on the walk

Efrem Smith was fantastic. Nothing I will write will do anything to capture the power of his presentation. I won’t even try.

He spoke powerfully about the need to do two contrasting things all at the same time. He called us all to think multi-culturally, and he called us to recognize micro cultures. I was excited by his talk because it resonated with a lot of issues that have been floating around my conversations lately.

To think multi culturally, is to recognize that cultural barriers are breaking down. The world may be not quite flat yet, but it is flattening. This is a reality of our world whether we admit it or not and if the local church is rigidly mono-cultural our witness is damaged and we simply don’t look like the church that God desires. (I have heard a lot of people saying things like, “The church at the beginning in Acts is multi-ethnic, and the church at the end in Revelation is multi-racial.”)

To be multi-cultural will be the natural mode of thinking for younger generations, but it will require a great mental stretch for many of us. We must learn to ask, what about our expression of being the church is a product of our culture and what is a product of the gospel. Having made this discernment we must be steadfastly flexible on those pieces that are cultural. Mistakes will be made along the way but to fail to make the journey is to pretend that the world is not changing.

This is all complicated by the second reality that Efrem Smith identified. I don’t recall him using the word, but by describing his church he made it clear that as the local church learns to become multicultural it will also learn to address and respond to micro-culture. This means that it is not enough to address the average culture or even the dominant culture. In a multicultural world majority does not rule. In a multi-cultural world, culture is not a melting pot, where all cultures are averaged, or a culture war in which one culture wins, instead it is a salad, or a potluck dinner, in which each micro-culture informs and highlights other cultures so that all of us understand ourselves better. Consequently, being mutli-cultural will precisely express itself in wide cultural expression.

Efrem Smith leads a hip-hop church. This is a powerful urban micro-culture that transcends many old cultural lines, but also establishes lots of new ones. This is exactly the kind of community that multi-culturalism promotes. In the waning of a dominant culture, new doors open for parallel micro cultures to emerge.

This is precisely the complex reality in which the church must serve. The whole world is becoming multi-cultural as the dominace of the west collapses and young people from all over the world learn form one another. At the same time micro-cultures are growing in strength all over the world. This transformation holds a whole new set of threats. Could the world be split into even more factions that are so different they can do nothing but fight? But it also creates an opportunity for the church. In the chaos of this transition, people are searching for a story that makes sense of the diversity of the world and is big enough to include all people. People are looking for a family from every tongue tribe and nation.

Looking that is fort he kingdom of God to be what is has been called to be.

on the walk

-Ethan

Ps. I’d be interested to hear ideas. What exactly could a church to do to effectively minister both to a multi-cultural world and to existing and growing micro-cultures?

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