08/21/2023
CROSS-CULTURAL CHURCHES ARE NOT FAILING!
By Randy Nabors
From whence does one take a declaration such as, “Cross-Cultural churches have failed,” as true? I have heard such statements passed around as if it were commonly accepted as fact.
They have always been difficult. Hard to plant and hard to sustain. Dr. McGavran of the School of Church Growth told me that when he said, “I’m not saying they are wrong, I’m just saying they are hard!” So he said when I spoke with him at Westminster Seminary in the 80’s. This is an important difference, and to fall into the trap of listening and believing anyone who has struggled, even suffered, in a failing effort, especially if they are now spreading a rhetoric of defeat, can be a sad mistake.
It is not a mistake to listen to those who fail in a particular church plant or church. It is not a mistake to have some empathy with their pain and wounds. It is a mistake to think their experience is definitive. We can commiserate without being discouraged or detoured from our calling if the Lord has sent us to the work of cross-cultural church planting. Far too many of the wounded in church planting, especially in a cross-cultural context, make their racial and ethnic experiences normative and tend to look around for sympathetic allies. This just makes it all the harder for those who are still at it, and especially for those still seeking to start it.
Every war effort has defeatists. They are the killers of hope, propagandists that the enemy is too strong and we are too weak to make a difference. Of course, Jesus is the one we need to keep our eyes on, and the one to whom to listen.
As I have already said, cross-cultural churches are hard to plant and hard to sustain. It is always easier to be with your own people, in the sense that one cannot blame their rejection of you on race, culture, or ethnicity. They might blame it on your poor preaching, or your lack of humility, or lack of love for the people, or dismal leadership. But if they reject you for any of those things, and they are of a different ethnicity, it is sometimes easier to reinterpret their rejection as racially generated. Sometimes racial solidarity will cause people to protect a poor pastor, or in turn, reject a good one. Racism does in fact exist and sometimes that is the reason someone rejects you or protects you.
Playing the “race card” is of course a possible option in a cross-cultural church. For that reason it is incumbent on pastors of such churches to work really hard at prayerful and spiritual discernment during times of criticism. Such periods of criticism, even rebellion, are hard for any pastor in any church. Too many pastors, and their wives, suffer intense grief in those times, whether mono-cultural or cross-cultural.
As a church planter of a cross-cultural church, which has now endured for over fifty years since its initial planting, and as a movement leader of a multitude of such churches, I cannot accept such an ill-informed, even ignorant, statement that they simply fail. In fact some of them exhibit a tenacious ability to survive due to their homogeneous ingredient, which is a biblical commitment to reconciliation and unity. More of them are succeeding than failing in my observation, even as they go through change and turmoil. Certainly, there are far more of them today then when I was ordained.
Those that fail have failed for a multiplicity of reasons. I will share some of my observations:
• Failure due to “paternalism”, where an outside church or group have the money and power and are not personally invested in the struggle for the work to grow. They make decisions from superficial reasoning which cripples the work.
• Failure to give (support) the work enough time to grow a strong cohesive core group and indigenous leadership.
• Impetuous attempt to bring in ethnic leadership or ethnic partners without their either being spiritually qualified, incapable of flexible leadership, or without them having a personal vision to invest in the work as their work. Hired guns usually leave town.
• Planting a new cross-cultural church, or merging two different mono-cultural congregations, without sufficient knowledge or experience to know what it takes to make them work. Idealism is not enough. The people have to be trained in what it will take.
• Planting a cross-cultural church with a weak leadership core, or weak Session, which is not unified either in the goal or the means to achieve it.
• A pastor who pushes too hard and makes rash decisions to achieve what he may think is proper racial or ethnic inclusion in leadership, even to replace himself. Every pastor must learn to get the sheep to trust him, not just send them down various valleys and rattle their confidence.
• A pastor who rejects African American concerns about social events and issues and seeks to sideline core concerns, spiritualizing them away, especially in his public comments. Generally any pastor who fails to listen and hear his people builds on air and will be surprised when things don’t hold up.
• Having another pastor on staff who has his own ethnic agenda and builds up a group only to take it away to create his own congregation.
• Immature assumption that because one’s charisma or gifts (and the testimony given by your admirers) that such a church plant will automatically succeed, or that due to ones own ethnicity one can be a successful cross-cultural church planter or pastor. Neither of these things have proven true.
END.
