Lesson 9 | Crossing cultures
Translating illustrations
Choose safe illustrations in cross-cultural teaching
Being a leader in a church with many international connections, I have much first-hand experience with illustrations that have flopped. At times this has been in my teaching, and other times with guest preachers. I have learned much from these experiences and would suggest a few guidelines when preparing a teaching to another culture.
First, know that there is a wide safe zone of common, cross-cultural life experiences—and stick to them. While cultures differ, much of the human experience transcends this and makes for a great source of illustrations. As for the more nuanced, culture-specific experiences of life, let those who grew up living and breathing the culture wade into those areas. That which is common between cultures will give you sufficient (and far safer) fodder.
This is especially important when visiting another culture. Never attempt to use an illustration which you think will be of particular cultural relevance for them! You may have read up on it on wikipedia, heard about it from a friend or seen it in a movie, but it is not going to go over well. To help bring this point home, let's imagine the situation reversed. A preacher from India is visiting your American church. Like the rest of us, he has heard quite a bit about Donald Trump's plan to be “the wall” and so decides to use it as a part of an illustration...
Paul's exhortation at the end of 2 Corinthians 6 includes the call to separate ourselves from making close unions with the ungodly—that is, with non-believers. Just as Donald Trump has committed to build “the wall” to keep out drug dealers and rapists, so too we must defend ourselves from the life of sin that the world would have us participate in.
Our pretend preacher has very good intentions, desiring to use an illustration that American culture can relate with. But in doing so he has committed a major mistake. For no matter your political positions, the contention of this issue is sure to have distracted the greater part of the church from the end of 2 Corinthians 6 where it is supposed to be. The Indian preacher should not have inserted an illustration based upon a cultural reality he does not understand well enough, and neither should we when teaching in other cultures!
Don't let your illustrations open a can of worms
You will also be wise to swap out distracting issues in your illustrations that might lead to unwanted rabbit trails. Personally, I have spent half a Bible study telling people to forget a topic that was brought up incidentally in an illustration!
Let me try to illustrate this with an example. Some good friends of mine spent twenty years teaching in the Ukraine. One of the many dynamics alive in the Church there in the 80s and 90s was the conviction that jewelry is altogether bad. Now, not knowing this, suppose you used the following illustration in your teaching of Luke 15:8-10.
There was a woman with a very costly pearl necklace that had been passed down for five generations. She adored this necklace for the beauty it possessed and the meaning it held for her family. But how much she loved that necklace was never seen so vividly as the day the necklace string broke. She was in her house and a ring she was wearing snagged her necklace as she brushed the hair out of her face. The pearls exploded in every direction. Frantic, she hurried to find a bowl and gather the pearls back together. But of the 72 pearls which made up her necklace, she only found 71. That would not do. The woman turned over every chair and searched behind every dresser until after hours of effort at last she found the seventy second pearl resting in a flower pot. Her joy was overwhelming, and all her family and friends were invited to share it with her. She gathered them together with an extravagant party to celebrate the repair of her precious necklace without a single pearl missing. And that is exactly how Heaven rejoices when one sinner repents and is likewise found!
In my opinion, the illustration is nice. But it would have bombed in the Ukraine! Your lesson on God's value of sinners saved would be lost in a debate on external adornment.
The big idea
Simply put, when living in another culture, refrain from swinging for the fences with your illustrations. If you have to think about the cultural aspect when creating the illustration, you should probably just avoid it. Rather, work with whatever has already seeped into you from your time spent in the culture, little though it may be.
And run your illustrations by a typical national before you use them in teachings. If it doesn't go over well in practice, don't try to force it. You love that illustration, but that doesn't matter—you need to scrap it.