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.