Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

from The Ballad of East and West
by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

The illustration above depicts the societal transitions from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age to the Information Age to the Conceptual Age from “A Whole New Mind” by Daniel H. Pink. This is an obvious take-off on the “Evolution of Man” illustration that has spawned so many parodies.

Pink’s book is fascinating. He tries to show how the Western economy is being squeezed out of Industry and Information Tech by Asia, Automation and Abundance. If you’re in tech or trade right now you probably feel yourself going the way of the dodo. While I certainly agree that the highest growth in US jobs is going to be in the areas of high-touch/high-concept, I get something else out of Pink’s evolutionary chart.

Working in one of the least developed countries in the world, I interact daily with people who are essentially living in the Agricultural Age. Yes, they have cell phones and sometimes TVs but 90% of Mozambicans grow most of the food they eat. When change agents like myself come in we are primarily techie people involved in activities like development technology or information sciences. Just imagine dropping an American farmer from the 19th century into a cubicle-filled office in the 21st century. We are unaware of the incomprehensibility of much of what we are trying to do.

Even so, there is a growing mass of college-educated and technically savvy Africans that are beginning to exert pressure on the secure jobs that missionaries and development workers have been doing for years. Our mission in Mozambique is experiencing a vacuum of expatriate personnel as many leave the field and few new recruits replace them. This vacuum is having a positive effect: Mozambicans that were previously limited to lower skilled and less responsible positions are being sucked up into higher levels of management and responsibility.

When I got popped into a higher area of responsibility and had to leave the Nyungwe translation behind, it wasn’t an expatriate who took my place. It was a Mozambican pastor who over the years took over more and more of the responsibility for the work until I was only needed for higher level skills (like when the computer got screwed up or when the translation needed to be checked for exegetical accuracy).

I just returned from a trip to our mission headquarters in Nampula and I was surprised to see that what was once a mostly white enclave has become a multinational organization. More key roles are being filled by Mozambicans and the primary language of communication has shifted from English to Portuguese.

People from other cultures are not simply interchangeable, however. When a Mozambican begins doing a job that has been for years performed by an American things are gained and lost. Because they are insiders to the culture and society, Mozambicans even while often less educated are far better at getting things done than their expatriate colleagues.

Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) like ours are a strange hybrid of cultures. They begin as a sort of franchise of their culture of origin. But over time they begin to evolve into something more indigenous. This can go wrong. NGOs can plant little versions of themselves and simply replicate a foreign thing. And they are also capable of being swallowed up by local staff who replicate all the worst aspects of third-world bureaucracy.

“Neither East nor West” is I believe the key. For followers of Christ, the potential exists for a “new baby” to result from the wedding of different cultures. I’m privileged to quite often hang out in multicultural settings that get the mix right. Yesterday, I got to play guitar with two Mozambican friends. As we jammed, the backgrounds and musical styles that we brought to the moment created something new and yet familiar. It was a joy to play music with people who play music differently.

And in an evening fellowship, six different countries were represented and all of us were focused on a single passage of Scripture, 1 John 3:3-7. South African, Mozambican and Malawian pastors each explained the passage using stories. A sheep and a pig. A child. Potholes and Mulange mountain. My contribution was more analytical. The seed is a symbol of growth of the fruits of the Spirit. What a privilege to sit at the feet of pastors who have contextualized the Bible for their flocks and are able to use story-telling to communicate deep truths that post-Enlightenment people like myself often try to reduce to a series of logical propositions.

The drive for modernity in developing countries can lead to a loss of traditional culture and wisdom. In the process of modernization and Mozabicanization, the positive benefits of traditional culture can be lost together with the negatives.

Television was the great flattener of American culture bringing homogeneity while also squelching regional idioms and culture. My fear for Mozambique is that in the process of racing toward modernity, the riches of tradition will be tossed aside.