A SHORT VISION STATEMENT OF TICCS

• The Mission-sending and Mission-receiving paradigms
• Implications for ministry
• The Cross-Cultural paradigm
• New wineskins
• Learning to leave
• Leaving to learn
• Implications for training
• Rationale for TICCS

It is stated on the TICCS brochure that “TICCS is a research and teaching institution of the Catholic Church in Ghana” that helps ministers in cross-cultural situations to do language-learning, culture-learning and action-learning (action for ministry and action for appropriate development). In these few words a lot is said and it is difficult on first hearing to appreciate all that is implied by this and all that is involved in carrying out this task.

THE PARADIGM OF MISSION-SENDING AND MISSION-RECEIVING:
To gain a clearer insight into this we should make explicit an important hidden paradigm in the church and in its ministerial training. The paradigm involves a complementary process: a “going out” and a “coming in”. It presumes a “sending” church and a “receiving” church. It presumes a group of people who are “missioned”, and a group who are “missioned to”. The paradigm is accompanied by strong expectations concerning their respective roles and functions. “Sending” churches have been characterized by such terms as: “parent church,” “one,” “universal,” “true,” “holy,” “traditional,” “self-sufficient,” “self-propagating,” “self-sustaining,” “mature,” “majority,” while the “receiving” churches have been associated with quite different terms: “child, plural, popular, local, syncretistic, flawed, weak, dependent, immature, minority.” The “sender” assumes a position of power and truth, the “receiver” a stance of weakness and falsehood. One knows and teaches, the other is ignorant and must learn.

Today it is both “politically” and theologically incorrect to continue to hold such distinctions. Today we say that all are meant to be both senders and receivers. Furthermore if we but look around us, it is simply inaccurate to continue to view church using this model of senders and receivers. The former “senders” are now, in fact, the “receivers” and the former “receivers” are “senders” and “receivers”. Yet, despite the anomalies and inconsistencies, our formational structures are very resistant to change. Most seminaries are now in the “receiving” world, the “Third” world, but they still produce priests and missionaries who are the “senders” when we need both “senders” and “receivers”. The old paradigm is still plainly visible at the core.

IMPLICATIONS FOR MINISTERIAL FORMATION:
As the triumphant missionary hymn “Bringing in the sheaves” aptly conveys, in the past mission like every other priestly ministry, was a matter of “bringing in” to the fold the pagans, the sinners, the outsiders. One need never learn how to “go out” to do such ministry because the minister-missionary never really left his own culture or context in the first place. In fact, to attempt to do so would be to lessen or jeopardize the authenticity of the message. Of necessity one might have to “go out” on forays from time to time to accomplish this but only if sufficiently steeled against idolatry and bolstered by “Mother Church”. Eventually a Christian enclave, a holy satellite, might be extended into the void rescuing it from damnation.

The everyday practical activities of ministry were the same for priests and missionaries. They involved establishing and maintaining a parish, youth work, teaching catechetics, preaching, carrying out sacramental ministry, works of charity, and most importantly, establishing and running schools. They differed only in the number and severity of obstacles to be overcome. Mission was simply the “hardship post” of the church’s ministry. It didn’t involve different work, only more difficult work, and more of it.

Before Vatican II, priestly formation and “mission-sending” formation was embodied in “the seminary” and what was taught there: in dogmatics, liturgy, scripture, spiritual exercises and (infrequently) pastoral theology. There was no other specialized type of formation needed apart from the seminary. In terms of actual ministry, being a priest and being a missionary were much the same regardless of the culture or context in which ministry was done. It was the receiver who was to be changed by the message, not the sender. Missionaries might have received some special training in the spirituality of their Order or about its objectives as enshrined in their constitutions but their actual work differed little from that of diocesan priests. Their ministry essentially came down to a set of prescriptions and activities, the history and theory of which was learned in the seminary and the practice of which was learned under the tutorship of an accomplished pastor in a parish.

Upon arrival in a mission territory, an additional element of “missionary receiving” formation or introduction was sometimes given the missionary. Such formation usually centred on learning the local language and some of the local customs, which were viewed as quaint and colourful but also as something to be overcome or expunged. But this kind of formation was not central to missionary training. If it existed at all, it was simply added on, an additional, last-minute aid intended to facilitate the process of missionizing.

A NEW PARADIGM FOR OUR TIME:
Today we must speak of inculturated ministry, if we are to call it in any way “genuinely Christian”. Cross-cultural ministers are asked to empathise culturally with their flock, to learn to see and feel as those being ministered to. Cross-cultural ministry means learning to be able to re-construct the world of the other, making sense of it, and learning to live in it. It also involves a deep spiritual experience, a new conversion and, something quite apart from the minister or those ministered to, it involves the growth of a new creation. It empowers the minister to discover faith anew within its symbolic, conceptual borders. Ministry in today’s global environ requires of the minister the constant learning of other cultures and subcultures such as the new urban cultures of street children and child prostitutes. It also means discovering new dimensions of peace and justice, of harmony and love that can only be arrived at when one takes such alien points of view seriously.

Post-Vatican II, post-Evangelii Nuntiandi, post-Redemptionis Missio, post-African Synod, post-modern ministry requires a new paradigm, a new way of doing ministry cross-culturally and a new way of forming “missionaries” to do this. In this new paradigm all the church’s people are at once “senders” and “receivers”. It is especially evident here on the African continent with its 1,700 different cultures. Africa’s rich cultural diversity means that all ministry is also mission, and all ministerial formation in Africa requires learning about and experiencing the dual movement of mission–the “going out” and the “coming in”. Even though this dual movement may not be quite as visible in other places as it is in Africa, it establishing its claim over ministry everywhere. The education and formation of all ministers today must involve what Don Larson calls, “Learning to Leave” and “Leaving to Learn.”

Today’s culturally adaptive ministers must learn how to leave their old contexts and learn how to learn in the new. Both of these dimensions of learning require the development of new skills, perspectives and creative responses to new situations. They require new learning skills, especially the ability to understand and interpret culture or the body of symbolic knowledge used to give meanings to things and events. The fact that all ministry, indeed all professions, today in some sense cross cultures means that they must be able to uncover their own biases and blocks to cross-cultural learning. This requires a facility for scientific inference and hypothesis testing, skills in social and cultural analysis, intensified perceptual skills and a flair for creative discovery. Ministry today, along with a host of other disciplines and professions, means being familiar with and using the skills of the participant-observer and mastering the art of ethnographic inquiry. It means ministers and other professionals must learn to do what the ethnographers and anthropologists have been doing since the 1930’s.

NEW WINESKINS:
Despite the logic, urgency and formal promulgation of the new paradigm in church circles (especially through recent Papal encyclicals) there is strong resistance to it. The resistance is encoded in the very formational structures and the clerical institutions of “Church Culture” that we have inherited. Even now, almost 40 years after Vatican II, formation structures for the new paradigm have yet to be established in our seminaries and theological institutions. They are found in isolated lectures or seminars but they are certainly not at the core of the Church’s ministerial curriculum and spirituality. There is a strong skepticism about the new paradigm among priests and Religious. Until very recently missionaries regarded this kind of “going out” as unnecessary and unacceptable. Mission was going out in order to “bring in”. Among the hierarchy, who often see themselves as the guardians of the Church’s integrity and tradition, there are grave concerns about the new importance given to context and culture. It is feared that the new paradigm may leave the Church open to dangerous, unwholesome mixing, that it may weaken the firm tenets of our faith and remove the last barrier to the chaos of cultural relativism. The paradigm challenges all that is familiar and true—the faith of our fathers as it was passed down to us. This is both risky and it goes in the face of the strong, unerring image that an authoritative “sending church” must exude. In a word, the new paradigm makes us insecure.

This intractable stance is not limited to the Church and her institutions—indeed, it characterizes our entire post-modern era. The paradigm goes against our innate presuppositions, our ethnocentrism. It requires of the post-modern world three leaps of faith to counter its unshakable presuppositions. The modern world asks “Is it possible”, Is it worth while?” and “Is it ethical?” Is even possible to assume other identities or to understand the world as insiders do? The answer is obviously no. The second is that even if such a crossing were possible it would in the end be fruitless. The nagging doubt persists that there may be nothing of real value out there, that apart from General European culture and the high cultural traditions of Asia, one will not find anything worthwhile on the other side. The third bias of our time is that such a crossing is unethical for it trespasses on the identities of others. It is assumed that any such crossings (except those that arise from deep within) can only be to “convert” others to one’s own beliefs. Thus such trespasses are deemed ignoble, presumptuous and unethical, and they are not easily forgiven. Those attempting such a crossing must pay heavily for their offence. They lay themselves open to the most devastating and unreasoning criticism.

Besides these obstacles there are also a host of practical reasons for the dearth of training programs to foster the new paradigm. Cross-cultural learning challenges both the form and content of the old systems. It is of necessity practical rather than theoretical. Since the culture codes are embedded in the institutions of learning and inform the learning process itself, learning in the new paradigm must take place in the actual situations of crossing over, namely other cultural worlds. The paradigm presumes that knowledge is expansive rather than contractive and the learning process itself is inductive rather than deductive. It involves learning from one’s mistakes, “trial and error”. The thought processes of the world’s cultures cannot be reduced to the thought of General European culture. Similarly the theological forms and processes of the world religions are not co-terminous with the Church’s present body of theological and philosophical teachings nor with their historical development. This kind of learning is not only difficult to facilitate, evaluate and control, it requires a new spirituality—one that involves a crossing over to concrete this-worldly entities rather than to other-worldly entities. New theological wine skins are indeed needed for a World Church.

A new set of professional educators are needed for this process, which hardly exist as yet. This kind of learning requires a new blend of disciplines: a mix of anthropology, linguistics and ministerial supervision within lived social contexts. But it must also be “clinical”, “experimental” or “controlled” in that it affords the possibility of systematic testing, critical analysis and hypothesis formation. This is not easily attained. The most useful tool that we have for this—cultural analysis—is still highly suspect in Church circles because it was nursed from its infancy by an anti-religious secularism, and in Africa it is both suspect and offensive because of the stereotyping of African cultures as “primitive”. The sort of training that is needed requires a new group of ministerial trainers–missionaries who are at once skilled anthropologists, socio-linguists and cross-cultural “field education” supervisors. There are very few of these at present. Bishop Vincent Boi-Nai SVD, who completed his studies in 1991, was the first to be trained specifically in cross-cultural field education. Now a whole generation of trainers waits to be trained. This is easier said than done. It is one thing to have to train all the seminarians in a new way and quite another to start from scratch or re-train all the “professors”.

As a whole, ministerial and other professional training institutions are only beginning to acknowledge that a special kind of training is needed to help today’s young professionals deal with the broader cultural contexts of their profession. They are not equipping today’s professionals to leave the contexts and cultures of their profession and to learn how to serve people in new cultural contexts and situations. They are fueled by old paradigms and bound by institutionalism. There are few models for this kind of training. Nevertheless, even if the process is still unclear and the structures incomplete, the objective is rapidly gaining recognition. It is now patently clear that old formulas for ministry, for healthcare provision, for industrialization, etc. no longer suit our cross-cultural situations. Professionals must be trained how to adjust their services to local understandings and needs. A real “going out” and a real “coming in” are therefore required of our ministers and other professionals. This will not happen by itself. It requires a new approach to training, new trainers and new institutional structures to meet these needs.

LEARNING TO LEAVE:
Rather than trying to describe what this new kind of formation might entail from a purely theoretical point of view it would be best to start from concrete ministerial needs. Today, African ministers and missionaries, development workers and other professionals have all but replaced their European counterparts. But we have seen that they too, no less than the Europeans who preceded them, must also learn to “go out”, to really leave their culture instead of striving to recreate it wherever they go and in whatever they do. In many cases the “culture” that must be left behind is not even their first culture. In the case of ministers the faith they are witnessing to was often nurtured in adopted culture forms—those of Western culture, Church culture and seminary culture. When this is the case, their “going out” must entail a dual departure, one from the rigid forms of ministry that are a product of a Christianized European culture. In the case of other professionals, it is also true that the dominant language and culture of their professions is English and the thought forms are General European. Christianity, healthcare and medicine, industrialization, and education are all embedded in Western culture and professionals in these fields must learn to separate services they render from the cultures in which they have been codified. The African Church is still worlds apart from the African religious realities as the medical systems, the ministries of health in Africa are still light years away from meeting their peoples’ culture-coded healthcare needs and expectations. Today’s professionals must be able to put aside their culture-based prejudices and stereotypes and learn to enter African contexts and cultures and therein re-discover their faith and the practice of their profession. They must allow the culture of the people to influence and inform their professional knowledge and their professional institutions and in turn this will bring the dialogue ever closer to cultures where it can critique and transform them.

In all of this they must be able to follow the lead of our master “always considering others better than yourselves” (Philippians 2: 3-12). Following Christ’s example, today’s cross-cultural ministers in Africa should consider their adopted African cultures as “better”. African ministers must be able to leave comfortable and familiar environments and traditions, the “tried and proven” way, and be prepared to constantly cross over from the cherished perspectives of their own tribe, seminary and elite sub-tribe, to those of others, from their old traditional rural contexts to the new complex urban environments and vice-versa. In each and all of these crossings we are assured by the Church’s teaching that God is already present in the other, on the other side of the crossing and that the “going out” is not only to witness the gospel but to receive it. It is not just to convert but also to be converted. Indeed, personal conversion and one’s spiritual transformation can only begin if there is a genuine “going out”.

“Going out,” means that today’s cross-cultural ministers must be “tribal” but not “tribalistic”. They must be tribal in a way that affirms and unifies–not in a way that condemns, polarizes or generates conflict. Paradoxically, this means that they must learn to leave their own cultures first. They must be de-tribalized before they can be re-tribalized. They must come to understand what is holding them to their first culture in order to be free of it. They must first learn what is involved in leaving their own culture. All of this must be learned as an integral part of their training.

LEAVING TO LEARN:
Cross-cultural ministers and other cross-cultural professionals must also learn how to “come in”, how to “enter” another culture. After learning how to leave their own culture instead of unconsciously striving to re-create it all around them, they are ready to move into another phase of learning. They are ready to learn about the other as it is and to enter into the other culture. This requires a different emphasis in contextual learning. It is directed outward rather than inward. It is gradual, processual and cumulative. There is still some divesting to be done. It is the art of “de-alienation”, of bit by bit becoming less and less alien, in the new contexts. But it also involves appropriation—the gradual appropriation of the entire culture, its meanings, patterns of behaviour, values, expectations, and with this acquisition comes a whole new personality and identity. It is a journey involving every aspect of the person in the appropriation of a new identity and a new world.

SOME IMPLICIT CULTURAL RULES AFFECTING CROSS-CULTURAL TRAINING
The programs and courses offered at TICCS respond to both types of formation. However, TICCS has frequently been identified with only the “coming in” type of training, and in particular with one aspect of it, namely “language-learning”. This is because up until now little thought has been given to the need for the other kinds of cross-cultural training for ministry or other cross-cultural professions. Unfortunately, this identification has also led to some confusion about the value of TICCS for the local people and the local professionals including ministers and missionaries. As one African minister exclaimed “I already know my own culture. What can such an institution teach me?” It is not unusual for cultural insiders to feel that they know their own culture. But in actual fact, the way our cultures move and control us is not usually known or understood. Most of us know some “facts” about our culture but what we think we believe and do are often vastly different from the observable reality. Thus we “know” our culture in a mythical sense and we do not usually reflect upon it. Our knowledge is implicit. It is there but it needs to be drawn out of us. We become aware of it only when these hidden expectations are challenged. Without first being “de-tribalized” we will find it next to impossible to distinguish our symbols from that which is signified and the meanings from the contexts. Without the broadening and grounding perspective of the outsider, we are forever doomed to be imprisoned in our own cultures. For we do not “own” them; they “own” us. All Ghanaian “insiders” to one culture are also “outsiders” to the other 50 Ghanaian cultures. Cross-cultural ministers and other cross-cultural professionals need training both for “going out” and for “coming in” in order to initiate culturally appropriate responses to peoples needs in different contexts.

Training for “coming in” or “entry” training is the most obvious sort of cross-cultural training. Most “introduction” or “orientation” courses by popular demand strongly emphasize this dimension. Yet we find that when “entry learning” alone is emphasized learners do not perform well. Few such learners actually go on to learn a local language or culture to any depth. This is often blamed on the supposed difficulty of African tonal languages but this in itself is not a significant barrier to learning. It is rather because the learners and their mentors are not sufficiently aware of the necessity of “leaving”, of first becoming “de-tribalized” before they can begin to be “de-alienated”. They never really leave their first language and culture.

We must learn to crawl before learning to run. Successful “entry” training builds on “exit” training. It presumes that participants already know how to “go out” and are capable of doing so. Contrary to what most people think, the process of “entry” is not so difficult once the learner has been freed of his first culture. This is why children easily learn other languages. But even as adults when we have been freed of the hold our first culture has on us through “going out” training or by having been de-tribalized by having learned another language and culture as an adult, we will have no insoluble difficulties learning another language and culture. In other words, for someone who has been properly de-tribalized, the de-alienation process is assured; it is simply a matter of perfecting it by becoming less and less alienated. This is a matter of time and sustained effort. But for those who have not been de-tribalized, for those who have never really left their own culture, there is no possibility of learning another language and culture no matter how good the course, how expert the supervision or how much time is spent on it. In short, “coming in” presents no major obstacles for ministers or other professionals who have already learned how to “go out”. On the other hand for those who have never de-tribalized, there can never be a “coming in”.

WHY TICCS?
Today the principles and practice of leaving one’s first context or culture, or “Learning to leave” and entering a new culture, or “leaving to learn” can and should be learned systematically as an integral part of ministerial formation or of interdisciplinary studies. The way to go about learning new systems of meanings should not wait until one begins formal ministry or one’s profession but should be learned as an integral part of ministerial and professional training.. Like “learning to leave”, most of the process of “leaving to learn”, especially the techniques and procedures for “coming in”, can be taught and applied to other cross-cultural experiences. Unfortunately neither of these dimensions of training can readily be found in theological schools, seminaries or schools for interdisciplinary studies. This posits the need for institutions like TICCS that are specialised in cross-cultural formation.

What is to be learned here goes well beyond simple facts about the languages, customs and beliefs of people. TICCS programs equip modern ministers and other professionals with the tools and skills to search for the cultural codes, which reveal the meanings behind these externals. Our various field education programs, the “Introduction” course, the SIA, FEP, are all aimed at training cross-cultural ministers and other professionals to “de-tribalize” and progressively “de-alienate” themselves, so that having done so once they can “get the knack” of it and be able to do it again, and again, as often as they need to change contexts and cultures in our multi-cultural world.

TICCS
1 June, 2001