The Diversity Project

More and more Mennonite churches and church planting efforts in North America have a multicultural vision of what church life should be. Sometimes that vision is present at the beginning church planting stage. Other times it is a vision which transforms an existing monocultural congregation into a multicultural one. Whenever the vision takes hold, those who embrace it join others who believe new outposts of the God’s reign on earth should reflect the cultural and racial diversity of God’s people in heaven (cf. Rev. 4-5).

Following the lead of the Multicultural Church Network of the Southern Baptist Convention, we take the following as a working definition of our topic: "The multicultural church is a biblical community of believers: (1) who have as a current reality or hold as a core value the inclusion of culturally diverse people, and (2) who come together and serve as a single body to live out God’s call to be a New Testament church."

This paper responds to the question, How does the vision for having multicultural congregations become reality? What can we learn from existing multicultural churches and ones that failed? Our focus will be on practical learnings. Our approach will be partly with stories, partly with analyses.

The focus of this paper falls between several existing bodies of Christian literature. The literature on congregations dealing with internal differences and cultural diversification usually does not seek for the best strategies to arrive at multicultural congregational life as a central goal. The substantial current literature on church planting in general rarely addresses the specific challenges of developing multicultural churches. Nor is this paper a guide to the practicalities of church planting.

This paper takes an empirical approach: What does data from Mennonite and other congregational experiments in multicultural life together tell us? The practical learnings outlined here have been developed from interviews with Mennonite urban church planters, supervisors of church planters, mission executives, and pastors of multicultural churches. Their counterparts in several other denominations have also been contacted. The interviews were conducted by the authors between October 1999 and January 2000.

The few books and articles on multicultural church planting are listed in the brief bibliography at the end of this report.

We are grateful to the Commission on Home Ministries and the Mennonite Board of Missions for requesting and underwriting this work.

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