybody coming and starting to be more like them. It’s about how they’re willing to change to be an environment that is healthy for people of other cultures to be a part of.

That means some of the leadership will probably have to change or make room for new leaders. You can’t just have a church run by the same elders that run it now if you really want to be multicultural. Churches need to be prepared for that kind of change so they can celebrate it instead of resenting it.