CONFAB–Tuesday
How to Communicate Across Generations?
1. How do you do this now?
“What you see is what you get.” (Speaker driven, little awareness of hearers)
Shot gun (One size fits all)
Trial & error (“In other words…”)
Power talk (“This is the pastor calling.” “Don’t do what I say, do what I do.”)
Active Listening (Watch for eye contact and body language)
Empathic listening (“I hear you say this.”)
Translating a sermon—conveys main idea but loses the fine points
There’s been extraordinary emphasis on individual responsibility to learn to communicate more effectively and how to listen more actively. You see this in Skillpath seminars. This understanding places the burden on the individual rather than on the community. It’s the individual who needs more training to communicate more effectively.
The focus of this seminar is to understand that the context in which someone is communicating has as much if not more impact on how effective communication takes place.
Communication often begins with whom and from where the one is communicating. When this happens, we assume that speaking from our particular context is understandable to the hearers. This is not so anymore.
2. World Context
Common Experiences
In our world today, what are some shared experiences that unite us as one people?
(Disney’s Magic Kingdom, MacDonald’s, Presidential elections, Bay Area traffic congestion, others)
Diverse Experiences
How has our world become diverse and pluralistic?
Absolutes giving way to relativism
Friction between tradition and contemporary
Power of words and the power of images
English language and Asian languages (Variety of Asian languages)
Multitude of products and choices
Rise of age group segmentation
Others
3. Generational & Cultural Factors
We see that for each generation of people, there is associated with it a cultural milieu/context.
How do you identify with a specific generational and/or cultural group? Identify the following:
Life stages: Youth, Gen Xers or Twentysomething, Baby Busters, Boomers, Builders, etc.
Origin identity: Immigrant, “1.5” Generation, Second Generation, Long-time
Californian, etc.
Ethnicity/ Primary language: English, Chinese, Burmese, Vietnamese, Mien, Korean, etc.
Circle or write in your identifying characteristics. From these characteristics, what kind of communication is most effective with you? Think about times when you felt you were being heard and when you felt others were listening to you.
Share.
How do these characteristics shape your ability to communicate with others and how others communicate with you? Possible responses:
*Use of familiar language, rhythms, accents, nuances
*Hearing relevant stories
*Use of understandable languages
*Assumptions & presuppositions are shared
*Common interests
4. High/Low Context
Liang Ho’s chart—Cultural Continuum
Ho identifies three basic cultures that perceive the world differently. Given our upbringing by family and home, we all have a primary culture. However, the task toward multicultural living is to develop skills to “swing” from one culture to another effectively.
Eric Law’s
5. Cultural Identity Context
Kitano & Daniels—Ethnic Cultural Identity and Adjustment of Asian North Americans
The horizontal line represents the degree of ethnic cultural identity and the vertical represents the degree of adjustment in or identification with western culture. The four quadrants are not exclusive of each other. One can identify with characteristics in more than one quadrant. This illustrates that one’s worldview is seen from a particular ethnic cultural and adjustment vantage point.
Sue & Sue’s Racial-Ethnic Identity Development
A “developmental” theory suggests that a person experiences a progression in a life time. The successive stages build upon each other toward an integrative awareness.
6. Biblical Context
How did Jesus communicate across generations?
a. Jesus met the children—Mark 10:13-16 (laid his hand, touched them)
b. Young Rich Ruler—Matthew 19:16-30 (focused on life issues)
c. Nicodemus—John 31 (focused on the meaning of life)
7. First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco
Vision/Mission Statement
The First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco is a multi-generational, bilingual, bicultural church. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are called to be a people so transformed by God’s gracious love in Jesus Christ that we joyfully commit ourselves in worship, witness, discipleship, and ministry.
a. Embrace differences
“The Practice of embrace” involves the act of two movements on the part of two people or groups—a movement to create “space in myself for the other” and an enclosing movement to communicate that I do not want to be without the other in her or his otherness. To embrace others suggests that we cannot “live authentically without welcoming others—the other gender, other persons, or other cultures”—into the very structure of our being.”
From Embracing Diversity, Charles R. Foster, The Alban Institute, Inc. 1997.
Share how it is when we know ourselves as different we are able to recognize that others are different from us as well.
FCBC ways of embracing differences:
*Translates all official documents in English and Chinese
*Endorses Chinese and English worshipping congregations
*Encourages “grassroots” planning (Sustainable Church TF, Chinese Coworkers Council, Bible study groups)
*Broad representation on all committees and boards
*
b. Living Between Myth and Parable
“Myth does not mean a pleasant story that is untrue, or what maybe called “sophisticated lying.” Nor is it some type of legend populated with gods and goddesses. Rather, in the technical sense, myth refers mostly to mediation and reconciliation. Myth performs the specific task of mediating irreducible opposites.
The double function of myth is this: to resolve particular contradictions and, more important, to create a belief in the permanent possibility of reconciliation.
Parable, on the other hand, is not about mediation but about contradiction. It creates irreconcilability where before there was reconciliation. Parable has the double function that opposes the double function of myth. Parable not only introduces contradiction into situations of complacent security, “it challenges the fundamental principle of reconciliation by making us aware of the fact that we made up the reconciliation.
If the stories we create are to be authentic reflections of the lives we live, we need room for ambiguity and vulnerability. Parabolic narratives show the seams and edges of the myths we fashion. Parables show the fault lines beneath the comfortable surfaces of the worlds we build for ourselves. Myths may give stability to our story, but parables are agents of change and sometimes disruption. For that reason, parable is often an unsettling experience.”
From Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals, Herbert Anderson & Edward Foley, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1998, pp.13-14.
A good example is p. 32 on adult children leaving home. The parable of leaving home and the myth of returning sustains this paradoxical journey. We leave home in order to go home again.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son—Luke 15
What does this teach?
The Purpose of Parables passages (Mt. 13:10-17; Mk. 4:10-12; Lk. 8:9-10)
These are troubling verses and seems entirely out of character for Jesus to speak in riddles in order that those who have not responded positively to his ministry may not repent and be forgiven.
FCBC Myths & Parables:
*We are one church with three worshipping congregations.
*It is because Chinatown is dense and crowded is the reason why we deal with traffic and little parking to be a church in the inner city. “If this is where the action is, we want to be there too.”
*When we worship in our joint bilingual services, it is not so much that we understand everything as it is the giving of presence that we are here for one another that’s divine.
*We are a little brick church situated on the “corner of Waverly Place and Sacramento Street” with a Bay Area wide ministry.
c. Giving Testimony
“Christian testimony has two dimensions. One is testimony to the church and the world, where witnesses tell others about the action of God. The other is testimony to God, where witnesses tell God the truth about themselves and others.
The practice of testimony requires a person to commit voice and body to the telling of the truth. It guards the integrity of personal and communal life, as much on the grand stage of history as in the small exchanges of home. Today, living in a world where falsehood is strong, we need to support one another as we rise to bear witness, speaking the truth about what we have seen and heard. When we do, we are also supported by another community, one that has inspired Christians since the earliest days: “the great cloud of witnesses” who have gone before us (Hebrew 12:1).
From “Testimony” Chapter 7 by Thomas Hoyt Jr. in Practicing Our Faith, Dorothy C. Bass, Ed., Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1997.
FCBC Examples of Testimony:
*Monthly “Parade of Witnesses”
*Personal stories in sermons
*”Tell Us Your Story” personal history project
*
d. Create rituals
“Similar to other species, human rituals can be defined, at least in part, as ordered, patterned, and shared behavior. What is different for human beings, however, is that our ritualization is an imaginative and interpretive act through which we express and create meaning in our lives.
Thus human ritual has a narrative substratum to it that is not present in the ritual actions of other creatures. Our ritualizing patterns are set apart by the way in which narrative becomes an essential aspect of and motivation for ritual. In our rituals, like our stories, we narrate our existence, that is to say, we individually and collectively express and create a vision of life. Furthermore, through ritual and narrative we mediate the many identities and relationships that shape that life.”
From Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals, Herbert Anderson & Edward Foley, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1998, pp.26 & 34.
FCBC Rituals:
*Monthly joint youth and adult worship (Children story, Parade of witnesses, drama)
*The Lord’s Supper (Blest be the Tie that Binds)
*The Lord’s Prayer
*Annual church picnic
*Maundy Thursday Service
*Christmas Eve Candlelight service
*Giving out candy when a couple announces their engagement
*Celebrating Chinese New Year program
*Chinese funeral services
*Serving one another tea
e. Do mission
“…As New Yorkers (Californians) approach the twenty-first century, the churches of our city will perhaps be called upon to fulfill a function even more vital than that of fighting poverty. Rev. Andrew Greeley writes: “No one has yet phrased in cogent enough terms for modern man the argument that love and civility are the only way to prevent the metropolis from destroying both the vision that brought it into being and [those] who have created it…Unless there is an emergence of a new urbanity, disaster is inescapable.” Religious institutions make life in the city possible. They serve culture by doing two vital things: they set forth a web of moral demands and provide the means through which people can find respite from the tensions created by those demands. From churches, we learn moral laws, but we also hear the gracious good news of the gospel, “with its own joyful motivations to do the work of building the earthly city.””
From Signs of Hope in the City, Ministries of Community Renewal, Robert D. Carle and Louis A. DeCarlo Jr., Eds, Judson Press, Valley Forge, 1999, p. 266.
FCBC’s Urban Ministries
*Friday Night School
*Day Camp
*Decision to remain in Chinatown
*Involvement in the CCU
8. Leadership for the Future
Howard Gardner identifies three kinds of leaders:
1. Visionary—Very rare who has the capacity to envision bold new possibilities for communities (Moses, Jesus, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr.)
2. Ordinary—Most common who simply relate the traditional story of their group as effectively as possible. They do not stretch the consciousness of the group through their leadership, but they do reveal the commonplace stories that inform and shape the group or community’s life together—an important task for any community seeking to maintain its identity, values, and institutions into the future.
3. Innovative—Take “a story that has been latent” in the group or community and bring to it “new attention or a fresh twist.” The genius of innovative leaders exists in the capacity to identify stories and themes in a community’s heritage that have been “muted or neglected” over the years, perhaps centuries. They bring them to the foreground of people’s consciousness as a resource to the renewal and transformation of the life of the community.
Leaders of multigenerational/multicultural congregations seemed to have the ability to draw on strengths of all three patterns of leadership.
Leadership Characteristics
1. Transformative
Primary attention is not given to maintaining the status quo of any one group but the nurture of change in the congregation for the sake of new relationships.
2. Anticipatory
Akin to proactive leadership, in which leaders anticipate questions that might be asked, issues that might be posed, and problems that might occur, and they prepare possible responses. They see a situation or event from the future rather than from the past.
3. Relational
Leadership emphasizes relationality in establishing ground rules for corporate conduct and decision making.
4. Leadership & Power
a. The presence of diversity means that every leadership activity engages us in the power dynamics among the various generational and cultural groups. This is negotiation.
b. The persistent effort to create conditions in which all parties have the freedom to recognize their concrete otherness, leading to the possibility of both mutual affirmation and critique. We engage each other as partners.
c. Long-termed commitment with the understanding that there are no quick “ten steps” to create multigenerational/multicultural congregations.
9. Conclusion
Finally there is no one single church model or “ten quick easy steps” to communicating across generations/multicultural settings. This would be a contradiction to the unique gifts and strengths of multigenerational and multicultural congregations. Ultimately, to communicate effectively across generations requires contextualizing your church’s ministry.
In light of today’s diversity particularly in our age-group generations, it would be very difficult if not impossible to remain effective in communicating to all age groups. At best, we are effective primarily with the group that we share most in common at that stage of our life.
However, when we are aware of the contexts in which we are attempting communication, we would be more apt to be received as relevant. Furthermore, it is when we contextualize within our own particular church setting of
Embracing differences
Living between myths and parables
Giving testimonies
Creating rituals and
Doing mission
that we design common experiences where there were none before to communicate across generations.