Introduction
To be culturally intelligent is to be a good neighbor. In the modern era, where many people are exposed to new cultures through technology and international migration, cultural intelligence is a valuable skill to posses and develop. This is even more true in the context of the Christian Church who is commanded by Jesus to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”(Mattew 28:19-20 Holy Bible: New International Version. 2011) If this commandment is to be taken seriously, then the Church (especially each local worshipping body of believers) must be willing to step outside of its comfort zone to engage with the community around it, no matter how similar or different it may be.
To lack cultural intelligence in the 21st century is to purposely and ignorantly avoid topics surrounding different cultures and how they impact the world at large. Interacting with other cultures is a core part of the modern human experience. Those interactions can be through the experiences education, understanding, advocacy, assimilation, or any other relatively positive pursuit, or through demeaning, oppression, colonization, degradation, or any relatively negative pursuit. It is increasingly difficult to not be confronted with different cultures surrounding us.
The Church is no stranger to wrestling with complex theological topics that have to do with cultural identities. Some modern topics would include women in ministry, liberation theology, and LGBTQ theology, to name a few. The work of understanding how to best serve the neurodiverse population is already under way, with multiple institutions and churches working in the fields of research and practical ministry to create welcoming and accommodating communities. Be that as it may, the neurodiversity movement is developing into its own cultural movement and it is now more important than ever for the Church be leaders in creating spaces for neurodiverse people in its worshipping and decision making spaces.
Engaging with Culture
There is a story in Acts, chapter 17 in which Paul is traveling around teaching others about Jesus and spreading the Gospel message. He is in the city of Athens when sees the altars to the many different gods that the citizens worshipped. Athens is an important city that had a “reputation as an intellectual and cultural center.”(288, Thompson 2015) Paul’s awareness Athenian culture would serve him well as he debated Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in the marketplace and then again later before the Areopagus.(Acts 17:18-19, Holy Bible: New International Version. 2011)
This interaction results in people choosing to follow Paul and become believers,1 which if the Great Commandment is to be the guiding evangelistic philosophy of the Church, is a victory. However the point of the story for this paper’s purpose is not to show how to use culture as a “weapon” to win people to Christ, rather it is to show that being aware of and sensitive to another’s culture will allow discussions of who God is to be the focus of the interaction.
It is this author’s belief that in order to be a good neighbor, one must first be aware of their own neighborhoods2. If one does not know their communities, then what they know about their neighborhoods and the people in it are left up to speculation, which can often times lead to fear. “When our primary posture to others, to our very own neighbors is fear or indifference, it’s almost always a clue that we are not orienting our lives to the gospel of Jesus, which changes everything.”(100, Soerens 2020) A neighbor that is met with an attitude of fear will not be able to see the fullness of the Christ because out of fear comes the devaluing of someone to nothing more than a threat.3
Secondly, have an open mind and curiosity about the spaces other people occupy. We are all a part of various cultures that work to shape the lived experiences that guides interactions and decisions in day to day life. To identify one’s own culture they would have to look at the culmination of their space, time, location, experiences, stories, and history. If one was to that for themselves, they would realize that there are many different influences that shape their experience as a person. The next step in the experience would be to recognize that other people would likely come to a similar conclusion, and it would likely not be he exact same. And that is ok.
Cultural Intelligence
“Cultural intelligence is one’s ability to adapt when confronted with problems arising in interactions with people or artifacts of cultures other than one’s own.”(Sternberg et al. 2022) While that is a fine starting point to begin understanding Cultural Intelligence (CQ), to stop there does not give the full picture of CQ, which breaks down into four separate components: thinking of other people and cultures (metacognitive), how one relates the knowledge a person may already have of a culture’s practices, identifiers, etc.(cognitive), how willing a person is to engage with other cultures (motivational), and the measurement of how appropriate any interactions between a person and a culture that is not their own. (behavioral).(Sternberg et al. 2022) When assessed separately, the four branches of CQ listed above are combined to give an overall picture of someone’s cultural intelligence.
These areas of CQ can be given a value for purposes of assessment, but it may not paint a full picture of an individual or an institution. For example, It is possible for someone to have high motivation to engage with other cultures, but exhibit very poor behaviors or basic understandings of other cultures. Therefore may exhibit a lower cultural intelligence than someone who has a high awareness of a culture and their social normalities, but has low motivation to engage. The totality of cultural intelligence requires multiple facets of engagement, many of which will force one to evaluate the impact of their actions and words for themselves and their neighbors. What will likely result is the identification of blind spots in how they interact with and care for their neighbor and subsequently, the resulting marginalization of those who are overlooked, intentionally or not.
Members in the Church (and championed by the clergy) must continually develop and nurture the desire to increase their own CQ as well as the CQ of the people in their spheres of influence. This pursuit is not one of any particular political agenda or the desire to remove of any one culture’s identity, but rather a pursuit to be good and loving neighbors to all people. It is not unlikely that when speaking of being culturally intelligent, people will focus on the divisive aspect of what makes each person unique, instead of the beauty of diversity in each of God’s creations. Where some will see the celebration of differences as separation and ultimately sin (or sin like), Christians should see uniqueness and beauty.
If the Church does not CQ seriously, it will continue to experience various movements inside the body that move it further away from unity. Those in the white evangelical church will view liberation theologies as separatist movements seeking to divide and likewise, those in the liberation theology movements will look to the white evangelical movements as discriminatory and unwelcoming. Mainline churches and evangelicals will grow in their distrust one another, LGBTQIA+ issues will continue pit Christians against one another, politics will be identifiers before allegiance to Christ (both as a self identifier and the identities of others), and now as the neurodiversity movement gains momentum, the church must get ahead of the conversation lest it lags behind and lets the secular world decide the value and rights of people, or even worse, contributes to the devaluation of people who are created in the image of God.
Cultural Intelligence and The Church
The Church has not, as a whole, gone out of its way to not be inclusive to those with disabilities, therefore neglecting a large portion of people from coming to know a rich and meaningful spiritual life. An unfortunate example can be seen with the Church’s opposition to the American with Disabilities Act (ADA)(Payne 2021). In this particular instance, freedom from the regulations of the government was more important than providing a welcoming space for those with disabilities. The Church’s response should have been “that is not a problem, we already have the accommodations in place.” While this example is one that many readers would not identify as relating to cultural, it is this author’s argument that it displays a lack of awareness towards people who face, sometimes insurmountable, obstacles in engaging with a spiritual community in a location designated for that space. In other words, the opposition of the ADA is an indictment of the culture of the Church. At the very core it lacked empathy for those with disabilities.
Neurodiversity Cultural Intelligence
The fear becomes that if outward identifiers (gender, race, abilities/disabilities, in some instances sexuality) are ignored and lead the Church to devalue someone’s existence in any way that is less than the creation of God, then how much more challenging is it for those who are neurodivergent? While there may be some stereotypical identifiers of someone who is autistic or who has ADHD, the reality is that many neurodiverse people learn to mask4 and operate in their environment that end up being more of a struggle than it is enriching.
The concept of neurodiversity itself is a relatively new understanding of the field of the way people’s brains work.5 The identification of neurodiversity as a culture itself is a constant work in progress. Timothy Beck writes “As opposed to trying to pin down exactly what neurodiversity has meant in the past, what is likely to be most important moving forward is whether the term facilitates a (counter)culture for neurodivergent individuals to both connect with community and experiment with what their always diverse bodies are capable of.”(13, Beck 2024) And this is likely true from many movements that were early in their development, and it is also likely that neurodiversity will contain many smaller movements with in it.
The Church will always struggle with issues that surround cultural intelligence when it refuses to be leaders in making space for people who are different than what society deems as “normal”. That leadership will require humility, listening, ambiguity in identity and social structures, and identifying with people who have been previously cast aside from the church. The hurdle that the Church will have to overcome when becoming more welcoming for neurodivergent people, is the same hurdle the Church has faced with every movement that welcomes more people into the fold of belonging and leadership, which is navigating the feeling that people and entities outside of the Church are “forcing” it to comply with and engage with topics that it thought it had settled doctrinally or perhaps not even begun to engage with theologically. Or said a different way, the Church will have to acknowledge that it favors the status quo over inclusivity.
How the Church Moves Forward
As it has been pointed out already, it often seems that entities outside of the Church lead the way in terms of making space for and integrating people who are not a part of the homogenous group into the regular community and leadership opportunities. The western Church continues largely abdicated its role of “caring for the least of these”6 in favor of maintaining the status quo of homogeny that makes power and control easier to maintain.
Celebrate Differences
Homogeny, or uniformity, seeks to conform every person and thing to look the same, speak the same, and act the same. But uniformity does not equal unity. Paul said as much in 1 Corinthians
Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.(1 Cor. 12:12-14, Holy Bible: New International Version. 2011)
Uniformity is a weak substitute to the fullness of life that is found as unique creations of God living in community with one another. In his book “Everywhere You Look: Discovering The Church Right Where You Are,” Tim Sorens writes that “Unity is achieved when we see the imago Dei in one another, when we refuse to live by the cultural script that some lives have more value than others. Unity thus honors diversity.”(88, Soerens 2020) The importance is that the recognition comes from seeing God in each other, not that each other looks like the group’s image of a God follower.
There is no qualifier as to how an image bearer of God must look or act before the Christian recognizes the creation of God before them. To do so would go against the very teachings of Jesus who says “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’”(Matthew 25:40, Holy Bible: New International Version. 2011) That mind shift will radically change the way in which the Church engages with others. If a person can see God in the other, despite any perceived differences, then CQ would hardly matter because what choice would one have in honoring the other. Neurodivergence is simply another manifestation of the uniqueness of people in the world.
This matters because people who are marginalized may not necessarily speak up. That could be due to a number of reasons, but as Amos Yong writes, “just as with racism and sexism, the excluded minority population internalizes the views of the dominant culture so that people with disabilities also come to understand themselves and act in ways that confirm the expected stereotypes.”(11, Yong 2011) “Fitting in” or “going with the flow” becomes a default method of operating for many people who have been pushed aside in the name of unity in the church. A term that is related and is becoming common among neurodivergent people is masking. People have grown accustomed to not celebrating differences in fear of being made to feel bad about their uniqueness, or worse, being ostracized because of it.
Another reason to celebrate differences is that though diversity, there is a deeper understanding of who God is and how God interacts with creation. The experience a person from United States has with God will likely be different from the experience of someone from Iraq, whose experience will differ from someone who is from Vietnam. The experience of a white male who is diagnosed with ADHD will differ from the experience of a black male with the same diagnosis. A person living in 2025 will have to wrestle with topics that people even 25 years ago, let alone 2000 years ago would have had to engage with theologically. In other words, it takes the work of the entire body of the Church to seek out God earnestly, which will require every single person, no matter their physical or cognitive state.
Look Towards Groups that are Already Engaging Neurodiversity
It is tempting to believe that the Church is the one authority over how humans should treat one another, but as it has been pointed out, the Church has done a fairly poor job at being welcoming to different groups of people. Therefore it is ok to see how other groups are welcoming marginalized people into their communities and allowing them to connect with each other and with God. It is likely that these resources will come from many different places such as grassroots movements by local churches to welcome people with autism to a sensory friendly place to worship, all the way up to researchers who spend their time studying scripture, psychology, anthropology, and sociology to provide data and insight for the Church to be culturally intelligent.
One field of study that addresses cultural intelligence is education, particularly at the primary and secondary levels. It is necessary for educators and administrators to understand how differences between students and their peers and/or environments affect their abilities to learn. Even more so when the movement of people between countries and cultures becomes more common. Anne M. Macaluso, Ed.D. discusses the advantages in CQ that immigrants have over their peers. She writes “that immigrant students have statistically higher scores on the CQS than students that are not immigrants.” and that “these students have the competencies necessary for success in a globalized world, and educators must find a way to harness and share these lived experiences so that all students graduate as globally competent individuals.”(36, Macaluso 2022) The immigrant students exist between two or more cultures, therefore they are forced to confront CQ in a way someone who has existed in the location their entire life.
Neurodivergent people exist between cultures in a similar way, but because of masking their neurodivergence, it may not be as obvious as someone who has arrived in school from a different country. For students, schools are some of the first places of community they may have to navigate, therefore educators must go out of their way to be a welcoming space for all students. “Affirming social inclusion as both a basic right and a provision of opportunity for children with disabilities is clearly stipulated in Article 23.3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child”[4, @scorgieSocialInclditality, something the Church should be experts at when interacting as a part of the body of Christ.
Another place the Church can look to in order to learn to be more welcoming to neurodiverse people are businesses and corporations. It is wise to acknowledge that many businesses are making decisions based on profit and reputation, and that there has been legislation to protect people from being marginalized. However it may have come about, there is growing acceptance of neurodiverse people in the business world, both as customers and employees.
No matter how good a business seems to welcome and address marginalized communities, those in the Church should not let their guiding principals be shaped by them, who may often times be advocating for inclusion simply to increase social credibility and increase profits. If followers of Jesus are to fall into that trap, then they are simply giving over their spiritual direction to profit driven morals and values. At best, a person will align themselves with a company that contains a thin veneer of Christian morality, and at worst, a person will fall prey to the clever marketing department of a company that uses the marginalization of people to increase their profits.(“Target Takes a Hit: $12.4 Billion in Value Lost after Boycott” n.d.)
Stop Engaging in Culture Wars That Demean People
Culture wars have a way of bringing the worst parts of people into the spotlight. This is even more true in the digital age in which statements do not always have to be based in fact in order to be spread around to devalue another. This is glaringly obvious in 2025 when the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr makes statement such as “autism destroys families” and is an “individual tragedy as well.”(C-SPAN 2025) Such a broad statement about people with autism creates division between them and everyone else, and it devalues people. This is the goal of a culture wars, to determine what is acceptable to a culture, and demonize anything that strays beyond that definition.
The goal of the Church is not to divide, but to unite. “In the culture-war approach, we have all too often grown misguided in the mission, making people the enemy.”(37, Bock 2022) If the perpetuators of a culture war is successful in turning Christians away from their commandment to love one another and to spread the good news to the ends of the earth, then the war has already been lost. At that the point, the Church “has transformed itself into a cultural statement, whilst at the same time positioning itself outside the dominating culture. It hopes to conquer the world not by missionary activities, but by associating itself with political points of view.”(13, Smalbrugge 2019) The witness of the Church to neurodivergent people will continue to be harmed if it relies on political parties, politicians, and demeaning language to guide its approach to those in the neurodiversity camp.
Conclusion
Since the formation of the Church it has had to engage with different facets of cultural intelligence, because if it did not, it would have failed at its mission to spread the good news of Jesus to the ends of the earth. Throughout the history of the Church there has been varying degrees of successes in achieving that mandate from Jesus, and there has also been defeats, great movements of hospitality, and regrettably terrible moments of exclusion of people from the family of God. Neurodiversity is now joining in the conversation of what it means to be welcomed despite being divergent from the norm.
There will be difficulty in many of those conversations, but if the Church engages faithfully with theology, cultural intelligence, and most importantly the people it is called to love, then value and acceptance of people who are different will not be an issue. Unity (not uniformity) will be celebrated, people’s unique identities will be honored, and most importantly, the Church will be a better representation of the complexity and beauty of God’s creation.
Footnotes
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Acts 17:33–34 ↩
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Understanding the very space you occupy is the beginning of being able to understand other people and have insight and empathy for situations other than your own. ↩
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I recognize that there are legitimate threats, and that would not apply to this line of thinking ↩
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Masking is the act existing in society in ways that are deemed “typical” or “normal” ↩
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Coined in 1998 in a thesis written by Judy Singer ↩
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Matthew 25:40 ↩