Your Church Can Grow

Last weekend I attended a wedding and sat at a table with friends of my son who just turned 30 years old. My wife and I were the only old folks. We were also most likely the only ones to notice the grand diversity at the table. Sitting with us were Latino-Americans, an African-American, a Korean American, Jewish Americans, and Euro-Americans. The others at the table saw the diversity as normative. Other tables also reflected the great diversity of New Jersey. The wedding was between a Jewish woman and a Protestant man. Neither were active in their respective religious traditions. The liturgy was a fusion of Jewish and Christian marriage ceremonies. The officiant pronounced the seven blessings; The groom broke glass with his foot. They exchanged rings and vows in the same fashion as a Christian wedding. And the celebration lasted hours with dancing and music and all of the traditional elements of an American wedding: first dance, bride and groom dancing with their parents, cutting the cake, throwing the bouquet. It was a grand celebration made all the more festive by the rich tapestry of people present.

I did not take a poll of participants–it would have been rude. Knowing many of the friends at my son’s table, though, I knew that not one of them attended religious services regardless of their background. This was their community. The party was their gathering time. What would it take to communicate the gospel effectively to this group? Robert Wuthnow, in his book, After the Baby Boomers, describes the younger generation of Americans as “tinkerers” when it comes to religion. They borrow from this tradition or that tradition whatever fits and whatever works. Is there something that our United Methodist Church could do to connect with this generation? Inviting them to be like us and worship like us doesn’t seem to cut it.

Lois Barrett, a missiologist in the Mennonite tradition, included the following quote from the second-century Letter to Diognetus in a recent article she wrote:

[Christians] follow local customs in clothing, food, and other aspects of life. But at the same time, they demonstrate to us the wonderful and certainly unusual form of their own citizenship. They live in their own native lands, but as aliens; as citizens, they share all things with others; but like aliens, suffer all things. Every foreign country is to them as their native country, and every native land as a foreign country.

The question for those of us who relate to multi-ethnic congregations is this: is there a “citizenship” that goes beyond our own ethnicities and the fact that we live in the United States? The answer to the question I hope would be, “yes.” We belong to God’s Reign that transcends nationalities and ethnicities. While we do not deny our own ethnicities, in fact, we even celebrate them, as members of the church, are we not called to an identification with what it means to be part of “the new Israel,” a Christian ethnicity that stands above and beyond our own particular ethnicities?

The question goes to the root of our faith. To whom do we give our allegiance? Is it to our country? Is it to our particular ethnicity? Or, is it to Jesus Christ and the reign He inaugurated?

I would never advocate that we deny or subterfuge our own ethnicity when we become part of a multi-ethnic congregation. There is a richness to diversity that deserves celebration when persons of different backgrounds come together. However, as the body of Christ, we are called to point to a “higher ethnicity” that is rooted in Christian identity. Often in multi-ethnic congregations there are conflicts due to differing cultural perspectives. For instance, in one congregation composed of nearly thirty nationalities, liturgical dance offered by black members offended some Asian members. The objections were rooted in cultural tradition. However, the Asian members, to their credit, refrained from protest until they gained an understanding of the expression being offered. Subsequently they realized that in the context of this “new ethnicity” of Christian community, the liturgical dance was not offensive but rather an authentic expression of worship to God. In this way, at times we are called upon to surrender our cultural biases in favor of the overall well-being of the new ethnicity of the church.
Some people critique the multi-ethnic church by saying that differing peoples conform themselves to the dominant culture in the United States, thus denying their own rich heritage and capitulating to a “melting-pot” stereotype of what it means to be a church-goer in this country. It is unavoidable that persons from different backgrounds will modify their ways in the context of a community that includes many perspectives. The challenge is to make adjustments oriented not to the dominant American culture but rather to an ethnicity beyond ethnicities–citizenship in the reign of God.

Bringing the rich diversity of our humanity together to form Christian community.