EMQ » Jan – March 2025 » Volume 61 Issue 1
Strong Together: Building Partnerships Across Cultures in an Age of Distrust
By Andrea Nelson Trice
Global Resilience Publishing, 2023
295 pages
US$28.00
*As an Amazon Associate Missio Nexus earns from qualifying purchases.
Reviewed by Karry Kelley, PhD, who served 15 years in Spain as a church planter with World Team, for which he now coaches and trains church planting teams.
Our church-planting team attempted to help financially struggling new believers in our emerging church. Our results mirrored so many other stories when we first started a home construction company and later started a grocery co-op: Both times, we failed.
Why does social enterprise so often fail? That is the question Dr. Trice begins with in her carefully researched book, Strong Together. To make her project manageable, she focuses on the efforts of American social entrepreneurs to benefit majority-world nationals by doing business together.
After all, she notes, many social enterprise initiatives are launched by well-intentioned Americans. It is in their nature, she observes, to solve problems. As the book unfolds, it becomes clear that American problem-solving sometimes becomes another problem.
Trice theorizes that social enterprises often fail across cultures because the American founders and financiers often provide drive, technical skills, and innovation, but not much more. When a business fails, they may write it off as a loss and move on to the next project without learning what other factors might be involved. Trice’s data point to differing values, goals, and assumptions as sources of failure. These factors can go unnoticed by well-meaning foreign entrepreneurs and often contribute to failure.
Rather than giving up on social enterprise and simply continuing to try to help without understanding, Trice proposes the path of partnership built on a commitment to listen and understand each other. The examples she describes in chapters 14–18 are a highlight. They transform the cross-cultural collaboration principles she proposes into vivid stories that reveal the truth and beauty of those principles.
The solutions enterprising Americans bring to majority-world contexts are often material and important. However, her data reveals that “even more essential … is the need to experience dignity, to feel as if you have something to contribute to the world, to believe your life matters and that you have the agency to make choices for your good and the good of those you love” (246).
Thrice describes how Americans and majority-world nationals can work together to accomplish more. Each must bring their unique assets and share power in partnership. She describes an “Uncommon Path Forward” (258–259) in four steps: (1) Each partner acknowledges their assumptions, (2) recognizes and accepts their own limitations, (3) notices and appreciates the assets each brings, and (4) aligns their visions while sharing power to make and implement decisions.
While she focuses on social enterprise, Trice’s insights may also be relevant to other cross-cultural workers. Missionary church planters, for example, seek to establish new churches led by national pastors. These new churches also aim to flourish both as communities of disciples and as individual disciples. This may be an area of application worthy of further investigation.
For Further Reading
The Culture Map: Decoding How People Think, Lead, and Get Things Done Across Cultures by Erin Meyer (Public Affairs, 2014)
When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor … and Yourself by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert (Moody Publishers, 2014)
Business as Mission: A Comprehensive Guide to Theory and Practice by C. Neal Johnson(InterVarsity Press, 2011)
EMQ, Volume 61, Issue 1. Copyright © 2025 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
