Welcome, to a blog that continues the exploration of how Christians of different ethnicities relate to each other. Warmest thanks to Rev Chris Hanning for turning my hand-written diagram into electronic form, and then guiding me into how to put it into my blog.
One Church, Many Cultures - Different Models for Church Life.
This entire blog series is under the heading of ‘Out of Many, One People’ - that is, its central concern is how Christians from the widest possible diversity of ethnicities and cultures can nonetheless be ‘one people’; not merely in an abstract, ‘spiritual’ sense (of which the Bible knows nothing) but in a loving, worshipping, witnessing, serving, disagreeing lived-out unity, which carries some discernible reality before a watching world. ‘By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’ (John 13:35). ‘Out of Many, One People’ is a declaration, an aspiration and a challenge which confronts the people of God.
Following the two recent blogs on how historic and diasporic churches can be united in mission, this blog explores the very local issue of how Christians of different ethnicities can relate within one geographical area. The diagram below sets out three alternatives - all seeking to answer the question at the bottom of the diagram: How do we hold together lived-out visible unity and credible witness to all cultures?
The left hand model is the situation of many congregations, holding together several different ethnicities (indicated by the various symbols) within the one worshipping community. The right hand model is what is found in many multi-ethnic areas - with both mixed congregations and also ethnic-specific, often ‘diasporic’, congregations; with varying degrees of relationship between them. In the middle is one church holding together both an ethnically-mixed (usually English-speaking) congregation, but also congregations worshipping in other languages. This is sadly rare amongst Anglican parishes, though Rev Marco Lopes ministry in east London with Spanish and Portuguese ancillary congregations is one of several emerging developments. It is the model we developed in Alperton with Urdu/Hindi and Tamil congregations. In terms of one church meeting in separate languages both Roman Catholic and Pentecostal churches tend to be more advanced and innovative than the Church of England.
I have set out what I see as the different strengths and weaknesses of each approach. What is vital is that each is pursuing ways to answer the all-important question at the foot of the diagram. The complex and fast-changing situation in which we minister means that dogmatism that one approach is always right is not appropriate; flexibility and improvisation are.
The left hand model depicts the situation of many Anglican churches in multi-ethnic areas. Whilst the Church of England’s record is permanently blemished by racist rejection of people in the early days of migration from the Caribbean, and whilst churches can still continue to be inept, thoughtless or lethargic in how they respond to ethnic minorities, we are now in a situation where churches (or, at least, the clergy) see it as their responsibility to positively develop ethnically inclusive congregations. In this sense, we should not undervalue what the Church of England is accomplishing. As indicated in the green ‘Positives’ listed in the diagram above, visitors to most urban Anglican churches would see people of different ethnicities gathered in worship together.
More important for the church’s life and witness is the second ‘positive’: that rather being a neglected minority - ‘creeping in and creeping out’ as one black person put it several years ago - ethnic minorities are sufficiently involved in the life of the local church that strong relationships develop. It is when churches are ‘centripetal’, drawing different ethnicities into a common shared life, that mutual influence, learning, understanding and growth happen. Implicitly racist attitudes and assumptions get challenged or broken down; people subliminally incorporate the strengths and qualities of other ethnic groups. A deeper ‘oneness’ beyond simply polite greetings emerges.
But, as the red ‘Negative’ bar indicates, some difficulties are not easily overcome. Given the history of Anglican parish churches their constituency was once entirely white English. That history is not easily changed. Most often the vicar is still white, the way worship is expressed and the way life together is organised will still tend to reflect that cultural tradition. Even where, as ought to be the case, the church’s leadership is increasingly diverse, the stamp upon the life of the church will still be dominated by English culture. Given that we are in ‘England’ and everyone is moving towards citizenship of the one country in many respects that is no bad thing, but it can limit a parish church’s calling to provide a Christian and worshipping home for all the people living in that parish.
That, then, indicates a further negative of the one congregation model - that simply joining it is too big a step for many people. Obviously there is a problem for people with very little facility in the English language. I sense that the consensus of most churches that have experimented with ways of offering bi- or multi-lingual services is that they are too clumsy for long term regular use. (I discuss options in more detail in my Grove booklet on ‘Worship in a Multi-cultural Society’).
At a more complex level, even where people can speak and understand English well, there can still be a sense of alienation where the majority of people and the ways of relating and acting are at some distance from what someone is comfortable with. Quite simply for many people from ethnic minorities the prospect of entering a space that feels alien, either to worship, or even more problematically to explore what the Christian faith is all about, can seem unappetising and unattractive. The hard reality is that there are members of our parish population that a single congregation model can not reach.
In reality, of course, single congregations meet in geographical districts where there are a range of different congregations meeting. That is the situation depicted in the right hand model in the diagram. Here there are both ethnically mixed congregations, often from the ‘historic’ denominations, but also a growing number of (often quite large) charismatic congregations such as Hillsong or Kensington Temple. And there will also often be mono-ethnic, usually ‘diasporic’ churches. As pointed out in the ‘Positive’ box, very often such churches are the only way in which people from some minorities will ever encounter the Christian gospel, especially since evangelisation of their ‘own’ is often a major motivating force in such churches.
Such evangelism is furthered by the use of mother tongue worship, a culturally familiar style, and - of particular importance - the opportunities it gives for leadership development for people who would not easily find opportunities in ethnically mixed and culturally diverse churches. Worship expressions - I think particularly of the stirring Pakistani zaboorr (hymns) - could be lost in the usually more homogenising approach of multi-cultural worship.
If, however, such diversity of both language and also forms of worship and church life seem to indicate that the Christian church is as fragmented, and, worse, even more fragmented than the surrounding society, then serious steps must be taken to develop some sort of fellowship structures between the various churches in the one locality. Such fellowships exist in most multi-ethnic communities, as illustrated by the connecting lines in the diagram. However their effectiveness is limited firstly by leaders reluctance to agree to a level of accountability to each other. (An element that I have realised I failed to give sufficient weight to in my two recent blogs on ‘historic’ and ‘diaspora’ unity in mission). Further participation levels by churches are fairly low given the huge number of small congregations there can be, with leaders and members too focussed on their own survival and growth to give time and energy to relating to churches with very different styles. In particular, I fear that when an historic church rents its buildings to an independent ethnically specific church the inevitable consequence is that we are seen to be witnessing to the gospel’s failure to unite people through faith in Christ, rather than create ‘one new humanity’ (Eph 2:15).
Further negatives of this widely common situation is that any churches with a fairly defined ethnic base (including English) can lack the correctives that ethnic diversity blesses us with, and indeed reproduce the worst characteristics of their specific culture. They can also create problems by not helping the next generations growing up in Britain up to adjust to this society. (More on these issues next week on ‘The Need for Multi-CulturalChurches’).
One way to avoid the problems of such fragmentation but rather to express unity and inter-cultural fellowship, whilst enabling the retention of mother-tongue worship is indicated in the central model in the diagram. Here both the main multi-cultural congregation and specific mother tongue congregations are gathered together in the one church. (I have written about this in blog #41 04/08/2022 on ‘Starting Minority Language Congregations’). Thus people who culturally are fairly far from the national mainstream, and may well not speak English, can be evangelised and discipled in a worshipping community within a familiar context, and yet nonetheless experience themselves being part of the wider ‘national’ culture. For others the possibility of moving between two ‘worlds’ within their life in the one church mirrors their wider social and working experience of shifting between different worlds.
Setting up such up such subsidiary mother-tongue congregations needs careful planning. In particular it is important that the overall unity of the church is expressed through such common functions as a united Church Council, a common budget for both income and expenditure, and leadership of all the congregations being centrally approved. The model provides a means by which the Church of England can extend its identity beyond a too narrow ‘Englishness’ and be more effective in becoming a ‘national church’ for all the peoples that now live in the nation. For example, the encouraging number of Iranians who have now become Christians raises the possibility of individual, or groups of, churches sponsoring Farsi language services, bearing in mind the organisational constraints that I have listed above.
As well as enabling more effective witness to minorities, especially linguistic ones, that are otherwise beyond the reach of parish churches, they also provide ‘bridging’ opportunities for young people growing up in this country to transition between mother tongue (or mother culture) church life and that of the ‘mainstream’.
However there are costs, and ‘satellite’ culturally-specific congregations should not be developed simply to seem adventurous or progressive, but rather the pros and cons need careful consideration. Insofar as leaders come from the mother congregation they will inevitably become detached to a degree as their energies are focussed on the new plant, and in that respect the church’s ethnic diversity be decreased. With separate congregations meeting in different languages, and the likelihood that the main leaders and some of the members will not have a common language to communicate in, it means that the drift towards fragmentation needs to be consciously countered by developing some moments of joint activity or worship. In particular the leaders, who are the main bridge between the different congregations, will face greater demands in retaining and developing a sense of unity.
Nonetheless if we hold to the fine Anglican parochial vision to be a united spiritual home for everyone in its parish area then we need to experiment with how we can make that at least in some small measure a reality that Christians of diverse ethnicities experience, whilst a watching world sees some credible evidence that the good news of Jesus Christ can draw people of many backgrounds into one community drawn together in faith and love.
Lots of good analysis and practical wisdom here. There might be different issues to consider in free church contexts, for example Baptists where idependence is embedded. However I know of examples where the middle model of multiple congreagtions has worked fairly well for many years (first saw it in Toronto in the 1980s but also in East London more recently).
John, I minister as someone who has worked hard on model 1 but after 20 years feels we are secure enough in our identity to moving towards model 2 at the same time as living ecumenically in model 3. You use term multicultural but in southall we are trying to be intentional about being intercultural. Can you expand on the differences please.