Plunging into the Kingdom Way

Practicing the Shared Strokes of Community, Hospitality, Justice, and Confession

Tim Dickau

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608992584
  9781498212465
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621893301
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

What practices might a community of faith take up that will bear witness to the alternative world Jesus envisions and calls us towards? That is the question that Grandview Calvary Baptist Church, an initially small and fragile group of Christ followers, has kept asking over the last twenty years. Along the way, this small group has spawned a vibrant community of faith that has traveled along four trajectories towards a shared life in community, radical hospitality, justice for the least, and confession leading to transformation. In a culture where individualism, consumerism, injustice, and autonomy shape us all, these practices have re-shaped not only the people of this church but also the neighborhood they inhabit in the East side of Vancouver, British Columbia. For anyone wanting to recover ancient but newly shaped practices of the first disciples, Plunging into the Kingdom Way offers renewed hope. By relating their story in conversation with a host of theologians, sociologists, and philosophers, Tim Dickau sparks the imagination for how you and your friends, your community, or your church can live out the radical vision of Jesus in your neighborhood today. Plunge in and you will discover renewed hope that you can actually follow the way of Jesus today.

five

Navigating the Rapids of Fear, Suspicion, and Alienation

We, who hated and killed one another and would not associate with men of different tribes because of different customs, now after the manifestation of Christ, live together and pray for our enemies and try to persuade those who unjustly harm us, so that they, living according to the fair command of Christ, may share with us the good hope of receiving the same things from God, the Master of all.1

While some might be threatened by the increasing diversity of our urban centers, churches are poised to view such diversity as an opportunity to practice the reconciling work of Christ and to discover the beauty of the image of God in all people. Over the past four decades, GCBC has shifted from a homogenous congregation to a diverse one towards an integrated multicultural body sharing life together in our particular urban context.2 Our movement along this trajectory has been less linear than the previous movement towards radical hospitality. While there has been steady growth in our common understanding of what it means to pursue this practice of a shared, multicultural life, there have also been times when we have become alienated from one another, and it’s felt as if we were paddling in circles without getting anywhere. But these awkward eddies seem to be characteristic of multicultural churches everywhere, and as one woman reported in a research study of our church, she “trusted the vision and can live with the awkwardness.”3

The racial and ethnic homogeneity of GCBC’s past is not simply something from a bygone era, for most church congregations today still reflect this homogenous composition.4 Among many Evangelical denominations, racial and cultural segregation was even promoted as the best way to facilitate church growth via the homogeneous unit principle.5 The quip that Sunday morning is America’s most segregated hour continues to name the reality for the majority of our ecclesiastical gatherings.6

But the biblical narrative traces the movement from one “culturally segregated” nation towards a community composed of every “tribe, nation, language and people.”7 Jesus crosses cultural and social boundaries in his public ministry, engaging and welcoming those who were lepers, Samaritans and even Romans, Israel’s enemies.8 The gospels tell the story of Jesus as the climax of Israel’s story, the story of a nation called to overcome evil and bless all the nations of the world.9 After his resurrection, Jesus confirms that the story of God’s salvation has taken this climactic turn, sending his followers to preach this good news to all the nations of the earth, making disciples among every group.10

The concrete expression of this new community moved closer to reality when Peter came to realize that “God does not show favouritism but accepts people from every nation who call out to him,”11 and then Paul envisioned the church as the new humanity12 made of Jew and Greek, slave and free, men and women,13 a sign bearing witness to God’s reconciliation through Christ.14 The thrust of the biblical story moves persistently towards this multicultural vision. The segregation stretching back to the earliest pages of scripture at the tower of Babel15 is confronted by the gospel message of reconciliation. The uniting work of the Spirit at Pentecost calls the church to overcome divisions—cultural, ethnic, and racial—and embody God’s reconciliation achieved through Christ.16 As the nations of the world continue to move cross-nationally to the cities of the world, church communities will need to seek God’s healing for the divisions within our countries by taking up the gospel’s vision for the peace and flourishing of all things in Christ.

From Homogeneity to Diversity

I looked and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the lamb. (Rev 7:9)

Currently, the composition of our two congregations draws from thirty countries among six continents.17 Within that ethnic mix are numerous races, and for many, English is not their first language. The three hundred people who make up our congregations come from widely varied educational, economic and social backgrounds and include those who live on or near the street and those who teach in universities or serve in leadership roles in business and social services. There are many people struggling to make a living and a few struggling to figure out how to give away their money well.

But the church did not use to be so diverse, for when one congregant joined thirty-eight years ago, there was only one non-white member. Grandview and Calvary Baptist began to shift towards greater diversity shortly after they amalgamated in 1970 and called a pastor of Japanese-Canadian ancestry. Though they slowly began to welcome other racial and ethnic groups, some of those didn’t stay long-term. One congregant who joined the church from the Calvary group gives this broad sweep of the church’s intercultural history:

It is only E. who didn’t fit in [back in 1970]. When we came from Calvary, there were the N.’s—they were probably the only Asians—and then that group of Indonesians came. There was quite a group of them and all their friends. And then the Spanish came and they left, and now we don’t have any dominant group, I don’t think. We are all mixed in, a few of these, a few of those.

When I arrived in 1989, the church was certainly moving towards ethnic and racial diversity, though the congregation was not yet very diverse socially or theologically. There were about five or six races represented, along with people who had immigrated from other countries in the previous decade. However, there was only a minimal attempt to acknowledge, express, appreciate or critique the different ethnic backgrounds. Our worship, theology and mission seemed to be little affected by the presence of other cultures. People were seldom invited to share their own cultural histories, practices or art in our public gatherings. There was some acknowledgment of how our cultural backgrounds shape our perspective, such as in our discussions about the type of leadership needed in our church, but not much. David Anderson disputes that the presence of multiple cultures or races alone makes a church multicultural: “Multiple colours of skin within a church do not a multicultural church make! A vibrant multicultural church allows multiple cultures freedom of expression through a variety of art forms.”18

But the presence of people from other countries brought together those who were visible minorities and immigrants within the congregation, as they shared camaraderie in their experience of being misunderstood and also in their struggle to adapt to a new culture. One woman, the lone congregant with her particular national and ethnic origin, told me that this shared experience with other immigrants gave her a greater sense of fitting in, despite the solitary status of her own ethnic group. This viewpoint was reiterated by a number of immigrants or people of visible minorities when we hired a Black African pastor from Burundi.19 Similarly, a man from Bangladesh remarked how valuable our youth pastor’s experience as the daughter of a man who immigrated from Tunisia has been to him: “Yes, N. is really in a good position. She understands what is happening. She understands us as parents.”

During our visioning process in 1993 and 1994, we were led to name the multicultural vision as part of our church’s mission, and we committed ourselves to be “a church which reflects the richness and diversity of our urban neighborhood and God’s kingdom” and “a community of healing and discipleship.” We began to celebrate our cultural diversity in our anniversary celebrations, and multiculturalism became a theme of our summer day camps.20 With Vancouver’s diverse cultural mix and the church’s growing diversity, we embraced what we believed was the call of God for our church: to move towards greater diversity in our shared life. But we didn’t get there without learning some hard lessons first.

Making Mistakes

In the fall of 1991, a few years into my pastoral tenure, our church received a request from a local refugee agency (with which I had developed a good relationship) to supply Christmas gift hampers for twenty-six Latin American families, mostly from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Refugees fleeing the civil wars in those regions had been settling in the Grandview Woodlands neighborhood throughout the previous decade since there were social services and cheaper rentals. A number of those families showed up at our worship services around Christmas, exposing us to the presence of this population group and piquing our imagination as to whether we could be together as one church, especially since a number of these guests expressed interest in being involved. Spanish speakers were not represented in our church before this time, and our congregation’s welcome of these strangers opened us to seeing them as “the neighbour I have not loved, the alien in my midst” rather than “people who were not like us.”21

A few months later, we were able to hire A., a seminary student who had recently arrived from Venezuela with her husband. (Eventually, we hired them both, since A.’s husband couldn’t find other work.) A. and O. moved into the basement of our house next to the church and started making connections with those Spanish-speaking families. Since many of these families had sparse English skills (including O. himself), A...

Table of contents

• Plunging into the kingdom way
• acknowledgments
• One: Getting Ready for the Ride
• Two: Navigating the Rapids of Isolation, Fragmentation, and Transience
• Three: Navigating the Rapids of Privacy, Possessions, and Power
• Four: Navigating the Rapids of Complacency and Religious Consumerism
• Five: Navigating the Rapids of Fear, Suspicion, and Alienation
• Six: Navigating the Rapids of Blame and Indifference
• Seven: Navigating the Rapids of our Idolatries
• Eight: Navigating into the River of Life
• Nine: Plunging into the Reign of God
• Appendix: Fellow Paddlers
• bibliography