One of the most talked-about books this year in Christian leadership circles is Dave Gibbons’s The Monkey and the Fish: Liquid Leadership for a Third-Culture Church. It is about the need for churches to embrace third-culture attitudes. First culture is the dominant homogeneous culture you live in; second culture is the culture of those who are uncomfortable with the first culture; and third culture is about embracing and affirming all different types of ethnicities and cultures.
Gibbons, who is part Caucasian and part Korean, is the founding pastor of Newsong, a multi-site megachurch with campuses in the US, Mexico City, Bangkok, London and India. His book contains some great inspiration for anyone wanting to catch a vision of how a church can take advantage of globalisation. He says that we need to read authors of different cultures, befriend people who are not like us, identify our neighbours, love without strings attached, and become a church without walls.
The book is reasonably short, inexpensive, and easy to read, and should be considered essential reading for any church leader who cares about God’s global mission. The author’s cross-cultural credentials are slightly dented by some factual mistakes relating to kiwifruit in chapter 4, and a roundtable discussion in Chapter 7 lurches around unpredictably, but the overall message concerning the church’s need for a global outlook is very timely.