Cross-cultural experiences shape faculty members’ teaching

Published: January 8, 2025
With 18 countries currently represented in AMBS’s learning community, both students and faculty members have opportunities to grow through collaborative cross-cultural learning processes. We invited four faculty members to share about cross-cultural experiences that have shaped how they prepare leaders for ministry and service across the world.
Note: This piece originally appeared in the winter 2025 issue of AMBS Window.
Leah R. Thomas, PhD
Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care; Director of Contextual Education

“Every human person is in certain respects (1) like all others, (2) like some others, (3) like no other.” — Emmanuel Y. Lartey, In Living Color: An Intercultural Approach to Pastoral Care and Counseling
As a professor of pastoral and spiritual care, I’ve found this definition to be a helpful guiding principle, both for teaching intercultural pastoral care and for practicing it in the classroom. It holds together the three-fold truth that there are characteristics that all have in common; that are shaped and influenced by our distinct community and culture; and that are unique to each one of us. In my own cross-cultural experiences, whether teaching in Zimbabwe, studying in Jerusalem or visiting base communities in Mexico, I have realized again and again that certain human experiences are universal. We all seek love and connection; we all grieve when faced with loss. Studies in grief and trauma confirm that certain neurobiological realities cut across culture, such as the response of the brain and body when confronted with an event that we interpret as a threat to our survival.
At the same time, the way we talk about grief, loss and trauma varies by culture; some languages don’t have a word for trauma, for example. Even the definition of “dead” can be culturally specific. Paul Rosenblatt notes that on Vanatinai Island, southeast of Papua New Guinea, people who would be considered unconscious in Western culture are referred to as “dead.” In this culture, it is possible for a person to die a number of times. Patterns of grieving — what people who have experienced loss believe, feel and do — also vary enormously from culture to culture.
In AMBS’s multicultural learning environment, three or more continents are frequently represented in the classroom, as well as various racial identities, ethnicities and languages. To teach about grief, I begin the class by inviting students to speak about what grief and mourning “look like” in their home culture. Students offer rich, culturally diverse descriptions of grief and mourning in their culture — including how it is (or is not) expressed, the role of the body in grief, what is considered “normative” or “excessive,” and rituals and traditions that accompany the grieving process.
While it’s important to seek knowledge about other cultures, it’s also essential to recognize that knowledge cannot be a substitute for authentic encounters with one another! Each person is beautifully unique — physically, psychosocially and spiritually — and needs to be respected as such. To respect interculturality in pastoral/spiritual care is to live at the intersection of these three realities, constantly discerning which aspect of human personhood is in need of our immediate attention while holding the other two in view.
Luis Tapia Rubio, MDiv, MPhil
Director of Practical Leadership Training; Core Adjunct Faculty

In my teaching at AMBS, I bring my intercultural and ecumenical experiences from my time in Chile, Ecuador and the U.S. I have worked in Baptist, Catholic and Mennonite settings with Latinos/Latinas from different countries. From all of those experiences, I have learned that to be an effective teacher, you need to be aware of your own social and cultural context and your students’ as well.
When I was a young pastor and theology instructor in the Baptist Church in Chile, my first theological teaching experiences were in my congregation and also in training Baptist pastors and leaders in the local Bible institute. Back then, I believed that teaching theology meant “depositing” abstract and academic “content” into the congregants’ and students’ minds, with the hope that it could change the way they lived and ministered. Over time, I realized that I was having problems connecting that specific theological “content” with my congregants’ and students’ needs because it was coming from other social and cultural contexts — usually from the U.S. and Europe. Our social and cultural context determines our theological convictions — the beliefs that we live out and communicate in different ways.
In my teaching at AMBS now, instead of trying to “deposit” theological “content” into students’ minds, my goal is to facilitate a teaching-learning process where we can learn from each other. I aim to form students who “do” theology within their own social and cultural contexts, considering their own needs and questions in line with the Anabaptist tradition. In that sense, I am aware that I, too, participate in the teaching-learning process. My own social and cultural background and AMBS’s social and cultural context are two specific settings that participate in a cross-cultural theological dialogue — a dialogue that integrates our bodies, minds and spirits.
Jamie Pitts, PhD
Professor of Anabaptist Studies

I lived in Scotland for five years while studying for my PhD. Very few people in Scotland are committed Christians, and almost no one has even heard of Mennonites. I had to explain repeatedly why I have faith — despite all the bad things Christians have done — and who Mennonites are. Over time I learned to not make many assumptions about what kind of theological knowledge someone might have; to honor their experiences with the church; and to answer their questions as directly and clearly as possible. Prioritizing clarity was especially important since, although Scots speak English, there are myriad idioms that do not translate well across cultures. These experiences helped prepare me to navigate AMBS’s multicultural classrooms, which always include students with a range of experiences with academic theology, the church and the English language.
At the level of spiritual and emotional formation, my time in Scotland also helped me to embrace my identity as a Christian from the United States — and Texas, no less. To be honest, it could be a little embarrassing to identify myself in those terms at a time in which American Christianity was associated with fellow Texan George W. Bush bombing Iraq. But as the years went on, I had many opportunities to reflect on how growing up as a Christian in the U.S. had shaped me in complex ways.
Coming to understand, accept and even affirm aspects of this shaping while I was learning to navigate Scottish culture began to teach me about the dance of differentiated relationships. In other words, the quality of my cross-cultural relationships did not depend on me becoming or acting Scottish but on my authentically being me — American Christian that I was — even as I opened myself with curiosity and receptivity to others. I have found cultivating this posture essential to everything we do at AMBS, especially as we have expanded our global partnerships.
Janna Hunter-Bowman, PhD
Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Christian Social Ethics

Janna Hunter-Bowman (at left) and Sun Ju Moon, MDiv (second from left), Course Assistant, pose with students at the Nehemiah Institute. (Photo provided)
Every day at AMBS brings opportunities for rich cross-cultural interactions and learning. Since joining the Teaching Faculty in 2015, I’ve enjoyed working with students from 22 countries. In May, I had the honor of traveling to South Korea to teach Introduction to Peace Studies and Nonviolence to a cohort of students through AMBS’s partnership with the Nehemiah Institute for Christian Studies (see “Responding to a call for peace education” below).
These cross-cultural encounters — in addition to nearly a decade of working for peace and nonviolent action in Colombia — have led me to think, teach and engage in what I call a third wave of Anabaptist peace theology. The first wave consists of nonresistance; the second emphasizes transformation. The third is about reckoning with the forms of violence that exist within our peace church communities, institutions, histories and theologies — so that we can more fully carry forward our commitments to justice and transformation.
My students from the Global South voice that first- and second-wave peace theologies exclude them because they don’t grapple with legacies of colonialism. In addition, my South Korean students said respectfully and clearly what I have also learned from people from the Global South and from survivors of sexualized violence: the second-wave conflict transformation peacebuilding framework does not adequately address hierarchies of power within a community.
I’m grateful for how our students help us grapple with textured truths about our peace theology from the perspectives of those it excludes and those most affected by violence. We can open ourselves to understand and address harmful patterns. When we pay careful attention together to the limitations of previous waves of peace studies frameworks, we gain new insights that students then use to design peacebuilding approaches for their contexts and to contribute to scholarship.
Responding to a call for peace education
Since 2022, AMBS has collaborated with the Nehemiah Institute for Christian Studies (NICS) in Seoul, South Korea, to offer an accredited graduate-level Anabaptist theology and peace studies program to NICS students.
A cohort of nine students is enrolled in AMBS’s Master of Arts: Theology and Global Anabaptism program with an emphasis on Anabaptist peace studies. Course materials are translated into Korean, and the courses are taught either in Korean or in English with Korean interpretation.
NICS leaders who knew Anabaptist leaders in South Korea (including some AMBS alumni) initiated the partnership. Also, Mennonite Church Canada International Witness and Mennonite Mission Network (both AMBS partners) have strong and historic connections to the Korean Mennonite Church and Korea Anabaptist Center.
Located in Elkhart, Indiana, on ancestral land of the Potawatomi and Miami peoples, 911±¬ÁĎÍř is a learning community with an Anabaptist vision, offering theological education for learners both on campus and at a distance as well as a wide array of lifelong learning programs — all with the goal of educating followers of Jesus Christ to be leaders for God’s reconciling mission in the world.
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