Welcome - to a blog about welcoming; a key aspect of congregational life which I hope may be of some use to congregational leaders. Please forward - and maybe encourage to subscribe - friends and colleagues who you think might find it useful.
Steps to Being Welcoming.
It is generally agreed that being welcoming is essential for a church to thrive. In ethnically diverse areas this is doubly true. Churches set in multi-ethnic communities simply have to take the quality of their welcome seriously.
Principles.
1. For all Christians in all meetings with another person the base-line is ‘Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness”’ (Gen 1:26). This means every welcome to a church should be marked by a sense of awe and respect in meeting a fellow human, indeed a delight in who they are and what they bring to us. It is not for nothing that ‘Respect’ has become such a high profile word, not least among young black people who are most likely to be sensitive to experiencing a lack of it. So respectful welcoming is not a question of techniques learned from ‘How to win friends and influence people’, but a deeply internalised sense that each person we meet of every ethnicity is God’s handiwork.
2. Don’t despise the attention to detail involved in providing a welcoming environment to people of all backgrounds. The tensions between Hebrew and Hellenised widows in Acts 6 was responded to by a practical down-to-earth solution of appointing deacons. Churches that have an atmosphere of natural cultural diversity often do so because they have taken unspectacular but thoughtful initiatives to help people feel at home. Small details like good visual displays or training a welcome team are more likely to produce a vibrant ethnically diverse church than high-sounding pronouncements about racism.
3. People from ethnic minorities are still uncertain how far they will be welcomed in predominantly white churches with white leaders. My impression is that on average they travel further to church than white people, more frequently come because invited by siblings or friends, and travel significant distances back to churches after they have moved away – all factors that I guess are caused both by suspicion of the unknown and by valuing churches where they know the reception will be positive. Good welcoming is part of the necessary reparative response to people wounded by racism.
4. You need to be wise and flexible in how you welcome people. Much of what is written here applies to visitors who have migrated to Britain. The same approach to visitors who are the children or grand
children of migrants can have negative consequences. Whilst responding to some people as ethnically different can be experienced as affirming, for others it can carry the alienating and insulting insinuation that they don’t belong here. Asking ‘where are you from?’ then seems like a deliberate attempt to distance yourself from someone, as opposed to seeking to strengthen a sense of commonality. It is one of a multitude of conversational mistakes and other implicitly racist remarks highlighted in the Youtube video ‘Dear White Church . . . (The British POC Experience)’.
5. Be aware of the importance of names. They matter more in most cultures (and in scripture) and have more meaning than they do in English in society, so take them seriously.
* So don’t joke, play with or twist names. It can be experienced as patronising and disrespectful.
* Feel free to ask someone what their name means – names often enshrine worthwhile aspirations.
* Do take care over correct pronunciation and be prepared to check with someone whether or not you are pronouncing their name correctly. (I remember many decades ago at how carefully John Stott pronounced the name of a student leader who had introduced him to speak. It was that sort of detailed courtesy that underlay his world-wide, cross-cultural credibility).
Practicalities.
1. Signs that say ‘Welcome’ in a variety of languages are now widely used, and rightly. It is a simple, straightforward way of declaring our intention. Better still learn to say a few of the words yourself. Quick wins are not to be despised, and it is a relatively easy but good way to let people know you take their identity seriously. But beware: over-forceful familiarity can come across as intrusive and alienating. (‘Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour’s house; lest he be weary of thee and so hate thee’. Proverbs 25:17, AV).
2. Use Pictures. It is important both for visitors to see that your church is multi-ethnic, and also for members to become familiar with each others’ names. It is sobering how often people in a church can’t put names to fellow members.
One approach if your congregation is small enough, it is to get a photograph of the whole congregation taken after a service. In a church where we did this and displayed it in the entrance hall, I know of people who started coming because it gave them confidence that the church was ethnically well mixed. We then produce a numbered and named key to an outline of the picture so that members could use it to connect faces with names.
Similarly, it is good to get members to provide photos of themselves with not just names but also other details people can connect with such as occupation or place of origin. (Why don’t church authorities should make this compulsory in all churches before a new vicar arrives and who is expected to connect scores of faces and names immediately!)
3. Pick up the clues that personal names, and also possibly accents, give to someone’s place of origin. If a newcomer gives his name as, say, ‘David Mensah’ then knowing it is likely that his family background is Ghanaian helps establish quick rapport, and gives him confidence that your church takes ethnic diversity as something to be welcomed. It is important with experience to build up an awareness of the clues that names give to help identify peoples’ family origins, so that, for example, you know whether a Nigerian is Yoruba or Ibo from their names. (They are very different).
Geographical and political knowledge is also important so that you have a good sense of the place that a person comes from. The curate who once told me that he was finding his Geography degree more useful than his theological training made an important albeit exaggerated point (and was unfair to the excellent college he came from).
Again, knowing names is also important in building up the unity of the regular congregation, especially in rapidly changing communities. One way to do it is that on occasional Sundays (the 4 times a year 5th Sunday of the month is a good opportunity) people are invited to wear name labels, providing it is done without pressure. (I hate wearing labels).
4. Be creative about finding ways to let visitors or enquirers know that your church is intentionally culturally diverse. One church has the flags of all the countries represented in its membership around the walls. It is surprising how large the diversity of countries of origin is in many churches.
Displaying pictures of church activities, or better still what church members are doing in non-church contexts, again both informs visitors of the diversity and implicit openness of your congregation, and is valuable in developing unity within.
(What happens before and after as well as during services is discussed in my Grove Booklet ‘Worship in a Multi-Ethnic Society’ W236).
******************
Add Ons
* My apologies to those involved in the ‘Calvin Robinson controversy’ that I gave too much weight to Robinson’s account of events. The Bishop of London has said “Much has been written about my private conversations with Calvin during the discernment process, some of which I did not recognise” (Church Times 27/05/2022).
* Alec Ryrie’s excellent Gresham lecture series on the early history of Protestant missions concludes on Wednesday 8thJune at 6pm with the vital topic of ‘Protestant Missions and European Empires: Allies or Adversaries’. Ryrie’s series is entitled ‘The Hidden History of how Protestantism went Global’, addressing the theme of how ‘These hesitant early missionary ventures did not win many converts, but they formed Europeans’ assumptions about ‘race’, ‘justice’, ‘civilisation’, ‘religion’ and the nature of Christianity itself. To see the world through those early missionaries’ eyes is to see not only why their ventures were so slow and stumbling, but how their experience primed the age of Christian expansion which followed, producing world-views which still underpin our own secular age.’ There surely must be a book on its way.
* I saw snatches of ‘A Gallop through History’ on ITV on 15th May celebrating the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. The evening was clearly planned to be ethnically inclusive, featuring a gospel-like song by Gregory Porter, a major role for Omid Djalili, and performances from around the world. Yet the section on the reign of Elizabeth 1 included a jarring celebration of its seafarers such as Sir John Hawkins, without reference to his shameful role in the beginning of Britain’s slave trade. In that sense the programme reflected the current ‘official’ stance over race in Britain: a positive affirmation of current diversity but turning a blind eye to past evils and their continuing consequences. (On another matter, it may be an ominous pointer to the secularising of the British monarchy that the section on the reign of James 1 - in England, 6 in Scotland - made much of the Gunpowder Plot but ignored the more significant national culture-forming role of the translation of the King James Bible/Authorised Version).
The ‘Intercultural Church Conference 2022: A one-day conference that aims to promote the approach of intercultural ideas in the UK church’ is taking place in Wolverhampton on Saturday, July 9th. Details and booking at the Evangelical Alliance website. It will be thinking around such questions as ‘From an African pastor’s perspective, the question is how can our church engage white indigenous British people? From a white British pastor, the question is how can our church or organisation engage Black Majority Churches or diaspora people? From a Chinese or Brazilian pastor, how can our churches or organisation go beyond reaching just Chinese or Brazilians? Added to this are questions around losing second generation Africans, Asians and Latin Americans so that some leave the church totally while others migrate to a church that reflects the multi-ethic make up of Britain’. Issues that are central to the thinking of this Blog.