Racial Reconciliation as a Fruit of the Sending Culture
PLUMB LINE:
“We Seek to Live Multicultural Lives, Not Just Host Multicultural Events.”
“If I could do it over again, I would pursue a racially diverse church even if it meant Willow Creek became only half the size it is today.”
I heard Bill Hybels make that rather shocking statement at a breakfast I shared with him and some fellow Raleigh-Durham pastors back in 2006. It is quite a statement, considering that Hybels was a pioneer of the modern megachurch movement, practically inventing the “seeker service.” Hybels built Willow Creek, a congregation that exceeds 25,000 weekend attenders, on the “homogeneity principle,” which is the idea that you can reach more people if you package your “product” for a particular slice of society — in his case, professional, middle- to upper-class white people in the suburbs of Chicago.
Knowing his heart for evangelism, I pressed him: “So you would be willing to reach fewer people just so your church could be culturally diverse? Greater diversity outweighs total number of conversions?”
Without skipping a beat, Hybels replied, “Yes, but that’s a false dichotomy. The corporate witness of racially diverse churches in America would be more powerful, and result in greater total number of conversions, than a numbers surge in any one congregation.”
In this chapter I want to press home Hybels’s point by arguing that the diversity of the church, reflecting the multiethnic nature of the body of Christ, will be a powerful witness in today’s world, one that is timely and prophetic for our generation. Our world knows that multicultural diversity is beautiful, but try as it may, seems unable to achieve it. We in the church have an opportunity to show that the gospel can accomplish what the world is incapable of. And, in line with the dominant theme of this book, I want to show you that the real potential for a multiethnic movement lies in the creation of a sending culture at your church.
Along the way I will share with you some things we, a historically white church, have learned as we have pursued multicultural diversification — insights that I hope both excite you about the possibilities as well as temper your expectations.
Why Even Try?
The first thing anyone who has tried to live multiculturally will tell you is that the novelty of being “multicolored” quickly wears off. It starts with an inspiring blog post and some token friends of color and a lot of “Hey, aren’t we neat?” kinds of pleasantries. But that sentimentality quickly fades, and people go back to preferring friends more like them.
At some point, if you’re serious about this, you’ll ask, “Is it even worth the effort? Is this just the fad de jour of the contemporary church?”
But reflect on this: The author of multiculturalism is God, and he declared his desire for it in his church from the very beginning.
From Genesis 12 onward, we see a subplot at work in the unfolding story of redemption. God is not only bringing sinners back to himself, but is also bringing together the divergent ethnic and cultures that sin separated. The salvation that God promised to Abraham was not just an individual reconciliation with God; it is also an intercommunal, intercultural, and interracial reconciliation with one another.
On the day of Pentecost, the birth of the church, the author gives us a striking and deliberate picture of unity among ethnic diversity. The apostles, filled with the Holy Spirit, begin to preach the gospel in the languages of people from all around the world — languages they didn’t speak and likely had never heard before — to a group of people from sixteen different geographical areas, ethnic groups, and racial categories (Acts 2:8 – 11). The significance of this cannot be overstated: The very first time the Holy Spirit preached the gospel, he did so in multiple languages simultaneously.
This wasn’t a cool stunt or a one-time fluke. It flowed right out of the vision of the church that Jesus had painted for his disciples, a vision arising out of the ashes of God’s purposes for the people of Israel: to be a light to the Gentiles (Isa. 49:6; Luke 2:32). Jesus viewed God’s “house” as a place where people from every nation would come to pray (see Mark 11:17). In Revelation John sees believers from “every tribe and language and people and nation,” united, in all their multicultural glory, in worship around Jesus’ throne (Rev. 5:9; 21:26).
The church between Pentecost and Revelation is to be a “sign” of this coming kingdom, an “already/not yet” picture of what is to come. Paul explains that the unity in the church between people of diverse cultures and ethnic groups signifies to the world the multifaceted wisdom and power of God (Eph. 3:10 – 11). It is a sign of the coming age.
Think about that! According to Paul, the wisdom of God is most clearly demonstrated, not in eloquent, anointed preaching or exuberant, intense worship — but through racial and ethnic unity in the church.
In Acts 13:1 – 2, Luke takes special care to point out that the early church experienced this unity. In listing out the names of the church leaders in Antioch, he gives their nationalities, too. Paul and Barnabas were Jews, though neither of them was born in Israel. Manaen was from Herod’s household, indicating a privileged Jewish upbringing. Simeon had the nickname “Niger” (which literally meant “black”), because he was from the region of sub-Saharan Africa. Lucius was from Cyrene, modern-day Libya. Of the five leaders mentioned, one was from the Middle East, one from Asia, one from the Mediterranean, and two were from Africa.
Why does Luke take the time to tell us the backgrounds and races of these church leaders? We don’t hear anything about most of these leaders ever again. The only reason I can come up with is that Luke wanted to show us that the leadership in Antioch was multicultural. And is it a coincidence, then, that it is there in Antioch that the followers of Jesus are first called “Christians”? It was there, in their unity-in-diversity, that they came to be known by the name of “Christ” — because no other factor could explain their amazing unity.
It’s About More Than Not Being a Racist
When you bring up the topic of racial diversity in most churches, many people think to themselves, “Well, I’m not a racist. So, I’m good!” But God’s goal is not simply to have us stop looking down on other races. God wants unity, not just a ceasing of hostilities. He wants the very makeup of his church to preach the gospel: that despite our racial variants, we are united under one ancestor, Adam; we had one problem, sin; and one hope, salvation in Christ. He wants us to demonstrate to the world that this unity in Christ is weightier than anything that might divide us. When the Holy Spirit confronted Peter’s racism, he didn’t just command him to quit looking down on other races. He commanded Peter to embrace Cornelius, to go in and eat with him. Peter did not go from “racist” to “non-racist”; he went from “racist” to “gracist.”
Thus, if your metric for success is only “have ceased to be racist,” you haven’t fully realized the gospel’s goal. Christ is not after racial neutrality; he wants multicultural unity.
Only 5.5 percent of American churches today qualify as “multicultural,” which sociologists generally define as no one race making up more than 80 percent of the congregation.1 Full disclosure: at the Summit Church, we are not quite at the 20 percent diverse marker yet (currently, we are at 15 percent), but by God’s grace we are getting close. And we are tenfold farther along than we were five years ago!
Multicultural diversity is in the very DNA of the gospel, and a Spirit-filled church will naturally drift toward this diversification. We see this reflected even in how the gospel has spread down through history: Christianity has roughly 20 percent of its followers in Africa, 20 percent in Asia, 20 percent in Europe, 20 percent in North America, and 20 percent in South America. Every other major religion has at least 80 percent of its followers concentrated on one continent. Christianity, statistically speaking, has no dominant culture. It is the most diverse movement in history.
So the fact that the majority of churches in the United States are predominately one culture is an abnormality. Thus, how can a white — or black, Asian, Hispanic, or Arab — church achieve multicultural diversification in its local fellowship?
To achieve unity-in-diversity, each member must elevate their “third race.”2 Think of your “first race” as whatever race or ethnicity you were born into, and a “second race” as all the races you are not. The third race is the new person that God has made you in Christ.
When you become a Christian, you don’t cease to be your first race, nor do you assimilate into the second race of the people who brought you to Christ (if they were different from you). Instead, you become a part of a new race, a third race, though still maintaining your first race. In that third race you find a unity with other believers that supersedes any differences that come from distinctions in your first races. In Christ, Paul says, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28 ESV). He did not mean that we cease to be Jews or Greeks when we get saved any more than we cease to be male or female. Our race in Christ simply becomes weightier than any other distinctions — of gender, culture, or socioeconomic status.
God is not colorblind, and neither should we be. There’s no bleach line in heaven where God makes us all the same. Revelation 21:26 says that God brings into heaven “the wealth and the honor” of the nations, which means he wants in heaven the rich varieties of culture. In that great throng of believers worshiping together around the Lamb’s throne, we still have distinctions of race, culture, and language (Rev. 5:9 – 11). It will be beautiful.
When our third race becomes our weightiest identity, unity becomes a possibility. We will always have ethnic preferences, of course, and there is nothing wrong with having those. I don’t need to hide the fact that I was born in West Virginia to a white family of Dutch and Scottish descent. I grew up in central North Carolina, and that shaped my tastes in music, food, clothing, and what I see as proper etiquette. I can appreciate those things without letting them become more defining for me than being “in Christ.”
The apostle Paul, a “Jew of the Jews,” was thoroughly Jewish, but he wore his Jewishness lightly. In 1 Corinthians he said, in fact, that to the Jews he “became like a Jew” (9:20). Wasn’t Paul already a Jew? Why would he need to become like a Jew if he already was one? Evidently, Paul no longer saw his ethnicity as primary to his identity. He was still Jewish, of course — and would never deny that — but his Jewishness was something so “light” to him that he could take it on and off like a garment. His third race — being in Christ — was more permanent, more central, and weightier to him than even his Jewish racial, ethnic, and cultural identity.
Recently a nonwhite friend and member of our church told me that our music, service length, and behavior in church are much different from what he is accustomed to, “but I so resonate with the gospel and mission here that all those other distinctions don’t seem that important anymore.” His third race hasn’t eliminated his first preferences; it has overshadowed them, however, and given him unity with a group of people he wouldn’t otherwise choose to hang out with.
We Must Balance Multiculturalism with the Need to Reach Whatever Majority Culture Is Around Us
Multiculturalism is a wonderful and inevitable product of the gospel, but it is not the only assignment, or even primary assignment, given to the church. Jesus identified “making disciples” as the core of the Great Commission. Thus, we must balance our efforts at diversification with the need to reach the entire community around us. To do that, Paul says, we must adopt the cultural patterns of those around us, becoming “a Greek to the Greeks.” It makes sense, then, that a lot of our cultural adaptation would be weighted toward the majority culture around us.
You reach Greeks best when you put the gospel into Greek clothes, Greek expressions, and Greek styles (1 Cor. 9:19 – 21). Paul didn’t expect the lost Greeks to become multicultural appreciators of Jewish or Ethiopian culture before they were saved, so he said he would adapt himself as closely as he could to the culture of the Greeks in order to reach those Greeks.
Certain outreaches are best done on homogenous grounds — athletes typically reach athletes best, professors often reach professors best, and yes, one ethnic group is typically most effective at reaching those of their own group. That’s not wrong. It is recognizing a characteristic of human nature and accommodating yourself to it, just as Paul did.
So we must balance our pursuit of multicultural unity with God’s command to make disciples of as many people as possible as fast as possible. It seems that some ministries put so much emphasis on a good thing (multiculturalism) that it has distracted them from the chief thing: making disciples. This is not to say we don’t lead disciples toward multiculturalism (that’s part of what it means to be a disciple), just that we can’t always start there.
Furthermore, local churches this side of heaven will only be a pale reflection of the multicultural unity we will one day experience in heaven; only a sign, and not the fulfillment, of the coming kingdom. At our very best, our reflection will be partial and distorted. This side of heaven, diversification has limits — if for no other reason than we don’t all speak the same language! Language is the most basic element of a culture, and church services, for the most part, can only be conducted in one language.
Furthermore, geography makes certain kinds of multiculturalism impractical. To judge a church in Northern Ireland for not being multicultural when their entire community for miles around is white would be unfair. Only in heaven will we experience the fulfillment of multiculturalism. Can any church on earth say it truly “looks like heaven” yet? I know several multicultural churches that have achieved remarkable diversity, but no one church has the rich diversity or absolute unity we see in Revelation 5:9 – 11, where even language distinctions don’t seem to be a problem.
I personally don’t know any churches that feature both Arabic and Inuit music in their services, even though both of those groups will be worshiping side by side around God’s throne one day. Maybe such a church does exist, and I suspect someday I’ll get a note from a reader telling me they attend that very church, but you get the point: While churches can be a reflection of the coming unity, we will not experience its fulfillment until Jesus returns. Even though all the different nationalities in Acts 2 heard Peter preaching in their own tongues, that has never happened to local Hispanic or Chinese residents around here while I preached. So we have separate services for them in which they can hear a preacher preach in their native tongue.
Thus we must balance our pursuit of multiculturalism with the need to adapt our message into the cultural forms of the community around us. Here is an example of how we are trying to pursue both unity and effective outreach at the same time: We have a Hispanic campus at our church that reaches hundreds of Hispanics. These Hispanic brothers and sisters don’t join in with the English speakers for most of our services, because they wouldn’t be edified by a message they can’t understand. But the Hispanic leadership in our church has chosen not to launch out as their own church (even though we gave them that option), because they want to remain in corporate unity with their English-speaking brothers and sisters as a sign to our community of our unity in the gospel. So each week our Hispanic pastor takes whatever text I am preaching and preaches it to our Hispanic congregation in Spanish. We are one body, under one government, meeting in the same facility, but worshiping in two different rooms and in two different languages.
Some churches seem to confuse multiculturalism with the gospel itself. I’ve even heard some talk about “the gospel of racial reconciliation.” While I understand their heart, I think that’s deadly dangerous nomenclature. The gospel is fundamentally about God’s reconciliation of us to himself in Christ (a vertical reconciliation), and the fruit of that reconciliation is reconciliation with everything else (horizontal reconciliations), including racial reconciliation. (As a general rule of thumb, anytime you hear “the gospel of . . .” and what follows is something other than Christ’s finished work on the cross, chances are a fruit of salvation is being substituted for its means!)
Majority Cultures Must Give and Adapt, Too
Many majority culture believers say they want a multicultural church, but when you get down to it, they really don’t. They want a group of people of different races coming together to worship in their style. You might say they want a multicolored church, not a multicultural one.3
“Do you want to know how you know you are in a multicultural church?” a friend of mine asks. “Frequently you feel uncomfortable.” If you’re not feeling uncomfortable, he says, chances are you are in a church still dominated by your own cultural preferences. I once had a white college student tell me that he wished our church were more multicultural. I told him to keep praying with me about that. A few weeks later he told me that he didn’t like how one of our worship leaders jumped around on stage and told everyone to raise their hands, and he wanted to know if I would tell that leader to back off a little. I suggested to him that maybe he didn’t really want a multicultural church after all, just a bunch of different-colored people worshiping in his preferred style.
The majority culture must learn to sacrifice its preferences, too. In fact, they should lead the way, because that is the way of the gospel. Those in a position of “strength,” Paul says, are to serve those in a position of weakness. Paul tells the Philippians to follow the example of Christ in considering others’ preferences more important than their own (2:1 – 5). Certainly that would have included their preferences of culture. Christians in positions of strength, including cultural strength, are to leverage that to serve not themselves, but those in positions of weakness. Majority cultures in churches may not have to give up their cultural preferences in order to grow numerically, but if they want to serve the minority cultures around them, they will elevate some of that culture’s preferences above their own.
Does that sound like I am contradicting my previous point about a church needing to weigh its adaptation to the majority culture around it? Maybe I am, a little. You have to balance these two principles.
It Is About the Music. It Isn’t About the Music.
On that note, let me address what is probably the thorniest issue Western churches deal with as they pursue diversification: conflicting preferences in music and worship styles. Here is something important I have had to learn about diversification, in all its contradictory glory:
1. DIVERSITY IS NOT JUST ABOUT THE MUSIC.
Some people say, “You want black people in your church? Play gospel music. Want Latinos? Play salsa music. Want rural people? Play bluegrass. Want them all? Play a little of each.”
That rarely works. If anything, it just reinforces the differences between us.
Gospel unity is about something far beyond uniformity on what constitutes good music and good worship experiences. Gospel unity is primarily about intentional relationships and a disposition of humility toward others.
2. AT THE SAME TIME, DIVERSITY IS ABOUT THE MUSIC.
There’s just no getting around this: Musical style seems to be the biggest practical sticking point churches encounter as they pursue multiculturalism. Everybody loves their preferred worship expression, and they can’t understand people who don’t like what they like.
We have some traditional Southern Baptists at our church, and during the musical portion of the service, they sing boisterously while keeping their hands firmly glued to their sides. Occasionally one puts up a hand shoulder high or, during a reflective song, they put out both hands in front of them as if they are trying to carry a TV set. But that is about it. When I stand up to preach, they pull out notebooks and feverishly take notes as if they are writing down directions for a recipe, slipping in an occasional, rousing “Amen!,” especially when I alliterate a point.
We also have some black members who jump and dance (and occasionally run) during worship, and some often attempt to carry on full conversations with me while I am preaching (not “Amens,” but sentences with subjects and verbs and adverbs).
There are also Korean believers who sing so energetically during worship that I sometimes wonder if someone is going to get hurt. They yell (not sing, but yell) the songs, and sometimes I think they are trying to jump up to heaven to give Jesus a high-five. During the preaching, however, they sit back and don’t make a sound. (I asked one why they are so demonstrative in singing and so demur during the preaching, and they said that in their culture it is rude to talk while someone else is talking, particularly when someone is teaching. So their silence is reflective of respect.)
Which of those behaviors is “best practice” in worship?
Well, Amen.
Some of the more expressive cultures in our church look with consternation at believers who remain unemotional in the presence of so great a God. They point out that we scream our heads off at basketball games, but we won’t do the same for the God of the universe? Why would King James (LeBron James) deserve a more rousing response than King Jesus?
On the other side, there are those who feel that aggressively “charismatic” worship leaders play on emotion, building crowd dynamics, and then unjustifiably labelling that “the Spirit.” Loud music, shouting, and a charismatic leader, they say, can get a crowd worked up regardless of the subject matter. Furthermore, unbelievers in the Western context are very skeptical of emotional moments they perceive as contrived — especially when you label those moments “the Spirit of God.” So if you want to reach unchurched Western people, you must guard against “emotionalism.”
Which culture’s concerns are more valid?
Umm . . . Well, again, Amen.
Both sides bring truths that need to be heard. What is wrong is for either side to declare the other’s concerns invalid. We must study our Bibles, analyze our given contexts, and be open to worshiping together with others who express themselves in different ways than we do. Again, the sign of being in a multicultural church is that sometimes you feel uncomfortable, because in a multicultural church there’s a strong chance that the person beside you, or on the stage in front of you, might be doing things differently from how you do them.
We sometimes use the analogy of beef stew to illustrate how we think racial diversity will play out in our church. We don’t want to be a bag of marbles, where each culture exists side by side in a congregation but with interpenetration with the others. We also don’t want to be a melting pot, however, where each culture loses its distinctive flavor. If you mix a hundred different paint colors together, you end up with a dull gray. We want the church to be like beef stew, where each element retains its basic consistency but “flavors” the others, too. That’s cheeky, for sure, but it helps us picture what racial diversification might look like in a local body.
The Staff Should Stay “Ahead” of the Congregation in Diversity
If we want to see multiculturalism take root in our churches, we must prioritize diversity in our leadership. Leadership sets the tone for the congregation to follow. The church in Acts 13 seems to have prioritized — and prized — diverse leadership, elevating and celebrating it. Eventually, the rest of the church followed suit.
Some people object, “But isn’t prioritizing diversity in leadership just tokenism?” Tokenism, as I understand it, is when either (1) you have no intention of actually giving away authority and just want a different colored face up front to make it look as if your leadership is diverse; or (2) you put an unqualified person in a position of leadership simply because of their skin color.
Tokenism is insincere, but intentionally pursuing diversity in leadership is different. Pursuing diversity deliberately in your leadership sends a signal about your intentions: “We may not yet be as diverse as we want to be, but this is where we want to go.” I once visited a large, all-black church with a white friend. I think my friend and I were the only white people in the whole place, and I felt like everyone was looking at us, wondering, “Why are you here?” They were extremely friendly to us, but I still felt out of place.
If just one white person had walked across the stage, I would have felt, “Oh, I belong here. He’s like me.” Maybe I shouldn’t have felt the way I did, but the fact is, I did. That experience helped me understand how blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or Arabs must feel when they step into our church and see nothing but a sea of white.
We try to have minority presence in positions of leadership in every service at the Summit Church, and we have elevated several new pastors and elders of color into senior leadership positions on our team. We have begun training numerous others for future leadership positions. We have seen the number of qualified pastors and leaders of color multiply as we do so. As of this writing, 60 percent of our central worship staff is black, and four of our eight campus pastors are nonwhite.
The point of pursuing diverse leadership is not to present an image, but to actually bring a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives to the table. This kind of cultural diversification will rarely happen without intentionality. Left to ourselves, we veer back to the ditch of homogeneity. Achieving diversity takes intentional, diligent gospel leadership.
Live Multicultural Lives, Not Multicultural Events
Gospel multiculturalism is not a weekend show; it is a way of life.
Before you bemoan the lack of diversity in your church, ask yourself:
Are you pursuing intentional friendships with people of other races?
This interpersonal connection is more important than finding a worship style that white, black, and Hispanic people all like. God did not call us to put on a multicultural display on the weekend; he called us to live out a multicultural wonder the whole week. When we begin to live multicultural lives, our events will naturally take on a multicultural flavor.
Some of us should consider cross-cultural engagement in our own communities a “calling.” Multicultural engagement within your city, like international missions, is something that all believers are expected to participate in, but that God moves certain believers to pursue with focused intentionality. The apostle Paul was in that category. Some of us (under the leadership of the Spirit) need to make this cause our cause. After all, it makes no sense to send people 10,000 miles across the globe to reach people of other cultures when we won’t send people ten miles across our own city to reach people in different neighborhoods. Why would we cross the seas but not the tracks?
Earlier in this book I brought up our “Dwell” initiative, in which singles and families from our church have intentionally moved into a different, less culturally familiar neighborhood for the purpose of integrating their lives and living out the gospel there. It has turned out to be a powerful testimony to our community. Perhaps you should pray about God sending you, or a group of friends from your church, into another part of your own community to live out the gospel this way.
Even if you’re not specially “called” to focus on this, however, we are all commanded to intentionally form relationships with people outside of our comfort zones. In that way, Paul said, we model Christ (Phil. 2:1 – 5) and declare the multifaceted, richly beautiful wisdom of God (Eph. 3:10 – 11). Following Jesus means going “outside the camp,” even in your own city or school (Heb. 13:13).
We Are at a Kairos Moment Regarding Race
The Declaration of Independence of the United States made the greatest statement about the equality of races ever put forward in a secular government document: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Yet, before the ink on the page was dry, many of its framers had returned home to their slaves.
Our country has always had the highest aspirations on this issue, but we have never been able to achieve the racial harmonization we desire. Even today.
I saw a recent article in The Atlantic magazine that showed how even those individuals who say they prefer mixed-race neighborhoods still gravitate toward neighbors of their own race once they have moved into those neighborhoods.4 Racial integration works better as a theory than as a sociological reality.
What the world wants, the gospel accomplishes. Paul said, “For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son . . .” (Rom. 8:3). The United States Constitution, like all laws, is sufficient to tell us how we should be, but insufficient to make us that way. For fallen human nature, laws function like railroad tracks: they lay out the path we ought to travel on, but are powerless to move us along the tracks.
The gospel is the engine that moves us toward fulfillment of the law.
African-American pastor Tony Evans says,
Our racial divide is a disease. Over-the-counter human remedies won’t fix it; they merely mask the symptoms for a season. What we need is a prescription from the Creator to destroy this cancer before it destroys us. It is my contention that if the church can ever get this issue of oneness right, then we can help America to finally become the ‘one nation under God’ that we declare ourselves to be.5
That prescription is the gospel. Evans continues,
The reason we haven’t solved the race problem in America after hundreds of years is that people apart from God are trying to create unity, while people under God who already have unity are not living out the unity we possess. The result of both of these conditions is disastrous for America. Our failure to find cultural unity as a nation is directly related to the church’s failure to preserve our spiritual unity. The church has already been given unity because we’ve been made part of the same family.6
When the church demonstrates the unity between races that our society yearns for, we will show that there is only one God who can save, only one God who accomplishes that for which our hearts yearn.
Sadly, however, it seems like the majority of the Western church is still behind the world in racial integration. We all know Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quip, “Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America.” Movies frequently depict churches as racist and bigoted. While some of that depiction may be unwarranted, much of it is based in truth.
The racial unity our nation thinks it is achieving, however, frequently reveals itself to be an illusion, and most sociologists recognize that. In the last decade, numerous events have revealed the deep divide remaining between whites and blacks in the United States: the Duke Lacrosse case; the Trayvon Martin shooting; and the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, being recent examples. Recent discoveries of email correspondence between Hollywood executives reveal a deep racial divide among the people who often fulminate the loudest against racial injustice.7
That’s why I say we, in the church, are at a kairos moment regarding race. Kairos is a Greek word for time that implies a specially appointed moment. I believe that God has appointed this moment for the church in the West to demonstrate a unity in Christ that the world yearns for but has yet been unable to obtain. What the flesh is unable to do through the law, God does by his Spirit through the gospel.
Rodney Stark, in The Rise of Christianity, points to the multicultural unity of the early church as among the primary factors that led to its growth explosion. The Roman Empire, he says, brought various cultures into close proximity in megacities for the first time in human history. Unprecedented racial strife plagued these cities. Local churches, Stark says, were the one place in the Roman Empire where races got along without social hierarchies.8 As the Roman world watched in amazement, these Christians explained that their unity came from the fact that Jesus was not raised from the dead for their sins as a Jew, or a Greek, or a Roman, but as the Lord of all humanity and the Savior of all races.
I believe we are in just such a kairos moment today. Humanity has a common problem, sin, and a common Savior, Jesus. Multiculturalism in the church puts on display our common humanity and common salvation and glorifies the Firstborn of all creation.
The great news is that the Spirit of God really wants to do this, so we have to just stay out of his way. The apostle Paul charged the Ephesians to “preserve” the unity of the church (4:3). Preserve means he didn’t expect the Ephesians to create it — the gospel and the Spirit would do that. They just needed to cultivate and protect it. The Spirit does the heavy lifting.
If we will step back, I believe the Spirit will do a marvelous work of unification in our generation.
Multiculturalism 2.0: Church Planting
Maybe you are wondering how all this applies to the theme of this book: The future belongs to churches that send.
It does in at least three ways: First, as Bill Hybels said, you may sometimes have to choose (temporarily, at least) between a numbers surge you can achieve through homogenous ministry and building a multicultural community of faith.
Like Hybels, I believe the long-term evangelistic effectiveness of a multicultural church will be greater than the temporary jolt of a numbers surge brought on a homogenous ministry. A group of 25,000 white people gathering to listen to great music and an entertaining speaker is not really a demonstration of the power of God. It happens in a Justin Bieber concert. By contrast, a group of people who come together around Christ when they have little else in common declares that God has the power to save.
Second, in order to achieve multicultural unity, churches and individual believers are going to have to learn to live “sent” to the other cultures right in their own cities, cultures distant and unfamiliar to them right in their backyards. If churches continue to coast along, simply watching to see who shows up in church each week, in five years the Christian society will be no more multicultural than it is today.
Third, the greatest displays of multicultural unity will probably happen in the churches we plant, churches that write this into their DNA from the beginning.
Civil rights activist John Perkins, after preaching at our church, said to me,
The American church will probably soon achieve the levels of diversity many of us have always yearned for, and always knew were possible . . . but mostly likely not through majority churches diversifying themselves — though they should pursue that. It will come through the planting of new, deliberately multicultural churches.
As many parents realize, our “children” can be greater than us. They can learn from our mistakes and stand on our shoulders to achieve heights we have only dreamed of.
This is not to say we established churches should not be pursuing diversity, too, just that it will come more naturally to our “children.” As I noted, the Summit Church is a large, majority-white church that has been pursuing cultural diversification, and by God’s grace, we are making progress. But we are excited to see what God does through churches we plant that establish this as one of their values from the beginning.
So, even in this, the future belongs to churches that send.