Our Multiply Podcast hosts conversations aimed to stir, equip and provoke. Through interviewing thinkers, practitioners and pioneers, we aim to inspire and equip Kingdom people to launch Kingdom communities.
This episode features a conversation between Harvey Kwiyani, Paul Lowe & James Rankine.
Harvey is a Malawian mission theologian who is passionate about raising up the next generation to lead churches that reflect the global church. Listen as he talks about the importance of growing a multicultural movement and shares practical tips of how we do that.
Quotes
People want to belong in a church that does not require them to cross cultural barriers, which is why we get black churches and white churches.
When our church planting philosophy is homogenous, what we do is we try and find a group of people who will respond well to what we are bringing.
Planting a homogenous church might help your church grow faster, but I do wonder whether what Christ is calling us to do is not to grow churches faster, but to share with people who look like him – from different cultures and backgrounds.
If the demographics where we are planting are made up of people from different cultures and ethnicities, that should shape the way we plant; to think how do we reach ALL people in this neighbourhood? How do we preach christ in this neighbourhood? We have to care about our neighbours who don’t look like us, or speak like us.
What we miss by planting churches that do not reflect the context in which they are planted is that we don’t get to receive what God has given to the body in other parts of the world or in other cultures. We miss out on the gifts that God has given them and we think we can do without them. It is a lie that we can do without them.
We need our church planters to commit to having different cultures represented in their planting teams right from the beginning.
To be a multicultural church, your church culture must be shaped by several cultures.
Every culture has a gift to bring. We need to receive those gifts.
Vineyard has a gift to give the world, but that gift will only make sense if the Vineyard begins to think of itself more as a world movement than a White European / North American movement.
The future of our movement depends on how we do the crossing of racial and cultural barriers.
