Mark DeYmaz’s new book Building a Healthy Multi-Ethnic Church makes a very important and challenging contribution to contemporary thinking about church life and health. If heaven is going to be filled with people of diverse ethnicities and languages, shouldn’t we be practising for that now? Have most churches nowadays somehow forgotten the lessons learnt by the early church in the book of Acts about welcoming the Gentiles into their congregations?
According to DeYmaz, a healthy multi-ethnic church has seven core commitments. These are: embrace dependence; take intentional steps; empower diverse leadership; develop cross-cultural relationships; pursue cross-cultural competence; promote a spirit of inclusion; and mobilise for impact. Many of the larger churches in Melbourne including Syndal Baptist Church have been heading down the multi-ethnic path for some years, with Chinese and other Asian-language congregations; however DeYmaz’s preferred model involves fully integrated multi-lingual worship services, rather than separate services in separate languages.
When a church makes a deliberate choice to be multi-ethnic, it is definitely not making the easiest available choice. It needs to be ready for plenty of conflict and intercultural misunderstanding. It won’t necessarily be the fastest growing church in town, and it might scare away some people. But a multi-ethnic church does seem to be more reflective of God’s plan for the church than a mono-ethnic church.