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November 2011

Preparing Pastors to Embrace Social Media Ministry

We’ve written about this subject before, but it is important enough to tackle from a different angle. Pastors must start to learn and use Social Media if they are to minister effectively in today’s world.

If your congregation is lucky, you have a pastor who understands the power of social media ministry. It seems like a no-brainer for anyone with the objective of reaching more people with the Good News.

The reality is that many pastors were called and trained for the ministry long before social media was available. Even fewer have been ordained in the last five years or so when social media began to spread its roots all over the world.

Congregations must realize as they develop Social Media Ministry that it requires work — daily work. It is a discipline just like answering snail mail used to be. Your Social Media Ministry Committee (Evangelism Committee) will want very much to work with your pastor, but may encounter resistance. It’s not what pastors do!

Here are some tips.

  1. You must convince your pastor that your Web Site, Blog and Facebook or Google+ presence is not for vanity. Communicating with and cheerleading your current membership is only the tip of the iceberg for your Social Media Ministry potential. Examples of going beyond this are few but growing. 2×2 is an example. We are a very small church reaching more than 100 new readers each week within only a few months of launching our site. We are finding our way, but we are a step or two in front of most and will readily share what we learn.
  2. On the other hand, appealing to vanity might work! Pastors might enjoy knowing they can put a video or slide show on the web and be found in the search engines by thousands.
  3. Convince your pastor that the Social Media is a powerful evangelism tool.  It is not just a place to post sermons. It is about communicating with the neighborhood in ways that show the church cares about them. Ironically, the web allows you to reach the whole world while you talk to the guy next door!
  4. Take the teamwork approach. While professional leadership input is helpful, it is not a one-person enterprise. Clergy and laity must work together.
  5. Statistics can be helpful. Point out that your pastor can continue to prepare sermons that are delivered on Sunday morning to the same 50 people — or their insights can be condensed and delivered to 100s or 1000s every hour of every day.
  6.  Don’t overwhelm. This is where pre-planning and the editorial calendar become invaluable. If your leader can see what is expected during the week, it will help him or her to begin adjusting schedules and routines. Point out that people in all fields are rearranging their work habits to make room for the potential of Social Media. If  CEOs of Fortune500 companies can do it, so can clergy!
  7. Don’t let it go. If your church is like most churches, time is an imperative. This is a tool which can help churches move from where they are to where they need to be. You don’t want to wait years in hopes of someday finding a pastor well-versed in Social Media to take your church in a new direction. You need current leaders to embrace technology now.
  8. Find the help you need to educate and train your whole team, including your pastor. This is more of a time commitment than a cost commitment. There are many resources on line which are free. socialmediaexaminer.com, hubspot.com, hubze.com, copyblogger.com, interactmedia.com are good starting places. Workingpreacher.org is a seminary blog that uses Social Media techniques.
  9. Make education a regular feature of your Social Media Committee Meetings. Assign someone each month to research a topic of interest and present ideas and a list of resources found. Business support groups do this routinely. They hold weekly meetings and one member is given 10 minutes to speak on a business topic.

If you’ve found helpful sources online, please share them! We’re in this world together!

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Calls to Action Are Nothing New to Christianity

A Call to Action helps your reader take the next step.

As you get comfortable with blogging you will want to start creating more interactivity with your readers. If you want interaction, you’ll have to ask for it. That’s where the Call to Action comes in.

Calls to Action are so important to the business world that they have their own acronym (CTAs).

You see them every day in advertising: “Call 1-800 . .,” “Send $24.95 to  . . . .” 

Typically, advertisers try to create a sense of urgency — a reason for people to take action NOW! They know that people need incentive to get off their backsides and do something. And so you see the warnings! “Act now. Offer ends July 4.” “Supply is limited.” 

This is not new thinking to Christians. Our whole faith is built on Calls to Action: “Follow me,” “Come and see,” “Do Unto Others . . . ,” “Love one another.” The challenge to the modern church is to translate biblical Calls to Action to reach modern Christians or seekers.

How do you create Calls to Action on your web site or blog?

Again, you see CTAs on web sites every day. “Click here,” “Download,” “Submit,” or “Enter.”

Churches can use the same tools. The goal is engagement with others and growth in Christian community.

Pace yourself as you build your community’s engagement and trust. 

Your CTAs should be stepping stones to involvement in your community. Help people move from the anonymity of cyberspace to “what’s in it for me?” participation to “how can I help?” commitment. In other words, watch your interactions with your readers grow from anonymous participation to sharing an email, to providing a name and eventually a physical presence.

Here’s a plan described in tiers or levels of engagement:

Your first-tier or introductory Call to Action might simply be to pose a question at the end of your blog article.

  • “What do you think?”
  • “Can you recommend a resource?”
  • “Share your experience.”
  • “Do you know anyone who can benefit from this idea?”
At this level of engagement, your only goal is to get people thinking about their involvement.

A second-tier Call to Action might be to provide a way for people to answer those questions on line with a comment box. Another possibility is to engage readers in a simple poll. Blogging software makes this easy. Limit your poll to one question and suggest just a few possible answers. It allows your readers to test the water. There is no risk. They are not sharing any personal information with you. Keep it fun. Everyone wants to know how their ideas stack up to others. Report the results of the poll in an entertaining way.

A third-tier Call to Action might be to offer something for download. 2×2 offers the Editorial Calendar for example. You can have this information offered freely (as 2×2 does) or you can ask for information when they download and begin to create an opt-in email relationship.

A fourth-tier Call to Action might be to interest readers in some action that requires a bit more initiative from your readers. Tele-evangelists, for example, often ask for prayer requests.

  • Sign up for our Walk for Hunger.
  • Volunteer to work in the Food Pantry or Thrift Shop.
  • Join our Prayer Chain.
  • Join our youth on their Mission Trip to New Orleans.
  • Attend our workshop on Autism.

A fifth-tier Call to Action asks for information and offers something of value in return for the information (an incentive). Do not ask for more information than you need. An email address may be enough. A physical address might be desirable. Keep in mind that the less information you require, the more comfortable it is for readers to participate and the higher the response. If all you need is a name and email address — that’s all you should ask for.

  • RSVP for Our Community Thanksgiving Dinner by November 1 and receive a beautiful Advent Calendar. (Blogging software will allow you to create the form.)
  • Sign up for Hunger Walk by October 15 and receive a free T-Shirt at the starting line.
We’ll explore the nuts and bolts of how to create and use CTAs in a future post.

Learning from Ministry Mistakes

A huge obstacle to transforming ministries is the fear of failure. Some failure is to be expected on the way to success. A congregation’s failures in ministry initiatives should not be a death sentence.

Our most eminent inventors will attest that their greatest contributions came after repeated failures.

Multicultural Ministry is particularly risky. Bonding can be difficult within families! Across cultures there are bound to be problems. Prepare to use failure to improve your ministry. People need to know that it is better to try new ideas and fail then to do nothing. Create an environment that embraces the risk of failure.

Unfortunately, in ministry, critics line the sidelines waiting for signs of failure. Some want to justify inaction with a ready “I told you so.” Although it is a harsh view, the reality is that some are waiting for small churches to fail to boost the assets of survivors. Congregations have significant incentive to avoid risking failure that may attract negative attention. Catch 22. Do nothing and wither. Do something and risk catastrophic resistance.

We’ve written in previous posts about the importance of preparing a congregation for Multicultural Ministry.

No matter how well prepared your people are, someone someday is going to say or do something that could be offensive to someone else — probably without realizing it. It may be a simple faux pas. It may come from a member who rarely attends. It may come from a visitor or a child.

No matter how thoroughly you plan, you are still likely to learn at the last minute that your best ideas won’t work for one reason or another for a cultural reason you never envisioned. That’s the nature of Multicultural Ministry. Be prepared for these moments.

There are three types of pastors: Risk Takers, Care Takers, and Under TakersLearn to manage failure. It can be a stepping stone to success.

Regular evaluation of your ministry is the key to avoiding problems and overcoming the glitches which will occur. Weekly evaluation is not too much and the evaluation session should be as soon after an event as possible. You want to build on your strengths and minimize your weaknesses. You also want to be prepared to identify opportunities that sometimes arise from the most unlikely places.

Acknowledge: Don’t sugar coat failure. Call it what it is.
Analyze: Figure out what went wrong.
Adjust: Shift gears, dramatically if necessary.

The first two are fairly easy steps — uncomfortable perhaps, but easy. Just don’t dwell on blame. Be as honest as possible without discouraging those who have worked hard. Honesty means that all involved in the ministry are subject to review. If you are to find answers to your ministry challenges, you must deal with the good information. Include as many as possible in your analysis. Don’t allow a few with vested interests to define problems. That is likely to result in hurtful finger-pointing.

The adjustments you make must match the analysis. If your best information indicates that your visitors and new members aren’t relating well to an individual involved (including the pastor), your adjustments must fix that problem. Mission is the goal. Personal pride must be put aside.

From Our Experience

Redeemer’s success with our East African Outreach failed at first. We hosted a few successful services. Soon interest began to wane and after about a year we discontinued the effort while we worked on another initiative.

The idea never died. Our East African members wanted to resurrect the effort. First we spent a couple of council meetings analyzing why things weren’t working. Brutal honesty was necessary.

We identified three major problems.

  1. The Swahili service was entirely separate from the English. Only a few existing members were aware of the outreach and the new people coming and going remained strangers. The entire church was not invested in the project.
  2. Our first attempt to reach the growing East African community involved working with a pastor who traveled 90 miles to lead worship once a month. Bad weather, illness, scheduling conflicts made consistency difficult.
  3. The project was adopted by one person in the congregation who was not East African and who worked independently. Neither the existing congregation nor the visitors knew how to contribute. Help was soon hard to come by.

The remedies were simple once we all agreed on what the problems were. We enlisted more members to help with the service in peripheral ways — fellowship, etc. We found two rostered, ordained pastors from Tanzania who lived nearby. We assigned leadership for the project to our East African members who enlisted help from others in the East African community. Within a few months the newcomers felt welcome and part of our community. A membership drive initiated by the first new members resulted in 49 joining our congregation. Within a few months, Swahili members suggested uniting the English and Swahili services.

Sadly, our denomination remembered the failure long after we had begun measuring success. This is something the church as a whole needs to address if they are going to ask congregations to invest in new initiatives. Make room for failure.

Report of Redeemer’s Kiswahili Ministry

Ambassadors Visit St. Peter’s, North Wales

Redeemer Ambassadors took our farthest Sunday visit to date to the suburban town of North Wales and the congregation of St. Peter’s. We noticed on their web site that their traditional service times were changed for a united worship on Consecration Sunday. We did not know what a Consecration Sunday entailed but learned that it was Stewardship Sunday with a Dedication of Sunday School teachers ceremony. This is the second Stewardship Sunday we encountered. St. Peter’s made the day very hands-on and participatory.

The sanctuary was packed. All the church choirs were robed and singing, including a young children’s choir, a girl’s vocal group and an adult choir. The groups sang separately and in a combined anthem featuring a song Redeemer sings each week as our offertory — Asante Sane Jesu or I Am Thanking Jesus. We noticed that their women and girl voices outnumbered males by a huge margin — something like 10 to 1 and that made us appreciate the work of our East Falls Community Choir, hosted by Redeemer, and the influence of the Keystone State Boychoir on our boy singers.

A guest speaker, Rev. Karl Krueger of the Philadelphia Seminary, spoke on stewardship. Pastor Wagner led the worship and we couldn’t help but notice that although the sanctuary held at least 100 people, he seemed to have a personal connection with each worshiper. He welcomed us to their fellowship dinner, which was a feast of ethnic foods. We were fortunate to sit with another guest, the Rev. Jonathan Shin and his wife. He is new to the Synod and will be working with the Synod Mission Developer, something Redeemer was once promised by SEPA Synod but was never allowed.

The youth led a quiz on the life of Muhlenberg. Our Ambassadors were well prepared with the answers as we had visited Muhlenberg’s home church two weeks before and had taken a field trip to the Muhlenberg exhibit at Ursinus College.

The most meaningful part of the service to us was the dedication of the Sunday School teachers. Pastor Wagner had a student offer a blessing for each teacher which was very moving. Our Ambassadors often talk about the influence of the Sunday School teachers in our lives. Their names are offered in remembrance at each All Saints Sunday. As the ceremony progressed, youngest child to oldest child, we were able to replace the faces of the strangers before us with the memory of our own teachers.

Our 34th Ambassadors visit was truly memorable.

Letter to St. Peter’s

Ambassadors Report

Timeline

Our Once and Future Church

Today’s Alban Institute Weekly Forum builds on the re-release of the books written in the 1990s by its founder and president emeritus, Dr. Loren Mead. The Once and Future Church (1991)Transforming Congregations for the Future (1994), and Five Challenges for the Once and Future Church (1996) tackle the very issues our sponsoring congregation, Redeemer Lutheran Church, has been facing since 1998.

None of our members was a scholar of his work at this time. We were just lay members working at what we believed was our mission. As we review the five challenges Mead poses for the church, we find remarkable similarities to the direction our congregation took — without leadership pointing the way but with dedicated lay people grappling, uncompensated and unrecognized, with issues as big as worldwide church.

Our discipleship has not been without cost. We have suffered both as community and as individuals. Most of the time we found ourselves very much alone. The church as a whole was struggling, its denominational leadership was struggling, its individual congregations — large and small — were counting every penny. Our small church was deemed insignificant.

Mead writes:

For now, here are the five challenges I see we have ahead of us: 

  • To transfer the ownership of the church. 
  • To discover new structures for the church. 
  • To discover a passionate spirituality. 
  • To make the church a new community and source of community. 
  • To become an apostolic people. 

Redeemer deals with each of these issues:

  • We insist that the ownership of our community rests in the congregation. Our constitution and church polity agree with our position. But this has been of no protection. When assets are coveted, governing documents are quickly rewritten in the minds of church leadership. Clergy serving us disappeared with little or no notice or explanation. We were eventually evicted from our property. This was intended to be a final blow. Our denomination even predicted publicly that within six months, our congregational identity would die. 26 months later our congregation still meets weekly and has found new ways to serve which do not rely on property or professional leaders. 
  • Left without a building to support, we began creating a new congregational structure which reached out to other congregations, denominations and the spiritually minded with no church affiliation. How fortunate that the world was never more prepared for this type of outreach!
  • We discovered within ourselves a spirituality we didn’t know we had when we were passive pew-sitters, receptors of our clergy’s sense of spirituality. A foundation was quickly laid for the development of dormant leadership skills.
  • We embraced outreach tools that the church as a whole has been very slow to use to anywhere near full potential. Within months we found that our community potential was worldwide.
  • We work now to create an apostolic presence using modern tools.

Mead goes on to write:

“We need to recognize that a classic conflict of interest is at work here. Clergy-dominated institutions make many decisions in which clergy have a direct stake: salaries and job security, for example—sometimes involving prestige and preference. In our society we generally feel that institutions that nurture “conflict of interest” frequently make bad policy—policy that supports the welfare of those with the conflict of interest not the welfare of the entire institution.”

Mead calls for more dialog between clergy and laity. He cautions that dialog must be entered into with equal respect among participants. This, Redeemer has found, has been impossible. The conflict we have faced has been fought for four years with virtually no dialog and no foundation for mutual respect. Power, not mission, was central to the conflict from the outset.

Mead’s books were rightfully acclaimed when they were published. As they are re-released in a single volume for a new generation of church leaders, we can only ponder why his respected advice has been so strongly resisted by the readers who once found his thinking so ground-breaking.

We hope for a new generation who can not only applaud his wisdom but also apply it!

How to Monitor Your Congregation’s Social Media

It will take a while to create online dialog, but start preparing.

If you want to encourage engagement on your site, remember to ask. Businesses use Calls to Action or CTAs. Every good ad has one. It could be a phone number to call or a web site to visit. The interactivity of the web allows you to get fancier. Ask questions at the end of your post. Include a simple poll on the topic you are covering. Direct readers to something you’d like them to download. Link to another page. We’ll talk more about this later.

There are three major forums for interaction in Social Media. Facebook, Twitter and your Blog. Focus for now on your blog. Blogs encourage thoughtful interaction. Facebook is more of a free-for-all. Twitter plays an important role, too. All need to be monitored. If help is short, start with the blog. Blog platforms send the administrator an email when a comment is posted. You can review the email before it goes public. (We’ll address Facebook and Twitter in future posts.)

There are tools to help you monitor your Social Media, but the focus of our series is helping churches use this media. The reality is that church experience with social media probably relies on volunteers. Much of the advice you find online will not help you get started with the resources you have.

Begin by Drafting Community Rules

Draft a short statement to readers about the type of content you will accept.

Post Community Rules prominently in a sidebar on your blog and Facebook or on its own tab. Rules should be very short and should encourage participation and give readers a sense of comfort in joining your community. They’ll know someone is watching out for them.

Suggestion for Community Rules:
We welcome you to participate in discussion on our parish blog with opinions or questions that are presented thoughtfully, responsibly and with respect to our readers. We will not publish profanity of any sort and reserve the right to exclude comments that bully, harass, threaten, are libelous, hate-oriented, racist, or illegal. You may post anonymously but do not impersonate someone else. If you read content on our page that you think is inappropriate, please report it. We want this forum to make the world a better place. We know that includes criticism. Following the Community Rules will make this a safe place for everyone to have a say.

It is important to be open in your approach to monitoring. Negative comments should be deleted only if they violate the Community Rules.

Negative comments are an opportunity to address issues which may concern many people. It is a chance to witness! Do so thoughtfully.

  • Answer all comments. It creates relationships.
  • Accept positive comments graciously.
  • Address negative concerns openly. You may want to ask the pastor to respond, depending on the nature of the complaint.
  • If you encounter a “troll,” someone who is out to make trouble on your blog, here are a few steps to take.
    Respond publicly to the first comment or two. Address concerns in a forthright manor. If the complaint is legitimate the negative comments will stop. If negative comments persist, respond publicly one more time, saying that you are going to address future concerns offline. Then do it. Your readers know that you are responding but any nastiness is no longer public.

You are likely to receive more positive comments than negative, but both are important. Personal attacks should not be allowed. Give more leeway for criticism of public figures or elected representatives. By virtue of their office, they are open to criticism.

Monitoring Social Media is work. We recommend that you designate a few people to monitor comments. Have a talk about how you will respond and what to do if you don’t know the answer to a question. Divide the responsibility, assigning committee members certain days.

People expect replies within 48 hours. The value of the discussion decreases dramatically after that.

Over the course of a few months, you will see patterns to participation and can prepare for busy days. But make sure someone checks daily so that questionable comments are not hanging in cyberspace without your attention and those in need know you are listening.

Why Small Churches Are Ideal for Multicultural Outreach

2×2 is polishing the crystal ball. Looking into the future, we see the small urban church as having the best potential to implement multicultural ministry.

Here are the reasons why:

  • Location, location, location 
    Small churches sit in the middle of changing neighborhoods. If multicultural ministry is the goal, the church needs to be where the cultures are!
  • Heritage
    Small churches remain close to their heritage which often had their roots in immigrant ministry. Suburban churches are likely to have had a later historic start and missed that experience.
  • Size
    Smaller groups of people make it easier for newcomers to become involved in influential ways more quickly. They will not be lost in a crowd.
  • Ability to Adapt
    Small groups can change more easily and quickly with the right leadership. There are fewer minds to change. Leaders are easy to identify and motivate.
  • Personal Touch
    Guests stand out in a small church. Visitors readily greet them. This has been very pronounced in our Ambassador visits. Smaller churches meet and greet — before church, sometimes during church, and after church. Medium-sized churches often assume somebody else knows you and may say hello. Larger churches have an invitation to sign the guest book printed in the bulletin.

Small Churches Have the Best Shot of Leading the Way — Except

  • Many small urban churches are targeted for closure.
  • Their ministries have often been neglected with minimal professional leadership provided. Leaders are often assigned as “caretakers,” waiting for congregations to get discouraged and close. While they are providing “palliative care” the neighborhoods around them are changing with no outreach efforts attempted.
  • Interim ministries (the new normal) slow the process of change. While congregations are in a year or more of evaluation/assessment limbo, neighborhoods keep changing. When the congregation finally calls a pastor, they are starting over once again with probably another year before outreach can be attempted. That’s two years of a congregation’s history and resources spent focusing on relationship with a pastor — not outreach. With an average length of pastorate being just a few years, that’s a high percentage of a congregation’s time and resources focused on self.
  • Often, resources are depleted during years of maintaining a status quo and doing NO outreach. People are afraid to spend money, attempting to preserve assets for their current ministry as long as possible.
  • Assets of small neighborhood churches are sometimes eyed by the denomination.
  • Attitudes toward small churches, fostered by hierarchy, make them unpopular places for clergy to seek calls. What energetic pastors want to hold the hands of a congregation that has been labeled caretaker ministries with closure in the near future?

If denominations want to advance multicultural ministry, they must take a fresh look at the neighborhoods where multicultural ministry is most needed and find ways to make ministry possible.

The first challenge to the Church is to reverse the negative attitudes towards small churches as not worth the attention of church leaders. These attitudes squander the resources available for multicultural ministry.

This type of ministry requires special training. Seminaries must stress evangelism skills. The current scenario many small churches face is pastors who charge the laity to do this outreach. The laity have even less training than pastors! This is not working!

New ideas for teaming ministry talent (both lay and clergy), church agencies and resources must be explored.

Failure to address these conditions over the course of many years has created distrust between congregations and regional bodies. Reports from church consultants and online polls are consistently close in numbers. According to them, two thirds of church members have lost confidence in their denominational leaders with an additional 10% or more not sure. This should set off the sirens among leadership circles, but they have been slow to recognize the problems.

Rebuilding trust is a good place to start.

13 Ways to Prepare Your Congregation to Welcome Other Cultures

The success of your Multicultural Ministry begins with preparing your people. You are entering uncharted waters and your people want to know what lies ahead.

People need time to adjust to new ministry initiatives. Expect apprehension.

Recognize that faith is not constant. It is likely that you have members that are in various stages of their individual faith journeys. Faith wavers with age and circumstance. Faith is precious and needs to be nurtured and protected.

  • Youngest children have the strongest faith. They rely on everyone else for survival.
  • Some are confident of their value to the church. They are healthy and prosperous enough that they know their position in the “society” of church is secure.
  • Others may still feel like newcomers and be unsure of their ability to contribute to the ministry. They are weighing what their investment should be in a new direction. They haven’t quite grasped the old direction!
  • Others may feel threatened. Once they were strong leaders in the church but are beginning to step back. Your congregation’s new direction may have them wondering if there will still be a church they recognize when they most need comfort and support.

Change must be implemented in ways that are not threatening and which can be sustained. Unless you want your congregation to become a revolving door of new members — attracted by a fleeting special initiative and gone with the next new initiative — you must prepare your congregation.

Here are important steps to take as you begin your outreach.

  1. Make sure your pastor is comfortable with the outreach initiative. Ask what help or additional training he or she may need. There are few pastors trained in multicultural ministry. It is as new to them as it is to many lay people.
  2. Work with your governing board long before you take plans to the congregation. You need their full support.
  3. Involve as many as possible in creating a plan. When people are part of change they have less to fear.
  4. Get support staff on board. Your church musicians may have to learn some new music. Your visiting team may need coaching.
  5. Remind members of scriptures that charge us to minister to all the world. Hold a special Bible Study. If people won’t come to a Bible Study, build the elements of the Bible Study into worship and other areas of church life.
  6. Address fears and concerns. Make sure that your current members know that their spiritual needs are still important.
  7. Educate. As you develop your plans and decide what groups in your community you hope to serve, help your members learn about the cultures you will encounter. Invite someone to speak. Recommend books. Point members to helpful web sites. Learn music from other cultures. Have a congregational dinner featuring food from the culture. Take whatever time you need to prepare your current members for change. (The children’s sermon is a good tool for change. Everyone is listening while you talk to the children! Teach the children and you will teach the adults.)
  8. Do not abandon your current culture. Make sure favorite hymns and observances remain prominent in the life of your congregation. Add new things. Don’t replace old things. As stated before, you will know when to mothball the old. No need to force it.
  9. Make it fun. If a foreign language is involved, teach a new phrase a week. You can make this part of your Facebook and Twitter initiatives.
  10. Answer questions immediately. Address negative comments immediately. Failure to do this can scuttle your mission project and allow discontent to spread. If you use Social Media, monitor it and respond to both positive and negative comments. Supporters will be encouraged. Those with doubts will know they are being heard.
  11. Make friends with leaders in the culture you hope to serve. Invite them to participate in a project, so that members make friends a few at a time.
  12. Use inclusive language at all times. Remember as you use Social Media that everybody can take part — your existing congregation and the people you want to reach. It will benefit your mission if you keep your multicultural outreach from becoming “us and them.”
  13. Love one another.

Beginning Your Multicultural Ministry

Multicultural Ministry requires self-examination. It starts by understanding who you are and moves on to looking outward.

Start by defining your own congregation. What cultures are already present? What talents, resources and experiences can they bring to your outreach ministry?

When you’ve answered these questions, begin to look outside your church community.

Define Your Neighborhood

The word “multicultural” can mean many things.

  • It can include subcultures of American Society — any number of ethnic groups and racial identities.
  • It also includes social status — working class, students, divorced, public or private school youth, aged, homeless, wealthy, disabled, etc.
  • It can include gender and sexual identity
  • It can be generational: Boomers, Generation X, etc.
  • It includes immigrants and natives.

All of these have their own “culture.”

Your congregation must define what it means in your community. 

Here are some questions to consider:

  • What cultures are present in your neighborhood?
  • Which live in closest proximity to your building.
  • Which are well established? Which are newcomers?
  • Which groups are transient? (Students, seasonal workers, snowbirds or summer residents)
  • What are their needs?
  • Is Christianity part of their culture or is the “Good News” brand new?
  • What languages do they speak? Are they also proficient in English? Will you have to find leadership to facilitate communication?
  • What are their cultural expectations? Dress, food, interaction.

Consider the Cultural Expectations of the Groups You Hope to Reach

The last item on the above list of questions may be the most important and hardest to implement if you want to create a “welcome space.”

Dress in some cultures is dictated. In America, we’ve adopted a “come as you are” dress code. If your congregation expects to welcome people from the community who come from a more formal culture, you may as a group have to consider “dress.”

For example:
One family made a project of welcoming foreign students into their home. They hosted several before they ran into difficulty with a male student from an Arab country. They just weren’t connecting. They voiced their concerns to a friend who had spent time in Arab countries. The friend pointed out that the problem was partly how the females in the family dressed. “Your spaghetti-strapped tank tops are fine in America,” she told her. “But to your guest, you are naked. He will not be comfortable in your home as long as you dress that way.”

Food can unite or divide. If your neighborhood hopes to minister to Asian communities, it may have to make sure rice is a staple at your pot luck dinners. Pork and bacon can also cause problems.

If your congregation is serious about multicultural ministry, you may have to change congregational customs. Dismissing children from worship may not be an attractive option to newcomers and will create a separation among your youngest members which could take time to overcome.

Allow people to choose their seating. Some cultures divide men and women. Many will want to observe from a distance as they become comfortable. Don’t rope off seats to force people to sit closely. Let them create their own space.

Plan on Evaluating Your Progress Often

There is a lot to consider. Take the time to think things through and reconsider frequently — weekly if necessary — as you learn about one another. Mixing cultures means being willing to adapt and correct the inevitable faux pas. When you make mistakes, correct them quickly. It can be humbling — but isn’t that part of being Christian!

Network to Find Help

In your Social Media Ministry, consider all these things and create content which addresses the concerns of the cultures in your community. Your congregational blog and web site should address the topics which arise from your answers to the above questions. Create content that the various cultural groups in your neighborhood will find and follow.

Look for help. Identify agencies which serve the groups in your communities. Study their web sites. Introduce yourself. Invite them to meet with your leaders. Link to their sites. They will probably be very happy to work with you.

Be hospitable. Offer space to operate a program — such as an after-school program or a well baby clinic.

Multicultural Outreach will soon give your congregation a plan. Follow it!

Experiencing Multicultural Ministry: Part 2

As we began to share in our previous post, Redeemer was moving in a promising direction. We had new leadership and new members. The national church heard about our mission outreach and requested information. Report on Swahili Ministry.

We were stunned to run into trouble with our regional body. They had an image of our congregation that didn’t include multicultural ministry.

In their mind, we were on a timetable for closure. They were waiting for the right moment. And then we grew! Five-fold! But they couldn’t shift gears!

We had attempted to share our successes. They responded to nothing: not phone calls, not letters, not emails. They were waiting for us to die.

At last, a synod staff person shared, “It doesn’t matter what you do, the bishop intends to close your church.”

Months passed and our church continued to grow. At last, a meeting with our bishop was arranged. We took the ministry plan we had worked on for many months. It included our membership list, budget, and stewardship report and a thorough analysis of our current and planned ministry.

We also brought a resolution to call a pastor who had agreed to serve us for five years under the payment terms we offered.

Early in the meeting it became clear that the bishop’s view of our ministry was that we were very few in number and had come up with phantom new members as a way to block closure. She asked everyone to share how long they had belonged to Redeemer. She was visibly surprised when the answers began: “Ten years,” “Seven Years” “Nine Years,” etc.

The tone of the meeting changed. But the image of our church as being ripe for closure was difficult to shake. She asked for our membership list, which we happened to have with us. There were about 70 names on the list. She scanned the list and said, “A lot of these names look African.” She added, “White Redeemer must be allowed to die. Black Redeemer . . . we can put them anywhere.” The old ideas kept creeping back.

We were offended at the attempt to divide our membership along racial lines, but we directed the discussion toward our strengths. At last, the bishop relaxed and things started to go in a positive direction. She told us we could work with synod’s mission director. She asked for a bit more information, including our mailing list, and we agreed to supply it. Our members left this meeting in song, confident that progress had been made.

But four months passed with no communication. We felt in limbo. Then we received a letter in the mail declaring us closed.

That was almost four years ago. The issue has been in the courts for three years.

The point of our story is that Multicultural Ministry, while a stated goal of the Church, is not something the Church knows much about. Preconceived notions about our ministry overruled reality.

We found that church leaders can follow a separate but equal mindset — people of other cultures meet at a separate time apart from the rest of the church, with their own leaders and their own budget — perhaps even their own government.

Our ministry didn’t happen that way and it threw the regional body for a loop!

Multicultural Ministry is bound to require flexibility and open-mindedness. You must make allowances. Other people do things differently and if you think people of other cultures are going to flock to your doors and automatically become cookie-cutter Christians  . . . well, you may be in for a surprise!

We’ll talk about the many positives that we experienced and that we believe await congregations willing to exercise creativity and patience in multicultural outreach. But we thought it honest to share up front that the our experience, while overall positive, was not without trials.

We hope you will share your experiences. If you’d like to share a story or guest blog, leave a comment below.

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