MULTICULTURAL HOSPITALITY
Practical lessons from urban church planters
Immediately after my family and I were met at Toronto Pearson International Airport in April 2007, the Filipino Canadian friend who picked us up told me point-blank, “Pastor, you cannot start a Filipino church in Toronto.” I was taken aback.
Now you tell me this, after I left a thriving ten-year church ministry in the Philippines, after I uprooted my family from the comfort and safety of a Christian church, school and friends, and after we travelled halfway around the globe?
I managed to ask, “Why not?” I knew I was in trouble because that was all I knew – planting a Filipino church.
My friend gave this startling reply. “It does not make sense to plant a Filipino church in one of the most multicultural cities of the world.” After being a full-time pastor for 13 years, I had to unlearn all I knew and then be willing to learn how to be a new kind of church planter in Canada.
I learned this lesson the hard way – and right away.
What did I have to unlearn? Greenhills Christian Fellowship (www.GCF.org.ph), our church in the Philippines, had sent my family and me to Canada to plant churches. This sending occurred after God enabled us to be part of four church plants in South Manila ten years earlier. We had realized it was time for us to leave our comfort zone and be engaged in the growing field of diaspora mission.
But the reality check my friend offered me challenged me and my fellow leaders to ask God, “What kind of church do you want us to be in Canada?”
Multicultural ministry is long and hard
To help fulfill our multicultural mandate, the Tyndale Intercultural Ministries (TIM) Centre in Toronto came alongside us to train and coach us in multicultural ministry (www. Tyndale.ca/TIM). I remember the two words Robert Cousins, who directed the TIM Centre at that time, told me to describe this kind of ministry – difficult and slow. Those two words went against my preferred style of ministry. I preferred my church-planting ministry easy and fast. That was not to be.
We still have a long way to go in this journey, but it is worth the trip.
Much of this journey involves being intentional and strategic. One early step we needed to take was to make an accurate assessment of our intercultural capability, fluency and competency. What did we know? What didn’t we
know? How good were we at interacting and communicating between cultures? What did we need to learn? (See sidebar on IDI.)
This is a challenging and humbling exercise for seasoned leaders whose extensive experience commonly offers us an overestimation of our own ability to cross cultures deeply and genuinely. With continual training and coaching, assumptions and values that are so often stumbling blocks for other cultural groups become evident and can be slowly chipped away. For example, a belief that multiculturalism is only about the colour of skin in our pews is an assumption that needs to be dismantled. We needed to realize culture had so much to do with our values and expectations, and the way we did things that ran deep in everything and everyone. We discovered multicultural ministry is long and hard. We also learned that to be intentionally intercultural we needed to be intentionally missional, to be on mission with God in what He is already doing where we were.
We discovered an important and relational way to engage the people around our church was to love and serve them through hospitality, which we defined broadly as welcoming strangers. Here is one way to think about hospitality. The acronym AT HOME opens the concept in six ways for what we call untamed hospitality:
• Acceptance with warm welcome
• Turning guests into friends • Hearty service for the new and needy • Open homes, open hearts • Making room for others • Extravagant and untamed hospitality.
To apply the practice of hospitality in our urban context, we sought to connect with and engage the international students in our community. At that time we met on Sundays at a local community college. I asked the director of the college residence how we could help the more than 200 international students who lived there.
She willingly opened doors for us to help the students feel at home. She asked our church to help carry the luggage of the new students from the parking lot to their dorm rooms. We were given permission to host a Thanksgiving dinner for the students at the main hall, a luncheon for them on the Family Day week
Multicultural mission needs to be missional