Why Conduct a Cultural Audit?
The Center for the Study of Religious Life developed a cultural audit tool to sensitize religious communities to the influence of their own culture on their life and mission, and to help them examine the relationships between cultural influences and their gospel/faith tradition. The goals of the audit are:
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To raise awareness of one’s own culture and the conscious and unconscious influences of cultural differences on community living;
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To increase awareness of the need for attitudinal shifts when a person from another culture joins a community or when one is working with someone from another culture;
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To acknowledge and appreciate the particular experience of each individual (both newcomers and community members), especially the feelings of uncertainty, threat and fear;
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To discover and begin to heal the wounds left by failed efforts toward action in the past.
In addition, the audit can lead communities to action:
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To deal with attitudes and behaviors that prevent effective intercultural communication (stereotyping, prejudice, racism);
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To assess the community’s will to change the cultures of the community.
Religious communities conduct the audit to develop a profile of themselves as a group, i.e., to identify ways culture influences their thinking and behavior, positively and negatively. Inventories and exercises help them examine influences from their congregational culture*, the dominant U.S. culture, societal attitudes and values, and cultures their congregation encounters. A fifth section gives direction for analyzing implications for congregational policies and practices.
Finally, the audit includes a listing of resources for meeting the challenges of the congregational and dominant U.S. cultures and other cultures in the U.S. The audit can only go so far. Through the use of the resources listed the community can move to the next step of building a multicultural community where people from different cultures can live and flourish together (both within the religious community and in mission).
* The audit is customized to the cultural context of the United States. The overall audit process may be applied to other cultural situations but only if major revisions are made by persons from the other cultures.
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