Gaining the Trust of Others Outside the Comfort Zone

In the book I’m reading, it explains that if we cannot gain the trust of the people we’re trying to serve, we’ll never be able to serve them in the capacity as a mentor or trusted discipler.  Servanthood should be the goal of those who love Christ, and so it is the goal for Christian workers trying to make disciples.  Serving others is not means to be rewarded later, nor is it a stepping stone to spiritual maturity.  Servanthood is the key to loving God and others as yourself. It is the end of what Christ instilled into His men. Servanthood cannot be boiled down to mere acts of service. Being a servant is who we are in Christ rather than just doing stuff for people in Christ’s name.  Serving others is what Christians do because it is their very nature.  Despite all the lessons there may be on how to serve like Christ did, what we really need to do is simply focus on our identity in Christ and we will find that serving is simply a natural expression of who we are in Christ. Trust is a prerequisite to servanthood.  Trust is not gained overnight, nor is it gained automatically from being a church leader. Trust takes time and work.  People must know that we seek their good and not their hurt, but without the right amount the time, trust cannot be realized.  From the Lord’s perspective, trust was not mutual.  What Jesus gave to His men He did not expect to receive again.  Instead His men forsook and left Him.  As missionaries, pastors, and leaders, gaining this kind of trust requires divine amounts of grace and humility. Even with all that can be said about trust, I want to highlight yet another difficulty of serving and gaining trust. When your outside of a culture or sub-cultureother than your own, things require extra effort, and extra humility.

“Trust must be built from the other person’s frame of reference” 

This means that in many ways, the opposite party gets to decide what earns their trust.  Helping old ladies cross roads that would rather do it on their own is not going to earn their trust.  Or taking American ideas of service and using them in foreign cultures can easily be read as prideful arrogance.  There is a reason why other cultures do not look and sound like our own.  Everything from the way they speak to what we eat is different, so it goes without saying that ideas of servanthood will be different as well.  If we are going to earn the trust of people in any culture, we’ll need to observe first what they will understand as  humility and what they will perceive as arrogance. I’ll write more on serving later.