Loving Our Neighbors: A Transformative, Relational Communication Guide($9.99Value)

Description

The Loving Our Neighbors guidebook helps inform, re-educate, repair, and heal misperceptions, cultural misunderstandings, racial conflict, and wounds that cause division in the world and in the Body of Christ so that we can fulfill Jesus' teaching to "Love your neighbor as yourself." Loving Our Neighbors is a faith-based relational and cultural communication guide. It uses scripture, cultural, and racial communication research along with interpersonal communication principles to help readers understand and apply solutions from scripture to modern cross-cultural challenges. "Looking like heaven and the worldwide Kingdom of God" is a common goal of many faith-based organizations, yet cross-cultural/racial bridge-building and friendship-building have empirically proven to be challenging between people groups. This guide aids in building the initial skills necessary to facilitate cross-cultural and inter-ethnic relationships, and positive group dynamics by building trust, understanding, restoration, and ultimately unity in right relationships with God and each other. With this guide, users intentionally gain a better understanding of themselves, their own cultural assumptions, and those of diverse others so they can build healthy relationships across cultural, ethnic, and "racial" divides within families, neighborhoods, workplaces, and places of worship. Individuals and groups who seek to be "peacemakers" benefit from this guide. Essential skills of adaptation and “deferring to one another” help build cross-cultural relational competence that this guide will help users acquire. Loving Our Neighbors helps users set aside "colorblindness" and "culture blindness" in favor of cultural and kingdom sightedness. By examining ourselves and cultures with open eyes and hearts we learn how to appreciate, embrace, and love people whom we may not perceive to be like ourselves, or who we naively see as "all the same under the skin. Loving Our Neighbors helps users recognize that we are not all “the same under our skin” as is popular to say by the “colorblind.” Because we do not think or feel the same way and have varying life, spiritual, and cultural experiences we may not share group memories, trust, or preferences even in the ways we communicate and worship. Thus, misunderstandings that turn into unresolved conflicts across cultural lines are common. This guide helps us see people more fully so we can love, embrace, and adapt to one another as is the will of God for disciples. Loving Our Neighbors helps build healthy, lasting relationships, so we can learn to, listen, pray, examine, and accommodate each other to fulfill the mission for the Body of Christ as we apply Romans 18 to “be at peace with all people.” Loving Our Neighbors is a stand-alone tool for individual growth. Loving Our Neighbors is also designed to be used in group studies and with the "Loving Our Neighbor Workshop" and/or video series. Faith-based organizations that aspire to be "multicultural" and hospitable places to build unity in the Body of Christ benefit from this guide. Each chapter addresses scriptural, cultural, and personal values. Each chapter is supported by co-facilitated inter-ethnic video conversations featuring “expert witness” accounts of relevant principles of people of color and Doc Courage!