Lecture: Biblical World Views (Pete)

This week felt more like facts about culture, not so much deep spiritual strengthening, but fully helped me to help me understand other cultures and people EVEN on my DTS much better. My acceptance to breath more around the people here in a warmer climate culture, helps me.
Pete basically has traveled to more countries than we can count and told endless stories, so I don't have heaps of notes, but I'll leave what I've got.
With our teams going out to Thailand, India, Kenya, and SA/Swaziland, it's soooo important to start to understand and learn about tha tculture and how they live, act, dress, speak, greet, eat, etc., so that we can better aclimate ourselves and respect.
For example, Pete talked about a country he went to where he grew his hair out before he went because it was modest to have long hair, so he was accepted much more upon arrival.
He drew a circle for us with 4 circles around each other. The outside is BEHAVIOR asking, What is done? The next inside is Values asking, What is good, best? Inside that is BELIEFS, asking waht is true. Lastly is all encompassing WORLD VIEWS. That's the picture we were to look at this topic as.
I learned that everyone has a world view and we don't even realize it! We also have a belief that our world view is comletely true. Our world view we grow up in, we believe is true, and changes as we travel and experience others.
Take for example the time you eat dinner. Here we eat at 6. My friend from Argentina thinks this is madness because they don't even start dinner prep until 8 or later. So my grandma would throw a fit if she heard that, but in another culture it's completely accepted.
So here we began to learn about ethnocentric. It's the way you look at the world, seen through your eyes.
There's 2 types of cultures (we can almost classify the world in these)
Cold Warm
Task Oriented Relational
North America South America
Englad/Germany African countries
Accurate and complete communication Communication must produce 'feel good' atmostphere
Efficient/goals
Direct Connunication Indirect Communication
Time oriented Event oriented
Individualism Group Oriented
'Colder' weather-indoors more 'Warmer weather'- more outdoors
Privacy Inclusion
Prepare meal for 100 Prepare meal for 200 cause more always come
Owns more things to self Community owns, sharing
Wealthy poor

Then we learned about 2 other types:
Old Cultures Young Cultures
High context Low context
Mississippi California
Who you know is greater value What you know is greater value
dress up-look smart casually dressed (YWAMers)
Table set orderly Eat wherever/with hands

We also learned a bit about Theism, Deism, Athiest, Agnostic, and a few others lightly. I felt like I was back in cultures perspectives course at Concordia. I am very interesting in studying more about these ideas, beliefs, and cultural views because mine is so limited and I want to understand where others are coming from and not only have my own questions but perhaps be able to answer many others.
There were few more on the lecture, but wanted to point out something that stuck out to me. Pete told us this story about a girl who died of Malaria. The village she lived in, with whatever belief it was they held, I forget what religion, they believed that she had been cursed by malaria because she was being punished. Where as we in our world view and Biblical view and say that God is good, and everything he created so she was bit by a mosquito with this disease so it wasn't that she was cursed. Then the people would go on to ask then, well who sent the sick mosquito to bite her? So on and so on you could see two different sides depending on their beliefs. So be careful because this reiterates sometimes 'our' own world views. In order to find truth in our world views, we MUST keep searchin for greater wisdom and asking God to show us what's truth in this. KEEP ASKING ?s