Returning to the question of who we are trying to reach
I want to have a bit more conversation about who our church plant is trying to reach. While I am excited that we are uniquely able to reach Indians (b/c we are Indians) I am also scared at the same time. And I know Anu is too.
Anu & I have been part of non-Indian churches for the last 12 years (Calvary Chapel for 10 years, Grace Covenant for less than a year and now Bridge Community for 8 months) . So the Indian, Mar Thoma world is not even in my rearview mirror…it’s just a very distant memory. My biggest concern is that who and what we are at the begining will reflect, for the most part, who and what our identity will always be as a church. That’s why its critical for us to determine from the begining what the DNA for our church should be. Because, like it or not, that’s probably what we will look like in the future. I know we can “re-invent” the church later, but that is awefully hard to do.
I understand why the Act29 people encourage us to reach the Indians, b/c they cannot easily reach them. But as much as that is our strength, that could also be our weakness and downfall. Even implicitly, I don’t want to communicate to Indians that the church is a place to foster their Indian identity. If we were in India, then maybe, but not here in America. Like it or not we Indians in America have been re-rooted in a land where there is a different ethnic and racial mix. So every day, at work or in school, we are forced to interact and build relationships with people who are in many ways different than us. The church shouldn’t homogonize that mix, but instead go one step further into breaking down even more dividing walls of hostility that exist in our culture and society.
The church should re-root our identity from our race & ethnicity to our identity in Christ. A white church or a Korean church should want to be racially diverse. And a white church that wants to be multi-cultural will struggle to bring in people of different ethnicity….so will a Korean church. But the struggle is good! We Indians should make it a point to struggle for ethnic and racial diversity, right from the beginning…so that its in our DNA.
So all Indians are welcome, but they shouldn’t be able to use the church to foster a hidden desire to create an Indian sub-community. All non-Indians are welcome, but they should never feel, even sub-consciously, that they are second class members — standing on the outside of the inner circle.
Being away on vacation this past week in the South (sort of a bible belt area) has made me think alot about this. It’s sad how many people in the South associate being Christian as synonomous with being American. That’s probably because the church has associated their nationalism into the church culture. In essence the churches have said (at the very least by their actions), “the gospel +” ….added to the gospel message another component. My fear is that we too will teach more than the gospel to Indians who have disordered loves —- putting their ethnic identity on par with their identity in Christ.
What do you all think? How does this affect our vision? Also, how does it affect the make-up of our core group?
Ok, here’s a lengthy response. (Shainu tells me my posts are too long…so I’m issuing the warning right off the bat.) Saju & Anu, so grateful for your honesty. Your questions are dead on and stuff that we’ll have to wrestle with. Here are some of my reflections after chewing on it for a little while. I wish these were concrete answers, but they’re probably more just thoughts to add onto the conversation…
a) The church we plant will never have the adjective Indian or even Second Generation added to it. You’re right – we’re not in India, and so we can never become exclusively Indian in vision or in practice. Instead, we want to attach adjectives like Biblically faithful, Christ-centered, and missional. Those aren’t clichés; those are words that describe the heartbeat we long for. And those words force us to expand beyond any single ethnicity. They compel us to be open to any human being irrespective of background. If you look back to our vision, our first two points (and I would argue most important points) are not in anyway exclusively Indian in scope. We want to plant a church in obedience to the Great Commission of Christ. And we want to see the city of Philadelphia redeemed by the transforming power of the Gospel. While we are hoping that the planting of a church among us would have ripple effects in the Indian community to the glory of God, those two points alone justify and motivate us to move towards church planting. So theologically, we are committed to a multi-cultural church.
b) While we long to see God bring people from every culture to our church, we can’t escape the fact that our lead planter and current Core Group will attract Indians, almost without trying. At Edgeworth, Matt Kruse is a white guy from Boston and there are a ton of white guys from Boston at the church. At Epiphany Fellowship, Eric Mason is an African American and there are a ton of African Americans attending his church. Geoff Bradford at Liberti, and Rob Burns at ReaLife are young white guys, and there are a bunch of young white guys at their church. I’m not saying something new here and don’t mean to belabor the point. But almost automatically, we will attract Indians. Fine. Let it be so to the glory of God that hundreds of Indians who don’t know Jesus would come to know Him as Lord!
If this is the inevitable reality, what will be important is the struggle. My favorite line of Saju’s post was, “But the struggle is good!” Amen. We have to constantly live in that tension of never being satisfied with an ethnically homogenous church. We must constantly struggle to be ethnically diverse. We’ll work to attract Indians…great. We’ll work to attract everyone…great!
c) I’m not worried that our Core Group is so Indian. Over these last four years, we’ve shared this vision/conversation with lots of folks, and people from other ethnicities. Somehow, these are the 16 people we have at this point. Who we are right now is not who we were when we started talking in 2003 and we don’t even know who we’ll end up being come 2008. So I trust God and His sovereignty with adding or taking away from this Core Group. Also, what’s not pictured on our Prayer Letter (which right now is a sea of brown with one white speck) is the many people at the Edgeworth Church who really are a part of launching our church. In an amazing way, God has tied us tight to this church that is ethnically so diverse from us. Who would have imagined that an ‘American’ church in Boston would be our ‘mother church.’ That’s part of why I’m insisting that we share a name with them. The name will be like an umbilical cord that connects us to them. (sorry for the baby image….but you know)
d) How will Indians ever be challenged to find their identity in Christ, and to re-orient their disordered loves, if there isn’t a church modeling that and calling them to it? It’s almost the chicken and the egg thing. It’s like we have to plant a church that inevitably attracts Indians to show them that we’re not about being an Indian church. Does that make sense?
e) I am incredibly grateful for the burden that God has placed on you/us to be ethnically diverse. I pray that God would keep you/us restless for a multi-ethnic church. It’s easy to get complacent – but I pray that burden would keep us connecting with people from every background.
f) Shainu and I also fear an Indian church. We’re with you 100%. But, I don’t apologize for the burden I feel towards Nicodemus-like, 7 Mile Road-walking folks; many who are Indian. But as for me, I honestly long to stand behind a mic and preach the Gospel to anyone who would listen.
g) We all really believe the Gospel has the power to unite people from ever culture. And so, if we preach the Gospel, sing the Gospel, live the Gospel, and share the Gospel, God can knit a community among us that shares spiritual bonds which go far deeper than ethnic ones. God please let us identify ourselves as a community of sinners-saved-by-grace and not Indians-from-Kerala.
h) At home, one of the ‘prayer stickers’ on our map of Philly reminds us to pray for non-Indian people to become a part of our Core Group. Shainu and I regularly pray that God would bring the right people to this church and keep the wrong people out. Let’s intentionally pray, even now, that God would knit us together with non-Indians.
i) Thank God for Derek Craig! D, did you ever imagine you would be the minority? Although, the way he eats rice and curry with his hands, I’m not sure there’s not some Malayalee in his family somewhere.
j) Thank God for Joe Thottukadavil! You only have to hear him speak Malayalam for 10 seconds to know that there is no way this kid is Indian. Most people look at him and think he is Latino anyway. Joe, for the sake of mission, you may need to change your last name to Lopez.
Guys, I hope that helps in some ways. I don’t have answers and don’t even know how to practically bring about diversity yet. It’s a tension, but I’m becoming more comfortable living in and trusting God with the tension.
Ajay
August 1, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Excellent points Ajay. (I’ll see your long response and raise you an even longer one — sorry, I watched Casino Royale twice last week).
At our Tuesday Night Fellowship we are studying Joseph. One of the points we discussed is that the dreams God gave to Joseph that his brothers and his father would bow down to him was so socially subversive — b/c in those ancient hierarchical and patriorchical society the elder never bowed down to the younger…and parents never bowed to their children. So in a sense God was breaking down social norms. In fact, all through Genesis God seems to be challenging and going against cultural standards.
In Act 6 the Christians are staying and meeting in Jerusalem and having much success. God had told them to go out to Judea, Samaria and the outermost parts of the world — again a socially subverse move on God’s part. But the Christians didn’t really go. It wasn’t until God allows them to experience severe persecution that the people scatter.
There are always dividing walls of hostility, as it says in Ephesians 2:14, which Christ, through the gospel is tearing down. Dividing walls come in many forms. We may not be as hierarchical as in Joseph’s time or geo-centric as in the New Testament times, but we still have our dividing walls. To me the Malayalee Indian wall is the most obvious one.
Lst week, I was sharing with my brother-in-law (who’s not Indian and who attends to a predominantly Korean church) some of our church plant ideas. His first question was how serious are we about being a multi-cultural church. He explained that his experience at the Korean church has been that though the church says that being enthnically diverse is part of their vision, it is not a primary vision and therefore, the church isn’t really achieving it. In fact, b/c that hasn’t been in their core DNA, the church isn’t really moving in the direction of diversity. Moreover, the way the leadership thinks and functions is so Korean that the church sends an unspoken message to its members that we are a Korean church. It isn’t a real stretch to figure out why this is happening: you assemble a leadership team of almost all Koreans and inevitably you become a church that walks and talks like a Korean church, regardless of how much they say they want diversity. That’s their default mode! This is a good gospel-centered church which I’ve visited and loved. But if you wanna prevent dividing walls from coming up, you have to have alot more wisdom and alot more struggle.
You mentioned Ephiphany and Liberti reaching certain segements of the population. But do you think there is a long term danger in doing it the way these churches are? Do you think there is a better way to do church than even these guys? In some ways its sad to me that Liberti & Ephiphany are located less than a couple of miles apart from one another, yet would members from one church feel a part of God’s family in the other’s church? Is that just a reality of life or is it because they are saying the gospel + black, hip-hop = church; or gospel + young white college educated = church?
A core team full of Malayalees will only think like Malayalees, dream like Malayalees, and function like….you know. I think we could be quite content in a church like this and even feel like its a success, but would we have been faithful (especially living in northeastern United States) communicating to the world around us what the body of Christ really means?
I don’t know if we have from the jump struggled enough to be socially subversive…and its probbaly alot easier now to be be radically subversive than a couple of years into the life of the church.
Again this is probably just pie in the sky talk….so ignore most of it.
Saju
August 2, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Hey guys,
It was good to read what the both of you have written and it led to Leena and I really thinking about it.
We have seen some of the same things that Saju’s brother-in-law noted from the church he attends. We have observed an organization that is doing great things but are having a very difficult time internally. A major reason is that the majority of the team belongs to one ethnic group and the others feel left out. As a result of this, the beneficiaries of the organization are getting short changed.
It would be great if we could find those in the core group to be outside of the Indian race, whether they be African Americans, Caucasians, Asians from other nations, etc. I feel that we have wanted this from the beginning but these people have not emerged. It could be because our inner circles consist mainly of just one people group and that in itself might be a problem.
Leena and I were talking and she suggested why not inquiring at Westminster Seminary (because she subscribes to their theological thoughts but I also suggest the esteemed Eastern Theological Seminary) and letting the students know what we are trying to do and see who there is sharing the same vision. Isn’t that how Pastor Matt Kruse got Ajay, Joe Lopez, and Derek?
hope all of you are well. To Him be the Glory.
Jim
August 3, 2007 at 6:53 am
Hello Momemtum Builders
Jim, you and Leena have a great idea. Talking to seminarians about our vision is a great way to possibly diversify the core group. It seemed to have worked out well for Edgeworth.
We are excited for your return this week!!! Blessings.
winson
Winson
August 5, 2007 at 10:35 pm
Edgeworth got Lopez and his friends 3 years into the life of the church. But that’s an idea we can talk about.
This will be a hugely important conversation for us to have and work through. How do we hold the tension of having a burden for Indians who don’t know Jesus, and at the same time, work towards a multi-ethnic church. I really have great faith that God will be with us as we hash this out. As we point our shoulders towards mission, towards the redemption of the city of Philadelphia (whoever that may be) and towards engaging others that we have unique, God-given access to (Indians), I trust God to help us faithfully live in that tension. But I agree, there may be a bunch of concrete, practical steps we can take towards that. I’m looking forward to our next meeting where we can sit in one room (instead of through cyberspace) and talk this out. In the meantime, keep thinking and praying about this as we move forward.
Also, I went away to a wedding in Chicago this weekend. Talked to a bunch of people about our church planting vision and they seemed excited and ready to pray for us. Again, I believe that we could be leading the way for a national movement. I’m also going to be talking to a Korean pastor from Chicago who planted a ’second generation’ church and has worked effectively towards multi-ethnicity.
Ajay
August 6, 2007 at 11:02 am