Transitioning from an Ethnic to a Multicultural Church

A Transformational Model

Byoung Ok Koo

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532680847
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Multicultural churches help us understand God's will for us to become one in this multicultural world and experience a heavenly gathering in advance. This book, based on case studies of four multicultural churches, provides insights and knowledge regarding minority-dominant multicultural churches in the United States. Many multicultural churches in America are mainly concerned about racial reconciliation between the white and the black. On the other hand, resources concerning minority-dominant multicultural churches are scant. With the special attention on Korean immigrant churches, this book contributes to the body of knowledge regarding minority-dominant multicultural churches. Specifically, this book provides a model transition process, called the Windmill T-process, to facilitate the movement of monocultural/monoethnic churches in taking steps towards acquiring the characteristics of multicultural churches. In addition, this book touches on the issue of evangelism in the multicultural church. Although there is limited insight, the book describes what factors first draw different racial/ethnic people to a church and what factors cause them to stay there. All in all, this book will guide you to a deeper understanding on multicultural churches and its practices for all nations beyond ethnic/racial identities.

1

Introduction

My interest in multicultural congregations emerged from my personal experiences at Madison Square Church (Madison hereafter) in Grand Rapids, Michigan while I was attending Calvin Theological Seminary between 2004 and 2007. In one of my memories of this church, there is a crying woman whom I will never forget.

The woman cried when my wife told her that she was pregnant. It was right after the Sunday worship service in the crowded church lobby where there was no space to move. When my wife found her and informed her of the pregnancy, she immediately started to shout and leap for joy like a child, unconcerned with the reactions of the people around her. She then prayed with tears. It seemed she could not be more joyful for such a great unexpected gift. The woman was Caucasian, around sixty years old, intelligent, tall, and a well-dressed church member. She was a prayer servant in the church and had known that we were praying for a baby. So after my wife had two miscarriages in the six years after we married, the pregnancy was a miracle for us.

My wife and I joined Madison shortly after our arrival in the United States in 2004. It was the first time in my life to observe and experience a multicultural church.1 My initial goal was only to see an American church. I did not imagine that I would instead become a member of a multicultural church that would give me a picture of what the heavenly gathering will be like after Christ’s return.

There is one other significant occasion that also caused me to think deeply about multicultural churches—this time about the ability of Korean churches to reach out to non-Koreans. Shortly after I arrived at Asbury Theological Seminary in 2007, God led me to serve a Korean immigrant church (Korean Presbyterian Church of Cincinnati: KPCC) as its educational pastor. Because KPCC was a small church with about 30 Sunday worshippers, there were only four students in my children’s Sunday school program. These students often missed Sunday worship, sometimes leaving me with no students at all. It seemed there was no opportunity for growth in my Sunday school because the church’s members had no children except those four students, and the congregation was located in a community which had no Korean neighbors.

Under these circumstances, God filled us with a desire to reach out to the non-Korean children in our community. Because my Sunday school class was conducted in English, expanding our outreach beyond the Koreans of the church seemed reasonable. When we went out to get to know some of our neighbors, we met two Nepali teenagers on the street. We invited them to church, and they started to come the next week. Soon after, whenever the church would hold special worship services such as at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, or a picnic, the number of Nepali attendees would often outnumber the Korean members of the congregation. As a result, the Korean church members learned how to joyfully serve these Nepalese neighbors through a combination of Word and deed. The children’s Sunday school grew to have about 20 to 25 Nepali students and a few parents every Sunday. However, when an existing Nepali church decided to move to within close to our congregation, KPCC and the Nepali church decided together to merge the (Nepali) children’s Sunday school into the Nepali church, so that the children could worship and learn in their own heart language. KPCC implemented this decision in the late Spring of 2012; however, unexpectedly almost all of the Nepalese children decided not to go to the Nepali church.

In spite of my sweet memories at Madison and the blessings of the Nepali ministry at KPCC, I can see that there are several challenges facing the church in America with regard to multicultural ministry.

Challenge of Korean Immigrant Churches

Most Korean Protestant churches in the United States are oriented only toward reaching out to other Koreans, forming a Christian ethnic ghetto, and are not effective in reaching out to non-Koreans despite being a part of a globalized multicultural society; they do not know how to do this well, even though they are often located in multi-ethnic neighborhoods and are called to serve all nations.

While minority populations are growing explosively and are becoming more and more diverse in terms of people and their cultures in the United States, most churches focus on their own ethnic groups, and relatively few churches strategically reach out to others of different ethnic/racial backgrounds.2 Korean immigrant churches are no exception.

The US Census for the year 2010 showed that within the 308.7 million total US population, the minority population was 111.9 million (36percent).3 According to the US Census Bureau, minorities, rather than non-Hispanic and single-race whites, will become the numerical majority by 2042.4 Diversity is a reality that we cannot avoid. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, less than 6 percent of American churches are multicultural (defined as churches where one single ethnic or racial group does not exceed 80 percent of the total membership). In other words, most churches are not ready to embrace people of other ethnicities and may not even want to. The problem is, while Christians are focusing only on reaching people of their same ethnic/racial backgrounds, many unchurched others are in “blind spots” in the evangelization ...