Here is the fourth part of my course preparing people for cross-cultural mission. 

What do you think you will miss most?

• friends and family
• home comforts
• familiarity (e.g. favourite foods)
• entertainment
• a professional environment
• Christian community
• corporate worship and teaching

What frustrations will you face?

• inability to operate in an unfamiliar culture
• slow progress with language learning
• conflict with colleagues
• lack of ministry opportunities
• time-consuming, boring or annoying cultural customs
• bureaucracy
• inefficiency
• corruption
• injustice
• set-backs
• the special challenges and limitations on women in a patriarchal society

Choose to enjoy the city
Choose to enjoy the city and its culture. It is all too easy to become bitter or resentful or to despise the people you are reaching or the place where you live. ‘It is not like home.’ ‘They don’t do things “right”’. ‘They are resistant to our message.’ ‘They don’t enjoy the things you enjoy.’ So work hard to enjoy the city.

Sometimes this will be a choice. Make a habit of saying positive things about the city and its culture. Delight in the city. Be 100 percent there 100 percent of the time. In other words, do not live in the past or the future, looking back or forward to life at ‘home’. Make your home in the culture for as long as you are there.

•            Make a list of ten things you like about the city and its culture.

Choose to enjoy God

Keep telling your heart that God is good.

•             What behaviour and emotions might follow from not embracing the truth that God is good?

Again, think of the towel over the head. Take refuge in God. Find joy in him. Get your pleasure from knowing him and being faithful to him. Remind yourself of all that he is and all that he has done. Search the Scriptures each day for something that makes you rejoice in God afresh.

•             Rewrite Psalm 84, either as a version adapted to your context or as a negative Psalm which says the opposite of the original