The Diversity Project

A survey of multicultural Mennonite churches reveals that they usually originate in existing congregations or groups that come under conviction that God wants them to become multicultural congregations. The same pattern is confirmed in several other denominations. Only rarely does a multicultural congregation originate in the vision of a church planter or church planting group which targets several ethnic groups at the beginning.

Many Mennonite churches have become multiethnic in time, but almost all have begun with a strong rootedness in one particular cultural group (frequently not an ethnic Mennonite culture). As Aubrey Malphurs states in Planting Growing Churches for the 21st Century (1992, pp. 168, 171), "The church will not reach everybody but will initially attract those who are culturally similar to those who make up the core group. . . . Once the church becomes more heterogeneous, it will be able to pursue more aggressively a ministry to people of other ethnic groups."

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