The Flattening of the E-Scale

​How globalization and digital culture may be reshaping the cultural distances in Ralph Winter’s classic framework for evangelism.
​By Aaron Myers

It was several years ago that I first wrote about Ralph Winter’s E-Scale as a tool for understanding cross-cultural ministry.  As I’ve continued working in cross-cultural ministry over the past two decades—and observed the effects of globalization and rapid innovation in communication technology—I’ve begun to wonder whether it might be time to revisit that article and reflect on how the E-Scale itself may be changing.

If you are unfamiliar with the E-Scale, I encourage you to read my article from 2019.(1) And if you want to go straight to the source, read Winter’s original article as well.(2) Links to both are included at the end of this piece.

In that earlier article, I focused mostly on the left side of the scale, suggesting that efforts to invite non-Christians to attend church are no longer as effective as they once were. As Western culture has become increasingly post-Christian, the distance between E0 and E1 has grown. The non-believers who once visited our churches are, for the most part, no longer doing so.

In this article, however, I want to look toward the other end of the scale, where I suspect the opposite may be happening. While the distance between E0 and E1 has grown, the distance between E2 and E3 may be shrinking as global culture becomes increasingly flattened.

As I wrote in another article:

Sixteen-year-olds in China and Mozambique, Canada and Mexico, the U.S. and Vietnam are watching the same TikToks, following the same Instagram influencers, and learning how to fix their iPhones from the same YouTube videos.

They share gaming advice on Discord and openly mock those of us who still use Facebook. They are poised to work together in business and service better than any generation in history.

Their embodied identities are still shaped by their local cultures, but their digital identities are flattening those distinctions as they interact online with people and content from across the world.”(3)

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The barriers to cross-cultural ministry appear to be shrinking with each successive generation and each new leap in globalization and technological innovation. English is rapidly becoming the world’s lingua franca. Growing affluence means more people are traveling beyond their country of birth for both education and leisure. More than five billion people now own a smartphone—roughly 60 percent of the global population—and that number continues to grow.(4) Unsurprisingly, smartphone adoption is highest among younger generations.

None of this eliminates real cultural differences, of course but this flattening creates new opportunities for ordinary believers in local churches to participate in cross-cultural kingdom work in ways that were nearly unimaginable twenty years ago. Yet it also presents new challenges.

Many younger people seem increasingly drawn toward a soft universalism or a kind of build-your-own spirituality sometimes described as therapeutic deism. At the other extreme are those who find themselves pulled into ideological echo chambers, easily shaped by more radical ideologies.

Both realities create real challenges for Christians seeking to share the good news of the gospel. And both require the same dependence on prayer, Scripture, and spiritual discernment that cross-cultural witness has always required.
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I am not suggesting that the E-Scale is obsolete. Far from it. But the cultural conditions surrounding it may be shifting. If the distance between cultures is flattening in new ways, it may be worth revisiting this familiar tool and asking how it might inform mission in an increasingly connected world.

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Resources
​1. Tools for Ministry: The E-Scale by Aaron Myers
2. Finishing the Task: The Unreached Peoples Challenge by Ralph Winter
3. Augmented Digital Identity: A New Generation’s Opportunity to Shine by Aaron Myers
4. How Many Smartphones Are In The World?