It was a sweaty night of tropical heat when our van pulled up to the curb on a narrow backstreet outside Monterrey, and our team of a dozen conspicuous Americans climbed warily out of the air conditioning.

Small pockets of neighbors stared from the shadows as Latin music thumped in the background. We got our first look at the Mission where we’d be staying for a week, and the barred windows were not an encouraging first impression. We hastily entered the protection of the stucco-and-concrete courtyard, exhausted from our trip—and overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all.

Later that night, after lugging duffels inside the protective gates and brushing our teeth at a cold-water tap, we climbed a rough outside stairwell to our sleeping quarters. That’s when Tara, one of our team members, happened to come up the steps behind me.

Tara had spent a semester during college in Central America, so she was much more comfortable with her surroundings than the rest of us. “Do you want to see a Mexican kitchen?” she asked softly as we climbed. I nodded.

She pointed over the wall from the top of the stairway: “That’s it.”

Below us in the open night air stood a camp stove connected to a propane tank, and a rough wooden cabinet with mismatched dishes. Nearby was a wire cage of chickens.

“Where’s the sink?” I asked Tara.

She just shook her head.

On our way from the border crossing to this working-class suburb, we’d passed a huge Whirlpool factory, where workers assembled gleaming refrigerators and washing machines for American consumers. But here in a nearby neighborhood, the house didn’t even have running water. I was stunned.

The rest of the team was already upstairs to the Mission’s most luxurious room, the sanctuary, which had an actual tile floor and roughed-in drywall. They were spreading out sleeping bags there on the metal benches; cranking open the windows for ventilation—making themselves at home.

But I stood on the stairway for a long time looking down on the tiny “kitchen.” I knew that in a week, I’d be back in my comfortable air-conditioned world with hot-water taps and electric stoves. Meanwhile, the citizens of Monterrey would be languishing in third-world conditions—two hours from the border of the wealthiest nation on earth.

Starting to “serve”

I woke up the next morning still exhausted. Sleep had been a fitful affair, punctuated every hour or so by the sound of the crowing rooster next door.

Our ambitious agenda for the week was to deliver supplies to an orphanage, lead a couple of worship services, and conduct children’s programs in a few outlying villages. Of course none of those ministries would alleviate the poverty surrounding us.

We held a worship service that night at the Mission, and it was laughably inadequate. We sang worship choruses in bad Spanish. A pastor from our church preached a sermon, which was translated line-by-line by the Mexican missionary we’d come to “serve.” Long before the end, the squirming children and restless teens in the front had completely tuned him out. I couldn’t help thinking that if a foreigner had tried our approach in an American church, the whole congregation would have walked out.

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Ministering Cross Culturally: The training articles in this download will give you a starting point for ministry in a new culture. Here you can read about cross-cultural ministry as we see it in the Bible; you can gain skills to help you with cultural immersion (and to avoid culture shock); and you can re-approach ministry in our ever-changing, globalized world. This is an ideal resource for a short-term missions team to discuss before they travel.

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