What I Learned About Unity From Pastoring Across Cultural Lines

I grew up in a church that was racially and culturally homogeneous — not by design, or at least not by conscious design, but by the accumulated effect of a thousand small choices about location, culture, language, and which community the church positioned itself to serve. It was a good church, and I am grateful for what I received there. But it was a church that never required me to be genuinely formed by anyone who was significantly different from me.

Pastoring a multiethnic congregation for the first time — which happened not because I sought it out but because the neighborhood around our church changed significantly while I was there — taught me more about the gospel than a decade of seminary had prepared me for. This article is an attempt to pass on some of what I learned, imperfectly and still in process.

The Bible Reads Differently in a Diverse Room

The first and most jarring discovery was what happened to the Scriptures when they were read and discussed and preached across cultural lines. Passages I had read hundreds of times suddenly opened in ways I had never seen. The parable of the Good Samaritan, discussed with a congregation that included people who had personal experience of being the Samaritan — the one whose help was unexpected, whose community was the source of theological suspicion — broke open something I had missed for decades.

The Psalms of lament, which I had always engaged primarily as individual spiritual exercises, became communal in the mouth of a congregation where some members carried the specific, historical weight of generational injustice. The resurrection narratives, filtered through the stories of people who had come to faith in contexts where the gospel arrived with liberation rather than with cultural imperialism, had a different texture than the resurrection narratives I had been preaching to people whose theological heritage was primarily the tradition of the colonizers.

"The Bible reads differently in a diverse room. Things I had missed for decades became visible when the people reading with me were not like me."

Conflict Had to Be Named Differently

The second discovery was that the conflict management skills I had developed in homogeneous ministry were inadequate for multicultural ministry. The assumptions I brought about how conflict should be expressed, what a productive conflict conversation looked like, how quickly resolution should be sought, and what a successful outcome felt like — all of these were culturally shaped in ways I had never examined, because I had never been in a context where they were challenged.

Learning to navigate conflict across cultural lines required me to be genuinely curious about how my own cultural assumptions were shaping my approach, to listen more and conclude less quickly, and to create space for forms of conflict engagement that looked different from what I had been taught but were not for that reason less legitimate. The humility required to do this well was a different kind of humility than the pastoral humility I thought I already had.

What Unity Actually Feels Like

The unity that a genuinely multicultural congregation produces is not the comfortable unity of a homogeneous community where everyone already agrees on the significant things. It is a harder-won, more surprising, and more genuinely beautiful unity — the unity that emerges from people who are genuinely different choosing to be bound together by something they share that is deeper than the things that divide them.

I have seen that unity in the grief that crosses cultural lines when someone in the congregation suffers. I have seen it in the shared prayer that is awkwardly multilingual and more moving for it. I have seen it in the table fellowship that includes foods and customs and languages from half a dozen backgrounds and that images, however imperfectly, the feast that Revelation promises. I would not trade what I learned from pastoring across those lines for the comfort of a church that never required it of me.

SECTION 4 — GLOBAL MISSION

Church planting trends, national partnerships, and mobilizing for world mission.