The Adam-Shawn Dialogue - Becoming an Intercultural Church

To read Shawn's part of the dialogue please visit http://westmanpreacher.blogspot.com/

This article is inspired by http://gc40.united-church.ca/en/node/598 an article entitled "Becoming Intercultural Requires a Vision."

Shawn:

I have found Bill Easum's book Dancing with Dinosaurs: Ministry in a Hostile & Hurting World to be such a fantastic read illumining the depth and complexity of sin that we, the Church, live in. Adelle Haliday, of the United Church of Canada's General Council Office offered this statement about intercultural ministry being a

broad inclusion of groups who have felt excluded. It is about impacting power imbalances. It is about challenging cultural empire.

My concerns about the Church making sweeping statements and initiating centralized policies around race and ethnicity are that 1) there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that black people put into leadership positions in the Church actually inspire more black people to become involved in the Church, 2) I hate socialism because it deals with how to administer Caesar's Empire when Caesar doesn't know a damned thing about what's going on in MY life or within the congregation that is the home base for doing the ministry that I and my (laity) friends have been called to do with those in the surrounding community who have had nothing but bad experiences in the mainline Church, and 3) I have no interest in amusing Church people who are tied to the old liberal and conservative political agendas in the Church - I find them (those particular agendas) to be idolatrous and of no use to Jesus or his Church.

One of the things I realized from Easum is that when we take a look at how worship happens in the local congregation, and this isn't a new concept, but we actually do get out of worship that which we put into worship. One reason why the United Church of Canada is a predominantly white, liberal, middle class, and aging church is because about 99.8% of local congregations invest into worship that precise culture. Most worship I have seen is geared toward the generation before the Baby Boomers and because of that we have organs dominating worship, long-winded liturgies, mechanical prayers, and sermons more informed by Greek philosophy than by the living Jesus Christ. To a certain extent I would argue in favour of the idea that the style of worship can either be an open door to non-Christians or the door can remain closed and sealed to these non-Christians who will just remain what they already are - consumers in a market economy. Sometimes these people are searching for more to life than agents of consumption.

One thing that shocks me about United Churches in Toronto are that many of them are near death; even ones engaged in social justice and action. It is because the United Church is programmed to only engage a certain demographic of the population - the white, liberal, middle class, elderly person. If local congregations began considering who lived in the neighbourhoods surrounding them they might find that their churches would become packed by a younger demographic (and probably more interracial) if pastors and lay leaders were a bit more creative in their marketing of the Gospel of Jesus Christ (same message, different couching). Bill Easum and Tom Bandy have hundreds, if not thousands, of stories of congregations whom they have consulted with about the new paradigms in 21st century ministry that link the style of music and the amount of music in a worship service determining who shows up to Church. It shouldn't be surprising that it isn't uncommon for churches with the majority of their congregations under the age of 40 to have up to 40% of their worship in the form of music - children, teens, and young adults today grow up with iPods and cell phones attached to their ears continually pounding out rap and hip hop, R&B, hard rock, etc. The disturbing thing about churches in Toronto is that almost half of the population of Canada's most populous city and surrounding region is foreign-born, and, by far, a clear majority coming from non-white regions of the world, and we cannot even attempt to offer the Apocalyptic Welcome to these people by attracting them to Jesus through music that welcomes them because it sounds like music they listen to. Rather, it is more important to appreciate Western European civilization's achievements in music that go so far beyond any other culture's musical achievements when only about 4% of albums sold in North America are actually classical - most people don't give a damn about much of the music we play in the Church. And to further my disenfranchisement with this stuff, I look to Luther and Charles Wesley who were in the know about how to package the Gospel and couch it as a soundtrack for the lives of the people where they lived - they took common bar songs and put Christian words to them, and built churches around that. It is just too bad that we don't have the audacity to live inside of that type of Welcome; but rather we are busy doing what you say, Shawn - we're busy rearranging the deck of the Titanic and nobody can see the gaping hole where it smashed into the iceburgh.

I don't know if any of this makes sense - it's 20 to 3 in the morning.

Peace,

Adam