Dongi Dongi Mission Trip - Day 1

Serving With Eyes Wide Open

12 hours, 3 flights and 2 time zones en route to our mission destination gave a lot of time to prepare my heart and mind for the next three weeks in Indonesia.  Apart from catching up on some sleep and watching a movie, I used the time to read the prescribed text "Serving With Eyes Wide Open - Doing Short-Term Missions With Cultural Intelligence" for the subject 'Intercultural Life, Work and Field Education' that I am studying this semester.  

This book critically evaluates why many short-term mission trips are ineffective and provides a very helpful framework to develop a level of cultural intelligence that will reposition short-term missions to be effective and empowering for both the sending and receiving individuals and organisations.

We are all familiar with IQ as being the measure of intellectual intelligence, and most would have heard of EQ that measures emotional intelligence.  CQ is a further tool to measure cultural intelligence and to adjust how we think and behave in various cultural situations.  David Livermore explores cultural intelligence through four CQ capabilities:

1. CQ Drive:  Your level of interest, drive, and confidence to adapt to multicultural situations
2. CQ Knowledge:  Your level of understanding about how cultures are similar and different
3. CQ Strategy:  Your level of awareness and ability to plan for multicultural interactions
4. CQ Action:  Your level of adaptability when relating and working interculturally

Over these next three weeks we will be endeavouring to increase our cultural intelligence by developing these four CQ capabilities so that our mission trip will have maximum impact for the people we will serve, our team and the kingdom of God.