Creating an Interculturally Friendly Environment

Every intentionally intercultural church works hard to ensure people of its target group or other internationals feel welcome. This goes well beyond a perfunctory handshake by greeters on Sunday morning. It includes both internal changes in the way the church staff and congregation think, as well as external evidences of cultural appreciation. Perhaps the only way to overcome barriers is to gain experience with the culture. This takes determination and persistence. A church’s leadership fosters its corporate culture. If the pastor and other leaders are sensitive to people of other cultures, congregants will soon pick up on this ethos as well.

Milton Bennet has proposed a six-stage model that helps to understand how people transition through stages from hostility or indifference to other cultures (ethnocentricity), to understanding and appreciating other cultures (ethnorelativity). Adapting Bennet’s model, we might classify churches (their leadership, congregation, and programs) as follows:

Stage 1 — Deny: The congregation as a whole has almost no experience with other cultures. Their culture is the only real one. Forms and customs intentionally maintain psychological and/or physical isolation from other cultures. Members are disinterested in cultural difference but will act aggressively to eliminate a difference, if it impinges on their cultural preference.

Stage 2 — Defend: Congregants’ experience with other cultures creates acknowledgment of their existence, but one’s own culture is considered the only good one. An us/them mentality prevails where our ways are superior and their ways are inferior. Church leaders and congregations are highly critical of other cultures, particularly if they find themselves in the role of hosts.

Stage 3 — Diminish: The congregation has experienced enough cultural differences to explain them away. Cultural differences are minimized, trivialized, or romanticized. Elements of one’s own cultural worldview are experienced as universal, obscuring deep-seated cultural differences. Leadership’s goal is to correct cultural behavior to match their expectations.

Stage 4 — Accept: The church and its leadership have finally accumulated enough experience to recognize that one’s own background is only one of many equally complex and perhaps valid cultural outlooks. This does not mean total agreement with or approval of different cultural behaviors, but the congregation expresses respect and perhaps curiosity toward other cultures and includes them through special events and recognition.

Stage 5 — Adapt: The church and its leadership have come to the point where their experience with another culture allows them to associate with that culture using behavior appropriate to that culture. They are able to look at the world, at least partially, through the eyes of another culture and will intentionally change their own behavior to communicate more effectively in that culture. The church expresses its cultural diversity in appropriate ways and leadership and resources are shared.

Step 6 — Integrate: People from different cultures feel comfortable in each other’s culture. This is not assimilation, which is what most often happens to nondominant minority groups entering dominant culture churches. People who are forced to assimilate will be dealing with issues related to their own cultural marginality and may feel they are not wholly accepted in another culture. This is particularly true of second-generation immigrants. Although many immigrants exhibit great competence in moving between cultures, this is an unrealistic expectation for most dominant culture congregants. If achieved, the leadership and membership of this kind of church would have the ability to move readily between their own culture and other cultures present in the congregation. This kind of mobility implies a great degree of cultural competence including bilingualism.

Having persons with this highest degree of intercultural competence on the church’s leadership team is desirable. Such people lead many of the most effective intercultural churches. In most cases, stage 5 (Adaptation) will be the highest achievable goal for congregations. In time, however, it is reasonable to expect that the leadership of the church will include highly competent, intercultural leaders that can move readily between at least two cultures.

Reprinted from Becoming an Intentionally Intercultural Church, by Ken Peters and Jonathan Lewis. Used by permission.

Jonathan Lewis, Ph.D., is an associate director of the World Evangelical Alliance Missions Convention. He is author of several missionary training manuals and coeditor of Becoming an Intentionally Intercultural Church.

Ken Peters is lead pastor of the Killareny Park Church (Mennonite Brethren) in Vancouver, British Columbia.