pat loughery

I asked several friends who are leading intentionally multicultural/multiethnic/multiracial churches to share some thoughts about that experience. First up is Matt Echohawk-Hayashi. Matt is one of the pastors of the church I am part of, Ohana Project in Seattle. I value Matt’s voice as a friend, as my pastor, and as somebody who’s been thinking deeply and crafting a faith community with these issues in mind. I hear a fuller story of God’s Good news from Matt than I have heard elsewhere, and I think you’ll get a glimpse of why below.

Here’s what Matt wrote to me. I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions – add them to comments here, and I’m sure Matt will engage them.

The closer we get to it, the clearer we see how tricky it can be to be a diverse community of faith can be.

Popular expectations of faith actually helping to segregate us are hard to deny. It’s 2008, we have presumably have a African American presidential nominee for the Dems, and yet just about all of America’s churches are functioning predominantly not just of a particular ethnos, but for one as well. Clearly, we are not in the same United States that was in part defined by slavery, or Jim crow, or Bull Connor, God’s people have paid heavy costs for leaving those institutions behind. But, the soil still seems to have those same seeds of racism scattered through out our society today.

I do have problems with the “Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America” statement. It is a fact, but not directly because of church. Its because we have a choice on Sunday where to go. If we could choose who we work with without it affecting our pay, everyday would be as segregated as Sunday. Sunday is not the problem. We are.

This leaves us not only ignorant of each other but in my opinion, it threatens our understanding of the gospel.

Even though I’m a fourth generation American, belonging to an ethic group with strong distinctions from the majority group and having others with the same or similar distinctions in proximity to me while I grew up, help to shape me. Some things that I’m naturally going to be more comfortable with, like non-verbal communication have been reinforced my whole life. In some cases, the opposite is true for some who come from other “distinctions”. Add cultural and ethnic bias to the things that are reinforced in our enclaves and real connection between peoples becomes really difficult and group identity that crosses these enclaves is really, really difficult.

But the gospel just repeated to ourselves in our own voices, without the conviction that comes when we hear it from “others” is in danger of becoming no gospel at all. A mentor taught me that without the power of hearing it again for the first time, which can rarely happen without an outcast involved, the good news can become just folk religion, designed to reinforce the status quo of our distinctions and not a force that calls to re-creation in Jesus.

A significant example: In the US, a Christianity that does not recognize the perspective of the Christians who survived (and died) through over four-hundred years of legal slavery, is not real Christianity. How can it be without claiming such glaring truths of evil, redemption, and forgiveness that have scarred the landscape of this country in almost every way?

But, as the recent election processes have revealed, we cannot recognize the perspectives of the other, while we are still separated from each other.

For us, the calling to be multi… is not possible to be separate from the calling to be Christian. It just seems like the gospel demands it.