Cultural differences: Encouragement

I thought of another difference which showed up during our Vitality Training session in Paris.

The French approach to encouragement and learning styles versus the American way.

Our enthusiastic American friend with such a heart for France would punctuate our comments and questions with "Excellent question !" and "Thank you for that comment. I'm going to use it straight away." "What a great answer!"

Our highly intellectual pastors present, trained in being unemotional and logical, looked at him sideways wondering if he was taking the mickey out of them! Over the week, they realised he was genuine and that it was part of his way of encouraging. We are simply not used to being encouraged by each other. And we certainly don't practise it in our everyday lives nor in our churches. French people are more likely to find fault: they are trained to do it in their quest for perfection. That's why it's hard for them to accept criticism - they put so much effort into getting it right.

But while there's life, there's hope! One of our pastors reported back last week that his wife pointed out the number of times he said "Excellent, thank you!" while explaining Vitality to his church council. Mind you, he's Belgian and she's American so maybe that doesn't count ... Of course it does!!! Change is in the air.

Church camps ... gotta love 'em!

Here they are doing a sketch on what they
understand to be 'Vitality: before and after!'

Do you remember the Vitality Pathway I wrote about in the previous entry ?

Well, we did the first workshop with 2 of our more fragile churches from the Lyon area over a church camp weekend.

Two very different communities combined : one of their options is to become one single community, so getting to know each other was an important step.

At the end of the weekend, a very moving time of prayer and praise. We have a long road ahead, but we are open to the Spirit's leading and prepared to take one step at a time.

Here is the Vitality team who will get started on the different tasks needed to get a real picture of their spiritual health. A time of prayer for them

Vitally yours!

Sorry about the gap in entries ... been busy!

I've invented a new French word to end my emails and letters to colleagues! It's 'vitally yours'. No-one has told me it's daggy (Australian term for stupid)

or wrong, so I'm confident it will stick.

The French are very quick to point out mistakes in their beloved language ... and they are right to because it's an amazing language to use. Such precision in the terms. Complicated ideas can be expressed with finesse. Diplomacy was built on French language and mentality. Even swearing and insulting sounds more picturesque in French ! (Mind you, that can be just as hurtful as in any other language).

These are the reasons why anything translated in French takes more print space than in English.

This was recently proved, yet again, by our week-long training session for the Vitality Pathway, a process that we are introducing to our churches in the Free Evangelical Church of France. Shock! Horror! it's an American idea from the Covenant Church in the US of A (American readers, this is a tongue-in-cheek statement; please do not take offense). But, it must be said that the French are very suspicious of foreign ideas and don't believe these ideas can work for them. On the other hand, they are envious of the way things work successfully in the States, but that's part of the contradictory nature of the French (French readers, please don't be offended by this: it's true and you say it yourselves!!)

Anyway, to get back to my story, our week together in Paris was fantastic! An enthusiastic, loud, hugely organized American Director of Vitality Pathway from the Covenant Church came to take us through the process and won us all over. I helped translate the material with another hard-working French lady and we both found our sentences going on and on and on. We had 3 interpreters working with us as well as me to translate the exchanges between us. And our American friend peppered his speeches with punchy, memorable sayings often with assonance : "Failing to prepare is preparing to fail," John Wooden; "Prior planning prevents poor performance," John Foxjohn. How do you translate that in a punchy way in French???

Do you know what won us over ? Not his structured ppts, nor his '10 steps to ...', nor his anecdotes, but his Bible references and the way he interpreted several of Jesus' parables and ... when he cried. Yes, at times when talking about his own Federation of Churches, and when talking of the lukewarmness of Christians and their indifference to the eternal fate of the unsaved, he cried. His heart was so full of compassion for them that all his energy has gone into helping churches understand their real state of spiritual health, so that they could repent of it and turn back to the Lord and let the Spirit take his rightful place in the life of the church in order to put energy into reaching out to those who are lost.

And he made us cry; and we realised that, before God, we were not fulfilling our Christ-ordained mission. So this Vitality pathway is going to bring change. And we are going to make it relevant to French Churches because it's not a question of language, but of compassion and God's love for humankind.