This time of the year is the, I-am-the-foreigner-and-I-know everything-you-need-to-learn-to-have-the-success-that-I-have-had, seminar time here in Eastern Europe. One after another! It is like they have a factory of these guys spitting them out our way! It is so frustrating, that a person from a completely different culture and language and history, believes/thinks/has convinced themselves, that if everyone does what I have done, the results will be the same.
This is not the Einstein equation of insanity where we are expecting different results by doing the same thing time and time again. This is Double Einstein equation of insanity where by doing certain actions in a totally and completely different environment, culture, language and country, and wanting and expecting the SAME results as you got in the first country when you did those certain actions! Doubly insane, perhaps even more so! This is like putting gasoline in a car and driving 600 miles, and then putting gasoline in a diesel car expecting to drive 600 miles, and you won't get even 6 miles! (This I know from very hard personal and expensive experience) This is like being in Northern Canada in the dead of winter and wearing very nice and wonderful Patagonia gear to stay warm, and then going to South East Asia the next week and trying to wear the same gear - you will die. This is like growing up under a constitutional Monarchy and then trying to enter into the ludicrous American political system of the electoral college. This is precisely like standing on a busy street corner in Russia trying to navigate the purchase of a house, while not speaking a word of Russian, with only Thai Baht for currency, and the lawyer across the table speaks only Siberian!
And on I could go, seriously. You have no idea how embarrassing it is to be an American living long-term abroad, and to have someone from your country come here and kill your credibility with ignorance and arrogance. No amount of coaching can fix this, no amount of debriefing will help this significantly. It takes years of learning a language and a culture and a people, and LISTENING rather than teaching, of being humble, of understanding that the people you work with are your equals in every way that matters, that you have far more to learn than you will ever be able to teach.
The speaker yesterday gets up and says, "You have to make your churches seeker driven, user friendly, unchurched Joe sensitive. In our big huge church (ok he didn't actually say that part but it was implied) back in ole' America, a person gets greeted at least seven times. We start in the parking lot, where they get their first greeting, then the narthex", etc, etc ad naseum. Dude, we don't have parking lots at our churches. The vast majority of the people coming to church here don't even own a car! Why would you have a parking lot?!? And when you enter a church here, you shake hands with every.single.person!! Stick that in your "we greet every person seven times starting in the parking lot" pipe and smoke it! Do you sense that I am upset here? That is why you are reading this blog! You are one of the intelligentsia.
America is event driven, time focused, and all about "creating community." Here we are relationally driven, everything IS community, there are no seekers, only the desperate. Take your socio-theology which has little to do with God, and much to do with Western Culture, and keep it to yourself. If you want to be missional (in the missionary sense, not the quasi-spiritual idea that everything is missions), and cross the oceans to learn. Cross the oceans to learn another language. Cross the oceans to learn another culture. Cross the oceans and learn some humility, and shed that ignorant arrogant coat from the West you are wearing in my country.
On second thought, just stay in America or wherever you came from! Thank God you don't speak Macedonian! You could do unspeakable damage with your ignorance and arrogance . . . and best of all we would not get to enjoy the translation mistakes :-). The speaker was most proud of the fact that his big huge church in America gives every guest a free ice cream sundae - and his proud point was translated, "every guest receives an ice cream free Sunday."
