AEC2000

Assistant Professor of Missions and Evangelism, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Indiana

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What does it take for a church to faithfully and effectively communicate the gospel cross-culturally?

For whom is the gospel meant? Well, we are told, in no uncertain terms, that the Good News is intended for the whole world. It is not just for the local news channel, but for CNN, for the BBC.

So, of course, we are not surprised to find that the early church not only got the news out, it got it out to the world. At first the news traveled from house to house within the confines of Jerusalem, but as soon as the opportunity came, they brought it to Judea, Samaria, and beyond.

In other words, from the earliest days of the church, this gospel has been recognized as news for all peoples.

Some of you may remember the poster, published sometime back, that depicted the United States as New Yorkers see it. As you can imagine, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, Central Park and other details of the city were quite prominent. You could very easily pick out the boroughs and even many of the suburbs. Out on the West Coast was Hollywood, also offered in some detail. But, in between, the picture was as confused as one presidential candidate seemed the other week when asked to name some prominent international leaders.

I wonder what a Mennonite, or Brethren, or Church of the Brethren, or Mennonite Brethren, or Brethren in Christ poster might look like? It would be fun to see! There’s Harrisonburg . . . there’s Winnipeg . . . there’s Kitchener-Waterloo . . . there’s Elgin . . . there’s Newton . . . there’s Fresno . . . there’s Ashland . . . there’s Grantham . . . there’s Richmond—but where’s the rest of the world?

In a way, that seems to have been the perspective of the apostles at first. They were as monocultural in their conception of the church as many of our churches and leaders are today. Today, however, as we have been hearing, we can no longer get by with that. Nor do we have to wait for something to scatter us. Why not? Because the world has come to us!

A little over a week ago, at a Church in Goshen, a woman in her eighties asked me, "Did you know that nearly one of every five persons in Goshen is Hispanic?"

In a way, we have been in a similar position to the church’s first missionaries. In the beginning, the primitive church was an ethnic church, a monocultural church, like too many of our own churches. Just as most of our churches reflect a Swiss, or German, or Dutch, or Russian heritage, the church in Jerusalem was Judaic.

In practice, this meant that the church continued to meet: (1) on the Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest; (2) in the temple, where only Jews could enter; and (3) in the Jewish manner, which included, among other things, circumcising newborn males, offering animal sacrifices, and reading from the Torah.

Also, as was the Jewish custom, the home remained the center of family and community life, where family and friends gathered for teaching—which now included the apostles’ doctrine; for cherished traditions, including the Kiddush—a traditional blessing which ends with the prayer,

"Blessed is our Eternal God, Ruler of the Universe, who creates the fruit of the vine;"

for eating together; and, of course, just before eating together, the prayer over bread, the symbol of life:

"Blessed is our Eternal God, Ruler of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth."

Sound familiar? Listen to Luke: "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. . . . Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts. . . ." (Acts 2:42, 46).

But when, after Stephen’s death. the first persecution came to the church, the scattered Hellenist Jews—now Christians—saw, for the first time, the opportunity for freeing the gospel from its Jerusalem confines and getting it out, as Jesus had said they would: to all Judea . . . and Samaria . . . indeed, to the ends of the earth.

Until recently, many American Anabaptists have found it easy—just as the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem did—to culturally isolate themselves.

I remember, for example, discovering in the library of the first church I pastored—a book put out by one of our Anabaptist publishers—a book whose sole purpose was to solemnly warn against the dangers of living in the city. And in those days, of course, to avoid the city was to avoid minority cultures, thereby making them invisible.

One of my childhood memories is of my parents, when I was seven or eight, announcing that our family would be hosting some "fresh-air children" from Brooklyn, New York. (By "fresh-air children" they meant children from the city who would come by train to the country for part of the summer.) So, there, in rural New Hampshire, that summer and a couple of succeeding ones—plus one Christmas vacation—my brother and I had as playmates the Marcel children: Betty, Beverly, Warren and Rene. As nearly as I can remember, these new friends were the first African-Americans I ever saw. Unlike the South, there were no black-skinned people in our town, or to my memory, in any other town in our neck of the woods. Why my parents—who were not well educated, nor religious—decided to invite the Marcel children, I don’t know. But I am profoundly grateful to them for making visible what was invisible.

When I was 18, I moved to Boston. One of my jobs was working as a cashier at a North Station/Boston Garden concession. One day, my boss pointed into the crowd of commuters and said, "That is so disgusting!" I stared into the crowd and, for the life of me, could not figure out what she was talking about. Finally, she became more explicit. She was pointing to a racially- mixed couple. I was shocked. I had never before heard someone verbalize their bigotry. However, because of my parents’ gift of summer playmates from New York, I knew instinctively that the only disgusting thing was my boss’ attitude.

You can’t grow up in Claremont or Newport, New Hampshire, anymore without at least, once-in-a-while, seeing an African-American. And in these days of television (our family didn’t have a television when the Marcel children came), the then invisible African American has become visible in other ways. Moreover, many new, formerly invisible, minorities have also come into view.

In Canadian America, they are mainly Chinese, who now number about a million—about three percent of the population. The next largest visible minorities are South Asians and Blacks, followed by Filipinos, Southeast Asians, Latin Americans, Japanese and Koreans. Seven out of ten representatives of these minority cultures, however, live in just three metropolitan areas: Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal—42 percent of them in Toronto alone. And 53 percent live in one province: Ontario. Nevertheless, these groups are growing and gradually fanning out. The farther we get into the new millennium, the more visible they will be.

As for US America, the future, so we’re told, looks like this: in the next forty years, the part of the population that is of European descent will not grow at all; the part that is African-American will double; Hispanics will quadruple in births alone; and Asians will increase fivefold. As in Canada, the largest number of the newly visible minorities today are in cities: New York has 170 distinct ethnic communities. More than 60 percent of the people in Miami were born outside the USA. And Los Angeles has more people of Mexican origin than any city in the world, except Mexico City. When I served as overseer of the Mennonite churches in Miami, I frequently passed shops and restaurants with signs announcing, "English spoken here."

But it’s not just the New Yorks, Miamis and LAs that contain large non-European ethnic communities. Already known for their ethnic populations are: Houston for its Vietnamese; Tecumseh for its Laotians; Minneapolis for it Hmong; and Pompano Beach for its Haitians.

Of course, these kinds of changes aren’t limited to North America. In Brussels, one out of every four new babies is Arabic. Asunción, Paraguay, has scores of Korean neighborhoods. Along the coast in Queensland, Australia, restaurants print their menus in both Japanese and English.

Unfortunately, most of us North American Anabaptists don’t have much of a track record of establishing multicultural churches. And even the ones we claim are not always true multicultural churches—i.e., embracing diverse racial and cultural traditions. Perhaps, we just didn’t recognize that these diverse groups were there—though I don’t believe it. Nevertheless, it is now abundantly clear that they are there!

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Taken from A New Humanity: Anabaptist Ministry Among Many Peoples (© 2000 New Life Ministries). Permission to reproduce for local church use only is granted. Provided by New Life Ministries, 6404 S Calhoun St, Fort Wayne, IN 46807, through its web site at www.NewLifeMinistries-NLM.org

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