Book Review: Serving with Eyes Wide Open: Doing Short-Term Missions with Cultural Intelligence

September 10, 2008

CRWRC armed us with a few books to read to help us discover more about the mission field. One of those books is Serving with Eyes Wide Open: Doing Short-Term Missions with Cultural Intelligence by David A. Livermore.

In the book, Livermore cites research that he and others have done on the impact of short-term missions on both the participants and the receiving parties. He exposes some common American assumptions about life, culture, mission work, and the Bible. He challenges us to "complexify" our understandings of these things, rather than do the typical American thing—to simplify them into easy-to-understand, and dangerously overgeneralized black-and-white categories.

For me, the most helpful section of the book was Part Three, about the theory of Cultural Intelligence (CQ). This was the first I had heard of this theory, and was impressed. He breaks CQ into four different, equally important parts:

Knowledge CQ: Understanding Cross-Cultural Differences
Interpretive CQ: Interpreting Cues
Perseverance CQ: Persevering through Cross-Cultural Differences
Behavioral CQ: Acting Appropriately

He mentions that the most training materials are made for Knowledge CQ and Behavioral CQ, but when used separately from the other two parts of Cultural Intelligence, they are at best useless knowledge and at worst extremely harmful in perpetuating vague generalizations about entire people groups. Books like Foreign to Familiar by Sarah A. Lanier and A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby Payne can only provide a quarter of what we really need to be skilled at intercultural communications (and that is only if we can trust those books to be the kind that don’t make too many overgeneralizations).

Livermore’s book is a good solid read for anyone working with people of other cultures, and especially for anyone going on a short-term missions project. I find it useful!

--Katie