A church can easily fall into isolation and monocultural groupthink when it doesn’t interact with other churches. Unfortunately, this is the norm in modern America. Churches generally don’t mix except for the rare occasion. Sometimes, pastors will gather together and enjoy accountability and the chance to bounce ideas off of one another during the week, but their churches never really mix. This leaves the general church body isolated within its denominational and ideological cliques.
In order to get out of this funk, a church can better encourage diversity by partnering with other churches. This partnership will be incredibly effective if, say, a majority-white church partnered with a majority-black church. The idea of partnership among churches can mean a lot of different things. Most of the time people are scared to partner with another church because of the difference in doctrinal opinion.
Here, though, are a couple of ideas that will help one get a better idea how a church partnership could work out:
• Join each other for worship. Take one Sunday out of the year, at least, where your congregation joins the other church for worship in their neighborhood. Doing so will get your church out of its comfort zone and let them experience a life and culture different from their own.
• Do outreach together. Set up outreaches with the church you partnered with where you can team up members of your church with members of the partner church as they outreach around the town or city. Or establish a worship event, like Unified By One does, that brings many cultures together. One church could host a block party type event while the other helps. Then the next time the location could be switched to the other church.
There are bound to be a plethora of ideas that could be used to implement more diversity in your church when your church partners with another church that is more diverse culturally. Share some of your thoughts below. Also, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you’d like to see a multicultural worship event in your church or neighborhood.
