Take Your Ministry Beyond Cultural Competence to Cultural Fluency

In Thriving Intercultural Ministry, specialist Pablo Kim Sun draws on years of intercultural ministry experience to guide churches and ministries beyond multicultural good intentions to genuine intercultural transformation. He offers a trauma-informed, embodied approach, addressing how cultural displacement and discrimination live in bodies and systems across generations, and how intercultural healing requires embodied safety for authentic transformation beyond surface-level accommodation.

This book shows how, in an age of heightened cultural differences, our communities need genuine cultural exchange where we are transformed through encounters with one another's differences. Rather than maintaining separate cultural expressions or one group adapting to serve another, intercultural communities allow different cultural approaches to mutually inform and enrich each other, creating new possibilities that no single culture could generate alone.

Through this book's distinct approach to intercultural ministry, you will learn



- An integrated approach that moves beyond cultural competence to cultural fluency;

- A new framework that helps readers discern how to approach intercultural challenges with cultural wisdom;

- How hosting meaningful conversation becomes a form of practical theology that serves transformation;

- A trauma-informed, embodied approach that addresses how cultural displacement and discrimination live in bodies across generations; and

- How to build and strengthen unseen webs of relationships that spread sustainable transformation.



You'll explore intercultural transformation on the individual, relational, and systemic levels, discovering how individuals are shaped in culturally embodied ways, how to build genuine partnerships across difference, and how these transformations must be supported by structures that enable intercultural flourishing.

With concrete case studies and examples from real-life ministry, this book empowers churches, ministries, and Christian communities with the practical skills they need to become their own researchers, facilitators, and collaborative change agents. Through stories of both tension and grace, Kim Sun shows how communities can embrace cultural difference as sacred ground and cultivate belonging for all.



Hyung Jin (Pablo) Kim Sun (PhD, University of Toronto) is the intercultural liaison, a general secretary–level leader of The Presbyterian Church in Canada. He is the author of Building Mennonite Belonging and Who Are Our Enemies and How Do We Love Them? He previously served as Senior Leader for Intercultural Ministry for the Christian Reformed Church in North America. He enjoys discovering good coffee shops and diverse ethnic restaurants across the Greater Toronto Area. He and his family live in Richmond Hill, Ontario.



Introduction: An Invitation to the Journey

Part 1: Transforming Hearts

1. Standing at the Crossroads: The Gift of Cultural Confusion

2. Water, not Ice: Understanding Culture as Living Flow

3. The Body Remembers: A Trauma-Informed Path to Wholeness

Part 2: Transforming Relationships

4. Building Intercultural Relationship Skills: How the Monkeys Saved the Fish

5. Creating Generative Intercultural Communities

6. When Conflict Becomes Curriculum

Part 3: Transforming Systems

7. Leading in Complexity: Beyond Hero Leadership

8. The Underground Revolution: Building Networks for Change

9. When Communities Analyze Themselves: Participatory Transformation

Part 4: The Integration Dance

10. Facilitation as Spiritual Practice

11. The Cultural DJ in Action: Reading and Responding in Real Time

12. Following Jesus across Many Borders: Living the Integration

Acknowledgments

Discussion Guide for Small Groups and Learning Communities

Recommended Reading