Featured Resource: What Missionaries Ought to Know About Culture Stress

Grow2serve partners, MissionaryCare.com and CrossCulturalWorkers.com., provide missions and mental health resources. Ron & Bonnie Kotesky are retired member care consultants with Go International who provide member care for missionaries in their home, on the field, through orientation and debriefing events and over the Internet and radio.

What Missionaries Ought to know… does not mean that the author sat down and decided what missionaries ought to know, but that missionaries themselves asked about these topics. During the author’s 35 years of college teaching, he learned that if one person asks a question, others probably want to know the same thing; if two people ask, the topic was certainly one that others need to know about. This article covers things missionaries need to know because several missionaries have asked about each of them at one time or another.

You feel tired, anxious, discouraged, isolated, angry, and homesick but cannot think of any reason why you should feel this way. You have been on the field for several years, but these feelings always seem to be there–increasing and decreasing. You wonder what could be causing them. It could be culture stress. You may ask, “I know about culture shock, but what is culture stress?” What is the difference between culture shock and culture stress? What causes culture stress? What are its effects? What can be done about it? Can it be prevented? Let’s consider some of these questions… (CONTINUE READING – PDF)

For almost nine years, God has been using me in the MEDIA ministry as a short documentary film producer. I am also a visual artist; an impressionist doing mostly impasto artworks with oil paint as my main medium. God lead me to Grow2Serve where I work as an administrative assistant to our Senior Director, Mark Morgenstern.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *