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 So many churches want to know: what makes a congregation successfully multiethnic? |
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Gerardo Marti on Successful Multicultural Churches
Whether you say multicultural, multiracial, or multiethnic, churches want to become more diverse. Sociologist and pastor Gerardo Marti shares his research about what’s the same and different among successfully diverse congregations.
Generalizations simplify life. They make us feel satisfied that we have answers. Gerardo Marti noticed this when researchers and reporters flocked to Mosaic, a multiracial Los Angeles church. These “experts” would visit for a day or two and then share their insights on diversity.
Marti, then a sociology professor and Mosaic pastor, did his dissertation on what makes and keeps Mosaic multiethnic. After interviewing 60 members and writing A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church, Marti had ideas on what made that congregation work.
Next he worshipped and talked with 50 people from Oasis Christian Center, a neighboring church with a different racial mix. The result was Hollywood Faith: Holiness, Prosperity, and Ambition in a Los Angeles Church (Rutgers University Press, Summer 2008).
Marti, who now teaches sociology at Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina, has since interviewed 170 members from a dozen other multicultural churches in metro L.A. He’s read the current popular advice on how to make your church multiracial, such as “Choose the right music” and “Be intentional about race.”
Marti’s take? “Too many times my brothers and sisters are writing books out of one experience. Take the witness. Take the testimony. But be careful before universalizing and generalizing from one successful experience,” he said in a recent lecture.
Marti says he wants to “sophisticate leaders, to save churches from expensive, painful, time-consuming changes that won’t accomplish what they want.”
And while he hasn’t found a program that will help any church diversify, he has noticed attitudes that successful multicultural churches share.
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It’s not the music
“Only about 5 percent of Protestant churches have more than one race or ethnicity in any significant proportion. It’s so rare that accomplishing it is something we don’t really understand,” Marti says.
The 14 churches he studied are all multiracial Protestant churches in greater Los Angeles. All conduct worship in English. They don’t have separate services according to language or ancestral background. Their worship ranges, Marti says, “from highly liturgical and mainline to wildly charismatic and Pentecostal.”
Many church leaders believe that music is the key to diversifying. After all, you can’t control neighborhood demographics or who comes to your church…but you can control the music and worship.
“I wanted to find out whether music style really matters and how it works. I was very diligent in listening to the sounds in each service. I quickly found I’d made a critical error.
“I thought worship was merely an acoustic phenomenon…something in rhythms and sounds. I thought I’d find a relatively small number of musical styles that were accomplishing diversity—because that’s what the conversation has been about so far,” Marti says.
He began his research hoping to find “the magic bullet.” Instead, he discovered, “there is no single style that successfully accomplishes racial or ethnic diversity in congregations.”
He spoke with church leaders who see music as a universal language and passionately believe that certain music touches the most people.
Mosaic believes rock and roll is most fundamental to human nature. It has almost a third each of Asians, Hispanics, and whites, with the rest from other ancestral backgrounds.
Oasis believes gospel, funk, soul, and rhythm and blues reach the most people. It attracts young blacks and whites from the entertainment industry.
Marti learned that music matters but not in the way people think. When asked what brought them to a church, worshipers told him their life stories and how they’d formed wonderful relationships that fit their lives into that church.
“Most people accept the music at a church as part of being at the church. They don’t say, ‘This place has cool music. I think I’ll stay.’ They say, ‘This is my church and this is how we worship,’ ” he says.
 Marti was surprised by many answers to his question about whether churches use race in planning worship and music. |
Not everyone plans for diversity
In every church Marti asked, “How much do you think about race when you plan worship and music?”
Some multiracial congregations plan worship as a buffet, with everyone happily taking turns as each group gets “their” song or worship practice. Certain music directors said, “I do an even mix of white music and black music.”
Others choose a wide base of music—because they want to promote and preserve music. These churches aren’t intentional about race but are multiracial.
Still other multiethnic churches “just do ‘their music.’ It may be contemporary or hymns. But they don’t think about race as an issue because their goal is not diversity, it’s to worship God.”
Marti was surprised when Mosaic leaders told him diversity wasn’t their goal. As he describes in A Mosaic of Believers, people came to Mosaic to escape something, often a monoracial church.
They were attracted by “havens,” affinity groups that match something they value in themselves and help them create a new community. He describes havens as theological, artistic, catalytic (change friendly), age-related, or ethnic.
Mosaic’s ethnic havens are different than Chinese Baptist or Mexican Pentecostal churches. One person described Mosaic as “a place for people who are Korean but don’t have to act Korean.” Others explained Mosaic as a haven for second and third generation ethnics who want to mingle with other cultures without being expected to fulfill all the requirements of whatever ancestral group they came from.
People at Mosaic see themselves as coming from different backgrounds to form one culture—becoming dedicated followers of Jesus Christ who are on a mission in the world.
By contrast, Oasis leaders are intentional about race. They talk and preach about bigotry and racial harmony. The church views racism as a sin that needs to be confronted as strongly as addiction or other moral issues.
“Blacks and whites don’t insist on having separate selves or cells at Oasis. They want to participate in whatever social realm they choose. About 85 percent of people there are trying to make it in the entertainment industry,” Marti said in his lecture. He noted “an amazing affinity” in how Oasis and historically black churches address people who are dealing with pain, frustration, and failures.
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Stereotypes in church worship
Marti studied a church that, to him, looked racially diverse, because it had whites and Asians. “But when you talk to these church members, they don’t feel diverse. They grew up together, went to school together, and marry each other,” he says. The cultural differences they perceive are between their church and neighboring blacks and “Mexicans,” by which they mean any Spanish speakers.
He uses this story to question whether churches should begin by reaching out to people most unlike them.
“We all want to reduce complexity by treating everyone in a certain racial group as the same. Churches want more blacks, so put huge generalizations around every person whose skin is darker. We have a sense of what we need to do and rush to attract more of ‘those’ people. We end up reinforcing stereotypes that divide us,” Marti explains.
He suggests reaching across racial or ethnic lines to people who are already assimilated into your school, work, neighborhood, or income or educational level. “That in itself is challenging enough. Assimilated people from different ancestral backgrounds can be your bridge to people who are more culturally distant than you,” he says.
The story continues ... Essential Attitudes that Help Churches Become More Diverse
Text by Joan Huyser-Honig
Photography by Steve Huyser-Honig
 What common interests or experiences do you have with people of other ethnicities? What life stories would you like to share? |
Don’t miss the bonus story on worship as “letting go.”
Listen to brief audio excerpts of a September 21, 2007, interview as Gerardo Marti talks about:
- How no one knows everything about multiracial worship (3:21)
- Whether starting a gospel choir makes your church more “black friendly” (3:59)
- Why churches that most hunger for diversity don't always achieve it (3:24)
Listen to Gerardo Marti’s lecture “Diversity and Innovation in a Multi-Ethnic Church.” Read his book A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church. Order his book Hollywood Faith: Holiness, Prosperity, and Ambition in a Los Angeles Church (Rutgers University Press, Summer 2008). Hear him speak at the 2008 Calvin Symposium on Worship.
This Christianity Today article, “Go and Plant Churches of All Peoples,” is interesting to read in light of Marti's comments on reaching out to people who are less or more distant to your culture. R. Stephen Warner’s review of Marti’s book A Mosaic of Believers looks at why some ethnic groups feel more comfortable than others at Mosaic.
Enjoy a Christian Century interview with Gerardo Marti about his Mosaic book. Get ideas from Mosaic pastors in this podcast on “How to Create a Culture of Innovation in Your Church.”
“Eavesdrop” on a Louisville Institute Dialogue on multiracial churches. Check out DJ Chuang’s definitive website on multiracial churches. Explore denominational resources on diversity from Christian Reformed Church in North America and the book Learning to Count to One by Alfred E. Mulder; Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; Reformed Church in America; and Vineyard USA.
On this worldwide worship site, you can see and hear how African church traditions differ from Anglo ones.
Invite neighbors (perhaps academically-minded ones) from other ancestral backgrounds to read and discuss:
- Christian Worship Worldwide: Expanding Horizons, Deepening Practices by Charles E. Farhadian
- Global Pentacostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement by Donald E. Miller and Tetsunao Yamamori
- Worship as Meaning: A Liturgical Theology for Late Modernity by Graham Hughes
Browse related stories about church architecture that builds community, Korean American churches, Laotian American churches, and Reformed churches worldwide.
Feel free to print and distribute these stories at your staff, council, worship, or education committee meeting. These questions will get members talking about successful multicultural churches:
- What have you learned by asking newcomers how they got involved in your church?
- What do you think of Gerardo Marti’s ideas that hospitality and humility are more important than music and intention in becoming a multiracial church?
- Which people in your church neighborhood are most like your congregation culturally…yet from different ancestral backgrounds? What relationships do you have with them?
What is the best way you’ve found to understand changing demographics in your church neighborhood or within your congregation? Please write to us so we can identify trends and share your great ideas. Whether you do these or any other things, we’d love to learn what works for you:
- Did you seek out people from different theological or cultural traditions for a discussion on what’s the same and different about how they welcome people or help newcomers connect? If you produced a resource summarizing your findings, will you share it with us?
- What has been most effective in helping your church discover embedded cultural practices, assumptions, or codes that make others feel unwelcome? Was it talking with people, worshiping elsewhere, a mission trip, a film, a seminar…something else?
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This article was first published by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, http://www.calvin.edu/worship/stories/