For a long time I have not been convinced that planting congregations targeting particular language groups is a good idea. In fact my thesis in my final year at theological college was an argument against such practices!
For me this has been based on two major concerns.
First, a theological concern. when I read the New Testament, increasingly I see Jesus and the Apostle’s bending over backwards to communicate that now in Christ, there is one body made up of many parts. In the last post I quoted Ephesians 2 where Paul speaks about the gospel tearing down the dividing wall of hostility that existed between two racial groups - Jews and Gentiles. This is reinforced by John’s vision in Revelation 7 of a multi-ethnic community gathered around the throne of Jesus in worship. The church, it seems to me, is called to be a foretaste of that future multi-ethnic worship service gathered around the throne of Jesus. We’ll see a glimpse of this, this coming Sunday as we look at 2 Corinthians 5.16-21. A passage that speaks of the present church in these kinds of terms.
My second major concern with this approach to church planting is a strategic concern. Congregations targeting particular language groups often are very effective at reaching first generation immigrants, but the second generation don’t identify as first generation immigrants as their parents did. They have been raised speaking both English and their heart language. I’ve found they often don’t feel entirely at home in their heart language church. By the time the third generation of immigrants come around (i.e. the grandkids of those who begin a service in a particular language group) they almost always never identify with that cultural group. They often only speak English and have very little desire to identify with their grandparents cultural group. I
In Sydney in the late 90’s and early 00’s there was a push to plant churches reaching out to the many SE Asian immigrants moving to the city. Twenty years on, many of these churches are now reporting how difficult it is to keep the emerging young adults in their churches. Many of them are leaving those home churches to join English speaking congregations, or sadly disconnecting from church all together. This is the third generation moment.
Because of these concerns, from the time we begun reaching out to the Mongolian community (in 2018) I have not been convinced that we should consider planting a Mongolian speaking service…until late 2020.
What changed for me was not my theological convictions, or my concerns about long-term strategy. I hold these perhaps stronger than ever, what changed for me was reflecting on our Anglican ecclesiology (this is going to get pretty nerdy for a little while) and how well suited it is to incorporate targeted ministry with certain parameters in place to ensure our oneness in Christ is not compromised. To put it simply, we are already one church with targeted ministry taking place. In the next post I will tease out some more detail about how we target ministry and express our oneness in christ, and our oneness as a church, St Paul’s Canterbury.