Connecting Culture and Ministry - Introduction

As a pastor in Cambridge, MA, I would often walk the two minutes from my office to Central Square, the municipal center of the city. I would sit and observe a veritable United Nations walking by in that busy square. I could walk into my bank and interact with the employees, and patrons from around the world.[i]

When standing in Central Square, I could spin the Buddhist Prayer Wheels installed as permanent fixtures there. From that spot, I could walk two blocks to a Mosque in one direction, and a Marxist Education Center in another. Harvard is a mile to the North, and MIT is a half mile to the South. There are also sixty-five churches inside a half-mile radius, but only two percent of the community attends church regularly.

Every day in that city, people are confronted with multiple cross-cultural experiences, be they visual (dress), auditory (language), or experiential (personal interaction). In Cambridge, cross-cultural experiences are an integral part of every person’s life, and they are celebrated by almost every resident.

With the history of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and ongoing discrimination, race is rightfully considered a most significant difference in the United States. However, without diminishing the importance of the historical racial struggle in our country, the immigration patterns of the last fifty years have brought many added cultural dimensions to our country.

Seen from a broader anthropological perspective, depending where you live in the world, culture can be more important than race. If you live in Europe, for instance, being White is not as important as being Italian, or Danish. If you live in Asia, being Asian is not as important as being Korean, or Japanese.

For new immigrants in our country, the same dynamics apply. When a person from Armenia, for example, immigrates to the U.S., he or she will most likely be looking to connect with other Armenians. The same can be said of immigrants from most cultures when they first take up residence in our country. Language is often an additional factor driving those decisions, but it is only one of several factors. We will examine those factors more closely later on.

Dr. Soong Chan Rah, who was a pastoral colleague in our multi-congregational church in Cambridge, now a professor at North Park Seminary, has recently published a book, entitled, The Next Evangelicalism. In it, he gives us a needed perspective. He writes that in the next few decades, the majority of evangelicals in the United States will be people of color. His conclusion is inescapable. Evangelical congregations must be more welcoming to people of color, or risk becoming anachronistic and an endangered species.

The rewards of reaching out far outweigh the risks. This series of posts will attempt to give you a little insight into some of the issues one can encounter when ministering cross-culturally.

How is your church serving people of color in your community?

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[i] Excerpted from my book “Reconnecting the Church: Finding Our Place in Complex Culture.”