The Need for Multi-Cultural Churches. # 96. 08/11/2022
Out of Many, One People
Welcome. Following last week, and the two blogs on historic/diasporic churches, a further blog on the issue of the local church in a multi-cultural society, which challenges all churches with the calling to exhibit cultural diversity.
The Need for Multicultural Churches.
Multicultural Britain is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It is also fast changing and exceedingly complex, with a very wide variety of ethnic groups, marked by different histories and evolving in different directions. Therefore discussion of how church life should be ordered requires a spirit of humility and openness, dogmatism and rhetoric are damagingly crude responses to the subtlety of the situation.
This Blog is basically a riposte to the ‘Homogenous Unit Principle’, which originally emanated from the School of Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary in California. Leaders of ethnically homogenous churches frequently claim that their churches grow fastest, which provides sufficient reason for them to continue with their distinct identity and focus in mission. Bruce Milne’s ‘Dynamic Diversity: the New Humanity Church for Today and Tomorrow’ (IVP 2006) argued the theological case against such views – possibly arising from his ministry in Vancouver, and the growth of sino-centric churches around the Pacific Rim.
In this blog I want to take Milne’s theological case for granted and apply it to our situation today, giving five reasons why it is important to seek to develop our churches as multi-cultural.
1. The necessity of cross-cultural witness in a post-modern society.
If churches today are going to preach that Jesus, who grew up in Nazareth 2000 years ago, is the only Saviour of all mankind, then we are in for an increasingly tough time. It conflicts with increasingly influential worldviews that there is no one truth, one story, or one moral pattern of universal validity. Humankind is, and always should be, a kaleidoscope of cultures, religions, worldviews and moralities. To proclaim the universality of the Christian gospel in this situation is hard; to do so out of the confines of a single-culture church is rightly seen as offensive and imperialistic. How can we think that our small subcultural group has the faith that everyone needs?
But when that proclamation comes from an ethnically mixed group of people it is given credibility. There is visible the first fruits of what is being preached. Further, I believe there is a deep longing in our society for pointers towards unity. Periodically we used to take a photograph of our congregation. It was an evangelistic tool. People started coming to church, and into faith because they had been impressed and attracted by the sight of an ethnically mixed group of people. A local councillor said that he thought we were the only group in the area that drew together the three main ethnic groups. The church can only dare to be rigorously ‘mono religious’ if it is also vigorously multi-cultural. Otherwise, we seem to be guilty of terrible religio-cultural arrogance.
2. The frustration of Christian mission caused by fragmentation.
Ealing Road, Wembley on a Friday lunchtime is an impressive sight. Worshippers spill out of the mosque, across the pavement and into the roadway. To passing motorists, it is an impressive display of Muslim strength in Britain. There is no comparable sight on a Sunday. But the assumption that this is because there are fewer Christians would be inaccurate. There is a not inconsiderable, and I would guess growing number of Christians in Brent, but they are spread amongst at least 217 churches (2012 figure according to Peter Brierley, with 114 being Pentecostal). That is considerably more than the number of mosques in the borough, and represents one church for not much more than 1000 inhabitants of all backgrounds and ages.
Does church planting of small new congregations, invariably without consultation with existing churches, help or hinder the spread of the gospel? How do we distinguish the ‘leading of the Spirit’ from empire building? Certainly, the result is to make any sort of united Christian voice or action at local authority level extremely tiresome and time consuming. One local Christian leader, who had worked faithfully over many years to get a significant Christian impact into local education policy, commented that if an issue affecting the Hindu of community was being discussed, they could get 1000 people to the Town Hall within 24 hours. For the equally substantial Christian community fragmentation made that impossible. The mushrooming of small network churches amongst ethnic groups makes Christian impact exceedingly difficult beyond anything other than the personal level. Churches may grow, the Kingdom doesn't. It is with this sort of situation that
The social psychologist, Peter Herriot, has spoken of the local success and worldwide failure of the Christian Church. That may seem unduly negative, given the growth of Christianity in many parts of the world. But the point being made is that our divisions mean that it is impossible for us to have a significant impact on policies either internationally or indeed more locally. By contrast, Muslims, though they have no central organization, yet have substantial. impact on political affairs because they are heard to speak with one voice and can quickly coordinate responses.
3. The loss of corrective to negative cultural traits.
The Anglican Marriage Service rightly refers to marriage as ‘a means of grace’, presumably on the grounds that an intimate relationship with someone of a different gender stretches and enriches our character. Similarly, close relationships with people of different ethnic groups are also a means of grace. One important contribution that Christians need to make to current discussions of Britain as a multicultural society is the recognition that all cultures have negative as well as positive aspects. As regards churches, this means that mono-cultural churches tend to reflect the weaknesses of their own cultures, indeed churches often intensify characteristics of the cultures that produce them, and so exhibit some of their most negative features. Are English churches remote and individualistic? African Caribbean churches legalistic and world rejecting? Pakistani churches riven by factional infighting? West African churches over preoccupied with material success and prosperity? Korean churches too achievement orientated? I fear the answer each time is ‘yes’!
It is in the interactions, the joys but also the hurts and bruises of multi-ethnic churches that we become more aware of our own cultural identities, as well how others see them. We learn to drink from the wells of other cultures, and become more sensitive to the offence that we can give to others. We become more mellow in treasuring the good things of our own background and inheritance. Properly functioning multicultural churches are a wholesome and, I believe God-ordained, context for maturing us as people and as Christians.
4. The need for children to be nurtured in multicultural fellowships.
Whatever the culture of parents, children who are schooled in Britain grow up in at least two, and often more, cultures. All but the most sheltered (usually to their harm) experience a multicultural school environment, as well as the influence of popular music, TV, films and games. For children in this country to be brought up in a church culture that looks back to that of their parents, without helping them to live in and look forward to the culture they are growing up into, means they will have even more problems than most teenagers in working out what being a Christian today means. Often the warmth of a minority ethnic church may motivate them to want to do that, but the journey has been made more difficult, and the risk of casualties increased if the only church culture they know is that of their parents, and have not had the privilege of being nurtured in faith with their peers of other cultural backgrounds.
5. The demands of ministry to micro minorities.
Multi-ethnic Britain is extremely complex. There are substantial core ethnic minority communities in particular areas, creating their own foci and networks, such as African Caribbeans, Punjabis, Mirpooris, West Africans, Bangladeshis, Gujaratis and so on. But there are also ‘micro-minorities’, the more so a numbers of asylum seekers has risen, that is groups that are too small or dispersed to form strong locally based ‘diasporic’ churches. In Alperton our church included Sudanese, Egyptian, Japanese and Malayalee Indians – there were no such ethnic specific congregations nearby. They needed a church that was able to be home to a wide variety of ethnicities.
A further factor is the unexpectedly large number of ethnically mixed marriages in our society, which generates families sharing an ever-increasing variety of ethnic combinations, and that can never fit into ethnically based churches. At different times our church had couples that were Pakistani/Tongan; Grenadian/Swiss; and no less than two Malaysian Tamil men married to Japanese wives. One teenager’s father was from Kenya, of mixed Chinese/Indian parentage, and his mother was Anglo/Jamaican. Mono-ethnic churches cannot cope with the super-diverse complexity of modern Britain. (But the booming large charismatic churches like Hillsong do so very successfully).
Whilst I disagree with the Homogenous Unit Principle claim that ‘people like to become Christians amongst their own kind of people’, I think it can usefully be reversed to ‘people don't like to become Christians, among some other kind of people’; that is, people need churches that look like a credible spiritual home to people of any ethnicity. Multi-ethnic Britain needs churches that don't belong particularly to any kind of people, but which reflect the cultural variety of their immediate areas, and which set the pace in those communities for how God's Kingdom can bring reconciliation and unity to between different peoples.
Appendix: Was the Epistle to the Hebrews written to a ‘homogenous unit’?
Given the strong New Testament emphasis that Christ ‘might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace’ (Eph 2:15; see also Gal 3:28 & Col 3:11), is then the Epistle to the Hebrews apparently an ethnic-specific drake in a ducks’ nest of supra-ethnic epistles? Whilst Hebrews is often assumed to be written to an ethnically distinct gathering of Jewish Christians, it was only given that title by the later part of the second century. But as David DeSilva concludes: “There is, however, nothing compelling us to view the Christian addressees as exclusively, or predominantly, Jewish in origin” (p 2 in ‘Perseverance in Gratitude: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Epistle ‘to the Hebrews’’. Eerdmans 2000). DeSilva argues that Gentile Christians (for whom our Old Testament was their only scripture) would have been equally concerned at how Christ provided a better way of salvation the Judaism both portrayed in the letter and which they encountered around them. He suggests that the letter’s title was possibly given as it came to be seen as ‘a sort of indirect manifesto of supersessionism’ (p3).
Howard Marshall summarises that “a differentiation between Hellenistic Jewish and Hellenistic Gentile churches in the early period is entirely without foundation . . . There is thus no specific Hellenistic Gentile Christianity to be found in the New Testament. No single New Testament document can be labeled as basically Gentile, but for almost every document it is possible to demonstrate its mixed Jewish-Gentile character” (Quoted on p 97 of ‘1 Peter: A new translation with Intro & Commentary’ by John H Elliott, Anchor Bible/Doubleday 2000).
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Add Ons
‘*****-washing’.
‘Sports-washing’ is a new and valuable addition to our vocabularies: countries or institutions supporting high profile sports events or teams in order to clean up their reputations and distract attention from their noxious and damaging activities.
So, are there other disreputable forms of ‘*****-washing’ – projecting virtue in one area in order to head off accusations of vice in another area?
Thus, was Gary Lineker engaging in ‘gay-washing’ when he suggested that the upcoming World Cup was a good opportunity for gay footballers to out themselves, so projecting himself as a tolerant, progressive celebrity in order to divert accusations of him financially benefitting from this shameful, odious, irredeemably corrupted World Cup?
As regards the subject of these Blogs, can people engage in ‘black-washing’ – finding easy, costless ways to promote themselves of anti-racists in order to divert accusations of other blemishes? (An old, crass example was in an episode of ‘The Office’ when David Brent sought to ingratiate himself with a colleague of colour by declaring that Sidney Poitier was his favourite actor).