MY NEW BLOG IS AT ...in the outer... |
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Coming from a country where multicultural churches are just there and a single-race church is an oddity, this whole conversation is quite strange for me. It shows how culturally different Malaysia is! |
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To me, the first step of integrating churches is to penetrate the hearts of the current congregation. They may "say all the right things" about other ethnic groups, but what about their hearts. They may claim that "those people" are so nice, but in their hearts and minds they are still uncomfortable. Sometimes old prejudices die hard. |
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To me it seems the church should be a reflection of the community. If the community is multicultural and all the people in church are of one race, unless it's a language thing, I would assume that the people of that community are not reaching their neighbors. |
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I guess I'm confused about why multi-culturalism would even be an issue for a church. Isn't a church supposed to be open to all, regardless of . . . regardless of anything? |
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I think the first step is for people not to form explicitly single ethnicity congregations unless they're language-based. There isn't an easy way to get beyond that very quickly simply through change in attitude. Any progress beyond simply not getting worse will either be very slow, due to congregations dying out due to slow migration away from them, or we'll need intentional movement to seek multicultural congregations. I don't know what that should look like, because I think there's a strong presumption against leaving a congregation unless one has a really strong reason to do so. So any question of what intentional progress will look like is going to be hard to answer. I've written on this in the past here and here and really don't have any further thoughts at the moment. |
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