BOOK REVIEW: A Beginner’s Guide to Crossing Cultures

Cultural Lenses

How can we learn to understand differences between culture? One way is by intentionally viewing cultures through different “lenses”. Lane helpfully gives us six different ways to do this:

• context
• activity
• authority
• identity
• time
• worldviews

Each of these is given a chapter, helping us to understand cultures at a deeper level and see where miscommunications may occur.

Lane draws on her own experiences of helping others deal with cross-cultural challenges and this helpfully illustrates her explanations. Many of these are in the context of multicultural churches, showing the challenges that occur due to cultural differences, even among believers.

A Practical Handbook

A Beginner’s Guide is suitably named, as it is approachable and practical. The book is clearly designed to be applied, with questions for reflection at the end of each chapter, exercises to carry out, and a very useful series of appendices. If you are not actively involved with building cross-cultural relationships, or a multicultural church, then these questions might not be as immediately relatable, but they are well chosen to prompt your thinking around building cross-cultural friendships. If, like me, you live in the UK or are from a British cultural background, you may have to look past the presumed American context (especially since the book is a few years old) but if you can, you’ll find a wonderfully practical guide to building effective cross-cultural friendships.