How to Become a Multicultural Church by Douglas J. Brouwer

Author:Douglas J. Brouwer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

The point I want to make with this listing is that there is no single model, no right way, to become a multicultural church. What seems to be more important than the model is the intention or the desire to be multicultural. As I have argued in a previous chapter, that remains the key.

A long, and not always distinguished, track record

The Christian church may seem like an unusual place to look to for cultural sensitivity and healthy cross-cultural relationships.

Anyone who has read James Michener’s Hawaii or has seen a movie like Mosquito Coast is likely to think of the influence of the church as destructive, incapable of much cultural sensitivity. As Michener depicted the missionary movement to Hawaii, the unspoiled indigenous culture was overrun by boorish Western missionaries who were intolerant of the “heathen” gods and the “savage” customs of the people they found. In addition to Christian faith, the missionaries brought disease, intolerance, and eventually capitalism. Until recently, missionaries were often condemned as exporters of American civilization first and Christian faith second.

More recent treatments of the nineteenth-century missionary movement have been more nuanced and much more charitable. It seems likely that some of these early missionary efforts were indeed fueled by racist assumptions and dominant culture superiority, but what also seems likely is that these Christian missionaries were among the first to try to understand and engage other cultures. The Wycliffe Bible translators, to give one small example, have now translated the entire Bible into 531 languages and the New Testament into a total of 1,329 languages (the numbers are from their own website). In the process, Wycliffe has played a major role in linguistic development and language preservation. More than a few cultures around the world might have disappeared altogether were it not for the work of Wycliffe and others.

Whatever the criticisms of the missionary movement, and however justified those criticisms might be, the underlying impulse of the Christian faith is to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” This missionary impulse has brought Christian faith to nearly every country on the planet. Some of this work has been so successful, in fact, that some of these countries are now returning the favor by sending missionaries back to the countries where the missionary movement originated.

The result of this powerful missionary impulse is that Christians generally and the church specifically have been doing the work of engaging with other cultures for a long, long time.

Peter and Cornelius

The description of the early church in the book of Acts contains a surprising number of conflicts, many of them cultural in nature. Anyone who thinks that the church, which had its start at Pentecost, expanded smoothly and continuously until it reached Rome should reread the book, especially the early chapters. A number of critically important issues had to be sorted out. The big one, of course, concerned Gentiles and what to do with them.

This is how a dominant culture thinks: Secondary cultures are often problems to be managed.

The dominant culture in

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