NOTE: This is a draft document of the CBC Missions Committee
1. Cross-Cultural Understanding and Experience:
- Expose participants to cultures outside of their own backgrounds and provide them with global orientation. Host leaders will provide on-site orientation to the culture and service methods
- Expose participants to the host culture’s perception of social structures, religion, worldview, and world issues
- Help participants develop a hands-on awareness of the host culture’s economic, social, educational, geographic and governmental distinctives
- Teach participants the importance of entering another culture as servants and learners who can appreciate and respect the differences between their home culture and host culture, as well as accept cultures other than their own
2. Service/Outreach Experience:
- Give participants direct experience in planning and implementing effective cross-cultural service
- Provide participants with many opportunities to share their faith in Christ through word and deed and develop and exercise their unique gifts and abilities
- Offer participants chances to test experientially the truth claims of the Christian worldview
- Give participants opportunities for servant-learning through partnership with and submission to host missionaries and national leaders to assist in implementing long-term goals of the host ministry
- Provide participants with exposure to current mission strategies and the realities of missionary life
- Furnish participants a chance to explore vocational calling and nurture spiritual growth
3. Interpersonal Development and Communication:
- Assist participants in learning to work well within a team that must strategize and plan ministry programs together and then function effectively in a foreign culture
- Help participants recognize the interdependence of humans in general and Christians in particular despite cultural differences
- Provide opportunities for participants to develop relationships across cultures through face-to-face partnership with host ministries and national Christians and through interaction with children, youth and adults in various settings
4. Personal Reflection and Integration:
Through academic preparation, experience, host interactions, discussion and journaling participants will reflect on the Biblical view of God’s global purposes and the role He is calling them to play within those purposes. Participants will also reflect on many other issues including:
- The hopelessness of humankind’s spiritual condition apart from God and the uniqueness of Christ as the only Savior of the world
- How God motivates/calls Christians to be involved in the Christian world mission
- The struggles, beauty and diversity of the worldwide Christian church
- Lessons from the lives of host missionaries and national Christians
- The elements of personal character, spiritual life, commitment and preparation involved in effective intercultural missionary service
- The attitudes and behaviors of a world Christian in living a life consistent with the Biblical view of missions, life stewardship, and how to respond to their home country’s culture and values
