The Multicultural Leader

course at Tyndale summer school

Over the past several months I have been working with Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, Ontario [one of the world's great multicultural labs] to design a course focused on developing leadership capacity for facilitating multicultural communities.

Their website has just posted info about the course for next summer: Becoming an Interculturally Competent Leader [July 18-22, 2011].

Here is the course description:

This course is designed for students who currently function, or who anticipate functioning, in inter-cultural environments. The course will enable participants to develop a biblical theology of diversity and to understand and apply the theory and dynamics of intercultural relations. The course will also examine leadership practices suited for facilitating intercultural dialogue and empowering diverse congregations – as a missional response to the demographics of our changing neighbourhoods and workplaces. Through lectures, discussions, exercises and assignments, participants will develop leadership skills for engaging with cultural and religious differences in both community and congregation.

 

Bennett's Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS)

The continuum model in my book, The Multicultural Leader, is related to Milton Bennett's Development Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS). A future edition of my book will make closer connections to Bennett's model; after almost a decade of using the DMIS in my work. You can find his original thoughts in these locations...

"Towards Ethnorelativism: a development model of intercultural sensitivity" Bennett, in Education for the Intercultural Experience (Paige, ed., 1993)

"Measuring Intercultural Sensitivity: the Intercultural Development Inventory" (Hammer, Bennett, Wiseman, IJIR, 2003)

"Becoming Interculturally Competent" Bennett, in Toward Multiculturalism: a reader in multicultural education (Wurzel, ed., 2004)

 

difference & Christian mission

I gave a presentation at the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) Conference in Minneapolis October 30, 2010... here are some of summary points from my ppt.

“conceiving the same on the basis of the different” makes identity secondary to and derivative from difference. [Deleuze, 1968]

–I am different from you, and that is my identity

“The freeing of difference requires thought without contradiction, without dialectics, without negation; thought that accepts divergence;” [Foucault, 1977]

–Will you allow me to be different, period?

“a theology of difference would stem from the diversity intrinsic in God’s creativity and would analyze the ways in which humanity has distorted God’s abundance of difference… of which the urge to suppress difference is one expression.” [Titus Presler, IBMR, 2010]

The encounter with Other challenges us to see the unexplainable beyond ourselves, and calls into question everything we have previously understood or constructed. [Levinas]

• If mission is intrinsic to Christian identity – that is, to be a Jesus-follower is to follow Jesus into the encounter with difference – then ‘engaging the other’ who is different is, in fact, intrinsic to Christian faithfulness.

• Christian mission, then, is not a marketing campaign to persuade people of other faiths, or non-faiths, to accept my version of reality [we are called to be a ‘witness,’ to state our experience with Jesus], but a community of practice which has come to believe a particular set of convictions about reality and would like the freedom to offer those convictions for consideration by persons who hold other sets of convictions, while at the same time allowing them to be different, period.
• And it is in this engagement with difference that I am adjusted and shaped toward the image of God, because I come to recognize the different other as also shaped in the image of God, period.

We need to be released from our “present dependence upon one set of cultural forms so that we can provide the place wherein we are able to do theology in the only way that it can be done properly – by learning with increasing capacity to confess the one Lord Jesus Christ as alone having absolute authority and therefore recognize the relativity of all the cultural forms within which we try to say who he is. [Newbigin, 1995]