GRANBERG-MICHAELSON

Introduction

I began writing this book when I was five years old.

The church in which I grew up, like a lot of churches at the time, supported missionaries all around the world. The worldwide missionary movement, which had begun in the previous century, was still going strong.

Occasionally these missionaries would pass through while they were home on furlough in the United States, and they would tell stories of their work. And I remember being taken not so much with their words, since they were rarely effective speakers, but rather with their slide shows and with the idea that someone I knew might actually live in a place like Nigeria or South Korea.

Someone in the congregation with a basement woodworking shop had the idea of making a large map for the church social hall, a map showing all the places where these missionaries lived and worked. This person even went to the trouble of electrifying the map. In other words, when you pressed a button—for Lagos, Nigeria, for example—a light became visible on the continent of Africa. One of our missionaries actually lived there!

I loved to play with that map. I suppose it was an early version of interactive learning, and it was remarkable for 1960, but it still required a great deal of imagination. What would it be like, I wondered, to serve a church, to tell people about Jesus, in Africa?

But I never made it to Africa.

I have traveled there, of course, several times, as I have traveled to lots of places around the world, but I have never lived and worked in Africa, which is sort of what I thought—it was all a little vague at the time—God would call me to do. Instead I became a pastor in the United States. And I followed God’s call to exciting, if not terribly exotic, places like New Jersey, Illinois, Michigan, and even Florida. (Compared to other places I have lived, Florida is actually quite exotic, but that’s another story.)

I grew up in a conservative Christian culture where movie going, card playing, and dancing were expressly forbidden. Those activities, we were told, might not be bad in themselves, but they frequently led to other things, worse things. To tell the truth, I was never much of a dancer or card player, so I never chafed under those restrictions, but the prohibition against movie going was a problem. Movies for me definitely led to other things. Movies opened my eyes to the world around me, and once I knew about that world, once I saw pictures and images from that world, I wanted to explore it, to get to know it.

The electronic map was for me a little like movie going. Once that map was hung, some little child like me was bound to imagine himself going to a place like Lagos . . . or Zürich. Parents should take more care before allowing electronic maps in the church social hall.

Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning

For the first 30 years of my ministry I served churches that were predominantly, overwhelmingly, even disturbingly white. (Disturbing because I was aware that the people inside the building seldom looked like the people in the surrounding communities and neighborhoods.) In other words, I served churches over the years with people who looked like those I had known all my life.

The advantage of a ministry like the one I have known, I suppose, is that I usually knew my people. In fact, I knew them very well. And of course they knew me. We had learned our Christian vocabulary together. We had memorized our customs and habits. We knew what to expect from church and from each other. We were rarely surprised.

Sameness, predictability, safety—these were important, cherished values to us. Not biblical values, certainly, but important values just the same.

Every year the churches I served in the U.S. would be required to fill out a questionnaire for the denomination about the membership. And every year, year after year, we would report that we were 99 percent white.

Why not 100 percent? Well, when the committee to complete the denominational questionnaire gathered to answer the questions, we thought we recalled having seen an Asian person once or twice. The spouse of a member maybe? Korean? Anyway, just to be safe, we told the denomination that we were 99 percent white. No church I have served over the years has looked exactly like the neighborhoods and communities in which the churches were located. Instead we always segregated ourselves along racial and ethnic lines.

Martin Luther King Jr. had many gifts, but surely one of them was forcing Americans to face some unpleasant facts about themselves. In 1968, just days before he was assassinated, King said to a congregation gathered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.: We must face the fact that at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning when we stand to sing ‘In Christ There Is No East or West,’ we stand in the most segregated hour of America.

His words stung, but apparently not enough for Christians to do much about them. Most of us weren’t sure what to do. We knew that what he said was true, but—really—what could we do about them? And so, for a long time—longer than what was right or healthy—we did very little, except guiltily filling out our reports each year.

At a church leadership retreat a few years ago, our facilitator encouraged participants to dream about the future of our church, and one of the dreams our elders listed was a more diverse church. And not only did we list it, but the idea attracted a surprising amount of energy. When we thought the best thoughts about ourselves, we imagined ourselves to be diverse, racially and ethnically.

But the facilitator pushed back. She said, Really? Is that what you want? Do you have any idea what would be required to get there?

The thing is, she never really said what would be required, but we apparently had active imaginations that day. Maybe she was right, we thought. Maybe diversity came with a high price tag. Maybe diversity would require changes that would be—how should I put it?—uncomfortable.

To fully appreciate how remarkable this discussion was, I should mention that we were considering a 16-million-dollar building campaign at the time. And somehow that didn’t seem nearly as out of reach as a more racially and ethnically diverse church.

We quickly erased diversity from our list of congregational goals.

One recent study of churches in the U.S. defined multicultural churches as those where no racial or ethnic group amounted to more than 80 percent of the congregation. Using that rather imprecise but telling standard, only eight percent of all Christian congregations in the U.S. can call themselves multicultural.

Mainline congregations, the kind I have served over the years, came in below that average, and Roman Catholic churches came in above, with about 20 percent of Catholic parishes claiming multicultural congregations.

The times they are a-changing

But all of that seems to be changing. Whether we like it or not (and many people do not). Whether we are prepared for it or not (and many people are not). The racial and ethnic composition of our country —our complexion, you might say—is changing. And our churches are changing as well.

Often these churches with racial and cultural diversity are new. In other words, they started out with the intention of being racially and culturally diverse. Others are older, more established churches that set out to look more like the neighborhoods and communities in which they find themselves. But the truth is, as I plan to explore in a subsequent chapter, not all of the change is intentional.

Some of it is happening whether or not congregations want it. No plan for change, no leadership retreat to set the goal; instead a slow evolution within the membership. Here and there a new nationality, a new ethnic group, a new language. What I experienced in my childhood—sameness, predictability, safety—still exists today in many, many congregations, but—and this is important—in a decreasing number of them.

One pastor, writing not long ago in Christianity Today, says this about his church: Even though we weren’t aiming for it, my first church was a multicultural church. It wasn’t necessarily intentional—we just reached out to our poor neighborhood and that’s who lived there.

Not all multicultural neighborhoods, however, are poor neighborhoods. Many neighborhoods—rich and poor—are becoming multicultural.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. is currently 17 percent Hispanic, 13 percent African American, 5 percent Asian, and almost 78 percent white. (For mathematicians, it is important to note, as the U.S. Census Bureau puts it, that people may choose to report more than one race group.) According to the Pew Research Center, the U.S. is approaching a kind of multicultural tipping point within the next few years, so that whites will no longer constitute the majority. Dates vary for when this change will likely happen, but 2050 seems to researchers to be a conservative guess.

What multicultural church means

I should define my terms here, though the truth is there is no agreed-upon definition of the multicultural church.

When people of various national backgrounds, racial/ethnic groups, and skin colors live and work and worship together, what you have is something that could be called multiracial or multiethnic. The church I serve in Zürich, Switzerland, is certainly diverse racially and ethnically. Most Sundays, I look at my congregation and think, This must be what God had in mind for the church on that first Pentecost— ‘Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes . . .’ (Acts 2:9–10). It takes my breath away.

What I have in mind when I use the term multicultural church, however, is something more—more than an unexpected mix of nationalities, races, and skin tones. A multicultural church will not simply have people who are African-American, but African-Americans who will engage to some degree their African-American cultural backgrounds, traditions, and norms. A multicultural church will not simply have people from South America, but South Americans who will identify with and intentionally engage with Latino culture. A multicultural church will not simply have second-generation Asian immigrants, but second-generation Asian immigrants who to some degree still engage and embody Asian cultural norms.

So, one key to this definition is that a multicultural church is more than a mix of nationalities and races and skin tones, but also a mix of cultures. But there is more. To be a multicultural church, in the sense I have in mind here, also means that these diverse cultures will not only live and work and worship side-by-side, but they will also try to do all of these things together, engaging with each other, making decisions together, trying their best to understand each other, and often irritating each other with their vastly different ways of looking at the world.

A multicultural church, therefore, is one where there is an intentional engagement of cultures, not just a mix of races and nationalities.

A country like the Netherlands, to take a helpful example, has recently been described as being tolerant rather than multicultural. The sheer variety of nationalities and races and skin tones on the streets of a city like Amsterdam, for example, is obvious to anyone who travels there. What is not so obvious is whether the various nationalities and races in that country are finding ways to recognize, accommodate, and support each other.

The criticism often leveled at that country—and several others in Europe—is that these cultural groups are hardly as integrated as they could be and perhaps need to be. They exist together, they inhabit the same land, they may even work together in the same offices and labs and classrooms, but they are hardly intentional about their life together. Leaders of countries like Germany, Great Britain, and France have gone on record as saying that their multicultural efforts have failed.

On the other hand, a few other countries around the world—Australia, New Zealand, and Canada come to mind—have claimed considerably more success with being multicultural. In these countries, so we’re often told, each minority culture makes a substantial contribution to the larger culture.

I use this discussion merely to illustrate my specific interest here, not to debate public policy. It’s a hugely controversial topic. There is, in Europe and elsewhere, a rising tide of nativism, a strong and sometimes troubling pushback against immigrant groups, a feeling that newer immigrant groups simply do not integrate well.

My interest is much more narrow.

The term multicultural church, as I understand it and plan to use it here, implies something more than being tolerant or even welcoming, it implies more than living closely together or even demonstrating the ability to get along. It implies nothing less than attempting to be the church of Jesus Christ together and in the process finding ways to honor and embrace and even celebrate a variety of cultural backgrounds.

The multicultural experience of my life

I am no longer sure what I expected when, at the ripe old age of 59, I accepted the call to become pastor of the International Protestant Church of Zürich, Switzerland.

Sure, I expected to live and work abroad, something that I had always dreamed of doing, ever since I got my hands on that electronic map at church. But what I experienced from my first Sunday here was so different from anything I had ever known that I feel compelled to understand it, to write it down, to put it into words. I knew from my first worship service that I had found something extraordinary—not perfect, mind you, but extraordinary—something that needed to be described for others who would find themselves making this same journey toward a multicultural church.

On my first Sunday here I had no responsibilities, and so I did something that I seldom have the opportunity to do. I sat in the congregation and worshiped along with everyone. I sang the hymns, I prayed the prayers, I listened to the sermon, and I went forward for communion—without any responsibility for anything other than my own worship.

And when it was over, when the pastor had given the benediction, when the organist was playing the postlude, for which we all sat and listened, my wife leaned over and whispered, That was awesome!

And it was. Truly, unexpectedly awesome. I had tears in my eyes. And not for the last time.

I have worshiped in churches all over the world—Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Israel, the Philippines, South Africa, and Peru. I have even preached in a few of them. And I can truthfully say that I have never in all my years of church-going experienced anything quite like this.

Waiting in line to receive the bread and wine of communion at the International Protestant Church of Zürich, I could see around me Africans, Asians, Indians, Europeans, and even a few, though not as many as I expected, North Americans like me.

I could see every skin tone God ever imagined.

I didn’t know what to wear that first Sunday, so I wore what I had always worn to church—a dark suit with tie, my uniform—but I learned that morning that the dress code for worship around the world is more varied (and colorful) than I ever imagined. There were one or two other dark suits and ties like mine, but some of the women from Africa and India wore colorful dresses. Or maybe they weren’t dresses. But whatever they were, they were colorful.

As I made my way to coffee hour, I thought, God, I am not prepared for this. I realize that I wanted it, and even prayed for it, but I know that I am not prepared for it. Why did you answer this particular prayer about serving a church like this—and not so many other heartfelt prayers I have offered over the years?

Of course I know that every person God has ever called to ministry—and to most other vocations, for that matter—has had similar thoughts and questions. And I know from my theological training that one of the signs of an authentic call is the overwhelming feeling of inadequacy that comes with it. Think of Moses (I am slow of speech and slow of tongue). Think of Jeremiah (I am only a boy). I know all of that. But still.

Here I was, about ready to assume the role as pastor of an international church, and for the first time in many years, for the first time since my ordination 30 years ago, I had no idea how I was going to do what I had been called to do. What in the world was I going to say to these people?

As it turned out, I need not have worried. They had plenty to say to me. When I was tongue-tied, they were not. Almost as soon as that first worship service was over, I heard many voices asking for, often demanding, my attention. I wasn’t always sure what I was being told, so I listened more carefully than I have listened in years.

And that careful, thoughtful listening, though I didn’t fully appreciate this on the first day, would become an essential component of leadership in a multicultural church.

What follows

In the chapters that follow is the story of one person’s journey into the multicultural church. It is my attempt to explain why multicultural churches thrive. Not all of them do, of course, but the one I serve does. Why is that? It thrived before my arrival, and unless I make a mess of things, it will thrive after I am gone.

So, it’s not me. And