Center for Intercultural Training (CIT)

I am really blessed to be able to have this opportunity to come to Union Mills, North Carolina to receive training on equipping missionaries for 4 weeks. The course is equipping for cross-cultural life and ministry. Equipping the heart and mind of the servant. Before the training began we were given two books to read prior to arrival, "Cross-Cultural Connections" by Duane Elmer and "The 3D Gospel" by Jayson Georges, along with some online assignments.

The two weeks since I have been at CIT have been very intense, overload, overwhelming, but very rewarding. Just to give you a list of some of the topics we have covered are transitions, characteristics of effective teams, mind styles, ethnocentrism, views of culture, tools for cultural awareness, folk religion, spiritual warfare, sexual purity, moveable marriage, singles in missions, genders matters, cross-cultural communication, social context, what is truth, and worldview. There are still two more weeks. This course is designed I believe to get missionaries to understand who they are and what makes you, you in order to be able to understand other cultures and what makes them who they are. There is a lot of reading assignments of different articles and sometimes even writing 2-page reflection papers on a topic that we studied.

I have really enjoyed everything we have talked about but I just wanted to share with you is on folk religion. If you are like me when I saw that topic I really wasn't sure what to think. It intrigued me. One aspect of religion is animism. Animism is a belief focusing on manipulating the spirits to get what you want. Even when we try to manipulate God to get what we want is animism. Being careful then about replacing the animisms of the people who I am serving with the animisms of my own culture. Let me give you some examples of animisms or superstitions that we use in the states. Crossing your fingers when you don't want to make a promise. The saying, "knock on wood..." after we have said something because we don't want anything to go wrong. A rabbit's foot or upside down horseshoe for good luck. Don't walk under a ladder or you will have bad luck. Many skyscrapers do not have floor number 13 because it infers bad luck or even death. Find a penny heads up, pick it up for good luck. These are just a few out of many that we have in our culture here in the states. My leader shared that sometimes these animisms come with the people even in Evangelical Christian Churches. When I return to the Dominican Republic I will be observing and try to learn any of their animisms as a country that may have trickled into the Evangelical churches. Again not wanting to substitute one animism for another when sharing Christ. It needs to be Christ and Him alone.

This past weekend, we were given two assignments for homework and write a paper about our experience. The first assignment to go to a church that is the main religion of our host country where we will be serving. Observe the service, how many styles of communication was used throughout the service and our feelings and attitudes. The Dominican Republic's main religion is Roman Catholic so I attended a Roman Catholic Mass at the Basilica in Asheville, NC. The second assignment was to interview three different people who were not born in the U.S. They can be tourists or now living here. I went to a variety of places where I was told to find some international people. I went to a Vietnamese Nail Salon which was very difficult to talk to them because some did not speak English and the one who did was easily distracted with the coming and going of everyone. A group of us went to an international equestrian pony show because of people from all over the world comes to the international show but we did not encounter anyone who was not born outside the US but we had a fun time watching the relay pony games. A few of us walked around the city of Asheville because we were told many tourists from all over come because it's a musical and artsy city. We didn't find anyone as we were walking but the Christian church we attended the pastor sounded like he had a British accent so as we greeted him, we conversed and found out he originally is from Manchester, England. My last hope to find someone was a small hispanic store in a neighboring town. The lady was from Honduras so I got to converse with her in Spanish and she invited me to come back for some Honduran food (baleadas and papusas). Both assignments at first were nerve racking but later as I was writing my reflection paper it was actually very rewarding and eye opening.