Hot Culture In A Cold Climate

Everyone has their favourite emerging/missional book recommendations, but let me put in a plug for the kind of books that informed my very earliest ponderings on ministry in a changing society: books on missions. For starters, I'd love to recommend Foreign to Familiar: A Guide to Understanding Hot- And Cold-Climate Cultures, by Sarah A. Lanier.

Lanier does an excellent job of presenting the most common (and therefore, most damaging) differences between what she calls "hot cultures" (from hot climates such as Mexico, South America, Fiji, etc.), and "cold cultures" (such as European, North American, etc.).

"the population of the entire world can roughly be divided into two parts. The two groups represented are 'hot-climate' (relationship-based) cultures and 'cold-climate' (task-oriented) cultures."

I'd recommend this book for anyone who was already or about to be involved in cross-cultural work of any kind.

I'd also recommend this book for anyone seriously trying to engage our post-modern, post-Christendom, post-_________ (fill in blank) society.

In a nutshell, most of North American Christian expressions of ecclesia have been shaped by the values of a cold culture: European Platonic & dualistic worldview, attention to precision and definition, and individuality. I'd like to suggest that -- regardless of the reality that we live in a cold climate -- society is shifting (particularly the emerging generations) into a "hot" culture, with a more mystical & holistic worldview (at least, they more readily acknowledge that there is a spiritual realm), attention to relationships and community, more concerned with process than product (although product is not seen as unimportant).

This has huge ramifications for leadership: cold cultures are built around dominant personalities and power, while leadership in a hot culture would put more emphasis on the community and shared vision.

This has implications for regular ecclesia gatherings as well: cold culture is built around meetings with adhered-to schedules and pre-determined outcomes (especially in mega-church models where everything is timed down to the nano-second). Hot culture gatherings would be built around creating a "safe place to take risks" and allowing "vision" to arise from the gathered community.

There are many ways to unpack how this might look in our various forms of communitas. Allow me to go out on a limb here, and suggest that since the book is pretty affordable anyway, GET A COPY and let's dialogue about:

1. Do you think we're seeing a shift to a "hot culture" even though most of us technically live in a cold climate?
   
   
2. Does this kind of understanding of hot/cold culture give us some "wheels" to put under our experimental (steps of faith) understandings of ecclesia and the missio Dei?
   
   
3. Where/how do we start?

I look forward to the conversation!