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Multicultural church planting: The challenge
There is a lot of talk about strategic church planting into cities, but many cities in the UK are changing very quickly due to migration patterns and different birth rates. Projected figures say that in the next decade, several cities in the UK will number “White – British” people in the minority for the first time in history.
I believe that the speed of this change, and a perceived difficulty in crossing cultures means that often non-white areas can be a kind of ‘elephant in the room’ when church plants are being planned and launched.
If we don’t rise to this challenge more intentionally, then I believe we could miss a huge opportunity and end up simply planting more churches into the “easier” suburbs, whilst overlooking, or putting off planting into the “harder” multicoloured neighbourhoods. The danger is that we could easily find that some cities have huge neighbourhoods and populations that are not being served or reached in any relevant, contextualised way and have virtually no targeted church planting.
We moved to a very multicultural part of Birmingham about 12 years ago, and once we were through the initial trepidation of living in an inner city, we found that it is actually really friendly and very easy to meet people, share hospitality and engage with people about spiritual things – all fantastic for a church planter!
Before we began this church plant, we had virtually no experience of any kind of cross cultural work, and have obviously made a lot of mistakes, but have always found people to be forgiving and have seen God’s Grace being more than sufficient to sort out any mess we have left behind. Despite our shortcomings, we now have many close friends from different cultures and have been welcomed into people’s homes and shown overwhelming hospitality again and again.
Over the years we have gathered a church which is now about half non-white and is made up of many nationalities.
I don’t believe that multicultural churches just happen; I think that the intention needs to be at the core of what we do from day one. This means that it is therefore generally much easier to plant multicultural churches than to try to transition an existing church towards being multicultural.
For us, the starting point was a theological belief that as all nations will worship around God’s Throne in Heaven, it was something we should also work towards on Earth. The more I have re-read the Bible, the more God’s plan for reconciliation and all nations jumps off the page.
As we have had prayers in Tamil, Farsi, Spanish and Panjabi and have had Nigerians lead us in prayer; heard insights into the Bible from Kurds and enjoyed Latino socials, it has been looking at God and His Church through 3D glasses, allowing us to live with a bigger sense of God’s Glory and worldwide plans.
Ephesians 3:10 says:
(God’s) intent was that now, through the church, the manifold (multicoloured) wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms
My experience is that people inside and outside the church see something of God’s Wisdom demonstrated as “dividing walls” are pulled down and different cultures are united under Christ. In multicultural cities, this can be a very clear prophetic demonstration that causes the Church to stand out from every other institution and religion. Often visitors have made comments along these lines and have been struck by the genuine depth of community and unity across cultures.
Of course there are difficulties too; as I have re-read Corinthians, I have recognised many of their issues as being challenges in building multiculturally – at times it has been like reading an instruction manual as we have thought through how we deal with food sacrificed to idols!
It takes time to work through all the issues that different cultures raise and that has meant that, for us, I’m sure that initially, building a multicultural church has been slower than simply reproducing a homogeneous church style that we have seen before.
But any difficult issues or challenges are easily outweighed by the many positives – the most wonderful multicultural family; and the privilege of making Jesus known to people that have never heard the Gospel.
We as a family of churches are called to go where there are ‘no well-worn paths.’ It is my prayer that all over this nation, as well as overseas, we will plant many churches that will forge ahead across cultures and demonstrate God’s Manifold Wisdom to this nation.
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