Why should the church be multi-ethnic?
Interview: Alan McMahan
Host:
Nathan Norman
Being the Church in a Multi-ethnic Community
America - CrossTalk Global (Salina, KS)
The CrossTalk Podcast is a production of CrossTalk Global, equipping biblical communicators, so every culture hears God’s voice. To find out more, or to support the work of this ministry please visit www.crosstalkglobal.org
Produced by Nathan James Norman/Untold Podcast Production
© 2024 CrossTalk Global
Nathan: How important is preaching to the growth of the church? What can the local church do to expand their church and Christ's kingdom? And how can the church become a place of welcome to people of every tribe and nation. Join us for a conversation with Dr. Alan McMahan. Dr. McMahan is Professor Emeritus of Christian Ministry and Leadership. Currently, he teaches in the Demon program at Talbot Seminary in the Growing and Multiplying Churches track at Biola University. He's also the co author of Being the Church in a Multiethnic Community, along with Gary McIntosh. We're excited to talk to friend of crosstalk, Alan McMahan. Alan, welcome to the show.
Alan: Well, it's good to be here. I'm glad to take this time and to talk to you and the listening audience.
Nathan: Yeah, and the listening audience all around the world. It's always surprising when I hear from folks in India or Vietnam that write in and say, hey, I was listening to this episode. It's an encouraging thing that we have that many people listening from all those different backgrounds. Before we really jump into it, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where do you currently live and what do you do?
Alan: Yeah, so I live in La Mirada, California. We've been here for about 19 years. I teach in Talbot Seminary, the Doctor of Ministry program in the Growing and Multiplying Churches tract. You already mentioned that, but that's where we currently are. I grew up in North Carolina and had a call to missions early on in my life. And so I studied, became a missiologist, studied missions, missions, theory, evangelism, church growth and so on. And I've applied that in a number of contexts. So we've lived in New York a number of years. Los Angeles, as I mentioned, the Los angeles area for 19 years. We've lived overseas in Indonesia, where I taught in a graduate school. And I've traveled rather extensively through Asia in a number of different countries. Ministry context. So I've had sort of a unique journey in the sense that I've worked in ministry and jungle environments in Borneo, briefly.
Nathan: Wow. Wow.
Alan: And also from an office in the Empire State Building where I worked for three years in New York City. And thinking about how does Ms. Theology apply in all of those different places? So it's been an interesting journey and I bring that to what I teach at Talbot.
Nathan: Wonderful. Yeah. What a wonderful perspective of that vast amount of cultures that you've had exposure to and have learned from and taught within and navigated through. That's. That is a wonderful thing. And just an image of the kingdom of God. That many of us don't fully appreciate where we get to see God's church throughout all of those different cultures. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. So crosstalk is about effective biblical communication. From your perspective, how important is preaching to church growth?
Alan: Well, it's very important and it's essential, really. We talk about 3P evangelism. I don't know if you've heard that term before, but evangelism takes different forms. Presence evangelism, where you live a good life in front of your non Christian friends and hope they notice proclamation. Evangelism, where you're putting words to it, you're speaking the gospel, telling the gospel, and persuasion evangelism, where you're really speaking to the emotions and to the will to make a decision to follow Christ. So we use those three forms of evangelism at different times. Part of it relates to the receptivity of the person that we're talking to. But I think most of us would say salvation hasn't really occurred until people have heard the good news and believed. So that requires at least some level of proclamation. Living a wholesome life in front of your non Christian friends isn't enough for them to understand your faith unless you put words to it or lead them to scripture. So it's vitally important to preach and to verbalize the gospel message to the people that we're working with.
Nathan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We tend to, because of personality, choose one of those things, right, Like I'll live out my life in Christ, or you know, I like to argue or you know, share the gospel in a particular way. But it really does take a holistic approach to share the gospel to an individual, which is the nice thing about the body of Christ. Right. Because some of us are stronger in other areas than than our brothers and sisters, and some of us are weaker in those areas.
Alan: I think there is a tendency for us to select presence evangelism because it's not politically correct. We think in our Western context to talk openly about our faith in the workplace or with our neighbors or wherever we're at. But I reflect back in Romans 10:14. How will they call on him in whom they have not believed, and how are they to believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? So it really requires some proclamation of the gospel to bring people to faith in Christ.
Nathan: Wow, perfect. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there, especially for Western culture, right, where it isn't politically correct and there's a whole movement of demonizing missionaries from, from decades past because how dare they go into that culture and share the gospel. It is a challenge that we need to overcome. But it is interesting, right, because my Muslim friends, they find it weird that we don't talk about our faith.
Alan: Right.
Nathan: Well, we disagree. Well, so what? Yeah, tell me what you believe. It doesn't matter to you because you don't talk about it is their response. And so I appreciate my Muslim friends perspectives on it because over the years it said, yeah, you know, it does matter to me. Romans 1:16. I'm not ashamed of the gospel. And as long as we can live it out and we're not obnoxious about it, it is effective. It is powerful.
Alan: Well, you know, that's true through most of the world. Actually. Most people that I've encountered internationally are quick to talk about their faith and they weave it into their daily lives. And it's really more of a Western thing, I believe that, where we tend to avoid verbalizing our faith. But if you look historically at the great revivals and the awakenings and the movements of the Spirit of God, they've always been accompanied by powerful proclamations of spirit filled preaching. Great preaching has always accompanied these events.
Nathan: Wow. Yeah, I'm sure we could talk all day about how that happened in the Western world to shift it to this hyper privatization. But let's move on. Kent wanted me to ask you what are the top three things a church can do to expand their church and Christ's Kingdom? That is a loaded question right there.
Alan: Yeah. Three simple steps, right, to expand your church. There's a lot of factors that go into a growing church. But one of the big things that we've discovered is that churches that winsomely and frequently introduce their congregation to the Savior and invite them into personal relationship with him are churches that are growing. My son and I, my adult son, he's a doctoral student at Asbury Right now. We did a research project looking at churches across the country that had much higher levels of conversion growth than the average church. We did a research on some rapidly growing churches for Outreach magazine and published an article in the October issue last year of what we discovered with these high conversion churches. When you look across the country, if you look at the statistics, you'll see that most churches in the US have a conversion ratio that's very low. I mean, sometimes 80, 90 people working for a year to produce one convert. I mean that's just exceedingly slow. In a study done of Southern Baptist churches, and they frequently, more frequently than many churches, talk about Evangelism more than the need to have a personal relationship with Christ. But in their churches, the average growing church had about 19. The ratio was 19 to 1, 19 people to bring one person to Christ. And these ratios, the lower the number, the better it is. But then we looked at some churches that had very low conversion ratios where there was only seven or eight or 10 people required in each year to bring someone to Christ. So we look at the average annual attendance numbers for a church and compare that to the number of reported baptisms. And we saw that these churches that are really bringing a lot of people to Christ are ones that frequently, almost in every service, are giving an invitation to accept Christ as Savior.
Nathan: Oh, wow.
Alan: And many of them use recorded and or live testimonies virtually every Sunday to talk about how people accepted Christ or how they won. Members of the congregation won their friend or their neighbor or their co worker to Christ as an example of it. The pastors woven those stories of their own sharing unfaith sharing opportunities into their sermons, and it permeated what they were doing. And those churches had much, much higher conversion rates in their churches.
Nathan: Yeah, that makes sense, because I know growing up as a kid, it was the only, the only real evangelism example I had was like cheesy Christian movies, right? And even as a child or a teenager, I would watch these things and how someone is presenting the gospel and then the character becomes a Christian and now they're perfect and never do anything again. I'm not saying all Christian movies, but there were cheesy Christian movies that did this. And those were kind of my exemplar. And I'm like, that's just not real life. But then to have people share their experiences and I would even say share their failures or their embarrassments in sharing the gospel, that's helpful too, because that, that teaches us you're not going to get a touchdown every time. And also when we're persistent, things happen. The spirit of God moves. Something will always happen when we share the gospel with our friends and neighbors and co workers.
Alan: Many Christians are intimidated by the idea of sharing their faith, wondering if their friend will ask a question that they can't answer or if their friend will judge them harshly if they bring up the topic. And so they tend to be intimidated by it. One of the values of working these real examples of successful faith sharing opportunities, weaving that into the sermon or into the Sunday service, is that it reminds people that this is really not as complicated as it seems. That really the research shows that most people come to Christ through a known relationship where they've had an opportunity to see that person's life over time, and they can see the life change that has occurred. And that becomes the most powerful element in faith sharing. And so lowering the bar in our minds to show that most of us are already good at those kinds of things. And faith sharing can come out in terms of our normal daily life, our normal interactions with our neighbors. And that's an empowering element, I think.
Nathan: Yeah, it absolutely is. So, changing topics a little bit, you and Gary McIntosh Co wrote being the Church in a Multiethnic community back in 2012. There is a link in the show notes for those who are listening and would like to get a copy of this. Why does multiethnicity matter for the church?
Alan: Well, if you look in the book of revelation, either Revelation 5:9, chapter 5, verse 9, or Revelation 7:9, we're reminded that someday before the throne there will stand a multitude of people from every nation and language and tribe standing before the throne, praising the Lord for who he is and what he has done. And so the heaven's going to be a multiethnic place. It's even interesting in those places, in those passages, this is a reality. Even in heaven, there is some retention or connection to the previous culture or worldview because in their own languages they're praising the Lamb. So that's very interesting. And it talks about God's intention for all people. What we do know is that the gospel flows most easily among people that hold things in common. And if you look around our churches worldwide, we tend to cluster into common language or common ethnicities in our churches. We tend to be more segregated in our churches than the community that we live in looks like. So it's a sociological fact that we tend to cluster with people that look like us. And we do know that the gospel flows more rapidly through a social group, among people that hold a lot in common. But to reach a wider group of people, we need to cross a barrier. And there are barriers of language or culture or geography that hinder the flow of the gospel or any other good idea that we're sharing with our neighbors. To get over those barriers, it takes much more intentional effort, sometimes learning a language, adapting to a new culture, contextualizing the message in ways that the hearer can appreciate. And so that takes intentionality to get over the barrier. So we can use both of those. Commonality and differences both have certain strengths if we modify our strategies.
Nathan: To go back to your point about, we tend to spend time and group with people who are similar in a variety of ways. I know Charlton Heston told the story of when they were filming Planet of the Apes and they would have lunch, that he noted that there were all different kinds of actors inside all of these ape costumes. But the people who were in the gorilla costumes ate lunch with the people in the gorilla costumes and the chimpanzee costume people ate with the chimpanzee costume people and the orangutans. And then the human characters, they tended to eat lunch together. So they already kind of naturally segregated themselves based on. On the parts that they were playing in this sci fi film. So, yeah, even in the film, even when you put a fake mask on, there's something psychologically that we do that. But going back to your point about revelation, and yeah, that is the image of the kingdom of God, where it's from every people, tribe, tongue, and nation, which you alluded to earlier as you were sharing, being able to minister all around the world. That is a wonderful, beautiful image that I think us as Christians need to embrace. But as you just described, it takes a lot of work. It doesn't come naturally, at least to us right now. And so it's almost like one of the things we need to do is to adopt that as a core value of reaching out for the other, reaching across ethnic and cultural barriers and divides so that we can have fellowship in Christ with individuals. One of the things I love about your book is that it gives multiple approaches to reaching our diverse neighbors. And so it's not a one size fits all. You have to do it this way. And this is the only way. It gives a number of options to do that. Now, obviously, this is a short podcast, so we can't do this. Talk about it at length here for the next six hours. But what are the first steps a church could take to reach out to their neighbors from different cultures? So, like, just like, baby step us here, someone says, yeah, you know what? We do want to reflect the kingdom of God here in our church, in our local community. What are those first few baby steps a church can take to start becoming a multiethnic community?
Alan: You know, I think one of the first things is to learn how to see people who are not there, which sounds like a superpower, right? To see the people that are not there. Most of us believe our churches are open to everybody. We welcome everybody, regardless of accent or skin color or background. We welcome everyone. But a quick look around our congregation on Sunday morning will reveal that we're not reaching everyone. Who are the people that we're Missing. Why aren't they coming? Jesus was constantly reaching out to people that others didn't see, that the disciples walked right past, that the church leaders had ignored. He saw the leper or the tax collector or the demoniac or the woman with the issue of blood. I'm sure that his actions in welcoming or approaching some of these people were surprising to his disciples. But Jesus constantly saw the people that were being missed by others. While I've been at Biola, one of the classes I taught was urban research. And I took students into New York City, California students to New York and also in Los Angeles. And we researched immigrant people groups in the city. And there are hundreds, as you would imagine, in cities like New York and Los Angeles. And it's true of most big cities around the world that they're multiethnic collections of people. But what's surprising is that you can have a church that successfully reaches one kind of person, one kind of community, and yet just a block away, two blocks away across the street, sometimes there are people of different cultures, different ethnicities that aren't naturally attracted to the church. In fact, they may feel alienated in your church because they're not like everyone else. And part of what we wanted to do was to alert churches that there are opportunities for cross cultural engagement, often not far away from their church. And by intentionally loving on this population that's nearby, they could effectively reach or have impact throughout the whole world. So learning to see people who aren't there and moving toward them to minimize the culture gap, minimize the income gap, sometimes that separates us from them, and loving them in practical ways, that's one of the first things I think we could do, opening our eyes and seeing the world around us. Donald McGavin was a missiologist, said we all need church growth eyes. And by that he meant we need spiritual discernment to see the receptive people that are around us. And that's a gift from God, when that occurs is that we need spiritual discernment to see hungry people. And Jesus constantly saw people like that. But we also sometimes need research to look around and be intentional about understanding the various communities, the mosaic of people that are surrounding us. And so learning to see them and learning to move toward them is a big step in that direction. I've reflected on the fact that you mentioned before that Gary McIntosh and I wrote a book on the multiethnic church. Multiethnic churches, especially in their larger worship services, tend to be very multiethnic. You'll have people from a variety of cultural backgrounds and Sometimes languages, but they perhaps have a common language enough to where they can understand the message. But if you did a deeper analysis, even of a multiethnic church, you'll find they have homogeneous groups. That means groups that are composed of people that look the same. So multiethnic churches had heterogeneous gatherings, as in the big worship services, where there was a big mix of cultures. And they also had small groups that were single cultures, all working in the same church. And those different kinds of groups reach out differently. I've already said that when the Gospel is spreading most rapidly, it's usually moving between people that have a lot in common. Yeah, but there's also the need, and this is the missional mandate, to cross the barriers that separate us, to hang out with the people that are not like us. And that leads us into other ponds, other pools, other communities of people that are quite different. And by being intentional and finding some receptive folks that are ready to accept Christ, then we have entry into that larger pond or that different pond. So convening gatherings in our churches that both mix people of different types and also cluster people of similarities, using both of those structures complement each other and give us the advantage to reach in different ways into the community.
Nathan: Excellent. Excellent.
Alan: As it relates back to preaching, even in our preaching, I think it's important to show the diversity of peoples that come together and even the way that Jesus in his preaching composed messages that reached into different segments of society. So he was bringing out application, or he was demonstrating God's truth to the diverse audiences and brokering or building greater understanding about the Kingdom of God in that process. And of course, that really accelerates when you get into the Book of Acts. And the church started sending out missionaries from Antioch, which was a cosmopolitan, multiethnic city. And it became even more of a deliberate action upon the part of the disciples in their preaching to contextualize, as we know, what Paul did in Athens and other places. So it intersects back to the task of preaching and appreciating culture as we explain God's Word.
Nathan: Yeah, and this is just the surface of. Of how deep we can go in this. I commend to our listeners being the church in a multiethnic, why It Matters and How it works by Gary McIntosh and Alan McMahan. I'd invite you all to check the show notes and find out how you can get ahold of that book and to become a more welcoming church to the neighbors around you or to wherever God sends you. Alan, thanks for being on the show today.
Alan: It's great to be with you.
Nathan: So you've heard it from Alan. Learn to see people who are not there, move towards them, not away, and be willing to cross barriers. And if we do that in our personal lives, in our church lives, in our biblical communication, and within our broader church community, we're going to start to reach people for Christ. They might think differently, they might have different cultures, but they're brothers and sisters in Christ, and they're part of what makes up the beautiful mosaic that is the Kingdom of God. The crosstalk Podcast is a production of crosstalk Global, equipping biblical communicators so every culture hears God's voice. To find out more about this educational nonprofit organization, please visit www.crosstalkglobal.org. we have a new cohort beginning in Celina, Kansas in 2025. If you want to be part of this revolutionary educational experience, check the Show Notes for more information. Students can participate in the program to receive biblical communication skills, and there's also an option to earn an MA Degree in Biblical Communication. You can also support this show by rating it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you find it. Be sure to listen next Friday and discover how to go deeper in your relationship with God. You won't want to miss it.