I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago. It is a long post, so I am separating it into two posts.
Building a Multiethnic
Congregation (Part 1)
CBFNC Annual Gathering
– First Baptist Church, Hickory, NC
March 31, 2017
Part 1 –
The Issue
Last week, I went to the local high
school my 14-year-old son will attend next year. His 8th choir was performing with
the various high school choirs. One of
the groups to perform was an ensemble made up of 18 male and female high
schoolers. They were wonderful musicians. I sat and thought about how much I’d love for
that group to sing worship music at our church.
I look more closely at the group and
my mind began to race. Each one of these
kids comes from a family. There are
parents, maybe grandparents, and siblings.
Each young person represents something more than just himself or herself. Would these teens and their families feels
comfortable at our church?
One of the kids of the 18 in this
ensemble was white, Caucasian. One was
black, African American. The rest were
various hues each distinct from eachother.
Asian; Arabic; Hispanic; there were kids from many ethnic backgrounds. I sat and wondered, would each of these kids
and their families feel welcome at the church where I am the pastor?
Every one of us here wants to say
“Yes” to that. It’s why we come to a
seminar on building a multiethnic church.
We’re at least pondering the idea.
So, would the kids in this choir, representing America in all its
resplendent diversity, be welcome in our churches? We want to say yes.
And yes might actually be the
answer. The teen from an African
American family or a Chinese family would likely be warmly welcomed into a
predominantly Caucasian church. The
white church would, say, smiling, “Come in.
We’re glad you’re here.” The white
church would say it and genuinely mean it.
The
actions of the people in the white church in many cases communicate something
else. We’re glad you’re here. If you
want to stay, you need to adapt to the way we do community, the way we are
comfortable relating to one another, the style and pace at which we worship,
and the particular approach we take to being a family. None of this is usually spoken outright,
but it is unmistakably known. And the
way the predominantly white church does community, and the style and pace of
worship in the white church, and the particular approach to being a family in
the white church is loaded with Euro-centric cultural heritage.
For
nine years, I led a church in an extremely diverse community – Arlington,
Virginia. It’s right across the river
from DC. The Pentagon was a couple of
miles away from our church building.
The
people in that church were generous with their willingness to welcome everyone. In a congregation that usually had less than
80 people would include families or individuals from 10 ethnic backgrounds on
any given Sunday. However, even with
this diversity in the pews, the church functioned the way it had in its heyday
in the early 70s when it was an almost exclusively Caucasian Southern Baptist
body of believers. I arrived in the late
90’s when the church was a decade or more into decline. When nonwhites stepped into leadership the
church family, they adapted to the culturally Eurocentric way of doing
things. The church did not adapt to the
way the new wave of believers lived and related to one another. As the community around the church changed
the older members tried to function the way they always had. And the failure to adapt led to significant
decline in membership and in relevance to the community.
Now, I have been in North Carolina
for almost 11 years. I and the church I
now lead am exploring a specific question.
Can what is a traditionally European-American church be transformed to
the point that someone who is not white can be at home within that congregation? Can this transformation be so complete that
so many non-white people come that the church can no longer be described as a
traditionally Euro-centric church? The
congregation becomes one in which there are Asian-background believers,
Hispanic-background people, African-background individuals, folks with a European
heritage, Native Americans, those with Arabic backgrounds, and mixed-race
persons.
There’s
such glorious diversity in the church that I envision, that you look at the
group the way I looked at that ensemble of high school singers. No majority can be seen. There a lot of people and they come from all
over. But, when I look at this church I
am imagining, here is what I can see. I
can see God in this place and I see more of God in the diverse church than I
would if it was just one culture that populated the church family. The
testimony of the goodness of God and the depths of the salvation in Jesus
Christ is fuller and richer because more people and different people add their
own stories to the church’s witness.
A. The Problem
This
dream comes at a time in our history as a people when we facing a real
problem. One of America’s great prophets
of the 20th century named this problem.
April
17, 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. said on the tv program “Meet the Press,” “I think it is one of the tragedies, one of
the shameful tragedies that 11:00 on Sunday morning is one of the most
segregated hours, if not the most segregated hours in Christian America.” Was Dr. King correct? Is Sunday morning
segregation a shameful tragedy?
He
went on to say that he definitely thought the church should be integrated and
any church that stands against integration and has a segregated body is
standing against the teachings of Jesus Christ.
However, in the same statement, he acknowledges that his own church,
Ebenezer did not have any white members.
They would be welcome, he said, if
they came. Maybe.
I
believe Martin Luther King Jr. would have welcomed the white guest who visited
Ebenezer. Maybe, many members would join
him in that welcome. But, at that time, if a white person or several white
individuals tried making Ebenezer their church, I believe many core members of
the Ebenezer family would feel challenged and uncomfortable because the ‘other’
has invaded their sacred ground.
And
we whites couldn’t blame them for such guarded attitudes. February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin is killed
by George Zimmerman. He was 17, walking
in his own neighborhood. August 9 2014,
Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer. He was unarmed. He was 18.
These events touched off a slew of high profile deaths of African
American young men. The perception over
the last five years has been that there is a public, violent, growing conflict between
law enforcement and people of color in America.[i]
In
addition to this growing racial tension, another reality that divides people in
America is the tension between the American populace and Americans of Arabic
descent. If someone is perceived to be
Arabic or Muslim, many Americans are suspicious of that individual. We had a high profile shooting of three
Muslims, dental school students, in Chapel Hill, February, 2015.[ii]
Not all Muslims are Arabs, and not all Arabs are Muslims, but the tension
conflates the identities.
Besides
the racial tension and the uneasy relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim
Americans, a third reality to be noted is the massive growth of the population
of persons who would be described as Hispanic.
Hispanics may well be the largest people group in the United States by
the end of the century.
In
this changing context where black people have trouble believing white people
have good intentions, where white people are unaware of their own privilege or
unwilling to acknowledge it, where American citizens are suspicious of their
fellow citizens if they happen to be Muslim, and where we are near the time
when whites will no longer have a numeric majority in the population, what
is the witness of the church?
·
What does the Gospel have to say to America as it is today?
·
How do we draw the people around us into the Kingdom of
God through faith in Jesus?
·
How do we show what the Kingdom of God is like?
B. The Opportunity
These
tensions are real and some of our friends who are white feel threatened. Now all but some; there is a sense that we’re
losing our country. And if pastors like me drag multiculturalism
into the church, then we’re losing our
church. However, it is not all
bad. We have before us a great
opportunity.
This
can be a time when we open the Bible and allow ourselves to hear the word and
hear God’s remind us of two things.
First, our loyalty and our calling is not to our country. It is to the Kingdom of God. We belong to the Kingdom. Our eternity is not the United States. Our eternity is the Kingdom of God. We can reminded of that and how closely we
are united to believers from different backgrounds. And second, we can be reminded the church is
not our church. It is God’s. If God is calling to make changes so that His
church can grow and be accessible to more people, we should rejoice as we
change because we’ll be closer as we do the work He sets before us.
The
world is at our doorstep. A couple of
years ago, I was with my kids on a camping trip and we stopped at a service
station. This was way out in the boondocks. The man running the station was
Pakistani. I am sure he had a
family. This was in the middle of
nowhere. We’re in a time when you could
meet someone from just about anywhere and it doesn’t matter where in America
you are. When you meet that person, ask
yourself the question I asked myself as I sat at the high school chorus
concert. Would this individual be at
home in my church?
The
reason this question is important is the Biblical mandate we have from
Jesus. It comes in Acts chapter 1. The
risen Christ appears to the disciples and says to them, “You will receive power
when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in
Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). In carrying out this mandate, the disciples
did not attempt to create different, ethnic congregations.
In
Acts chapter 6, a conflict arose in the church, an ethnic church. Acts 6:1 – “the Hellenists complained against
the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution
of food.” The Hellenists were
Greek-speaking Jews in the Jerusalem church, and the Hebrews were
Aramaic-speaking Jews. What was the
young church’s solution to this ethnic division? Appoint the very first deacon board, leaders
of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom (6:3). The first job of the first deacons was to
attend to the task of equality in the church, keeping Hellenists and Hebrews together, even with their differences.
In
Acts 10, Peter is given a Heavenly vision in which God tells him that in Christ
there is no place for distinctions between Jews and gentiles. Those who previously were kept apart are now
united. Peter then goes and baptizes the
Roman Cornelius and his entire household.
The Romans were despised invaders who kept the Jewish people as exiles
in their own land. No one was hated
more. God showed Peter that Romans and
Jews were united when they joined to one another in Christ. Peter did not plant a “Roman congregation”
that would share space in the Jewish church.
They were all together.
Much
of the content of Paul’s letters was devoted to drawing together people who had
been very much divided – Jewish and non-Jewish followers of Jesus. Romans 9-11, Ephesians 2, and the entire
letter of Galatians are some examples of Paul’s unifying efforts.
Paul
changed his presentation of the Gospel based on his audience. He always preached salvation in Jesus, but he
adapted his method based on the cultural experiences of his listeners. He was a rabbi to the Jews, and in Athens,
Greece, he took the approach of a philosopher as he shared the Gospel with
philosophers. This story is in Acts
17:16-34. , Paul presents Jesus to
pantheistic philosophers. He adapts his
message so that it is intelligible for his hearers.
One
of the issues that arose in many of the early congregations was the fellowship
meal, where the main dish, the meat, was meat that had been sacrificed to
idols. Paul writes in Romans 14:15, “If
your brother or sister is being injured by what you eat, you are no longer
walking in love.” He neither recommends eating that meat, nor does he prohibit
it. His concern is doing what’s
necessary to welcome all people and doing it with a loving, gentle spirit.
The
church I mentioned in Arlington sometimes failed to have that gentle
spirit. The Wednesday night dinner cooks,
white women who for years ran the kitchen like drill sergeants, had gotten
tired. They were well into their 70’s,
and while some people in their 70’s are full of vibrancy, these particular
septuagenarians wanted me, their young pastor, to find a new Wednesday
cook. And I found one!
She
was a woman in her early 40’s, one of the women in our Spanish
congregation. She is Costa Rica. The older white women complained about her to
no end, often in her presence as if she wasn’t there. They leered over her shoulder as she
cooked. One woman came to me and barked,
“Well I don’t know what they eat, but
my husband has a sensitive stomach.”
After
a few months of this, the Costa Rican sister came to me in tears and said,
“Pastor Rob, I just can’t do this. These
women treat me like I am a child. All I
want to do is serve the church and I love cooking the Wednesday meal, but I
can’t do it anymore.” And we didn’t have
Wednesday meals any more.
That
type of tension came up again and again in that church. The people of the church welcomed everyone,
but they did not trust everyone. They felt
genuine love toward their nonwhite brothers and sisters, the lack of trust
negated their love.
The
witness of the New Testament is clear.
Throughout Acts and in the writings of Paul, we see numerous ethnicities
together in the church: Jewish, Cornthian, Roman, North African, Ethiopian. They were all together. Not only that, but the destination to which
history is moving, shows a united humanity under God.
A
key verse for my understanding of the church is Revelation 7:9-10. John of Patmos has been guided through a
vision of Heaven. He has seen the throne
room of God, the 24 elders representing the 12 tribes and the 12 disciples, he
has seen spectacular heavenly creatures that defy description, the horsemen of
the apocalypse, and the redeemed of Israel.
Then he writes, “After this I looked and there was a great multitude
that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and languages,
standing before the throne and before the lamb, robed in white, with palm
branches in their hands.” And people of
every shade, from every background worshiped God together. If we can successfully build multiethnic
churches, we can show the hurting world around us a real life picture of this
heavenly future.
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