Cultural Intelligence Thesis Receives Vice Chancellor’s Award for Doctoral Thesis Excellence
David Turnbull, the current Global Interaction State Director for SA/NT, grew up in Papua New Guinea where he developed a love for intercultural engagement. In the mid-1990s David responded to God’s call to train pastors in Nigeria in a theological college. For family reasons he had to return, and moved to Adelaide in 1998 to lecture in missiology at Bible College SA and since 2004 at Tabor.
While lecturing David became interested in developing intercultural capacity in leaders in response to the increasing multiethnic nature of the Australian Christian community, drawing on global mission principles and practices. The motivation stemmed from his desire to realise a truly multicultural church vision (Revelation 7:9) where cultural diversity flavours the life of church communities, and welcomes others to contribute more holistically.
To identify areas to better equip clergy for intercultural engagement, in 2010 David commenced a PhD through the Department of Theology at Flinders University. The goal was to ascertain the foundational capacity of South Australian clergy in the Uniting Church in Australia and Baptist Churches in South Australia to be culturally intelligent multicultural leaders who can function effectively in intercultural contexts. The journey concluded in 2019, a protracted but invaluable experience, and resulted in a unique study.
David investigated clergy’s capacity for intercultural engagement, and the theological, demographic and experiential factors that contributed to their levels of cultural intelligence. The research documented the clergy’s overall support for a multicultural church vision, their diverse but limited cross-cultural experience and their predominantly moderate range scores for the self-assessment of cultural intelligence using the internationally renowned CQ Scale instrument. A perceived gap emerged between the goal and the delivery capacity for intercultural engagement to realise the vision. The way forward is for the denominations to become more culturally intelligent through intentionally building capacity, and using experiential and educational programs. To explore further and learn more, click here to access the thesis and here to access David’s Doctoral lecture at Tabor.
David was recently announced as one of 12 recipients of the Flinders University Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Doctoral Excellence, which recognises research quality based on the content in the examiners’ reports, extent of revisions, and the extent of communicating the research.
Congratulations, David.
Images from Edwardstown Baptist Church Multicultural Service 2019
