Is
the Church for Everyone?
Planting Multi-Ethnic Congregations
in North America
Chuck Van Engen1
Professor of Biblical Theology of
Mission, Fuller Theological Seminary, CA, USA
Published in
Global Missiology, Featured Article, October 2004, www.globalmissiology.net
Introduction
I grew up in one of the
oldest towns in the Americas: San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. My parents were missionaries, essentially
Dutch-American immigrants to Mexico. Born and raised in Mexico, I was therefore the second-generation of an
immigrant family. As such, I grew up
as what I call a "double-minority." I was part of a small group of
about one hundred and fifty
Protestants in a Spanish colonial town of 65,000 people who wished we did not
exist. And ours was one of only four
or five "foreign" families in town: "Gringos," strangers,
pilgrims in a strange land. Now that I
live in the U.S., I consider myself a Mexican-American immigrant of Dutch descent. So when I think of immigrants,
ethnic minorities, and multiple cultures in North America, I tend not to
identify with the dominant descendants of Europeans, but with immigrants from Latin America–past and present. I’m sure this
colors the way I approach the issues in this paper, and I hope the reader will
take that into consideration.
The thesis of this
paper is this:
Because God’s mission
seeks careful and balanced complementarity between universality and particularity,
churches in North America should strive to be as multi-ethnic as their
surrounding contexts.
I would like to offer
some reflections on this thesis by means of the five parts of the title of this
paper:
1. "Planting"–the motivation for mission vis-a-vis multi-ethnic churches
2. "In
North America"–the context
of mission vis-a-vis a history
of immigration in North America
3. "Multi-"–the means of mission vis-a-vis cultural diversity, looking
at the HUP
4. "Ethnic"–the agents of mission vis-a-vis cultural blindness of
churches in North America
5. "Congregations"–the goal of mission vis-a-vis the nature of the
Church–models considered
Bibliograph and Footnotes
In
each section I will reflect briefly on issues of the complementarity between
universality and particularity in God’s mission.
PLANTING — The Motivation
God recognizes and
values cultural and ethnic diversity. Yet within the particularity of ethnicity
God loves all peoples and invites all
to faith in Jesus Christ, each in their own special cultural and ethnic make-up.
"For
God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes
in him shall not perish but have eternal life." (Jn. 3:16)
These words of Jesus to
Nicodemus focus the biblical narrative of God’s universality of love for all peoples–and God’s particularity of loving a
plurality of specific and different peoples. As can be seen in Appendix A, one need only trace this
theme through Scripture to see how very important it is in understanding God’s mission. Risking belaboring the
point, I will simply point out a few
illustrative biblical references that may help us see the complementarity of
universality and particularity in God’s mission.
Genesis
Three times in the
first eleven chapters of Genesis we are told that God is the creator and judge of all peoples. All people are created in Adam and
Eve; all people descend from Noah; all people have their languages confused and are then spread out over the entire
earth after the Babel episode. In each case, there is a recognition of the
particularity and difference of various peoples–as is signaled by the inclusion of the Table of Nations in
Genesis 10–yet in each case this
multiplicity of peoples are collectively and unitedly said to be the object of
God’s concern.
Abraham
When God calls Abram,
his call involves being a blessing to a plurality of nations–but this happens through the particularity of one clan whose
origins are traced back to Nahor and Terah from the Ur of the Chaldeans.
They are particular instruments of God’s mission, chosen with the intention of being a blessing to many particular
peoples within the universality of God’s love for all peoples.
Deuteronomy and II Chronicles
The
complementarity of particularity and universality is repeated in Deuteronomy
and, for example, II Chronicles. I Peter 2 draws, for example,
from Deuteronomy 10:14-22. The creator Lord
God (to whom "belong the heavens, the earth and everything in it")
chose Israel out of all the nations, and now calls Israel
to exhibit compassion and care for the fatherless, the widow, and
the aliens who represent the plurality of particular nations. Thus many years
later, at Solomon’s dedication of the Temple, the symbol of
the most centralized form of Israel’s faith, Solomon
prays, when "the foreigner who does not belong to your people Israel but
has come from a distant land because of your great name....comes
and prays toward this temple, then hear
from
heaven....and do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the peoples of
the earth may know your name and fear you...." (2 Chron. 6:32-33)
Jesus and Isaiah
Thus it is no accident that Jesus, the Messiah of
Israel, would use Isaiah’s language in speaking of Herod’s Temple as
"a hou se of prayer for all the nations." (Isa. 56:7; Mk. 11:17) The
complementarity of universality and particularity is very strong in Jesus’
ministry. At one point Jesus sends his
disciples "to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Matt. 10:6).
Yet this is the same Jesus and the
same gospel of Matthew that will strongly emphasize that the disciples are to meet him in the cosmopolitan, multi-cultural
setting of Galilee. There he will say, "all authority is given to me in heaven and on earth, go
therefore and disciple ta ethne–the nations (Matt. 28:18-19). 2 The gospels strongly
support the vision articulated by Simeon at the time of Jesus’ dedication in the temple: Jesus is the Lord of
lords and the Messiah of Israel and he is "(God’s) salvation which you have prepared in the sight of
all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel" (Lk.
2:32). Later, when Jesus describes his own mission, drawing from Isaiah 35, 49, and 61, he will
proclaim his mission in Nazareth, but speak of it as a mission of
preaching good news to the poor, freedom to the prisoners, recovery of sight
for the blind, to release the oppressed and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s
favor in global, universal terms that have specific, local contextual
significance in Galilee (Lk 4:18-19; 7:22-23).
Paul
Paul emphasized this complementarity. Even in the
oft-cited universal passages like Galatians 3:28 ("There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor
female....") and Colossians 3:11 ("Here
there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian,
slave or free....") the cultural
distinctives are not erased. The particularity of ethnicity, sexuality, and socio-economics is not ignored. Rather, in the
midst of such specific forms of homogeneity, there is a universality of union (not uniformity of culture)–a
universality of oneness in Jesus Christ: "you are all one in Christ
Jesus." (Gal. 3:28); "but Christ is all, and in all" (Col.
3:11). Thus in Ephesians, Paul’s
ecclesiology recognizes the distinctive differences of being Gentile or Jewish ("This mystery is that through the
gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together
in the promise of Christ Jesus" (Eph. 3:6). Yet Paul also affirms that
they are brought together into one new family in Jesus Christ (Eph. 3:15). This does not mean that Jews must live
like Gentiles, neither must Gentiles live like Jews. Paul follows the dictum of
the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 in affirming the cultural differences, yet creating a new oneness in Jesus Christ. In Acts
21, Paul participates in a Jewish rite of purification in the temple in Jerusalem, knowing he will be arrested, but
making a public statement that Jews
who are now believers in the Messiah may still follow Jewish custom. Thus, even though "there is no difference between
Jew and Gentile–the same Lord is Lord of all," (Rom. 10:12), yet the proclamation of the gospel,
according to Paul, is "first for the Jew, then for the
Gentile" (Rom. 1:16). 3
John in Revelation
In
Revelation, John echoes the same kind of complementarity of particularity and
universality. Peppered all through the Revelation, John keeps
emphasizing the fact that Christ is bringing together people "from
every tribe and language and people and nation" (Rev. 5:9; 7:9). In
Revelation 21, in the
vision of the New Jerusalem, a picture of the Church, there is a plurality of "nations" that will "walk by its
light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it....The
glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it..." (Rev.
21:24-25). Thus there is a recognition and
celebration of the differences and distinctives of a plurality of different
peoples and cultures–yet a oneness in
their coming into the same New Jerusalem, to be in the presence of the one Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the
world. 4
And understanding of the complementarity of
universality and particularity of God’s mission as described in Scripture is of utmost importance. This biblical orientation
will influence the rest of our
reflection concerning the planting in North America of multi-ethnic
congregations. The way in which we
associate these twin truths will affect our orientation to the issues facing
the church in North America today. Too
strong an emphasis on universality will drive us toward uniformity and blind us
to cultural distinctives. Too strong an emphasis on particularity will push us
toward either exclusivist homogeneity
or fragmented ethnocentrism, and create serious questions about our oneness in Jesus Christ.
As I read Scripture, I
see God affirming cultural distinctives. I see Babel as judgment, yes, but also
as grace. The beauty of resplendent creativity shines forth in the wonderful
multiplication of families, tribes, tongues
and peoples of humanity. Rather than destroy humanity (which in the Noahic covenant God had promised not to do), God
chooses to confuse the languages. This confusion, although an act of judgment,
mercifully preserves all humanity in its cultural and ethnic distinctives, differences so significant
that we are given a Table of Nations to enumerate the civilizations known to the compilers of the
Pentateuch. These differences are so significant that when the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost one of the first
extraordinary acts of the Holy Spirit is
to enable people of many different languages to hear the proclamation of the
Gospel in their own
language. Yet these distinctive
features of multiple cultures are not allowed to divide humanity’s relation to
YHWH, nor t o support the concept of a national or ethnic plurality of gods. There is one God, creator and sustainer of all
peoples. Oneness in plurality,
plurality in oneness: particular
universality, universal particularity. How can we give concrete, lived out shape to this biblical view of reality as God sees
it? This theology of humanity should be normative for us as we consider the missiological implications of
planting multi-ethnic churches in North America. It is the bottom-line biblical
motivation for such activity.
Sociological
realities, human justice, economic equity, survival of a unified and
functioning society; or greater
numerical growth, or being a truer sign of the coming Kingdom of God, or survival of older churches in transitional
neighborhoods — all of these situations call for us to rethink the matter of planting multi-ethnic congregations
in North America. However, I would suggest
that the most basic and pervasive reason derives from the universal scope of
God’s mission as depicted in
Scripture and spoken by a particular Messiah (Jesus) to a particular Jewish teacher of the law (Nicodemus): ":For God so
loved the world (of many peoples, tribes, tongues and nations) that he gave his
Son...." (Jn. 3:16).
This
complementarity of particularity and universality may help us understand more
fully our mission in North America. It could help us see
that neither cultural superiority or uniformity, nor multicultural
fragmentation or balkanization are acceptable forms of Christian mission. For decades,
cultural anthropology has worked with two complementary strands: the deep-level
themes of common humanity which all people share, and the
unique ways in which these themes take shape in both surface-level
and deep-level meanings in specific cultural settings.
Young Lee Hertig has
pointed out that
"Problems
in a diverse community often come from the oversimplification of human
complexity. The three dimensions of being human–"like all
others, "like some others,"
and
"like no other"–are very important
factors for everyone living in diversity. The universal,
cultural, and individual dimensions in human beings are interdependent. (David)
Augsburger rightly stresses: ‘Only when the universal is clearly understood can
the cultural be seen distinctively and the individual
traits respected fully; only when the person is prized in her or
his uniqueness can the cultural matrix be seen clearly and the universal frame
be assessed accurately. The universal unites us as humans, the cultural identifies us with significant persons, and the
individual affirms our identity.’" 5
This complementarity of
the universal and the particular is a built-in feature of Paul’s organic image of the Church as a Body. Is there not a way
we could bring both the universality and the particularity of God’s mission to bear upon our mission in the North
American context? I will try to do
this in the next sections of this paper. But first let’s look at our context.
IN NORTH
AMERICA–The Context of Mission The Reality
We are talking about
planting multi-ethnic congregations in North America–with particular focus in the United States. What, then, is the reality of
cultures and ethnicities in our North American context?
Sixteen years ago, Time
Magazine said it this way.
"Invited or uninvited, rich and poor–but mostly poor–foreigners are
pouring into the U.S. in greater numbers than at any time since the last great
surge of European immigration in the early 1900s. Indeed the US today accepts
twice as many foreigners as the rest of the world’s nations combined....
Although their turn-of-thecentury
predecessors were mainly Europeans, today’s new arrivals are mostly from Latin America and, to a lesser extent, Asia and the
Caribbean. They are transforming the U.S. landscape into something that it has not been for decades: a mosaic of
exotic languages, faces, customs,
restaurants and religions." 6
In 1986, Peter Wagner
wrote,
Whether in Oregon, California, or
Maine, this is the real America. Today’s America is a multi-ethnic
society on a scale that boggles the imagination. The teeming multitudes of all
colors, languages, smells and cultures are not just a quaint sideline in our
nation; they are America. And it is this America that God has
called us to evangelize... 7
Two years later Orlando
Costas commented, "Besides the traditional European groups, which have "melted" into the main
"pot" of North American society, there are said to be over 120 ethnic groups communicating in more than 100
languages and dialects." 8
Four
years ago, Oscar Romo remarked, "It is said that America is a melting pot
where the English language is the ‘language’ and the ‘Anglo’
(European) culture is superior. In reality, there
are 500 ethnic groups who daily speak 636 languages of which 26 are considered
major languages."
9
Also in 1993, Jorge Taylor, then Associate Provost for
Multicultural Affairs at Fuller Seminary, reminded
us of our reality.
Almost every day you read about
it. It’s in the daily news. It’s on television. What is this new
reality? The increasingly diverse multicultural
society in which we live. Just a few weeks ago, I read the
following statistics in the July Issue of ACCESS, a newsletter for recruiting and retaining students of color.
"By the year 2000, more than half of
college-age students (in North America) will be people of color.
Within 15 years, people of color will make up
more than 50 percent of the population of California, Florida, New York, and Texas.
In the 1980s the U.S. population increased by 9.8
percent. During the same period, the African-American
population increased by 13.2 percent, the Native-American population
increased
by 37.9 percent, the Asian population by 107.8 percent, and the Hispanic population
increased by 53.6 percent.
The July 31, 1992 issue of The
Los Angeles Times reported:
"Los Angeles has become the immigrant capital of the world: 27
percent of the residents in Los Angeles County are foreign-born compared with the national norm of 10 percent. 38 percent of
those older than 4 years of age speak
a foreign language at home. Of this 38 percent, 26 percent speak Spanish, 7 percent speak an Asian or Pacific
Island language."
As a consequence of this
increasingly diverse multicultural population, most schools and businesses also will have
a multiculturally diverse constituency. Churches, too, will have diverse, multicultural congregations. 10
As I write, I have in
front of me two local newspapers that carried related articles on September 10, 1997. One was headlined, "State’s
Diversity Expected to Rise: Population Areas Will Be Divided," 11 and the other stated
matter-of-factly, "California’s Future Marked by Diversity." 12 Both
articles cite a study by the California State Library’s Research Bureau that
concluded that Los Angeles County will
grow by almost 3.4 million by 2020, with the major share of that growth being in the Hispanic population whose
"natural increase...-- the total number of births minus deaths–will be
five times larger than the natural increase among non-Latino whites....By 2040,
Southern California, at almost 60 percent Latino, will be an even stronger
magnet for immigrants." 13
Statistics abound, and
to give more would be to belabor the obvious. The North American context is
increasingly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic. In the midst of diversity, many
are striving for equity and justice and a degree of cohesion, while at
the same time seeking to affirm, preserve and
celebrate cultural distinctives. We have known about our cultural diversity,
and we have heard it presented often.
Yet the churches in North America seem reluctant to face what perhaps may prove to be the greatest challenge. So,
how do we read reality–what hermeneutic of the context do we adopt? I would suggest we are faced with two different
perspectives: universality and
particularity.
Universality: An
Immigrant History
A
quick review of American history would point to the fact that the church in the
U.S. has been an immigrant church from its very inception.
Twenty-five years ago, Sydney Ahlstrom documented
the rise of what were essentially immigrant, ethnic churches in North America.
In the American colonies, he speaks of the development of
the English Puritans, the Dutch Reformed, the Quakers, the German
Pietists, and the German Reformed and Lutheran churches. Later Ahlstrom
chronicles the rise of the Scottish Presbyterians and the mostly English Congregationalists.
14 The fact is that the history of Christianity in America is a
history of ethnically-defined and culturally-shaped religion–although the
Americanization of that is also part of the history, as, for
example, in the case of early Methodism. Ahlstrom says, "No group prospered
more in the West or seemed more providentially designed to capitalize on the conditions
of the advancing American frontier than the Methodists. A small and highly
suspect adjunct to Anglicanism before the Revolution, this church had begun its
independent American history only in 1784. Since then its web of preaching
circuits had come to cover almost the entire country.
In 1789 even New England had been invaded." 15
Ahlstrom
summarizes,
"Immigration has had from the first a
decisive effect on the religious affiliation of Americans and the relative size
of the various churches. The statistics of church membership, to be sure, are a notorious quagmire.
But even when full allowance is made for
the known inadequacy of existing figures, certain drastic changes are manifest
when one compares the ecclesiastical situation before and after the Great
Migration.
At the end of the colonial period (1775) three
large ecclesiastical blocs, all of British background, accounted for at least 80 percent of the Americans who
could be regarded as affiliated with
any church. They were distributed about evenly among the Congregationalists of New England, the Anglicans
of the South, and the Presbyterians whose
chief strength lay in the Middle Colonies. Small but influential Quaker,
Baptist, and Methodist groups added
two or three percentage points to the British Protestant total, while Dutch Reformed churches, strongest in New
York and New Jersey, had over the
years
become very closely affiliated with the English-speaking population. Roman Catholics
and Jews constituted at most 0.1 percent of the population....
The Great Migration of the nineteenth century, as
everyone knows, drastically altered the religious composition of the American
people. Steady acculturation was naturally a major feature of the passing decades, yet by the
twentieth century the United States had become far more than before a nation of
religious minorities whose self-consciousness was by no means rapidly disappearing. In 1926, by which time
40 percent of the population claimed a
religious relationship, Roman Catholics were the largest single group
(18,605,000), while the next three
largest denominations–Baptist (8,011,000), Methodist (7,764,000), and Lutheran (3,226,000)–accounted for 59 percent
of the Protestants. At that time Jews constituted
3.2 percent of the total population. Immigration, of course, was not the only reason for these radical changes in the American
religious balance, but it alone had ended the possibility of speaking of
the American churches solely in terms of a common British background." 16
Certainly,
immigration is at least one of the most significant determinants of the nature
of American religion, as historians like Withrop Hudson, 17
Jerald Brauer, 18 and William Sweet 19
have forcefully
demonstrated. This special nature of American Christianity is such a strong feature that Martin Marty calls American
Christians, "Pilgrims in Their Own Land." 20
In North America we are all immigrants. To lesser or greater
degree, all Christianity in America has been
ethnic Christianity. The reality of Christianity in North America is that
churches have always been immigrant,
ethnic churches that are culturally influenced and culturally circumscribed. For example, I am an ordained
minister in the Reformed Church in America, the 370-year-old Dutch Reformed church whose roots, history and to a large
extent even its present forms are
shaped by its ethnic particularity.
There is, however, a
very important difference between the Nineteenth Century immigrant churches and
the immigrant/ethnic churches of the 1980s and 1990s. With a few notable exceptions, the cuturally-shaped churches of last
century all shared a common world-view in their Western European roots deriving from the Enlightenment. By
contrast, the new immigrant churches
of the last three decades in North America represent Christians from every part
of the world, a global church located
in the cities of North America speaking a host of languages like Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Gujarati, Tagalog,
Indonesian, Korean, Mandarin, Japanese. In Los Angeles alone more than 96 languages are spoken, and member of Christian
churches speak many of them. Oscar Baldemor, a doctoral student at
Fuller Seminary, for example, has found 58 Filipino
churches in Los Angeles, many of recent origin. And Natarajan Jawahar Gnaniah
has studied thirteen Asian Indian
churches in Los Angeles, all begun since 1960. 21 We are all
immigrants. Part of our self-understanding must be the fact that we are
"aliens and strangers in the
world." (I Pet. 2:11; Hebrews 11:13; Gen. 23:4; Exod. 22:21-22; Lev.
24:22; 25:23; Ps. 39:12; 105:12;
119:19; 146:9).
This perception could
transform some of our contextual hermeneutic. For example, in terms of my own
context in Southern California, if the predictions are correct and by 2040
Southern California will be 60
percent Hispanic, it simply means that Southern California will return to the cultural make-up that marked its beginnings in the
late 1700s and early 1800s when it was Spanish
Catholic and later Mexican territory. 22 In Southern California,
only the Native
American peoples who
were here before the Spanish arrived might be considered an exception. But in remote history, they too are descended from
immigrants to the North American continent. All of us need to remember, we are all immigrants.
Particularity
So now we must ask,
How do we then read our context? What hermeneutical spectacles influence what we see? Although written twenty
years ago, Peter Wagner offers helpful clarifications
regarding ethnicity, based on his doctoral dissertation done at USC on the
subject, the product of which became Our Kind of People. I believe his
hermeneutic of multi-ethnicity in North
America needs to be re-read by many. Wagner clarifies what ethnicity is not and
then offers a definition.
o An
ethnic group should not be confused with a nation. A nation, as currently defined,
is a group of people under a common government at a particular time and place.
Typically, a nation is eligible to join the United Nations. Most nations contain
within their borders and under their government several ethnic groups.
o An ethnic
group should not be confused with race. Race is closely related to genetics. A group of people who share prominent
physical characteristics that are transmitted
genetically constitute a race....
o An ethnic group should not be confused with a
tribe, a designation that has become
hopelessly imprecise. Tribe has been used to describe states, ethnic groups, nations, districts, and many other social
entities. An ethnic group can and does
often correspond to a tribe, but the words are not properly synonymous.
o An ethnic group should not be
confused with a social class.
o An ethnic group should not be confused with a
minority group. A minority, according
to sociologist Louis Wirth, is ‘a group of people who, because of their physical
and cultural characteristics, are singled out from others in the society in which they live for differential and unequal
treatment....’
o Finally an ethnic group should not be confused with
a homogeneous unit. Ethnicity is an
important part of a homogeneous unit, but it is only one of several considerations necessary in describing a group of
people as a homogeneous unit....
If
ethnicity is not any of the above, then what is it? Common to the prevailing
usage of the term, is the concept of
‘ancestry." Shibutani and Kwan provide the most concise definition I have found:
‘An ethnic group consists of those who conceive of themselves as being alike by
virtue of their common ancestry, real or
fictitious, and who are so regarded by others.’ 23
C.
Peter Wagner and others have made a case that we need to seriously re-consider,
if not discard, the "melting pot" idea prevalent at the
beginning of the Twentieth Century. 24 I will draw at
this point from Natarajan Jawahar Gnaniah’s excellent doctoral work in which he
simply calls the "melting-pot" concept "a myth, an illusion."
Though
the melting-pot theory is an ideal, it was not a practical one in the history
of this nation. All the races and cultures and values and ideas do
not melt into a smooth, even, well balanced mixture. The
"melting-pot" theory of assimilation appears to have been rejected
by members of the dominant culture as well as by members of the culturally different
populations25 McGavran puts it bluntly: ‘America is not a melting
pot in which all metals are speedily reduced to a single comprehensive alloy.
Rather, what used to be called the new world is a curry in
which potatoes are still potatoes and chunks of meat are
still
meat." 26 As Thom and Marcia Hopler write, "The task of
Northern European Protestantism dominates the
soup." 27
In
today’s North American context, the "melting -pot" model of
assimilation is inadequate, inappropriate, and irrelevant.
In 1988, Orlando Costas suggested that the "melting-pot" theory of assimilation
was no longer valid. "Besides the traditional European groups, which have
"melted" into the main "pot" of North American society,
there are said to be over 120 ethnic groups communicating in more than 100
languages and dialects. They represent roughly one-third of the total population." 28
Also in 1988, David
Shenk and Ervin Stutzman stated, "A major stream contributing to ethnic self-consciousness is the massive immigration into
the United States and Canada during the last decade or so. During the 1980s the immigration numbers to the United
States, legal and illegal, are
reported at significantly more than one million annually...Many of the
immigrants, particularly those from
Latin America, Asia, and Africa, have no intention of becoming submerged
into a homogeneous Anglo culture. All our cities have become rich mosaics of
ethnic diversity. For example, in 1985 the
public school system of Los Angeles was teaching in some 65 languages! In that
same year, 25 American cities enjoyed the distinction of minorities being the majority." 29 Five years
later, Oscar Romo caricatured the "melting-pot" idea by pointing out that many in the U.S. still want to say, "All
are equal! It is said that America is a melting pot where the English language is "the
language" and the "Anglo" (European) culture is superior. In reality, there are 500 ethnic groups who daily
speak 636 languages of which 26 are considered major languages." 30
All over North America,
we need to re-examine what we mean by "minority" and
"ethnic," since the
minority ethnicity may in fact be White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. "The real
America," Peter Wagner says,
"is not a melting pot; it never was. The real America is a stewpot. While
some prefer using the analogies of salad bowl, mosaic, tapestry, or
rainbow, I prefer the stewpot. In the stewpot
each ingredient is changed and flavored by the other ingredients....each ethnic
ingredient now has the potential to be enriched through intercultural
contact with the others." 31 Following Wagner’s lead, C Wayne Zunkel expressed this dream. "The patterns may
vary, but somehow caring Christians will put aside the old "melting
pot" attitudes and come to see the beauty in each people, each culture." 32
So, what do you, the
reader, see when you look at the North American context? There are a number of options. Melting pot, stewpot, mosaic,
multiculturalism, postmodern political-correctness,
complete fragmentation and balkanization of a multiplicity of
"ethnicities" and viewpoints. Our perspective of the present and
future context in North America in relation to cultures and ethnicities
will greatly influence our assessment of, and approach to, the matter of "planting multi-ethnic congregations in North
America."
MULTI
— The Means of Mission
Particular
universality, universal particularity. How can we understand this dialectical perspective of God’s view of humanity that
Scripture? In the next two sections of this paper I will outline what happens in our North American
context when either one or the other of these twin viewpoints is over-emphasized.
First,
no examination of the issues of the means of
multi-ethnic church planting in North America
would be complete without a re-examination of the Homogeneous Unit Principle
(HUP) upon which church planting in North America has based its
emphasis on planting ethnically homogeneous churches rather than multi-ethnic
ones. In section "C" that follows I will suggest that
the HUP may represent an over-emphasis on particularity, with an accompanying
loss of legitimate openness to universality. Then in section
"D", I will examine three major streams of analysis of the church in
North America, using them to illustrate how in each case there is an ethnocentric
blindness evident in them due possibly to an over-emphasis on universality.
Finally, in section "E" I will review some of the models
of multi-ethnic church planting in North America
in terms of their
potential for exhibiting the dual nature of the Church as being particularly universal and universally particular.
In
this section, then, I would suggest that the historical development of the
missiology of the Homogeneous Unit Principle (HUP)
calls for a re-examination of its emphases. Given the changes
reflected in the North American context, the original intent of indigenization
and contextualization may suggest that planting multi-ethnic churches may be as
contextually appropriate as planting homogeneous ones.
The
origins of the Homogeneous Unit concept can be traced back to India, to Donald
Anderson McGavran,
and to his association with J. Waskom Pickett. 33 In 1938 McGavran
first published Church Growth and Group
Conversion in conjunction with Pickett and
A.L. Warnshuis of the International Missionary Council. 34
In 1938, John R. Mott wrote the Foreword to the second edition.
"The distinctive and important contribution of this most instructive,
stimulating and reassuring book has been the setting forth with clarity and
frankness why on the one hand the work of so many churches and mission stations
has been so comparatively sterile, and why in other
cases their labors have been attended with wonderful fruitfulness." The
answer McGavran and Pickett offered to that
question of "why" was centered in the concept of "people movements."
In the 1973 edition of this work, McGavran wrote,
Across the world today, in practically every
non-Occidental country numerous people movements
to Christ are going on. Some are making good progress producing strong churches. Some are limping along producing weak
churches. Some have stopped. Some have even died....
The people movement point of view describes these
movements, defines their essential nature,
defends them as being a valid, common, and significant mode of church growth.
It seeks to correct the common
misunderstandings concerning them and to focus attention on them as an important highway of the spirit along
which Christ is advancing to the heart
of the nations....Readers may find the term "people movement"
unfamiliar. By it we
mean church growth which has variously been called
mass movements, revivals and group
movements....Our principal term, however, is "people movement"
because we are
describing the way in which a people (tribe,
caste, or clan) first becomes Christian...
Another term used is "an approachable
people." Approachability does not mean merely that the people in question is friendly, can be
addressed, or listens to the Gospel; but that some of its sub-groups are actually accepting Jesus our Lord, being
baptized and formed
into
congregations. On the basis of this kind of response, we judge that we have an "approachable
people."
How does the Church grow when it grows greatly?
It grows within some social stratum. If to the
necessary difficulties of denying self and following the Lord Jesus are added the unnecessary abandoning of one’s
own race (caste in Mid-India) and
joining another, then church growth will inevitably be slow. Great
growth
has almost always been caste-wise. When the Church has made its greatest strides,
individuals became Christian with their fellow tribesmen, with their kindred
and with their people....Not only so, but multiplication
usually occurs within some prepared
people.
One of our basic assumptions is that God prepares certain peoples to accept His
son If our evangelism is to bear the richest fruit
these two basic assumptions should be
considered in their varied aspects.
If the Gospel is preached to such peoples, chains of families may be expected to decide for Christ.
Churches will be built up in which social solidarity has not been impaired. 35
McGavran’s original
conceptualization, then, included the beginning formulation of three interrelated observations: (1) that there are
distinct culturally-defined subgroups in any given population in a
specific context; 36 (2) that at a specific time certain sub-groups
appear to respond more readily to
evangelistic efforts than others; and (3) that this is an important factor in
being able to explain why some churches grow numerically more quickly than
other churches. Notice that in this early formulation McGavran’s desire
was to find methods of evangelization that were culturally-appropriate to the particular context of a specific people
group. McGavran assumed that greater
cultural appropriateness would be more effective in yielding more-rapidly
growing churches.. Later McGavran
would draw upon others for words like "indigenization" and "contextualization" that would build
upon these early suspicions.
In what follows, I will
survey the development of McGavran’s thought as it flowed into two missiological
streams. (a) globally in terms of targeting responsive "unreached
peoples," and (b) locally in North
America in the use of the HUP to support planting ethnically homogeneous churches.
From People Movements
to Unreached Peoples
In 1955 McGavran first
published his landmark book The Bridges of God. 37 Here he affirmed "five great advantages" of people
movements over what he called "the mission station approach."
"First, they have provided the Christian movement with permanent churches
rooted in the soil of hundreds of
thousands of villages....(Second), they have the advantage of being naturally indigenous....People movements have a third major
advantage. With them, ‘the spontaneous expansion
of the Church’ is natural.... 38 (Fourth), these movements have
enormous possibilities of
growth...The fifth advantage is that these (people) movements provide a sound
pattern of becoming
Christian...." 39
Four years later,
McGavran began emphasizing the fact that different peoples demonstrate varying degrees of receptivity. In How
Churches Grow, 40
McGavran wrote, "A nation is usually a conglomerate of peoples, sometimes bound together by language, religion
and culture and sometimes divided by
just these factors...Each people is played upon by many different forces to prevent or produce responsiveness to the Good
News....How populations are composed is a factor of great importance for church growth. It is essential to discern
each separate community and its degree
of readiness...." 41
In 1965 McGavran wrote a
book chapter entitled, "Homogeneous Populations and Church Growth." Here is one of the earliest instances
I can find of McGavran using the terms "homogeneous unit" and
"mosaic."
Men
(sic) meet the Church not only as isolated individuals but as multitudinous
societies, each made up of interrelated individuals who are often of one blood,
skin color, language,
dialect, or section of
the country....Among the many aspects of human society none is
more important to church growth than these
homogeneous units of (hu)mankind.
This technical term, homogeneous
unit 42 is
elastic...The Church will grow differently, not
only in each different culture, but in each of the many homogeneous units that
make up most human cultures....The general population may be compared to a
mosaic. Each piece of the mosaic is a society, a homogeneous unit. It has its own
way of life, its own standards, degree of
education, self-image, and places of residence....
What is commonly called group conversion is really
multi-individual conversion. It is many
individuals believing on the Lord at the same time in shared knowledge of the
joint action and mutual dependence on
each other....
People movements...are only one way in which
churches grow; the structure of society affects church growth at every level. Even in our relatively homogeneous
American Society, churches are
recognizing that certain denominations flourish in certain sections of society and not in others. An inescapable and
significant truth is that society not only has a mosaic type of structure, but that different pieces of the mosaic
are responsive to the Christian
message in different measure. 43
In
1965 as well, McGavran made a strong case for this sociological hermeneutic in
a controversial article published in International
Review of Missions. "Right strategy tailors mission
to fit each of the thousands of separate communities, so that in it the Church
may grow..., " McGavran stated. "The one world we
often speak of is made up of numerous ethnic units,
suddenly brought close together but not yet fused into one race. Nor are they
likely to be so fused in the near future....The hard fact is,....that b4y
far the largest number of growing
churches are growing in some
tribe or segment of society. 4
McGavran
further refined this line of reasoning, publishing, in 1970, the foundational
work for all Church Growth thinking, Understanding
Church Growth. 45
"The homogeneous unit," McGavran
wrote, "is simply a section of society in
which all the members have some characteristic in common. Thus a
homogeneous unit (or HU, as it is called in church growth jargon) might be a
political unit or subunit, the characteristic in common being that all the members
live within certain geographical confines....The homogeneous unit may be a
segment of society whose common characteristic is a culture
or language, as in the case of Puerto Ricans in New
York City or Chinese in Thailand....The homogeneous unit might be a tribe or
caste....As these illustrations indicate, the homogeneous unit
is an elastic concept, its meaning depending on the
context in which it is used....A Homogeneous Unit Church may
be defined as ‘that cluster of congregations of one denomination
which is growing in a given homogeneous unit...." 46
The
development of this line of reasoning led McGavran to articulate the
observation which became foundational to all subsequent thought on the issue in
the Church Growth Movement:
"MEN (sic) LIKE TO BECOME
CHRISTIANS WITHOUT CROSSING RACIAL, LINGUISTIC
OR CLASS BARRIERS." 47
Over the next fifteen years,
McGavran’s thought changed little on this subject, although he softened
and qualified the way he spoke about homogeneous units. In 1972, Alan Tippett,
McGavran’s colleague and associate, articulated the concept by affirming,
"When we speak of
‘responsive
populations’ we are thinking of large homogeneous units of people who, once
they have made their decision, act in
unison. Many peoples have become Christian in this manner....Today the people-movement idea is more
widely accepted by evangelical missionaries and strategists because it
is better understood....Church-growth writings,...have been working on people movements for years and have resolved the
basic problem by means of the term multi-individual to describe the phenomenon................................................ Side by side with (the use of group structures
in...the
process of church-planting), some new
dimensions, and warnings, have been developed about the indigenous church concept....The concept relates to the permanence
of culture change when the social group accepts it, and speaks especially
to directed change and therefore is significant both in anthropology and mission." 48
In
1983, McGavran said it this way. "Consider, for example, a form of
contextualization adopted in societies where important decisions are invariably
multi-individual. In those societies, until the group decides, no
one moves....In such cases, contextualization means making the decision to follow
Christ a group decision, or better, a multi-individual
decision. This form of contextualization
has been enormously influential in the spread of the Christian faith." 49
The next year McGavran re-affirmed, "Men and women like to
become Christians without crossing
linguistic, racial, and class lines. This missiological principle, sometimes called the homogeneous unit theory, has been vigorously
attacked from both the left and the right....Churches
must fit the segments of population in which they are multiplying. Each must
read the Bible in and worship in the language spoken by its segment....Since
urban (hu)mankind is a vast mosaic of
innumerable pieces, my thesis is that the Church in the cities of the world
must have multitudinous new urban faces. A significant part of the plateaued or
declining membership of many
congregations and denominations is that their image of the church is limited to what it should be like in their segments of the urban population." 50
And, "In almost every land some
pieces of the mosaic are receptive to the Gospel." 51
One can find a
consistent emphasis in global Evangelical missiology on the concept of people groups (reached and unreached), on their
differentiation in terms of their receptivity or resistance, and on the strategic importance of focusing on responsive
populations from 1974 through 1995.
Examples of this could be drawn from the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland; the
Lausanne Continuation Committee meeting at Pattaya, Thailand in 1980; the World Consultation on Frontier Mission
held in Edinburgh in 1980; the
gathering of Lausanne II in Manila in 1989; and the AD2000 World Missionary Conference
held in Seoul, Korea in 1995. Ralph Winter’s strong advocacy of Frontier
Missions, Winter’s inclusion of this concept
as central to the "Perspectives" program in church-based mission studies, David Barrett’s statistical work
on "unreached peoples," and the AD2000 Movement’s emphasis on "a church for every people" are some of
the arenas that have highlighted this
viewpoint in the minds of evangelical churches, pastors, and missionaries.
So,
for example, Ed Dayton and David Fraser wrote about the various streams of
thought that had contributed to the missiological foundations
of their book on Planning Strategies for World Evangelization, not
least being, "the work of MARC and other research groups which have sought
to clarify, classify, and identify peoples and people groups throughout the
world who are unevangelized or underevangelized...."
Evangelization must
focus on a specific group or people group within its larger context. Only then is the target suitable for designing a
plan to engage in evangelism. 52
What we need is more agreement as to how precisely
to define an unreached people group. The best and most widely used
definition emerged out of a 1982 meeting of forty mission leaders: "A people group within which there is no indigenous
community of believing Christians
able to evangelize this group."
"When we consider the world in
particularistic focus we classify individuals in terms of people groups:
a significantly large sociological grouping of individuals who perceive themselves to have a common affinity for one
another. From the viewpoint of
evangelization
this is the largest group within which the gospel can spread without encountering
barriers of understanding or acceptance." 53
From People Movements
to Planting Ethnically Homogeneous Churches in North America
The
most intentional, focussed and thorough-going application of the concept of
homogeneous groups occurred in American Church Growth led by Peter Wagner and
helped along by Donald McGavran, Win Arn,
and others. Already in 1971, when C. Peter Wagner was just beginning his tenure at the School of World Mission/Institute of
Church Growth (SWM/ICG) at Fuller Seminary, Wagner wrote in Frontiers in Missionary
Strategy, in a chapter entitled, "Strategy for Urban Evangelism,"
Homogeneous Units: Try not to
allow diverse social and cultural elements to mix on the
congregational level any more than necessary.
Churches must be built as much as possible within homogeneous units if
they are to maintain a sense of community among believers. 54
By
1973, Donald McGavran had begun to pool his efforts with Win Arn in relation to
North American church growth and McGavran’s emphasis on people
-group homogeneity came through clearly and forcefully. Together
they authored a book entitled, How to Grow a Church: Conversations
about Church Growth. The book is organized in an
interview format.
ARN: "Earlier in our conversation you
suggested that one of the reasons why churches grow is that the Gospel
was preached to a clearly receptive part of the mosaic. Now, what you’re saying is that responsiveness grows as we
recognize that a community is a mosaic of
many homogeneous groups."
MCGAVRAN:"Yes.
Every community has many different segments. Many different communities live within the general
community."
ARN: "The
significance of homogeneous groups must be remembered as we consider growth.’
MCGAVRAN: "Let’s consider these homogeneous
units. Some are ethnic. One thinks
immediately
of Blacks, Chicanos, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants; but among Caucasians
also there are many ethnic or almost ethnic units...To use another
illustration, the hippies with
their counter-culture formed a distinct homogeneous group, a unit of society
most "straight" churches were utterly unable to influence.... 55
In
1976, Wagner presented McGavran’s concept of homogeneous groups in a social
mosaic not only as a hermeneutic of the cultural context, but
as a desirable characteristic of a local congregation. In Your Church Can Grow:
Seven Vital Signs of a Healthy Church–a basic textbook used for the next twenty years in many
church growth courses–Wagner stated,
The fifth
vital sign of a healthy, growing church is that its membership is composed of basically one kind of people...In church growth
terminology this is called the "homogeneous
unit principle." Its classic expression is found in McGavran’s
Understanding Church Growth: "People like to become Christians without
crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers...." A "homogeneous
unit" is simply a group of people who
consider each other to be "our kind of people." They have many areas
of mutual interest. They share the
same culture. They socialize freely. When they are together they are comfortable and they all feel at home. 56
Notice that at that time,
Wagner spoke of "the homogeneous unit PRINCIPLE," something that McGavran consistently avoided doing. McGavran
remained strictly descriptive in his observations
about homogeneity–and he predominantly used the concept of homogeneity as a
tool of social analysis of the reality outside the church. Thus Wagner
transformed the concept into an
ecclesiological characteristic, adding an imperative twist to it, making it a
"principle" of the nature
of vital, healthy, growing congregations.
In
1977 Donald McGavran and Win Arn stated that, "churches grow as they
rightly discern the community."
Community has typically been defined in
terms of geography, that is, people who live within
areas. However, for Church Growth thinking, it is more useful to define
community as a
group sharing common characteristics and or interests. In a given geographical
area many different kinds of people can exist. An adequate understanding of community seeks
to identify and understand the various groupings and the ways in which they
interact....
The ministry area may
include diverse ethnic and linguistic groupings. At least fifty-eight million people in the United States consider
themselves ethnics....It may be un-Christian to demand that the ethnic become part of white, middle-class
congregation. In the United States,
the melting pot hasn’t been very hot. Racial, color, language, and cultural distinctions are important considerations for the
growth of the church....
Certain
congregations will be more effective in reaching certain kinds of people. Since
all people need to be evangelized, effective Church Growth
strategy recognizes the diversities within a given
ministry area and focuses its message for
responsiveness....Each church, much like the
fisherman, seeks responsiveness by using the right approach at the right time... 57
During the next several years,
McGavran continued to advocate the same line of social analysis of
the mosaic of multiple ethnicities in the North American context. In Ethnic
Realities and the Church,
published in 1979, McGavran wrote,
One cannot talk about society in
any country without explicit mention of the sociological components
of its population. In the United States, for example, out of a population of
220
million, 25 million are African Americans and an equal number Americans of Spanish name. Indeed,
there are over fifty block of ethnics Americans, a few larger, most smaller than these. America is not a melting pot
in which all metals are speedily reduced to a single comprehensive alloy.
Rather, what used to be called the New World is a curry in which potatoes are still potatoes and chunks of
meat are still meat. Ethnic, linguistic, economic, and occupational homogeneous units in every land are what
make up the total population. 58
In
1980 in Church Growth Strategies that Work written with George Hunter, McGavran stated, "The faith spreads most naturally and
contagiously along the lines of the social networks of living Christians, especially new Christians.
Receptive undisciplined men and women usually receive the possibility when the invitation is extended to them from
credible Christian friends, relatives,
neighbors, and fellow workers from within their social web...When the church
grows so fast that it becomes a
movement, the following two events are usually occurring: (1) The faith spreads between persons who know one another within
a particular social unit. (2) It spreads from one particular social unit
to another within the same subculture or homogeneous population....Multitudinous homogeneous population units in American society
call for tens of thousands of new churches....Protestant denominations must
have many congregations of many different
ethnic groups. They must have them soon. That means new churches, a costly multiplication of new churches in ethnic units and
subunits all across the country...The thousands of pieces of the American population mosaic in which are millions of
God’s children who could be
reconciled to him in the Body of Christ is abundant reason for thousands of new
churches, especially designed to incorporate
our ethnic brothers and sisters............................................................................................ "
59
In 1981, McGavran
again emphasized the importance of recognizing the social realities of the multiple
cultures in the cultural "kaleidoscope" of North America. "I am
asking, ‘Why are some American churches growing?’
My ...answer is that in devising a growth strategy for their churches, they recognize
the social realities and teach
these to their members, leaders and task forces. Church growth does not take place in a vacuum. It occurs in an
enormously complex society, which is really a kaleidoscope of changing
parts. Society is constantly changing....Ethnic enclaves are enormously important....Nongrowing congregations and
denominations refuse to see social realities....Hundreds of exclusive
homogeneous units now in America prove that thousands of new churches are needed. American society is not composed of
one kind of people....American
churches ought to place glowing congregations in every homogeneous
unit....Furthermore,
most existing American congregations will not actively seek new immigrants and
provide the care and linguistic accommodation which they crave.... 6
In 1979, Wagner wrote
his doctoral dissertation on the subject, published as Our
Kind of People: The Ethical Dimensions of Church
Growth in America. "An
increasing body of missiological research
worldwide and sociological research within America itself," Wagner wrote,
"indicates that most Christian people meet together for worship and
fellowship within the basic sociological groupings
into which they were born. Where Christianity is taking root in different
nations and cultures of the world, it seems to develop most vigorously when it
is allowed or even encouraged to grow in specific homogeneous units rather than
forced to include different groups." 61
At
this point, Wagner seems to have been aware of the need to differentiate
between a descriptive approach of sociological analysis of
the context and a prescriptive affirmation of what church should be like.
My
studies of a number of churches showing membership growth consistently indicate
that they are growing within fairly homogeneous units
Just because Christian churches do tend to be
culturally homogeneous and just because they do seem to maintain more
growth and vitality when they remain as such does not, of course, lead to the conclusion that they should be
homogeneous. A description of what is cannot be taken as what ought to be,
and more substantive ethical considerations must be brought to bear on the issue.... 62
However, Wagner was
clearly more optimistic about the growth of homogeneous congregations than heterogeneous ones, although at this point he
was open to considering both options, both heterogeneous congregations and homogeneous unit churches..
The debate continues and probably will for some
time to come, but the issue is clear. The classic statement of the homogeneous unit principle remains McGavran’s:
"Men like to
become Christians without crossing racial,
linguistic, or class barriers." Notice that McGavran is focusing here on non-Christians rather than Christians. His
purpose in advocating the homogeneous
unit principle is consistently that of bringing non-Christians into the Christian movement. An underlying
assumption of the principle has always been
that once people become Christians and are growing
in their application of biblical ethical
principles to their daily lives, they will lose their inclinations toward
racism and prejudice....Other things
being equal, a higher rate of conversion growth can be predicted for the
homogeneous unit church.
The
issue that needs urgent attention is how to do both. Ways and means must be discovered
so that Christian brotherhood can be enjoyed to the greatest possible extent while
at the same time maintaining a high evangelistic potential.... 63
In 1981 Wagner wrote Church
Growth and the Whole Gospel in
which he tried to respond to some of
the criticism which Our Kind of People had generated. "The ‘homogeneous unit principle’ i s by far the most controversial of
all church growth principles. Because it relates directly to socio-cultural issues, it cannot be omitted from this
book....The homogeneous unit principle
should be seen at the very beginning for what it really is: a tool which many
have found helpful in implementing the evangelistic mandate. But it is
nothing more or less than a tool....The essential
purpose of the Church Growth Movement is not to fulfill the homogeneous unit principle, but to fulfill the evangelistic
mandate...." 64
In response to the
criticisms leveled at the HUP, Wagner explained that McGavran’s view on the issue of homogeneity was descriptive, not
normative; phenomenological, not theological; and involved a principle of evangelism, not Christian
nurture. "The homogeneous unit principle should be regarded as a penultimate spiritual dynamic," Wagner
affirmed. "The ultimate is that believers
are all one in the Body of Christ, and the more this is manifested in a
tangible way, the better... 65
However, throughout the 1980s,
Wagner became more forceful in his support of planting homogeneous
unit churches, based on what he called the "homogeneous unit principle."
Where this became especially strong in terms of almost
exclusive support of homogeneous unit churches
was in Wagner’s descriptions of churches that grow in North America–and by
inference, an
affirmation of what churches in North American ought to be like. As I mentioned earlier, in 1976 Wagner had published Your
Church Can Grow: Seven Vitals Signs of a Healthy Church. Here Wagner stated, "The fifth vital sign of
a healthy, growing church is that its membership
is composed of basically one kind of people....Of all the scientific hypotheses
developed within the church growth
framework, this one as nearly as any approaches a ‘law.’ 66
In the same volume
Wagner proposed the opposite of the "vital signs," that is,
pathologies of churches that are not healthy. One of these was "ethnikitis...caused
by a failure on the part of the church
leadership to understand and apply the homogeneous unit principle to their
planning in time. This failure will
just certainly cause debilitation and death in a church as a failure of the liver or the kidneys will in the human body."
A second related disease that Wagner pointed to was "people blindness" which "comes from a failure to
recognize the homogeneous unit principle
of church growth." Wagner had developed these pathologies in 1969 in Your
Church Can Be Healthy. 68
This
two-pronged emphasis on the HUP on Wagner’s part in term s of both the signs of
health and the signs of disease was a consistent emphasis
throughout the 1980s in relation to American Church
Growth. These same vital signs were repeated by Wagner in 1984 in Leading
Your Church To Growth. 69
By the mid-1980s,
however, Wagner was beginning to qualify his view of the HUP. "Every church growth principle has exceptions. Some church
leaders are so accustomed to thinking in categories of true-false or right-wrong that they mistakenly place
church growth principles in those frameworks. This is one reason why the
homogeneous unit principle, for example, has offended many people. They have understood church growth leaders to say
that homogeneous churches are the
right way and true way for churches to grow, when they haven’t been saying this at all. They have simply been describing the
observable fact that, worldwide, most unchurched
men and women are first attracted to Christ by hearing the gospel from those
who talk like them, think like them,
and act like them. Apparently God has been using such culturally-relevant channels of communication for
the spread of the gospel for centuries, just as a matter of history. McGavran calls those channels
"bridges of God." But he has never suggested that a church be kept homogeneous as a matter of
doctrine or ethics. His ideal and mine is a church where lines of class, race, and language are completely broken
down. Are there exceptions to the homogeneous
unit principle? Of course there are. Are there exceptions to the seven vital signs of a healthy church?
Certainly..." 70
Yet in 1987 when
Wagner published Strategies for Church Growth:
Tools for Effective Mission and Evangelism, the eight diseases were again prominently
highlighted with little critique or qualification. Later in this book, in a
section entitled, "Targeting the Cities," Wagner emphasized the HUP approach. "Traditionally, the
geographically distant peoples have been the chief target of those we send to the mission field. But in
today’s cities, culturally distant peoples may be living in any neighborhood at
all, and we are frequently blind to their existence as important targets for sharing the gospel. A first step is to
see them as legitimate people groups who must be reached on their own terms or not reached at all....Some ethnics,
particularly the upwardly mobile,
will want to become part of Anglo congregations. Some, the nuclear ethnics,
will be reached only by homogeneous
unit churches which gear their ministry to a single people group."
71
Three years later
Wagner wrote Church Planting for a Greater
Harvest: A Comprehensive Guide. A treasure-trove of excellent and helpful
information on church planting, this manual works from the basis of the
HUP. "In most American urban areas....geography and culture do not coincide. Webs of human relationships often
supersede geographical boundaries. Social networks play a powerful role in human behavior....Social ties are more
important (to people) than geographical locations. This is why the parish
system where the ministry area of a local church is limited to prescribed geographical boundaries may have been
useful centuries ago in relatively
stable homogeneous societies, but is dysfunctional in today’s mobile urban
mosaic. All this means that when you
select a site for the new church, locate it in a place where the members of
the social networks of your target audience or audiences can most easily get
together....In any geographical territory
will be found different people groups, homogeneous units,
"ethclasses," life-style
groups, social networks or whatever term one wishes to use to describe the
target audience....Skillful use of
demographic information can help you estimate beforehand the degree of receptivity the members of the target audience
will have to your methods of sharing the gospel." 72
In
1996 Wagner published an updated and expanded version of the 1969 book, Your
Church Can Be Healthy, repeating the eight pathologies
and adding a ninth dealing with spiritual issues. The book includes
recommendations from an impressive group of people involved in church planting and
church growth in North America: Ted Haggard, John Maxwell, Lyle Schaller and
Elmer Towns. The second pathology (ethnikitis) and the fourth
(people-blindness) are offered there with little modification from the
way they had appeared in 1969 in Your Church Can Be Healthy, and in 1976 in Your Church Can Grow.
One conclusion we might
draw from the foregoing survey of Wagner’s emphases is that the prominence of
the HUP in American Church Growth may have been the result of its strength in the "vital signs" and the
"pathologies." The importance of the "vital signs" and
"pathologies," may be appreciated by seeing their impact on a
colleague of Wagner’s and a member of the American Church Growth Movement, Kent Hunter. Hunter became the founder
of the Church Growth Center in
Corunna, Indiana and also the editor of what was Global
Church Growth, no known as Strategies
for Today’s Leader.
In 1983, in reviewing
Wagner’s "Seven Vital Signs" of growing churches in North America, Kent Hunter affirmed Wagner’s fifth sign with no
qualification or critique: "A healthy church is one that has basically one kind of membership.
People like to be with people like themselves. They share common life
styles, goals, foods and a common language...." Hunter then drew from Wagner’s eight pathologies or diseases that
inhibit the growth of congregations in North America, stressing without critique the second disease: "Ethnikitis:
The key to understanding ethnikitis is the recognition of different cultural groups
called homogeneous units. The church
must make opportunities
available for people to become disciples of Jesus Christ without leaving their own cultures. If there continues to be less
and less of the old culture in the original church, it will die of ethnikitis."
Next,
Hunter tackled "People Blindness." "The disease occurs when
Christians look at all other people as being the same. It is a
failure to see the distinctives of various groups of people. It is a problem
of failing to accept people as different. Different people are reached for
Christ in different ways...The answer to People
Blindness in the church is to open the eyes of Christians
to see that here are ethnic groups in the so called melting
pot of society who refuse to melt. In fact,
many people are
becoming more ethnic oriented. They are more concerned about their cultural roots....Being able to see the world as a mosaic
of cultures will enable the church to reach out within each segment of society, rather than trying to force everyone
into the mold of the majority. The
result is that more people will be won to Jesus Christ." 73
So one can appreciate
the influence that the "seven vital signs" and the "eight
pathologies" have had in
strengthening the impact of the HUP on American Church Growth. Thus if one were
to ask the American Church Growth
Movement what it would advocate in relation to church planting in America–homogeneous churches or
heterogeneous churches-- the answer is quite clear. In the view of the American Church Growth Movement, homogeneous
unit churches are predicted to
grow–heterogeneous churches will apparently tend to be neither vital nor
healthy.
But let’s take the
discussion one step further in terms of today’s environment in North America. Exactly what do we mean by "homogeneity"
today? Even following McGavran’s concept of socio-cultural mosaics, how do we read our present reality? Clearly what
I would call the "macro-cultural" categories of the U.S.
Census Bureau (African-American, Asian, White, Native American, etc.) simply do not work. Hispanics are sometimes lumped among
whites, ignoring places of origin and
a host of other ways in which Hispanics differentiate themselves one from another. "Asian" is a catch-all term
that is essentially meaningless, given the wide differences between, say the Korean, Chinese (American-born or
Overseas-born) Japanese, Taiwanese, or Vietnamese,
Thai, Cambodian, Laosian, and so forth.
When one gets into
generational issues of immigrant families, the second- and third-generations are so culturally dissimilar to their immigrant
parents that to lump them into the same "ethnic" categories is to ignore some of the most important
features of cultural differences which anthropologists
and sociologists would want us to hold dear. Further, when one begins to take
into account major generational shifts even in "Anglo" culture
(boomers, busters, twenty-somethings,
retirees, etc.) the compartmentalization of society stretches the limits so far
as to produce a profound
balkanization, fragmentation, and atomization of American society. Eventually, "ethnicity" is reduced to
the peculiarities of each individual person. That would mean taking the HUP to its absurd extreme of
encouraging the creation of a church for every person. But maybe this is not so extreme as we think, given
the present North American context. As Robert Bellah and his associates
pointed out in Habits of the Heart, American religion has in fact moved to a high degree of individualization. As
Lesslie Newbigin has emphasized during the last decade, modern Western religious values have become very strongly
personalized and individualized to an
extent that reduces faith to a matter of taste, and eliminates religious proclamation from the public arena. 74
Eddie Gibbs is right
in his warning of the "dangers of overemphasizing the homogeneous unit concept....By
elevating the homogeneous unit concept into a principle which is normative and universal the church growth movement has laid
itself open to misunderstanding and misrepresentation...."
75
Whether
intended or not on the part of McGavran,, Wagner, Arn and others in the
American Church Growth Movement, the emphasis on homogeneous units
tends to stress cultural differences to such a degree that
oneness, togetherness, the universality of the Gospel is in danger
of being lost. This issue is not the same as the ethical, racial, and social
criticisms which many of the mainline church persons leveled against the HUP.
Rather, I mean to point here to the
fact that too strong an
emphasis on the HUP makes its strengths (cultural sensitivity,
contextualization, receptor-oriented communication, careful targeting and wise
presentation of the Gospel in
appropriate ways for specific audiences)–become glaring weaknesses.
They
too quickly can atomize social cohesion and relegate persons to ever smaller
units of homogeneity–completely ignoring the ways in which all persons share
common human traits within a social structure which
calls for common sharing of resources and experiences. In our present
context in North America, especially in our cities, persons from so-called "homogeneous"
groups may in fact represent people who all together attend the same schools, use
the same banks, shop in the same stores, go to the same health facilities, use
the same freeways, enjoy the same entertainments, rent the same
videos, and maybe even live in the same neighborhoods.
To divide these persons up into little "homogeneous units" is in fact
to superimpose a social viewpoint that may be quite foreign to the
reality of North America today. This calls us, then, to consider the
other side of the coin–those who have studied North American reality
from the point of view of universality rather than particularity. We will meet
them in part "D" below.
ETHNIC — The Agents of
mission
The thesis of this
section is that an over-emphasis on universality tends to blind people to cultural
distinctives and will then tend to superimpose one cultural perspective on the
multicultural reality of North America.
The other side of the
coin of an over-emphasis of homogeneity is an over-emphasis on universality to such an extent that we become
insensitive and blind to cultural diversity and cultural uniqueness. If
on the one hand church planting in North America has given too much emphasis to
homogeneous units, on the other hand it is also true that church planting in
North America has at times been
ethnocentrically blind.
As we saw above, multi-culturalness
must not be confused with only race or only ethnicity. Nor should it be allowed
to fragment into atomistic multi-culturalism that points only to differences between
groups and offers no social cohesion. On the other hand, neither is it any
longer realistic or appropriate for social
analysts, missiologists of western culture and church planting strategists to
pretend that cultural differences are not significant. Briefly I want to
mention three streams of analysis in North America–three streams
that demonstrate the ethnocentric blindness to which I am referring.
North American Church
Growth Strategists
First,
it is fascinating to see that apart from the HUP emphasis some of the most
prominent strategists of church planting in North America have
essentially ignored issues of multi-ethnicity. In the
interest of space, I have taken just a brief sampling of works that are
otherwise considered to be of major significance with
regard church planting and church growth in North America.
The name of George Barna
is well known for his demographic and social analysis done primarily through telephone surveys that seek to describe to
pastors and church administrators the unchurhed
people in North American and how they might be reached. One of his most recent works is Evangelism
that Works: How to Reach Changing Generations with the Unchangeable Gospel. 76
This work has much to commend it, and serves well to raise the consciousness of
folks
inside the church as to
how differently those outside the church look at religious issues and church affiliation. With such a title, one would
expect the book to contain solid research on the multiple ethnicities that make
up the unchurched populations in North America. Sadly, this is not the case. There is no reference whatsoever to the
multi-cultural context in which we find ourselves, nor to multi-ethnic or even
homogeneous churches, or to the impact of multiple cultures on the shape of the church. It is not that
Barna says this is unimportant–he simply does not mention it at all. Which of the multiple cultures of North America
is he studying?
A well-known and
important church planting strategist, Robert Logan wrote an excellent manual in 1989, entitled, Beyond
Church Growth: Action Plans for Developing a Dynamic Church. 77Logan offers some excellent, concrete, practical
suggestions for growing churches in North America, emphasizing especially the importance of cell-group ministries.
He suggested ten principles for
growing churches.
o Visionizing Faith and Prayer
o Effective Pastoral Leadership
o Culturally Relevant Philosophy of Ministry o Celebrative and Reflective Worship
o Holistic Disciple Making
o Expanding Network of Cell Groups o Developing and Resourcing Leaders o Mobilizing Believers According to Spiritual Gifts
o Appropriate and Productive Programming o Starting Churches that Reproduce.
One would expect that
Principle 3 would have something to do with the multi-cultural reality of North America. To the contrary. The only
references in the chapter to "cultural" issues refer to the
differences in perspective between church and unchurched persons, one reference
to the difference between
"pre-war" and "post-war" people, and how the unchurched
will view the sign and the name of
your church (presumably a sign in English). Toward the end of the chapter Logan says, "Once your church of culturally
similar people has been established, you will want to look carefully at how you
can plant new churches among distinct ethnic or other culturally different groups from your own. Chapter 10 deals
more with this idea." However, chapter 10 only deals with what a
homogeneous church needs to do internally to prepare itself to support the planting of new churches. It appears that Logan is
dealing only with Anglo-Saxon, white Protestant suburban baby-boomer culture
only. Why is the multi-cultural reality of North America ignored?
A
third prominent figure among the strategists of church planting in North
America is Carl George. In 1991 he published Prepare
Your Church for the Future. 78 When I first saw
the title, I thought the book would help me a great deal with
understanding the matter of being Christ’s
church
in a world of multiple cultures and worldviews. Although the book has some
excellent ideas, particularly with reference to what George
called the "meta-church model," there is not one
paragraph dealing with multi-ethnicity or multi-cultural issues related to
church growth. I would suggest that the
meta-church model was almost exclusively constructed for white, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant suburban upper-middle and upper-class congregations.
One of
the best-known and highly-respected analysts of church growth, and one who has critiqued
Church Growth theory is C. Kirk Hadaway. He wrote a helpful book in 1991
entitled, Church Growth Principles: Separating Fact from Fiction. 79 When I saw
the title, I thought that surely Hadaway
would help me with the matter of planting multi-ethnic churches in North America. Alas, I found no help here. Hadaway
mentions some essential and urgent things like "the most important thing a church can do if it wishes to grow is
evangelistic outreach and recruitment."
80 And he mentions issues of the mix of ages of the members of the
congregation, as well as the matter of
the length of time the congregation itself has been in existence. Hadaway also says, "Churches must understand their
context, their competition and their character." 81
However, there is no mention whatsoever of culture, ethnicity, ethnic churches,
multi-cultural reality, or language issues in
church planting. Is this work also ghettorized within a white, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant, suburban (WASPS) world?
Increasingly
disappointed, I turned to two works written by two of my good friends, both
works published in 1996. George Hunter III wrote Church
for the Unchurched. Seeing the picture of faces
of many colors on the cover of the book, I was anticipating a work that would help
me with the matter of planting multi-ethnic churches in North
America. The book is an excellent overview of the characteristics of
what Hunter calls "apostolic" churches. Apostolic congregations,
Hunter says,
1.
Take a redundant approach to rooting believers and
seekers in Scripture.
2.
Are disciplined and earnest in prayer, and they
expect and experience God’s action in
response.
3.
Understand, like, and have compassion for lost,
unchurched, pre-Christian people.
4.
Obey the Great Commission....Indeed, their main
business is to make faith possible for
unreached people....
5.
Have a motivationally sufficient vision for what
people, as disciples, can become.
6.
Adapt to the language, music, and style of the
target population’s culture.
7.
Labor to involve everyone,, believers and seekers,
in small groups.
8.
Prioritize
the involvement of all Christians in lay ministries for which they are gifted.
9.
The members....receive regular pastoral care....
10. Engage in many ministries to unchurched non-Christian
people. 82
Eagerly I turned to
Chapter Three: "A Case for the Culturally Relevant Congregation" 83
This is an excellent chapter helping people inside the church learn to
lower the "culture barrier" between churched
culture and non-churched culture, especially with reference to issues of
contemporary worship forms, styles of music, and processes of the organization
of the congregation. However, there
is no treatment of multi-ethnic churches, of ethnicity, of crossing cultural
barriers. There is no entry in the
book’s index for "immigrants": or "immigration." Language
issues are not touched. In what
cultural corner is this book located?
From Hunter, I turned
to Thom Rainer who did his doctoral work with Peter Wagner, published The
Book of Church Growth, and is
considered a significant leader in church growth matters among the Southern
Baptists. His 1996 book deals with Effective Evangelistic Churches: Successful
Churches Reveal What Works and What Doesn’t.
84 The book is the product of a
survey of 576 mostly Southern Baptist
churches with effective evangelistic programs in North America. The book is a treasure chest of wisdom
and understanding concerning the growing of churches in North America. The research is excellently carried out and
clearly reported.
I found two references
to "ethnic ministries." One was to note that 130 of the 576 churches
have begun ministries to ethnic
groups, mostly making their facilities available to a particular ethnic group (I assume this means white congregations
lending their facilities to a non-white group.) (pg. 141). The second reference
on page 147 reported that, "most of the churches that did not view ethnic ministries as a factor in their
evangelistic effectiveness were those that did not have such ministries. Forty-five of the 576 (7.9
percent) cited ethnic ministries as a main or contributing factor to
their evangelistic outreach." I found no other reference to
multi-ethnicity, homogeneity, immigration or
multi-cultural reality of North America. Could this work also be located so exclusively among the WASPS?
Researchers
of the Church in North America
Lest the reader think I
am being unreasonably critical of North American Church Growth Strategists, let me offer an overview of some
significant works in the field of the study of religion and evangelization in North America. This survey is not intended
to be exhaustive or even
representative–it is only an illustrative sampling.
In 1993, James Bell
with a D.Min. from Fuller Seminary, almost twenty years of pastoral ministry and a Th.D. candidate at the General
Theological Seminary in New York City wrote Bridge
Over Troubled Water: Ministry to Baby Boomers, a Generation Adrift. Full of good suggestions and wise counsel about ministry to baby boomers, the book
contains a chapter on "The Baby
Boomer Cultural Ethos." Significantly, this chapter has a section entitled
"Cultural Relativism." I
expected that Bell would deal here with issues of multi-ethnicity. Instead, he transforms conversation about
"relativism" and "pluralism" into a theological discussion regarding a plurality of faiths and the uniqueness
of Christ. Important as this is, it is strange that Bell then makes only two
passing references to multi-cultural matters and none to the matter of ethnic church planting. Why is there no
recognition that dealing with Baby-boomers is in fact dealing with a specific,
narrow segment of Anglo, affluent, educated, suburban America?
I
found it curious that Donald Posterski’s book, Reinventing
Evangelism: New Strategies for Presenting Christ in Today’s World, published in 1989 showed
the same mistake found in Bell. The
references to "pluralism" found in a chapter with that word in the
title deal with issues of
inter-religious
proclamation of the Christian gospel among people of other faiths, completely ignoring
the matter of multiple ethnicities and cultures. 86
In
vain did I search in the following works for references to, acknowledgment of,
or suggestions for, multi-ethnic churches in
North America: The reader should note from the bibliography that all
these works have been published within the last ten years. What does it say to
the church in North America that significant sample works like
are essentially blind to matters of multi-ethnicity
in North America?
o Harold Bloom, The
American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation.
o Charles Colson, Against
the Night: Living in the Dark Ages.
o William
Pannell, Evangelism for the Bottom Up: What is the Meaning
of Salvation in a World Gone Urban?
o Wade Clark Roof,
A
Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journey of the Baby Boom Generation.
o David A. Roozen and C. Kirk Hadaway, edit. Church And
Denominational Growth: What Does (and Does Not) Cause Growth or Decline.
o Doug Murren, The
Baby Boomerang: Catching Baby Boomers As They Return to Church.
o Dean R. Hoge, Benton Johnson and Donald A. Luidens,
Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of
Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers.
o Robert Wuthnow, The
Restructuring of American Religion.
The
one notable exception in this group is Lyle Schaller. In three of his most
recent works, Lyle Schaller recognizes the issue, though his treatment is
disturbingly brief. In 21 Bridges to the 21st Century, 87 Schaller lists
forty-eight changes from 1901 to 1950 to 1981 to the present. Among these
changes he mentions the matter of immigration and multi-ethnicity in America.
However, he has no chapter dealing with ethnic churches and nothing
on ethnic church planting or the development of multi-ethnic
churches.
In Innovations
in Ministry: Models for the 21st Century
there is a brief notation about ethnicity and
the church. "Recently, many leaders from Protestant denominations that
served a constituency that in 1975 was at least 95 percent white
decided that the all-white denominations should
become a multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, and multilingual religious
body. This decision means the number-one audience for future
new missions would be black, Hispanics, Asians,
and other ethnic minority groups." 88 Schaller then mentions as
an example of a multiethnic urban church the First
Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens in New York City. This is a reference to
a congregation whose description can be found in an earlier work by Schaller, Center City Churches.
In Center City Churches: The New
Urban Frontier, Schaller included a chapter
entitled "A
Multi-Cultural Church in a Multi-Cultural
Community." that describes in detail the history,
development
and present ministries of the First Presbyterian Church of Jamaica, Queens, New
York City. 89 The suggestions offered at the end of this chapter are
helpful.
"The
leaders of the church write, ‘Out of our experience in multi-cultural
congregations we have learned these lessons.
1.
Multi-cultural congregations grow
best by word of mouth as enthusiastic members
share their story and their pilgrimage in God’s community.
2.
Multi-cultural congregations
grow when leadership is shared and is representative.
3.
Multi-cultural congregations grow
when the community of faith is nurtured through
worship, education, and fellowship in content and relationships.
4.
Multi-cultural congregations grow
as they serve.
5.
Multi-cultural congregations
grow when they extend a warm and genuine welcome
to visitors from another culture.
‘We have also learned that a single-culture congregation
moves to a multi-cultural identity through a combination of hope, vision,
planning, prayer–and surprises. Among the central principles we have identified and can affirm are these:
1.
The inclusive congregations has
its identity grounded in biblical doctrine, especially
that of reconciliation.
2.
A healthy pride in diversity is
nurtured.
3.
Leadership is carefully planned,
both clergy and lay.
4.
Sociological factors are honestly
studied and realistically understood, and these include:
o availability of diverse people
o peer identity for all
o attractive, adequate facilities
o accessible location in a nonthreatening setting o parking and security
o membership
of sufficient size to support quality worship, Christian education, pastoral
care, service/advocacy
1. Structuring and planning in terms of growth patterns,
visible leadership, and a variety of styles of worship are essential.’"
The Gospel and Our
Culture Network
A
third group studying the matter of the church and culture in North America are
persons who around 1990 formed a network for conversation and
reflection called the "Gospel and Our Culture
Network" (GOCN), with George Hunsberger as the coordinator. Some of the
most significant fruits of the group’s reflection were
published in 1996 with the title The Church Between
Gospel and Culture: The Emerging Mission in North America. 90
.The book is organized in four sections: (I) Focusing the Mission Question; (II)
Assessing Our Culture; (III) Discerning the
Gospel; and (IV) Defining the Church.
Given
the nature of the task that this network has set for itself, and given the
obvious importance of cultural considerations built
into the reflection of the group, one would expect to find a detailed
analysis of the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural reality of present-day North
America, coupled with some careful exploration of the forms of the
church which would be appropriate for the
various cultures of North America. Clearly this is within the arena of interest
of the group. In the Introduction the authors affirm,
Every church everywhere will embody a local,
particular expression of the gospel. God intends this to be so to give variegated witness to the salvation given
in Christ. But each
local expression is valid as an incarnation of the
gospel only as it is faithful to the gospel’s
version of what is good, true, and beautiful. If there is too little identification
with the culture, the church becomes a subcultural ghetto. If it assumes
too much of the culture’s perspectives and
values, it domesticates and tames the gospel. The latter has become the major problem for the churches of North
America....
According to such an analysis, the present crisis
for the churches is not a matter of regaining
lost ground or turf....Rather, it has to do with our need to encourage the encounter of the gospel with our culture. It will
mean learning how to be a church that by its nature lives always between gospel and culture, recognizing, on the one hand, the cultural dynamics that shape us as well as everyone
else in this society, and, on the other
hand, hearing the gospel
that calls us to know and value and intend things in a very different way. 91
So
with great anticipation I examined this work as a possible guide to help me
understand more clearly what is involved in being
the church today in North America. Alas, I was to be disappointed.
One looks in vain in the volume for any recognition of multi-ethnicity, of the
fact of immigration, and of a consciousness of multiple
cultures living side-by-side in North America.
In fact, what is especially disconcerting is that there is no examination at
all of what is meant by "culture." itself with reference to
multi-ethnicity in the North American context. This volume demonstrates the
cultural blindness can be created by an over-emphasis on the universal side
of the continuum we are studying in this paper.
A couple of illustrative samples
from the book will suffice. On page 24 we are told, "First, we must pay
attention to culture (emphasis is
Hunsberger’s)." But there is no clarification of which culture,
except at the bottom of the page we are told to pay
attention to each other. "It will require of us a new
range of "ecumenical" partnership if we are to hear the gospel as it
takes form in the variety of cultures, subcultures,
denominational cultures, and ethnic cultures of North America...At
this point, the agenda takes on global dimensions because the growing pervasiveness
of Western culture....has made the agenda Newbigin has fostered a world-encircling
one."
But what is meant here
by "culture" in this use of the term? I would suggest that what is
really being referred to is Western,
WASPS culture which then eclipses all consideration of alternative world views that are in fact present in the North
American reality.
This suspicion is
borne out in an examination of the rest of the book. The excellent chapters in
Part II are helpful if one is thinking of the Gospel’s relationship to Western
WASPS cultural values. But there is no
clarification or qualification in the section as to who the subjects are to whom the word "our" refers. So on page 156 at the end of the
chapter entitled, "The Gospel in Our
Culture," the question is posed, "What is the gospel in our North
American culture?" I realize
that the author of this particular chapter (a brilliant anthropologist whose
definition of worldview and approach
to missionary anthropology I share and utilize all the time), and the various authors and editors of this volume did not
have in the foreground of their thinking the matter of multi-ethnicity–a plurality of cultures–in the North American
context. But that is precisely the
point I am making. Is it by coincidence only that this issue was overlooked?
The very fact that in the volume there
is no recognition of multi-ethnicity and multiple worldviews in the North American reality–that fact itself–should
serve to demonstrate how one particular dominant culture can eclipse all other worldviews in a particular
context. Too strong an emphasis on the universality of the gospel to everyone
keep us from seeing the particularity of the cultural groups that make up that
reality. 92
Now, lest I be accused
of spotlighting only one volume, albeit a symposium volume, let me add some additional titles of works by Evangelical
authors whose thinking I deeply respect and whose theological work in many
instances provides foundations for my own. Each of these books has excellent and important material. I
share many of the concerns and find myself in substantial agreement with much of what they are presenting. However, the
issue of planting multi-ethnic churches in North America has given me another
set of glasses, a different hermeneutical
question with which to read these works, among others. I find disturbing the extent to which they demonstrate the same
phenomenon of cultural blindness which we have observed in others. What does this mean for Evangelicals attempting to
plant multi-ethnic churches in North
America?
Here I will only
mention the titles. In each case I have looked in vain for a recognition that Western,
WASPS culture is itself a particular contextualization of the gospel and a specific
and particular cultural context for the
Gospel in relation to multiple cultures and ethnicities in the North American reality. 93
John H. Armstrong, general editor, The Coming Evangelical
Crisis.
James
Montgomery Boice and Benjamin E. Sasse, edit. Here We Stand: A Call from Confessing Evangelicals.
Harold Bloom The American Religion: The Emergence of the
Post-Christian Nation.
Os Guinness. Dining With the Devil: The Megachurch Movement
Flirts with Modernity.
John
F. MacArthur Jr. Ashamed of the Gospel: When the
Church Becomes like the World.
Dennis
McCallum The Death of Truth:; What’s Wrong With
Multiculturalism, The Rejection of Reason, and the New Postmodern
Diversity.
Alister
McGrath. Evangelicalism & the Future of Christianity.
Douglas D. Webster. Selling Jesus: What’s
Wrong with Marketing the Church.
This
section has sought to demonstrate the effect of an over-emphasis on
universality that seems blind us to cultural distinctives
and then tends to superimpose one cultural perspective on the multi-ethnic reality of
North America. Coupled with section "C," I have tried to demonstrate
how important it is to hold together both
universal particularity and particular universality. On the one hand, when particularity is over-emphasized, as
has been the case with the HUP, atomization and fragmentation may occur. 94 On the other hand, when
universality is over-emphasized it tends to blind us to cultural distinctives and often will move us to superimpose
one particular dominant cultural
perspective on all others. Both of these possibilities may have disastrous and
hurtful consequences in multi-ethnic
and even multi-congregational settings. This, then, provides us with some sensitivity with which to review the
various models suggested for multi-ethnic congregations. Our question, then, becomes, precisely how are they
allowing a balance to be offered in
which the members may experience the complementarity of the universality and
the particularity of the Gospel.
CONGREGATIONS–The Goals
of mission
The
essential nature of the church is that it is a reconciling community, one
family made up of persons from all the families of
the earth, intended to demonstrate simultaneously oneness in Christ and cultural
diversity. 95 This calls for a particular set of special
cross-cultural and pastoral qualities of
leadership, and therefore specific needs in relation to ministry formation. In
this section I will
1. begin
by briefly affirming the dual nature of the church, then
2. suggest
a guideline about church planting in North America that might be consistent
with the Church’s nature. Given this guideline, I will,
3. demonstrate
how the guideline is in fact a consistent application of McGavran’s original
intent and a more recent concession on the part of Wagner. Finally,
4. I
will briefly reflect on what "particular universality/universal
particularity" might mean in assessing various models
of planting multi-ethnic congregations.
The Oneness of the
Church that is Made Up of Many persons
Our
starting point here must be the nature of the Church as that is embodied in the
local congregation. As I have pointed out in God’s
Missionary People, the nature of the Church resembles
the nature of the Head of the Church in having two complementary yet united
aspects: human and divine. The Church Universal can only be
experienced as it takes concrete shape in the
local congregation–wherever in the world that may be. And when we study the
local congregation, we are especially struck by the way these
two sides of its nature coexist. As we know
it embodied in the local congregation, the Church is both theological and
sociological;
both
a spiritual unity in faith in Jesus Christ its Head and a socio-cultural unity
of human relationships that come together in corporate vision, sense of
purpose, shared interests and similar needs.
Paul made a strong
case for this in Ephesians 2:11-11. Reminding his readers that "at one
time you were Gentiles by
birth..." (differing greatly in their ethnic and cultural background). Yet
they are all together united in Jesus
Christ who makes them to become one. "In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy
temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God." They are
socio-culturally many, yet theologically one. So Paul made it a habit of
writing to "the Church" (singular and universal) "in" Ephesus, or Galatia, or Corinth, or Rome (plural in
location and contextually particular). Authentic
congregations that embody the most essential nature of the Church should
demonstrate this dialectical
reality-- they are simultaneously universal and particular.
Wayne Zunkel offered a
helpful way of saying this with reference to issues of ‘blindness."
There are two areas of
blindness of which Christians must be ever aware. Both are limiting and destructive.
The
first is people
blindness. A failure to see peoples as they are. To recognize that culture
is for each person a total thing. Its foods, its values, its language, its
little ways of doing things are all bound up
together....God comes to us. First by becoming flesh and dwelling
among us. By suffering and struggling and by being tempted at every point as we are
(Hebrews 4:15). But more than that, by speaking to us in the heart language we understand,
in ways that we are best prepared to hear....
But there is a second kind
of blindness which afflicts us: kingdom blindness. Not
only must we see the richness of cultural diversity, we must know that God
wants his people drawn together into his own
family, brothers and sisters together.
We see the
breakthrough in the New Testament.... And it is Christ who alone can bring us
together....
We need to see people in their
richness and in the richness of their culture. We need also,
at
the same time, to see God’s dream that we are all his children. Until we see
and understand both those
truths, we have missed a major part of what the gospel declares. 96
Thus it is imperative
that we understand this dual nature of the Church when we consider the matter of planting ethnic churches and relate this
to planting multi-ethnic churches. This greater balance of the two sides of the Church’s nature was emphasized by Rene
Padilla, David Bosch, Eddie Gibbs and
Arthur Glasser. These authors were supportive of many of the directions and emphases of the Church Growth Movement and they
shared the desire on the part of Church Growth folks to be sensitive to cultural matters and desirous of being
culturally appropriate. However, they
each have voiced their discomfort with over-emphasizing the cultural and sociological side of the Church’s nature to the
detriment of its universal and theological. 97
A
Suggested Guideline for Church Planting in North America
If we take seriously
the dual nature of the Church mentioned above, I would suggest we consider a new "guideline" of church planting in
North America. The guideline is this:
Church-planting
in North America should strive to be as multi-ethnic as its surrounding
context.
In God’s
Missionary People I draw from the
work of Alvin Lindgren and Norman Shawchuck 98 in viewing the local congregation as one of many
sub-systems within a larger system. If we utilize such a systems-approach to understand the nature of the
congregation’s relationship to its surrounding
culture, we will soon notice the following. People representing many different cultures
in a place like, say, Cerritos, California, are the same folks who attend the
same schools together, who keep their money
in the same banks, shop at the same malls, use the same hospitals, buy groceries in the same supermarkets,
and drive the same freeways. Is there, then, any reason for them to be
"segregated" when it comes to their church attendance?
On the other hand, is
it realistic or appropriate to advocate the planting of a multi-ethnic
congregation in the middle of the cornfields of eastern Nebraska where my Dutch
ancestors lived? Recognizing that the Church is both particular and
universal, is it not time we move the discussion
about homogeneity to another level and make our recommendation dependent on contextual analysis rather than theoretical dogma?
In North America, are we not dealing with a changing context that now calls for different approaches and transformed
perspectives? Please notice that this
call to consider the planting of multiethnic congregations cuts equally in all directions,
directed to all mono-ethnic, culturally-bound congregations: Anglo, Swedish,
Dutch, Korean, Chinese, Hispanic, African
American, and so on.
McGavran’s
Original Intent and Wagner’s Concession
I believe that the approach outlined above is consistent
with Donald McGavran’s original intent, although
it yields a very different result. In the first edition of Understanding
Church Growth (1970), McGavran
voiced a suspicion that this might become the case. At the end of the chapter entitled "Without Crossing Barriers,"
where we have seen that McGavran developed some of the most basic
conceptualization of homogeneity, McGavran included a small section, "An
Urban Exception."
In
true melting pots, the fact that the Church is a unifying society, different
from any of the disappearing clans, classes, or castes, and
seems likely to supersede them, draws men (sic)
to the Christian faith....The Christian Church in the cities of the Roman
Empire flourished in just such melting pots. She provided a
supra-racial community or ecumenical fellowship to which
city dwellers, emancipated from their provincial and tribal
bonds, flocked in great numbers....I such cities (where there may be a true
melting pot),
some supratribal Churches are growing rapidly by conversion. Congregations
which worship in a standard language and
disregard class differences multiply furiously. In such cities the unifying brotherhood should be
stressed, breaking with the old homogeneous unit should be a prerequisite for baptism, and worship in the standard
language should become the rule. 99
This early suspicion of
McGavran’s underwent significant softening in subsequent editions of Understanding
Church Growth. In the 1980 edition he
preserves the title of the sub-section and says,
"In (melting pot metropolitan cities) some conglomerate Churches are
growing rapidly by
conversion....In such
cities the unifying brotherhood should be stressed and worship in the standard language should become the rule. In most
cities, however, conglomerate Churches are not growing rapidly by conversion.... 100
Then in the 1990
edition, edited by Peter Wagner, the title of the subsection drops out
completely and gets changed to "Common Sense Assumed." "The
church, I am sure, will not deify the (homogeneous
unit) principle I am describing in this chapter....If in a given instance, congregations neglecting the homogeneous unit
principle grow better than those observing it, the church will not blindly follow the principle. It
will be open to the leading of the Holy Spirit." 101
After 1970, McGavran
seemed to make a point of mentioning the possible exception to homogeneity in the development of what he began to
call "conglomerate congregations." 102Although McGavran’s major interest was in whether
such congregations grew numerically or not,
I would like to suggest that there was something else in the back of his mind.
As we saw earlier, McGavran’s
foundational thought had to do with cultural sensitivity that recognizes what is happening in a given context and responds
appropriately. This led him to stress predominantly the matter of cultural
differences between groups. But behind this was a profound desire to be "indigenous," to be contextually attuned
to the cultural realities of the situation in which one was to plant churches. It was by no means coincidental
that McGavran’s first major faculty appointment
when the established the School of World Mission/Institute of Church Growth was
to bring in
Interestingly, Alan
Tippett, a world-class missionary anthropologist and McGavran’s first colleague in the School of World Mission, once
wrote a chapter entitled "The Dynamics of the Bicultural Church." In one section he stresses
that we should "recognize the ethnic units" 103
But in the next section he affirms,
"Recognize the Multi-Ethnic Context." "I have already suggested
that we must go further than just recognize the different ethnic units. We need
to realize that we live in a multi-ethnic world. This is our context."
Tippett then goes on to describe his experience in a multi-ethnic congregation
in Fiji. "We patronized each other’s public functions and money efforts; we shared each others preachers and
teachers; and social events like weddings were quite multi-ethnic. Thus in the fellowship of believers,
although our organizations were distinct and we retired into Fijian, Hindustani
or English at many points, yet we were always glad for the events we shared as a multi-ethnic community,
whether these were conducted in English or were multi-lingual....On the level of the Church as the Body of Christ
proclaiming the word of Christ to the
outside world, we sought to demonstrate that the Gospel was adequate to
incorporate all races....In the
example of multi-ethnic fellowship and witness I cited above, it was apparent
that not only were the ethnic entities
recognized, but they were also working together with their hearts beating as one heart. The diversity was
within a unity. I venture to say these people were ‘one in Christ’ in spite of
their differences. They were wel l aware of the fact that they belonged to
different folds,
yet were also one flock under one Shepherd." 104 It seems to me that Tippett’s emphasis here is in tune with what McGavran originally intended.
C.
Peter Wagner has been changing in his assessment of the HUP, and moving in the
direction of grudgingly affirming the possibility that planting
multi-ethnic congregations may be appropriate. In 1981, in Church Growth and the
Whole Gospel, Wagner offered the suggestion that in specific multi-ethnic situations, the church planter should
consider a continuum from homogeneous to "conglomerate" (multi-ethnic or multi-cultural) relationships
in a congregation. There, Wagner suggested
that primary relationships
are best developed along homogeneous lines, and
secondary-level
relationships might take place in conglomerate settings. Wagner than tied this
in with his well-known "family, cell,
congregation, celebration, festival" typology of congregational life, suggesting that at the level
of "family" homogeneity is best affirmed–and at the level of
"festival" there is a place for conglomerate relationships.
This concession was
significant, since it built on an affirmation that Wagner had made two years earlier
in Our
Kind of People. "The local congregation in a given community
should be only as integrated as are the
families and other primary social groups in the community, while intercongregational activities and relationships
should be as integrated as are the secondary social groups in the community or society as a whole. 105
Interestingly, by 1996
Wagner was willing to view a multi-ethnic congregation with in a somewhat more positive light. In The
Healthy Church, he lists several
solutions as to how one might respond
to "ethnikitis." Wagner states, "Many church leaders, aware that
in the kingdom of God barriers of race
and culture and social class should not divide believers, desire their congregations to mix people of various cultures in
worship, fellowship and ministry." (Notice that these are for Wagner primary relationships, not secondary.)
"This would, by far, be the most ideal
way to handle church ethnikitis. A few experiments in developing conglomerate
churches have succeeded." (Here Wagner
mentions the Church on Brady with Tom Wolf, a church which Manuel Ortiz also mentions.)
"Realistically
speaking," Wagner says, "the odds of success for a conglomerate
church are so low that I include it
in this list of options somewhat reluctantly. I know of many pastors who
invested deeply in such efforts, only
to find that their subsequent failures led to critical setbacks in their
personal lives and their ministries, and I hesitate to do or say anything that
would tend to add to their
numbers...." 106
Harvie Conn recently
edited Planting and Growing Urban Churches: From Dream
to Reality. This symposium contains a chapter by David Britt
entitled, "From Homogeneity to Congruence." I believe what Britt is calling
"congruence" is very close to the contextual approach I am suggesting in advocating the planting of
multi-ethnic churches. After a thoroughgoing analysis of McGavran’s concept of homogeneity, and having noted
the difficulties we face in using it in urban settings, Britt suggests that we substitute a linear, stacked-up
analysis of the multiple institutional and contextual factors that impact
church growth with the concept of "congruity" which compares the make-up and nature of the
congregation with the make-up and nature of the context. Britt writes,
Congruence is similar to
homogeneity in that congruence also assumes that most of us are attracted to others who share like values.
Congruence differs, however, from homogeneity
in that it refers not only to a characteristic of the congregation, but to a relationship between the congregation and its
community context. My adoption of the term
stems from my understanding of social theory, especially that of (Peter)
Berger...
Where
the cultural symbols of a congregation are congruent with those of a local community,
the gospel will receive an easier hearing . Church-community congruence forms
the backdrop for church growth or decline....
The
church-community congruence model argues...that conservative congregations grow
best
when they articulate the values already present in their cultural contexts.
These values may be different from the values assumed to be
dominant in the national culture, but they are community values in
a local sense. 107
It may be that the
concept of "congruence" will offer us a helpful way to allow the
multi-ethnicity of the context to
influence the multi-ethnicity of the congregations we plant in that context. The reader should note that this approach
does not say that planting homogeneous congregations is inappropriate. Quite the
contrary. The "guideline" I am suggesting allows us to affirm the planting both of homogeneous and multi-ethnic congregations. As David Shenk and Ervin Stutzman said in Creating
Communities of the Kingdom,
In a
pluralistic society like North America or in most large cities around the
world, it is desirable to plant both homogeneous people group
churches and heterogeneous churches which are highly diverse in ethnic
composition. Furthermore, it is never right to exclude any true believers from
the church of their choice. No congregation is a true colony of heaven
on earth if it denies membership to a person because of racial, ethnic,
language, social, educational, or economic considerations.
That fact is central to the New Testament
understanding
and expression of church. At the same time, it is right for people to worship
in the language and idiom of their choice. It is for this reason that we believe
it is
both
biblical and wise, especially in urban settings, to plant both heterogeneous
and homogeneous congregations. 108
Models of Multi-ethnic Church Planting109
Eldin Villafañe has
suggested that there are at least four options which address the matter of multi-ethnicity. "The first model is the
‘multi-congregational model’....This pattern is ‘as a corporation composed of
several congregations (Anglo and ethnic) in which the autonomy of each
congregation is preserved and the resources of the congregations are combined
to present a strong evangelistic witness in
the community."
"The second model
is the ‘temporary sponsorship model.’ This model pictures and Anglo congregation using its resources to minister to
the ethnic groups in the neighborhood by aiding them to establish their won ethnic congregation....
"The third model is the
‘bi-lingual, bi-cultural model.’ This is an ‘integrated church’ model, where members of more than
one homogeneous unit hold membership and participate in the activities of a single congregation.
"The fourth model
is the ‘total transition model.’ This pattern involves the planned phasing out of the original congregation and the phasing in of
a new ethnic neighborhood congregation....
The
above models and others than can be added represent structural adaptations that
try to respond to communities undergoing ethnic transitions.
While the ‘multi-congregational model’ may be
the ideal for urban ministries in transition communities, the other models are
viable options. The particular context
of ministry, with its distinct demographic
trends, cultural/ethnic diversity, and socioeconomic
reality, coupled with the ‘health’ of the receiving and the original church,
are the most determinative factors in the Spirit-let selection of the
appropriate model." 110
Oscar Romo has
advocated what he called, "Transcultural Outreach," which he
describes as following at least two different paths. The models he
mentions involve a number of multi-ethnic dynamics
and overlap with what some seem to be calling "models of multi-ethnic
church planting."
Transcultural
Outreach is the effort of an existing homogeneous church to share the gospel
with persons of another ethnic/languave-culture group residing in the community...
The
recent emergence of the "indigenous satellite" approach uses the
bases of the concept (of Transcultural Outreach),
encouraging a continual ministry. Transcultural Outreach provides
a way for a local church to minister to all the people in the community regardless
of culture and language. It also permits the usage of existing facilities
initially. Often this has led to the development of a
bilingual, bicultural church...
Decades
of change in America and the diversity of value systems call for a mission strategy
focused on ethnic people. The strategy should consider the nation, especially
the urban areas, as a related unit made up of people who live
not only in a geographical,
professional, and socio-economic
community, but also in the ethnic community. 111
In The Hispanic Challenge: Opportunities Confronting the
Church, Manuel Ortiz described a number of "ecclesiastical
structures" as possible options in ethnic church planting. He mentioned "Model 1: Growing Alongside,"
"Growing Within," "Growing Without," "Growing Through House Churches," and "Growing Into
(Assimilation)." Without taking time here to describe each of these, it is significant to note that in this
work Ortiz suggests that primarily contextual matters and issues of the historical development of
particular congregations should assist the church planters in selecting from among these models.
Clearly Ortiz’s thinking has progressed since the 1993 publication of this work, and in One
New People Ortiz is wrestling
more deeply with the issues that face
congregations in affirming ethnic diversity while finding processes that positively contribute to oneness and unity.
Here is the issue.
These and other "models" should not be evaluated only on the basis of
whether they grow numerically, nor only on whether the "work"
in terms of reducing cultural conflict and preserving
the cohesion of groups. They should not even be evaluated on whether they are
well-received by the people or groups
in a particular context. I believe the primary criterion on which models should be evaluated is the extent to which
they are able to preserve a contextually-appropriate balance between the UNIVERSALITY and the PARTICULARITY of the
Church. We should seek to avoid both
cultural blindness nor cultural imposition. Thus, given a particular missional context, particular styles of leadership,
specific cultural emphases, and concrete changes occurring over time, the models that best seem to foster a
complementarity of universality and
particularity should be the ones we encourage. In other words, we should seek
to balance the "multi"
aspects with the "ethnicity" factors.
In today’s multi -ethnic North America, we need to
find ways of planting "multi-ethnic" churches where cultural and ethnic differences are affirmed, appreciated and
celebrated. Yet at the same time we
are beginning to understand that ethnicity (particularity) as such must not be
the basis of unity for these
congregations. They are brought together and held together as disciples of
Jesus Christ, as the Church. Their
basis for unity needs to relate to the universality of
the Gospel–but
that universality must
complement rather than eclipse the marvelous richness of ethnic diversity which can be fostered in multi-ethnic
congregations.
Here, then is both the
exciting possibility and deep pitfalls facing us when we attempt to construct congregations that celebrate and embody
the complementarity of the universality and the particularity of God’s mission.
CONCLUSION
The extent to which a
particular congregation embodies the fullness of the Church’s nature depends on many internal and external factors past
and present. Thus a variety of models needs to be encouraged and attempted.
So, what kind of
church should I attend in North America? A Spanish-speaking congregation because I grew up in Mexico speaking Spanish? A
congregation predominantly made up of people
of Dutch descent? Or a congregation of WASPS baby-boomers with a degree from a university in North America? Does it not seem that
such questions are rather absurd? And yet, I also know that my ethnic and
cultural history affects the way I see the world, the way I relate to Jesus
Christ, and the manner in which I relate to other people. In fact, I often find
I feel most comfortable in a worship
service that is bi-lingual in Spanish and English. Or could I say that I feel most at home in a multi-ethnic church?
If the church is for
everyone, why is not everyone in the church?
The challenge lies
before us. Let’s get on with the task of planting multi -ethnic congregations
in North America.
Writer
Van
Engen, Charles: Address: Fuller
School of Theology, 135 N. Oakland Ave., Pasadena, CA 91182. Title: Associate Professor of Theology of
Mission, Theology of Church Growth, and Latin American Studies. Dr. Van Engen earned the B.A. degree in
philosophy at Hope College, the M.Div. degree at Fuller School of Theology, and
the Th.M. and Ph.D. at the Free University of Amsterdam. He has authored numerous books and articles.
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NOTES
1. This
paper was originally delivered at the Ted W. Ward Consultation on the
Development and Nurture of Multiethnic
Congregations, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Chicago, Illinois, Nov.
3-4, 1997." The participants also read Manuel Ortiz, One New People:
Models for Developing a Multiethnic Church (Downers Grove: IVP, 1996), a
work I would highly recommend for the readers of this paper as well.
2. This combination of
universality and particularity, with special emphasis on the Gospel of Matthew was the subject of Paul Hertig’s Ph.D.
dissertation done at the School of World Mission
at
Fuller Seminary. His work will be forthcoming from Mellen Biblical Press as Galilee
in Matthew’s Narrative: A Multicultural and Missiological Journey.
3.
In this regard, I have offered an outline of
Paul’s missiology in Romans in, "The Effect of Universalism on
Mission Theology" in Mission on the Way. (Van Engen 1996a:
159-168).
4.
In Mission on the Way, I spoke of this as a
missiology that is "faith-particularist" in Jesus Christ;
"culturally pluralist," dealing with all the various peoples of the
earth; and "ecclesiologically
inclusivist" all peoples are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb
(Van Engen 1996a:183-184).
5.
Young Lee Hertig,. "Female Leader," Theology
News and Notes 40:4, December, 1993, 14. She is quoting here from
David Augsburger. Pastoral Counseling Across Cultures. Phil.:
Westminster, 1986, 49-50.
6.
Quoted by Eldin Villafañe, Seek the Peace of
the City: Reflections on Urban Ministry. G.R.: Eerdmans, 1995, 47.
7. C.
Peter Wagner, "A Vision for Evangelizing the Real America," International
Bulletin of Missionary Research, X:2, April, 1986, 59.
8.
Orlando Costas, Christ Outside the Gate:
Mission Beyond Christendom. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988, 72-73.
9.
Oscar Romo, American Mosaic: Church Planting in
Ethnic America. Nashville: Broadman, 1993, 207.
10. Jorge
Taylor, ""Preparing Leaders for a Diverse, Multicultural
Church," Theology News and Notes, 40:4, Dec. 1993, 11.
11. San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Wednesday, Sep. 10,
1997, B1.
12. Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, Wednesday, Sep. 10,
1997, A1.
13. Ibid., A1.
14.
Ahlstrom, Sydney E A Religious History of the
American People. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972, 121-471.
15. Ibid., 436.
16. Ibid., 517-518.
17.
Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America: An
Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life. N.Y.:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965.
18. Jerald C. Brauer Protestantism
in America: a Narrative History. Phil.: Westminster Press, 1953. Brauer says, "Thus the early years
witnessed the planting of the Christian Church in America. The Church came in many ways, using many
languages. It came with the Anglicans, with
the Puritans, with the Dutch Reformed, and with the Swedish Lutherans. To this
day there is no one Christian group that embraces all the American
people. It is strange, because each group
thought that it was
establishing its form of Christianity as the true and final form for the New World. This was not to be...By 1646, 18 languages
could be heard along the Hudson River alone. The gospel was preached in
all tongues." (28).
19.
William Warren Sweet. The Story of Religion in
America. N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1930. Sweet says, "From 1865 to 1884 more than seven million immigrants entered
the ports of the United States, nearly
50 percent of whom came from Ireland and Germany. This immigration was mostly Catholic, Lutheran, or rationalist and its
influence upon American Protestantism is most important" (334).
20.
Martin E. Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land:
500 Years of Religion in America. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
1984. See also Martin Marty early thought-provoking and uncannily predictive
work, The New Shape of American Religion. N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1958.
21.
See Oscar Baldemor, "The Mission of the Church
Among the Filipino Immigrant Communities
in Los Angeles Country," (Dissertation Proposal), Pasadena: FTS, 1991; and
Natarajan Jawahar Gnaniah, Developing
a Missiological Basis for Reaching the Immigrant Asian Indian
Community in Southern California (Ph. D. Dissertation) Pasadena: FTS, 1996.
22.
A couple of excellent summaries of this history
have been compiled by a number of people; for example, Juan Francisco Martinez, "Hispanic Catholicism in the
19th Century United States Southwest
(1848-1880). (Doctoral tutorial., Pasadena: School of World Mission, Fuller Theological Seminary, 1992.) and Francis Raymond
Lyons, Growth of Episcopal Hispanic Ministry in Los Angeles:
1980-1990 (unpublished M.A in Missiology thesis,), Pasadena: FTS. 1997.
23. C. Peter Wagner, Our
Kind of People: The Ethical Dimensions of Church Growth in America. Atlanta: John Knox. 1979, 38-39. Wagner is quoting from Louis Wirth,
"The Problem of Minority Groups," in Theories of Society:
Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory, ed. Talcott Parsons et all, 2 vols.(N.Y.: Free Press, 1961), 1:309; and
Tamotsu Shibutani and Kian M Kwan, Ethnic
Stratification: A Comparative Approach (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1965) 47. Wagner adds in a footnote: "Ancestry is also a
prominent dimension of Max Weber’s discussion of ethnic groups. He regards as ethnic those human groups
that ‘entertain a subjective belief in their common descent...in such a way that this belief is important for the
continuation of non-kinship communal
relationships,...’ M. Weber, "Ethnic Groups," in Theories of
Society, 1:306. See also Natarajan
Jawahar Gnaniah, Developing a Missiological Basis for Reaching the Immigrant
Asian Indian Community in Southern California (Ph. D.
Dissertation) Pasadena: FTS, 1996, 19-20.
24.
C. Peter Wagner, in Our Kind
of People; op cit., documents the rise and strength of the "melting-pot"
concept in American social ideology, especially strong around the turn of the century. See pp. 45-48;
95-96.
25. Gnaniah
cites here Don C. Locke, Increasing Multicultural Understanding: A Comprehensive Model, Newbury Park: SAGE,
1992.
. 26.
Gnaniah is quoting here from Donald A. McGavran, Ethnic Realities and the
Church. So. Pas.: William Carey, 1979, 7.
27.
Gnaniah is quoting
from Thom and Marcia Hopler, Reaching the World Next Door. Madison: IVP,
1993, 126.
28.
Orlando E. Costas, op cit., 72-73.
29. Shenk,
David W. and Ervin R. Stutzman. Creating Communities of the Kingdom: New Testament Models of Church
Planting. Scottdale: Herald. 1988, 126.
30.
Oscar Romo, op. cit., 207.
31.
C. Peter Wagner, "A Vision for Evangelizing
the Real America," op cit., 60.
32. C.
Wayne Zunkel, Church Growth Under Fire.
Scottdale: Herald, 1987, 112-113.
33.
Helpful overviews of the development of the
"people group" concept toward the formation of the HUP in Donald McGavran’s and Peter Wagner’s
thinking –and through them throughout the Church Growth Movement–may be found
in Eddie Gibbs, I Believe in Church Growth. G.R.: Eerdmans,1981, 115-130; Wayne C. Zunkel, . Church
Growth Under Fire. Scottdale: Herald.. 1987, 100-119; and Thom Rainer,. The Book of Church Growth: History,
Theology and Principles. Nashville: Broadman. 1993, 254-263.
34. In
his Preface written for the Third Edition in 1955, McGavran describes how the
original work by Pickett, Singh and McGavran was first published in 1936 under
the title Christian Missions in
Mid-India. A second edition in 1938 contained a foreword by
John R. Mott. For the third edition the title was changed to Church Growth and Group Conversion,
and Pickett’s terminology of "mass movement" was changed to "people
movement."
35. J.
Waskom Pickett, A. L. Warnshuis, G.H. Singh, and Donald A. McGavran. Church Growth and Group Conversion, Pasadena: William Carey, 1973,
1-7, 98-99.
36.
In seeking to understand McGavran, one must take
into consideration the context that provided
the background for his thinking: the Indian sub-continent where for centuries populations have been divided into distinct
castes. However, this does not necessarily mean that McGavran works from a racist set of
presuppositions, as some have simplistically tended to accuse him.
37.
N.Y.: Friendship.
38.
Here McGavran is borrowing and affirming the
phrase used by Roland Allen in Allen’s book by that title.
39. D.
McGavran, Bridges of God,
88-92.
40. This
seminal work of McGavran’s includes a very favorable Introduction by Hendrik Kraemer!
41. Donald
A. McGavran,. How Churches Grow.
N.Y.: Friendship. 1959, 41-44.
42. The
emphasis here is McGavran’s.
43. Donald A. McGavran,
"Homogeneous Populations and Church Growth," in Donald A. McGavran, edit. Church Growth and Christian
Mission. So. Pas.: William Carey, 1965, 69-74.
44. Donald A. McGavran,
1965 "Wrong Strategy, the Real Crisis in Mission," IRM 54,
October, 451-461. This was reprinted
in Donald A. McGavran, edit. 1972, 97-107. The quotations here are taken from the 1972 reprint, 103-106.
45. Donald A. McGavran, Understanding
Church Growth. G.R.: Eerdmans 1970 (Revisions in 1980 and 1990). The 1990 revision was done by C.
Peter Wagner.
46. Ibid., 83-87, 210-211. (The emphasis is McGavran’s.)
47. Ibid., 198. See Eddie Gibbs, op cit., 117; C. Wayne
Zunkel 1987, 100; Thom Rainer 1993, 254,
256; Reeves and Jenson 1984, 37; C. Peter Wagner 1976, 110; 1979, 32; 1981,
167.
48.
Alan Tippett, "The Holy
Spirit and Responsive Populations," in: McGavran, Donald A. edit. Crucial
Issues in Missions Tomorrow. Chicago: Moody, 78-79.
49. Arthur F. Glasser and
Donald A. McGavran. Contemporary Theologies of Mission. G.R.: Baker. 1983, 148.
50. Donald A. McGavran, Momentous
Decisions in Missions Today. G.R.: Baker, 1984, 100, 180.
51. Donald A. McGavran,
"Ten Emphases in the Church Growth Movement," in Doug Priest, Jr., edit. Unto the Uttermost, Missions in the
Christian Churches/Churches of Christ. Pasadena: William Carey, 1984, 252.
52.
In a
footnote, Hesselgrave says,
"And so, over the years since World War II
both the vision and the plan.... for world evangelization have slowly emerged.
The slogan ‘the evangelization of the world in this generation,’ has taken on new meaning. People
groups must be identified, described and targeted. Then the gospel must be proclaimed with a view to
establishing viable churches among them."
David Hesselgrave, Today’s Choices for Tomorrow’s Mission: An Evangelical Perspective on Trends and Issues in Mission, G.R.: Zondervan, 1988, 59.
53 Edward R. Dayton and David A. Fraser. Planning
Strategies for World Evangelization. (Revised Edition) Monrovia: MARC; G.R.: Eerdmans. 1990., 50, 72, 102.
54. Frontiers in
Mission Strategy. Chicago:
Moody. 1971, 194.
55.
Donald A. McGavran and Win Arn, How
to Grow a Church: Conversations about Church Growth.
Glendale: Regal. . 1973, 47-48.
56 .C. Peter Wagner, Your Church Can Grow:
Seven Vital Signs of a Healthy Church. Glendale: Regal, 1976, 110.
57.
Donald A. McGavran and Win Arn. Ten Steps for Church Growth. N.Y.:
Harper & Row, 1977, 74-76.
58. Donald
A. McGavran. Ethnic Realities and the
Church. So. Pas.: William Carey, 1979, 7.
59. Donald
A. McGavran and George G. Hunter III. Church Growth Strategies that Work.
Nashville:
Abingdon. 1980, 30-31, 111-113.
60. Donald
A. McGavran, "Why Some American Churches are Growing and Some are
Not," in Elmer L Towns, John N Vaughan and David J. Seifert,
edits. The Complete Book of Church Growth. Wheaton: Tyndale House,
1981, 290-294.
61.
Atlanta: John Knox, 1979, 11. Wagner goes on here
to give as an example of rapidly-growing
churches in North America the ethnic church planting work of the Southern
Baptist Home Mission Board.
62. Ibid., 16.
63. Ibid., 32-33.
64.
C. Peter Wagner, Church Growth and the Whole
Gospel: A Biblical Mandate. N.Y.: Harper & Row. 1981, 166-167.
65. Ibid., 167-168. Wagner cites here McGavran’s
"classic formulation of the principle....’Men like to become
Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers’" (pg
167).
66.
Glendale: Regal, 1976, 110.
67.
Ibid.,
125, 128. Wagner gives an example here the growth and development of Circle
Church in Chicago, stating, "If Circle Church does turn out to be a
mixture of homogeneous units, this might be
one reason why it is not growing. The homogeneous unit principles is a vital
sign of growing churches, not plateaued churches....I still
argue....that Circle Church is a homogeneous unit." (Emphasis is Wagner’s,
pg. 129).
68. C.
Peter Wagner, Your Church Can Be
Healthy. Nashville: Abingdon, 1969.
69. C.
Peter Wagner, Leading Your Church to
Growth: The Secret of Pastor/People Partnership in Dynamic Church Growth Ventura: Regal. 1984,
37. (pg 44).
70. Ibid., 44.
71. C. Peter Wagner, Strategies
for Church Growth: Tools for Effective Mission and Evangelism. Ventura:
Regal, 1987, 191.
72. C.
Peter Wagner, Church Planting for a
Greater Harvest. Ventura: Regal, 1990, 80-81.
73.
Kent R. Hunter, Foundations for Church Growth.
New Haven, Missouri: Leader Publ. Co. 1983, 108-116.
74. See,
e.g., Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western
Culture G.R.: Eerdmans, 1986; The Gospel in a Pluralist Society.
G.R.: Eerdmans, 1989 and Truth to Tell: The Gospel as
Public Truth. G.R.: Eerdmans, 1991.
75.
Eddie Gibbs. I
Believe in Church Growth. G.R.: Eerdmans, 1981, 126-128. Gibbs draws here from Rene Padilla’s very forceful and credible
critique of the theological, biblical and ecclesiological issues
involved with elevating observations about homogeneity to a
"principle." See C. Rene Padilla,
"The Unity of the Church and the Homogeneous Unit Principle," IBMR VI:1, January, 1982, 23-30; reprinted in Wilbert
Shenk, edit. Exploring Church Growth G.R.: Eerdmans, 1983,
285-303.
76. George
Barna. Evangelism that Works: How to Reach Changing Generations With the Unchangeable Gospel. Ventura: Regal. 1995.
77.
Robert E. Logan. Beyond Church Growth: Action
Plans for Developing a Dynamic Church. G.R.: Fleming H. Revell.
1989.
78
.Carl F. George Prepare Your Church for the Future. Tarrytown, N.Y.:
Fleming H. Revell, 1991.
79
.C. Kirk Hadaway. Church Growth Principles: Separating Fact from Fiction.
Nashville: Broadman, 1991.
80. Ibid., 192.
81. Ibid., 202.
82. George
G. Hunter III. Church for the Unchurched. Nashville: Abingdon, 1996,
29-32.
83. Ibid., 55-80.
84.
Nashville: Broadman, 1996.
85.
Wheaton: Victor Books, 1993.
86.
Downers Grove: IVP, 1989.
87.
Nashville: Abingdon, 1994.
88.Lyle E. Schaller, Innovations in Ministry:
Models for the 21st Century. Nashville: Abingdon, 48.
89. Nashville: Abingdon,
1993, 99-108.
90. George
R. Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder, edits. The Church Between Gospel and Culture: The Emerging
Mission in North America. G.R.: Eerdmans, 1996.
91. Ibid., xvi-xvii.
92. A
sequel volume flowing from the same network’s work is Darrell L. Guder, edit. Missional
Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North
America. G.R.: Eerdmans, 1998. I could
find only one reference in this second volume to the matter of multiple
cultures in North America. In Chapter 6,
"Missional Community: Cultivating Communities of the Holy Spirit," Inagrace T. Dietterich
asserts that "As the church interacts with all cultures, the issue is not
to identify the characteristics (language, tradition, beliefs, values, needs,
customs) of a particular
culture and then
figure out how to relate or apply the beliefs and practices of Christianity to
it. The primary issue, instead, is the identify, name, and critique the
ways in which various social realities form
or make–cultivate–a people." I would suggest that Dietterich has the
matter exactly backgrounds. The
pastoral and missionary issue par excellence is in fact to examine the
ways in which the Christian faith may
be presented, shaped and understood annew in each cultural setting.
93. I would encourage the reader to carry out this exercise
for yourself and peruse a number of recent
Evangelical works that deal with theology, evangelism, missiology and gospel
iin the context of North America. I
believe you will find a degree of cultural blindness as striking as that which
I found in preparing this paper.
94. Orlando Costas pointed
this out a number of years ago in Christ Outside the Gate. op. cit., 166.
95.
See C. Rene Padilla 1983.
96. Wayne
Zunkel. Church Growth Under Fire.,
105-114.
97.
See, e.g., C. Rene Padilla,
"The Unity of the Church and the Homogeneous Unit Principle," 285-302;
David Bosch, "Church Growth Missiology," 21; Eddie Gibbs, I Believe in Church Growth, 120-128; and Arthur F. Glasser, "Church Growth
at Fuller," Missiology
XIV:4, October, 1986, 415-418.
98.
Alvin J. Lindgren and Norman
Shawchuck. Management for Your
Church: How to Realize Your Church Potential Through a Systems Approach. Nashville: Abingdon,
1977, 34. See C. Van Engen. God’s Missionary People, 138.
99.
pp. 214-215.
100.
pg 244.
101.
pp 177-178.
102. See,
e.g., Ethnic Realities and the Church,
250-251.
103. Alan
Tippett, Introduction to Missiology,
363.
104.
Ibid.,
366-367.
105.
pg. 150.
106. pp
34-35. See also Thom Rainer, The Book of Church Growth, pg 262, where
Thom suggests that Rene Padilla’s call for the unity of the
Church and Wagner’s later perspectives seem
to be approaching one another.
107. David
Britt, "From Homogeneity to Congruence: A Church-Community
Model," in Harvie M. Conn, edit., Planting and Growing Urban
Churches: From Dream to Reality, G.R.: Baker, 1997, 144-147. Britt’s
conclusions are based on a careful and thoroughgoing study done in 1985 of 70 churches in Jefferson County, Kentucky.
Britt feels the data gathered in that study support
the
concept of "congruence" as being a much more dependable predictor of
numerical growth than the concept of "homogeneity."
108.
Scottdale: Herald, 1988, 138-139.
109.
Given the fact that the participants in the Ted
Ward Consultation for which this paper was originally written were asked
to read Manuel Ortiz’s masterful work, One New People, I have kept this section on "models"
necessarily brief. However, it might stimulate some discussion for the
reader to take note of the pro’s and cons of the options that various persons
have offered.
110.
Eldin Villafañe, Seek the Peace of the City:
Reflections on Urban Ministry. G.R.: Eerdmans, 1995, 54-56.
111.
Oscar Romo. American Mosaic: Church Planting
in Ethnic America. Nashville: Broadman, 1993, 146-147.
112. C.
Peter Wagner, Churchquake! (Ventura CA: Regal Books, 1999), p. 75.
Editor’s Note:
Republished with permission by Journal of the ASCG. Originally publis hed
through Journal of the ASCG - Volume 11 - Spring 2000. http://www.ascg.org/journal/11Spg00/VanEngen1.html