Audio Transcript:

Welcome to Missions on Point, the Propempo perspective on church and missions.

Hi, it's so good to have you join us for episode 209 of Missions on Point. We're in a series on church planting. In today's topic, we'll talk about near cross culture concerns. In this series, we first talked about just simple ideas church planting as a sign of a healthy church. In the second episode of the series, we talked about universal challenges to church planting no matter where or when. In the third episode of the series, we talked about universal issues to answer. In the fourth episode, we talked about modern schemes and pointed out some of the shortcomings of modern schemes with regard to even Biblical hermeneutics as well as methodologies and redefining Biblical terms and end results. In episode 208, we talked about near culture concerns. That is planting a church like yours near yours.

In this episode, we'll talk about near cross culture concerns. That is planting an intentionally different culture church that is not too far from your church. You might guess that this actually follows the outline of Acts 1:8. It's one of the more familiar occurrences of the great commission. When Jesus is speaking to His disciples and He says, "You'll receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth." The author of the book of Acts, Luke uses that as sort of an outline of the entire book of Acts, which is the earliest record of expansion of the Christian Church in the first century. Today, let's talk about near cross culture concerns.

1. Number one, this is a complex topic. It is more difficult than you might think. Unless the Lord drops a perfect situation in your lap, and that is possible if, for example, a local cross-cultural group to the majority culture comes to you and says, "Can we use your church to meet in?"

Now, strictly speaking, that's not a church plant, but it is a church partnership of a kind. It's complex because there are issues of culture and language and background, and often those things are much more challenging than you might imagine if you are from a majority culture church. There are immigrants and hardship and unbelievable home country issues. There are relatives left behind. There is substance sexual abuse in this whole process of even getting to the states and living as a minority culture and trying to survive. There's an incredible level of American bureaucracy and discrimination. Even in a loving, solid, Biblical healthy church, there are people who have very subtle undercurrents of discrimination about people from other cultures. Unfortunately, some not so subtle. And it's not limited to white people. African-American people have similar discrimination against people of other cultures, including white cultures. It is complex because just the choices of creating a majority culture church versus a minority culture church are different.

It's also different if you are looking for a blended church culture. All of these choices have huge implications for how you do church in the church plant.

2. Secondly, I think that this near cross culture church planting is a Biblical imperative, at least to consider. Acts 1:8 is simultaneous, not sequential. I think it leaves the church to try to understand what it means to grow and multiply the church locally, even in local cross culture, all the way to foreign cultures to the ends of the earth. It's Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, that's this near cross-cultural place and the ends of the earth simultaneous. It's not sequential. It's intended that every church think about how can we develop and multiply churches around us in all of these situations all the way to the end of the earth. There are local near culture, near cross culture and foreign cross culture goals implied in Acts 1:8.

So when considering church planting in a nearby cross-cultural situation, we still have to deal with all of the near culture concerns and all of the issues that we dealt with in some other episodes. Every church plant benefits from having a missionary mindset from the beginning. Just to review briefly, opportunity versus initiative or reactive or proactive. Do you wait for another ethnic community to come to you and ask to have church in your facility, or do you intentionally take the initiative to go out and approach someone who is like-minded, seeking to build a healthy church in a different ethnicity near you and welcome them to work with you in partnership to grow and develop that church? You still have all the same kind of concerns about finances and location and leadership, both transitional leadership and long-term leadership. And also understanding how the gospel and biblical teaching is integral into the culture of the church plant as well as the convictions of those doing the church plant.

You're going to have similar issues in this cross-cultural church near you about style of worship. And the styles choices may be many more because of their ethnicity. And then you have other choices to make with regard to their independence. Do you want it to be a standalone ethnic church or do you want it to be integrated into the host or the sponsoring church?

3. Let's go back to our major topics for this episode and we come to number three, foreign language versus English language. This is not an easy topic. As the church leaders think about planting a near cross-cultural church, you have to wonder about what kind of language are we going to use? Are we going to use the language of the ethnicity that is our goal and target, or are we going to use English language? A lot of it depends on how you want it to integrate, and we're not just talking about racial integration, but integrate into church life the whole foreign language church.

It's curious and strange to me that Korean Christians tend to plant Korean churches wherever they are, their Korean language use, Korean cultural churches. Not surprisingly, we all tend to think the same way that our way of doing church is the best way, whether we are white or Black, Hispanic or Asian or British extraction or African or whatever. If we're the leaders of a church plant, we tend to think that the church plant should look and feel and taste and smell a lot like our local church because we know how to do church the best way. It takes special efforts and the grace of God to move beyond that bubble kind of thinking to think that the church we plant could be language integrated in different ways than we expect. Many different ethnic churches in America tend to want the children and grandchildren to be fluent in English.

In fact, there is a large pressure to fit in to the majority culture and be acceptable to the majority culture. So there may be opportunities for simultaneous translation of various kinds, whether electronically by earphone headsets or by a segment of the meeting room or seating set up in such a way as to have a simultaneous translator in front of them. Ethnic and English churches tend to want to move toward having segregated services for Spanish speakers versus English speakers or Asian speakers of some language versus English speakers. And so this issue always swirls around really for the whole life of the church. It's certainly an issue for the people you want to reach because they may be speaking at home their own language entirely and not English. Even though the leader of the home or the one who is employed or the student or the one who is functional in an English-speaking context, the rest of the family may not be. How are you going to reach them with the gospel and minister to them spiritually unless you deal with this foreign language issue?

Of course, it rolls over into what version of scripture you use, what language of scripture you use, what songs you sing. Do you sing in the other language versus the majority supposedly English language? I'm aware of a really good church in a major city that decided to plant a nearby cross-cultural church in a largely Hispanic community, and they're doing it in English. I'm not saying that's the wrong choice, but it needs to be conscious among the leadership of what implications that choice has. Are they ministering to and serving their target population best by conducting church in English when they know it's an all Hispanic community?

4. The fourth issue is the problem of reproducibility or indigeneity. I know of several bad examples around the world in which the majority culture is trying to mainstream cultural immigrants into the main service.

Doing so forces that immigrant community and cross-cultural ethnic community to learn the majority language well in order to be able to understand what's going on and to understand the ministry of the word. It becomes an impossible conundrum when a majority church and a city is trying to reach really hardcore cultural immigrants that are fixed on their culture to try to mainstream them into such a solid American, no matter what kind of American, service. So that is the problem of reproducibility and in indigeneity. In one major city in the US I'm aware of, a church spent 20 years trying to reach an ethnic minority immigrant community. And had such little fruit that they just gave up. I think that part of the problem was this particular ethnicity of people were hardened and very loyal to their ethnicity, their culture, their language. The church planning effort needed to be in their language and conducted in such a way that made sense to them.

So most of the meetings would be in a living room sitting on the floor around a meal rather than sitting in a classroom style or a church pew style in an English-speaking service. Not only would the style of worship be reproducible by them and understood by them, but as they become Christians in God's grace, they would be able to transfer and transmit that same style of church to others. Eventually, as they integrate more into the majority society, some of those people might actually join the majority church and understand what's going on in a regular American church service. There are other issues as well dealing with this problem of reproducibility and indigeneity. It has to do with how the congregations function together. There are big decisions and problems about mainstreaming or segregating, about leadership. Does the cross-cultural leader become part of the leadership group of the whole church in order to have decision-making authority over things affecting their cross-cultural church inside the majority church?

What about finances? Is it all put together? What about facilities, ownership and maintenance? All of these things have to be decided when you're planting a near culture church that is near to yours or inside your church or using your church's facilities. So let me go back to number one. This is a complex topic. Similar to what I've said before, it's best if those involved in the church plant have lots of good conversation and discussion and decisions about these issues before they ever start their first cross-cultural worship service. Dear friends, let's not be afraid to step up to the challenge of near cross culture church planting. I have seen churches who, by God's grace, have done this and done it so well. It has had a wonderful, beautiful impact on the sponsoring or host church, as well as a great impact on their cross-cultural missions. In general, let's trust God as we think and pray about planting churches in cultures near us.

Thanks for joining us today on Missions on Point. We trust that you'll find more help and resources on our websites at propempo.com and missioserve.org. We are so thankful for those who support us, enabling us to produce this podcast. Now to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus forever and ever. Amen.