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EMBRACING A PEOPLE:
THE JOY OF INCARNATIONAL MINISTRY
Christopher T. Bajkiewicz
Citation: Bajkiewicz, C. T. (1999). Embracing a people: the joy of incarnational ministry.
Journal of Christian Nursing, 16(4), 4-8.
Scripture translations quoted/referenced are source-noted:
HOLY BIBLE New International Version
copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society
Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers
THE MESSAGE by Eugene Peterson
copyright 1993 by Eugene Peterson, published by Navpress
Embracing a People: The Joy of Incarnational Ministry
Copyright 1999 by Christopher T. Bajkiewicz BSN, RN. All rights reserved.
Citation: Bajkiewicz, C. T. (1999). Embracing a people: the joy of incarnational ministry.
Journal of Christian Nursing, 16(4), 4-8.
(Note: All names given in this work are fictitious to mask the identity of the real persons.)
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Isamu Ishi writhed in pain, as his family frantically attempted to communicate with me in Japanese. I was a new
graduate nurse working in a small community hospital. He was my first Japanese patient, but not my last, now that
a group of Japanese employees had been relocated to a large auto plant near Detroit. The interpreter was
unavailable for an hour. I needed to assess the patient and call the surgeon, but each attempt I made to have the
family leave intensified their emotional words and gestures. I was frustrated.
This experience twenty years ago led me to ask questions about caring across cultures.
I was not a missionary nurse in a foreign land, but I faced critical issues of transcultural care. Nurses confront
many crosscultural challenges. The shape of nursing in America has become multicultural and multiracial.
Through people-group movement, every major urban center of the world is now filled with people from multiple
cultures, all requiring our care. Being multicultural is a survival skill in professional practice, as well as in life.
How did Jesus reach across cultures? Is there a biblical and Christ-centered transcultural model applicable to
nursing? The answer is yes, as we will see through the incarnational example of Emmanuel Jesus by cultural
immersion, taking the role of a culture learner and acquiring culture skills as a 200 percent person.
Bridging the Divide
Transcultural nursing requires nurses with their own cultural package to care for a person with a different cultural
package. The resulting interaction can either lead to connection and shalom (wholeness, relationship and
peace), or fragmentation and lack of care. These crosscultural interactions occur more frequently and with
greater potency than we generally understand. Increasingly, we see the face of a client and know we are looking
across a great expanse of culture and diversity. Many nurses have had difficulty connecting with these clients,
leaving health needs unmet and creating barriers of frustration in the health care worker.
Western countries now experience great cultural diversity living in close proximity. Each American generation
emerges with its own distinct culture, heavily influenced by technologies, such as the recent development of the
Internet. The world is coming to the West in the form of international students, immigration and large-scale people-
group migration. This is especially true of peoples, both documented (legal) and undocumented (illegal), coming
from the developing world, seeking better economic opportunities. Increasingly, immigrant populations attempt to
build a closed society based on their home culture, while living in the heart of the West.
New socioeconomic and technological factors have also birthed a phenomenon I call cultural micro-encapsulation
within our own cultures: a large population living in the same geographic area, sharing a similar regional heritage
but actually existing in multiple and distinct cultural groupings.
For example, modern-day youth work in the US requires the same crosscultural skills as a foreign missionary. As
one nurse recently related, “I graduated in the 1970s. Last year I took a position in a large outpatient clinic. The
patients were mostly in their teens and twenties. I grew up in the same town, but they may as well have been from
Mars! I had no idea where they were coming from in many aspects of their lives.”
One significant micro-encapsulated grouping exists among the poor, a greatly misunderstood culture in the West.
More and more, the underserved poor constitute a large portion of our clients. Embracing and connecting with
them is not merely an issue of dealing with economics or resources but requires a holistic understanding that is
complex and multifaceted. Nurses can no longer assume that they understand a client just because they live in
the same region.
Finally, there are the cultures we want to care for through relief and development missions outside our region.
Either in a short-term outreach or long-term relocation, our level of multicultural skills will have a direct impact on
our nursing effectiveness in that setting. Although missionary work has always been synonymous with
crosscultural encounters, many of the same skills used overseas are now vital domestically as well.
As Christians, we must understand God’s desire to reach across and embrace all cultures and peoples. God
promised Abraham that through us (his descendants), all nations and cultures would be blessed and, through
redemption in Christ, members of all nations and peoples will be gathered at the throne of God (Gen 18:18; Rev 7:
9). God is at work in all cultures today, especially those where he is known and worshiped. We know that Jesus
has called us to go to “the least of these” in all cultures to bring healing (Mt 25:34-40, 28:18-20). The question
becomes, “How?”
Beyond Culturally Competent Care
Recognizing this increased cultural diversity in nursing and in our clients, nursing ethno-psychologists (the new
term for transcultural theorists) have re-examined these aspects of culture, health, illness and care. Culturally
competent nursing care is the new term in the nursing literature and has been defined as a “sensitivity to issues
related to culture, race, gender, sex orientation, social class and economics.” Juliene Lipson stresses that it is not
only knowledge but also attitudes and skills sensitized to variations.
However, with cultural strife and racial discrimination as the boiling issue for many of our clients, is culturally
competent care sufficient? Are we called to something higher, such as being reconciled to each other and serving
one another with our gifts? How do we become true salt and light of our master Jesus to our multicultural clients?
How do we move beyond simply getting the job done with a discharge plan, for a client from another culture? How
can we expect a client to follow a restricted diet when his culture values something different? We must begin to
move toward redemptive relationships and “a ministry of compassionate care for the whole person, in response to
God’s grace, which aims to foster optimum health (shalom).”
Jesus’ life gives us cues and clues to caring across cultures. He became human, initiating the ultimate
crosscultural interaction and immersion. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us” (Jn 1:14). God crossed
over and fully became one of us. He completely immersed himself for thirty-three years as a human being.
Jesus did not come to us as an adult but as a helpless infant, who took on the role of a culture learner. “Jesus’
status as a learner is seldom discussed, let alone understood or applied. God’s Son studied the language, the
culture and the lifestyles of his people for thirty years before he began his ministry.” Thirty years’ preparation for
three years of professional practice!
Jesus, being God, had prior cognitive knowledge (mental skills acquired through study) of human cultures.
However, the Incarnation meant he acquired affective knowledge (behavioral skill acquired through experience) by
being in the flesh, an insider. Cognitive learning alone cannot provide this inside experience. Cultures can be
studied academically, but the complete cultural knowing also requires affective acquisition. This can only come
through direct in-culture relationships and live-in experience. Learners may then “earn their way within the
framework of the values and ideals of the culture and acquire an insider’s perspective of the cultural knowledge in
order to serve and minister in ways that demonstrate sensitivity and insight.”
In this process, Jesus didn’t discard his godhood to become human, nor did being God lessen his humanness.
Scripture plainly shows us that this dual-culturalism is possible (Phil 2:6-7). Some have noted that in this aspect
Jesus was a 200 percent person, fully God and fully human. Incorporation of the new culture into the self does not
mean rejection or loss of the original culture. We can assimilate new cultures into our lives and maintain our first
culture, forming a wonderfully new and enriched personhood.
After rising from the dead and completing his crosscultural mission, Jesus put forth his transcultural model. Of
Jesus’ three Great Commission passages in the New Testament (Mt 28:19; Mk 16:15; Jn 20:21), the latter has not
been fully explored, “Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you’”(Jn
20:21). Regarding this, Bible scholar John Stott points out, “Jesus did more than draw a vague parallel between
his mission and ours. Deliberately and precisely he made his mission the model of ours.”
Our Lord came as one who served, emptying himself for the cultural experience and mission, and took the form of
a servant. The apostle Paul instructs us that this same mind of humility should be found in us for the same task
(Lk 22:27; Phil 2:5-8). In valuing both the cognitive and affective cultural aspects, we see something of Jesus’
Incarnation that we are to perpetuate and extend into the world.
If God has placed me in another culture or context area of professional practice or ministry, I must “become flesh”
like Jesus in that culture before becoming “Immanuel, which means 'God is with us' ” (Mt 1:23). Reading or taking
a class about the culture cannot suffice, since these will only supply academic knowledge and not the experience
needed to relate with people in the culture. The affective sphere is essential to effective cultural transaction.
As missionaries to the Mexican people, my family had to live with the people before really learning. Then, only as
a part of the people, could we be trusted and heard. A good portion of what we studied before living with Mexicans
was incompletely framed. Now, what we know to be true and real through experience has replaced or completed
our learning. I came to learn a culture but ended up embracing a people. It’s a joy when my Hispanic friends
fondly call me the Mexi-gringo!
Presence
“You cannot know a man’s journey until you have walked a day in his shoes,” the saying goes. Respect for
another can be difficult unless you can see from the other’s perspective. To learn how to minister with the urban
Mexican poor, we lived in an impoverished neighborhood for seven months. We were amazed at what we learned
by just being there. This presence also revealed surprising underlying health issues. In an outreach clinic we
treated one woman with severe and chronic back pain for almost a year. Finally, we decided to spend a day at her
home, lending a hand with chores while looking for the cause of her suffering. We discovered that the washboard,
crooked and almost on the ground, was a major culprit. After we built a level washboard station at the proper
height, her back pain greatly lessened.
A parish nurse from Nebraska notes, “To promote health in a rural community, you need to understand the
people in that community: how they think, what they value, the way they live, what they believe and how they
communicate.” As one nurse reflected on a teenage peer abstinence program in Mississippi, “I realized that the
girls I have spent time with are the girls who have grown the most. It’s all about relationship.”
Choosing to identify with a people won’t hide your original cultural identity, but the effort will gain enormous
respect. One nurse commented, “Living like the Haitian peasants didn’t fool them for a minute into thinking I was
poor like them. But I found they really appreciated that I would choose to live almost as simply as they did.” Truly,
there is joy in transcultural relationship when there is connection and shalom.
Practical Enculturation
Some have asked, “How can I get inside a culture if I can’t relocate?” Nothing can replace full immersion learning,
but there are ways to come close, in order to learn about a culture and its people, including:
• As a first step, discover your own sociocultural economic worldview (SCEW). This is the you-are-here dot on
the map of life. It encompasses where you’ve come from, who you are and through what “lenses” you view life and
its unfolding. When you know “where your dot is,” you have a point of reference to see others as well. We cannot
care for others in the absence of self-awareness. “Know thyself,” when approached through the eyes of Christ,
can be an important development of our therapeutic selves. It is essential for the appropriate use of self in
vulnerability, humility and commitment.
• Understanding SCEW is the key to bridging ourselves into another culture. For example, my own SCEW
held that “time is money.” Being punctual was a strong value for me. Then I came to Mexico and found that all my
Hispanic friends viewed time in a completely different way. At first, this was a major point of frustration, but I am
learning to recognize and value another SCEW, and even adjust my SCEW to embrace a new worldview.
• In large urban centers with diverse cultures represented, a practitioner may need to prayerfully choose an
underserviced people-group and enculturate with them preferentially, in order to increase effective health care
and shalom.
• Identify two or three individuals who are clearly participating members of the culture you wish to learn and
form apprenticing relationships to learn the affective aspects of the culture. Ask to be included in personal and
cultural events whenever appropriate. Look for events where you may be one of the few outsiders. With time, you
will not be the outsider and can be bridged into the culture in your locale. Learn the foods, the important group
events and appropriate body language. Use what you’ve learned with care and humility.
• The best advice I received was, “Love the people, eat the food, speak the language, wear the clothes, take
the same transportation, sing the songs, learn the gestures, dance at the feast days, make many friends, laugh a
lot, say thank-you, be at home.”
• Begin language study from a bilingual individual. Use whatever you learn immediately. Others may chuckle
at your attempt, but you will gain respect for the effort. Avoid self-study or tapes; they cannot communicate the
affective part of a language.
• After one to two years of intimately relating to a culture, academic study of the culture may be beneficial.
Seek authors or professors of that culture’s origin.
Incarnational ministry is not only a foreign mission paradigm but also one to which we are called domestically. As
nurses, this incarnational model applies in the emergency department, the operating room, the step-down unit
and the school-based clinic, as well as the jungle health center. I suspect that this incarnational model may hold
the key to real hope for the poor, the wanderer and the foreigner, both in our midst and abroad.
________________________________________________________________________
References
Duane Elmer, Cross-Cultural Conflict (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993): 12-13.
W. E. Vine, et. al. Vine’s Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words (Nashville, Tenn.: Thomas
Nelson, 1985): 464.
Bryant L. Myers, “What Have We Learned?” in Serving with the Poor in Latin America
(Monrovia, Calif.: MARC/World Vision, 1997): 139-49.
Arlene B. Miller, “Thinking Christianly About Culture,” Journal of Christian Nursing 10, no. 4
(Fall 1993): 8-10.
Judith Allen Shelly and Arlene B. Miller, Called to Care: A Christian Theology of Nursing
(Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1999): 97-102.
6Juliene G. Lipson (with citations to Meleis, Isenberg, Koerner & Stern, 1995), “Culturally
Competent Nursing Care” in Culture & Nursing Care: A Pocket Guide (San Francisco: UCSF
Nursing Press, 1996): 1-10.
7Ibid, 1.
Shelly and Miller, 57.
Sherwood G. Lingenfelter and Marvin K. Mayers, Ministering Cross-Culturally: An
Incarnational Model for Personal Relationships (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House,
1986): 15-26.
Shelly and Miller, 100; David W. Augsburger, Pastoral Counseling Across Cultures
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986): 17-41.
E. Thomas Brewster and Elizabeth S. Brewster, Language Learning IS Communication--IS
Ministry! (Pasadena, Calif.: Lingua House, 1984): 10-11.
Lingerfelter and Mayers, 24-26.
John R. W. Stott, Christian Mission in the Modern World (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity
Press, 1976): 23.
Augsberger, 26.
Linda Miles, “Getting Started: Parish Nursing in a Rural Community,” Journal of Christian
Nursing 14, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 23.
Grace Tazelaar and Jodi Pyper, “Teen Treasures: Mentoring in Action,” Journal of Christian
Nursing 16, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 32-34.
Margaret DeJong, “Living Simply: Choosing to Become Poor,” Journal of Christian Nursing
16, no. 1 (Winter 1999):23-25.
Sharon Fish and Judith Allen Shelly, Spiritual Care: The Nurse’s Role 3rd ed. (Downers Grove,
Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1988): 93-103.
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