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While responding to a blog post recently I was compelled to introduce a concept to those that follow my blog. It’s a story that was briefly introduced awhile ago, yet only engaged new Asian readers into the discussion, while most of my readership is not Asian. Asian or not, this is an issue that we must face within the church and I’m curious what you all think.

A reply to one of my comments on the blog was:

“In the short-run, you are right, i don’t think you’ll see much positive growth at all, but ethnicity needs to validated as a gift from God and our inheritance from our immigrant parents. so while i agree with your implication that many would benefit from a multi-ethnic or missional church (culture/ethnicity can be viewed as an inefficiency from many people’s eyes, but), an honest exploration into the question of why God created us to be from a certain place and of a certain people should inspire us to discover our ethnicities and cultures in a redemptive light.

This is where i think the example of the people of israel and the biblical practice of remembering, remembering what God has done, who God is, and who God has made us to be, a very real practice to engage in the ethnic context.”

First of all, let me state very clearly that I am extrapolating something from a post that had a larger context. It is not my intention to argue or criticize the blog author or anyone that shares his viewpoint. I am just taking the statement and inflecting my experiences and ideas in the hopes of engaging in some dialog about the subject (hopefully) from both Asian and non-Asians.

Okay, so I’m Japanese, but I’ll admit there were some times in my life where I wished I could have been born looking like Brad Pitt or Joe Montana (nod to my NorCal upbringing) or David Cassidy. Usually it was so that I could have a girl attracted to me that wouldn’t date me because I was Japanese or so that I could avoid the words and violence associated with racism and prejudice. However, I am who I am and all that I am is for the glory of God.

However, do I want to celebrate my heritage in such a way that I need to have everyone around me be Japanese and understand my culture and my language when I’m in a Sunday church service? Is preserving my heritage in such a way something that can honor God much in the same way that the Israelites were true to their place as God’s chosen people? Did God create me as a Japanese person to engage only other Japanese people and rally us around a common cause of preserving who we are?

The Israelites were in-fact God’s chosen people. They were to inherit the earth as Abraham’s descendants. They were not to intermarry or in anyway corrupt the lineage. However, even in the Old Testament we see evidence of something that goes against this notion. Ruth was a Gentile that came to faith in the one true God. Not just any Gentile, but a Moabite and therefore hated by the Israelites. Ruth marries Boaz and bears a son that can be traced to the family line of Jesus himself.

As we see here, introducing Ruth into the Israelite culture of Judah had a profound place in history. Therefore, what is my place as a Japanese person living in the United States? Am I to segregate myself to a place where I can teach the things of God based on the context of my Japanese culture for those that will understand it because they too are Japanese? Or should I celebrate who I am in Christ and share my culture and experience with others so that they may benefit?

Let me shift to a different scenario to help me make my point. With Barack Obama’s candidacy the discussion of black church and white church came up in the media. There were some black churches (I personally dislike this label even though it is socially acceptable) where the message was preached against white America. It was almost an us-against-them mentality that was glorified. However, what if instead of trying to empower African-Americans in the church to stand up to social injustice from the caucasian world they tried to share their stories outside of the black church in a way that brought attention to what has gone on and continues to go on in their lives? How can white America know what is going on in the black community if the black community segregates themselves from the rest of us? The same is true with Asian-Americans in my opinion.

I talk to so many people today that have no clue what I go through as an Asian-American in society. So many think that racism and prejudice is a thing of the past. You wouldn’t believe how many people think I must be smart in math or must have gone to college at UCLA or Cal or that I must be an engineer or know all there is to know about computers or ask me questions about sushi. The outright hatred of me due to my Asian features has diminished greatly over the years, but the stereotypes have not. How does being exclusively with other Japanese people on Sundays help me to make a difference? What if I could take the fulfillment of one of God’s Ten Commandments to honor your mother and father to a whole ‘nother level by introducing my Japanese culture of being there for my parents in ways that aren’t the norm here in America?

I believe that God created me more to honor him and bring glory to his Son Jesus through my unique perspective of a Japanese person with my own individual experiences than he did to see me perpetuate my ethnic values and cultures at all costs. As the Great Commandment in Matthew 25 calls us to do, we are to preach the gospel to all nations and teach them what Christ has taught us. He didn’t say each nation is responsible for the preaching of the gospel to themselves. Three thousand didn’t come to Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost and believe so that they could go back to their nations and keep their faith within the borders of their individual nations. Paul didn’t preach there is neither slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile only to see us reverse that in order to preserve our ethnic culture in a new land.

I should not have the viewpoint that I am Japanese and you are not so I can perpetuate my culture and heritage in my church and you are excluded, therefore you lose out on all that you could gain through knowing and understanding who I am and what I experienced. Through knowing my struggles with racism and prejudice and the pressures I faced in school here in America you can have some insight on persecution for who I am and how I dealt and continue to deal with that now that I am a Japanese person and a Christian. You can learn how some of the values revealed to us through the Scriptures have been in place in the country of my birth even though less than 1/10th of 1 percent of its people are Christian and how that breaks my heart. You can learn how to look at me as a brother or sister in Christ with individual experiences I can bring to the table and share rather than someone you have no idea how to address since you couldn’t be as mathematical or technologically savvy as me or because you don’t like sushi or whatever.

The harsh reality is that I am different from most of you. Heck, I’m different from many Japanese people as well. However, not only do I truly believe that you can learn from me, I absolutely know that I can learn from you. Together we can celebrate all of God’s people and all that he is doing in this world as the brothers and sisters he created us to be.

Let me start with a question: Can the seeker-sensitive, mega-church model really be missional? I’m one of those that thinks it can. Missional really is a matter of the heart that is realized through application. Serving others becomes relevant because it is in the very nature of who we are as missionaries. Can such an environment exist in a mega-church? I think it can.

The biggest problem facing the missional mega-church is one of how it can be organic and easily mobilized when it operates with 2-5 services per day and affects 2,000-50,000+ in attendance on any given weekend. Menlo Park Presbyterian Church actually closed its door one Sunday in April last year to be the love of Christ to the surrounding community. With about 2,600 of its 5,000 members committing to serve others as reported in the Oakland Tribune:

For only the second time in its 134 years, a church in Menlo Park today canceled Sunday morning service and shut its doors.

It’s no crisis — it’s only because the majority of its 5,000 members instead spent the weekend renovating homes, refurbishing schools, assisting the homeless or building thousands of support kits for AIDS caregivers in Africa, among scores of charitable activities throughout the Peninsula.

As Pastor David Meysembourg stated in a comment to one of the previous posts here on the blog about the missional church, “So for those who are already doing church, the real work lies in becoming missional without losing the flock. The difficulty comes in transitioning from a more traditional church (which is many of the things missional is not) to a missional church. Education and training, modeling missional values, discussion, reading, all are an important part of this process. One of the first things we’ve done is to define ‘church’.”

Ask 100 pastors to define what the church is and you may find 100 different responses. Sure, the underlying theme and overall context may be similar, but just as God calls individuals to lead/preach/teach he also inspires them with visions that complement their giftedness and passions. Another point made by Pastor Meysembourg that we as pastors must be united on though: Church is “Not a building, not program, not an event, but people living God’s plan for their lives.”

What is God’s plan for our lives? Simply stated in the eloquent words of Christ himself in Matthew 22:37-39:

37″‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

If we gather together as the body of Christ and love God completely and love others with the love of Jesus aren’t we being missional? Must there be a 100% buy-in from all that gather in a Sunday service in order for the church to be considered missional? If we look at missional as some formula of how we can “do” church, then the answer would be no. However, if we look at being missional as a matter of the heart and an application of our love for our fellow humans and realize that not everyone may be willing to walk in the same shoes at the same time, then any body of Christ that exemplifies the Greatest Commandment is in-fact going to be missional.

As Alan Hirsch states on page 182 of his book The Forgotten Ways,

“One of the reflections arising out of my fifteen years’ experience at SMRC is that as we grew and began to operate in the classic church growth mode it became increasingly harder to find God in the midst of the progressively more machinelike apparatus required to ‘run a church.’ With numerical growth, it seemed that we were increasingly being drawn away from the natural rhythms of life, from direct ministry, and that our roles seemed to become more managerial than ever before.”

With Mr. Hirsch’s statement being a generalization of what is thought to occur in the mega-church model of ministry, there are definitely large, looming issues inherent in this model that could or would prevent a missional dna from developing as the environment can lend itself to becoming consumeristic and inwardly focused. However, with a missional vision for a mega-church committed to the Greatest Commandment, all things are possible with God.

It’s amazing to me that through a simple question so much information can be found through study and research in order to confirm an answer. I was asked the following question by a Korean friend:

What should be our attitude toward multi-cultural church? Should we seek it out or just build a church without actively seeking it?

As someone that has way more experience on this subject than me, I contacted DJ Chuang and got some insight from him, which he posted on his blog to illicit feedback from others to help as well. Then I started finding that through following blog links that this is a subject discussed a lot within the Asian-American context. As an Asian-American, this interests me a great deal. It seems that there is quite a lot of debate on the issue of having segregated Asian churches in the US or whether we should strive to be an amalgamation of one body within one homogeneous church.

For me, I really feel more comfortable in a multi-cultural church. I want church to be about loving God and loving others and being in-service to my fellow man rather than being served. I feel like being in an ethnic church makes it more about one’s heritage rather than about serving others. In a Korean church, the context of the message is going to be presented in a way relevant to the culture of Korea. Food will cater to Korean taste buds. So, what if God sends a Mexican family to a Korean church? Well, maybe they will connect, but most-likely I think they will feel out of place. Even if they connect, the church is probably so inwardly focused on reaching other Koreans than unchurched Mexican, Caucasian, African-American, Argentinian (etc.) people with the saving grace of Christ for both the Jew and the Gentile, that they will miss out on connecting others to the church and subsequently to the gospel of Christ.

One thing that puts me up against a lot of others in ministry is that I believe church was never intended to be safe and comfortable. The minute it is, where do we need to seek Jesus? If the church is feeling all warm and fuzzy then why would they want to venture out and attract those unlike them to be a part of their community? Jesus called upon the disciples to be challenged and always learning and growing. They were put in situations so risky that at times their life was dependent on whether or not they would be willing to die for their faith in Christ. I don’t think we can truly comprehend this idea in modern-day America.

Looking at the church and it’s amazingly rapid growth under oppression and persecution, it causes me to wonder something. They are Chinese and don’t really have options to worship in multi-cultural churches, but if religious freedom came about, I’m wondering what would happen. As a country that just hosted 200+ nations for the Olympic Summer Games and is reaching out to the US, Middle East & Europe and adopting some of our cultures into their way of life, would they really want to be just a church to the Chinese?

If we are to expect the kingdom of heaven to reign here on earth, will there be ethnically separated churches on that day? Are their segregated streets with segregated worship spaces in heaven? I seriously doubt it! So, we might as well realize that Christ has only one bride and it has nothing to do with our birthplace or skin color. It has to do with our love and faith as we set out in the journey to follow Christ.

For more thoughts, some of which go against my thoughts in this post, take a look at:

• Churches should stay segregated: http://waynepark.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/churches-should-stay-segregated/
• I could write pages and pages on this: http://www.randplaty.com/2008/08/06/i-could-write-pages-and-pages-on-this/#more-223
• Does a multi-cultural church need to be intentional?: http://www.djchuang.com/2008/does-a-multiethnic-church-have-to-be-intentional/
• Asian-American churches…the wave of the future?: http://www.randplaty.com/2008/07/26/asian-american-churches-the-wave-of-the-future/
• In class today: Mosaic Church: http://nextgenerasianchurch.com/2007/10/16/in-class-today-mosaic-churches/#more-352
• Why many Amerians prefer their Sundays segregated: http://eugenecho.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/why-many-americans-prefer-their-sundays-segregated/

Just some more random things, but as I have watched some of the Olympics the past few days, some things have popped into my head that I believe apply to the church.

1. Unity- The Olympics obviously are about unity. Individual countries come together in unity and globally nations are coming together in China for the sake of a common goodwill and competition.
2. Peace- While there was some random violence that has occurred in China, there is a sense that all nations are coming together in peace. At the games there is no judgment on way or communism. It’s simply about sportsmanship and losers congratulating winners and just enjoying the opportunity to represent their beloved countries in this international competition.
3. Diversity- Not only is Beijing, China incredibly diverse with hundreds of countries in attendance for the summer games, but there is even diversity within each nation’s teams.
4. Teamwork- There are varying levels of talent within each team, yet no one complains about others dragging them down or how some may have to work harder and forsake individual recognition in order to help the team win. This was especially prevalent in the gymnastics floor exercises on Sunday night. Of course it will be prevalent in all of the team games such as basketball, volleyball, and even the synchronized swimming events.

If warring nations can come together in peace and just become people with a sincere desire to help their nation win a gold medal in the Olympics, why can’t we put aside our differences within the church for the sake of fighting the good fight of faith with the ultimate prize being Christ glorified through the salvation of the lost? Even within individual churches we can’t seem to come together in unity through a bond of peace.

One of the common notions within the church is that 10% of the people do 90% of the work. Why is that? Jesus came to serve, not be served. We say we want to be more like Jesus, yet we come to church to be served. There is just something wrong with that! It was also stated somewhere that if just 10% of the current Christian population would make an effort to tackle the world’s hunger crisis that it could be eradicated. Imagine that…a world where no child would go to bed hungry. Just 10% of us required to impact the world for Christ!

After watching spirited competition and a genuine desire to come together in unity and peace and give 100% of each person towards winning the prize, it is so obvious that we in the church don’t have much position to stand upon when Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Atheists, Christians, etc. can do this in the Olympics, yet we can’t do it in our workplace, our neighborhoods, or our churches. May our eyes be opened to the true nature of loving others–regardless of their skin color, religious belief, social class, etc.–in a spirit of peace and seek to be unified in Christ so that the way may be paved for his glorious return when he comes calling for his bride.

Taking on the leadership at my home church for a season as a final learning step before being sent to plant a missional church has been very challenging. I came with so many ideas, yet many of them don’t seem to relate to the immediate congregation. Trying to take a group of people that are accustomed to maybe one missions trip per year and no other real form of group outreach and try to instill a passion for sacrificing our time and resources to go make a difference in our local community has been slow in connecting with them. It’s not their fault, but at times I wonder if it is mine.

Am I being prepared for the future move to a new ministry that will start off as missional in its dna, or am I being asked to lead the current group of people that God has put me before while meeting them where they are at? It’s tough sometimes, but I’m trying to move a little slower and exhibit patience while trying not to be discouraged.

Note to self: Gotta quit giving attention to Satan’s voice during my idle times!

I believe with all my heart that we are called to be the church, rather than just simply go to church. We are to bring Christ to the world and show others how he is the same yesterday, today and forever. We are the body and therefore we need to go out and be active in the community or we will sit around and get fat and lazy.

Lord, cause me to continually seek the wisdom and patience that you require me to have in order to lead your people in your timing and not my own. Continue to call me to be an example (through my actions) and not just a voice. Keep reminding me that it is for your glory and not my agenda that I have been called into service for. You grow the kingdom, I don’t. Search my heart and know that it is my desire to be obedient to your will and to be in service to the kingdom of heaven as long as you ask me, it is my honor and I am not worthy, but you are and that is where I will put my faith.

Wow…wow…wow! I am speechless. What a humbling experience One Prayer has been. What a life-changing event One Prayer has been. To have a vision given to Craig Groeschel that required few words to convey, yet resonated so loudly and clearly to all those that became connected was definitely God showing His face for the world to see. I can’t to write out my reflections on our final One Prayer service today. Oh man, what a day it has been!

When we connected at www.oneprayer.com about 1 1/2 months ago, we were part of 50 churches and 35,000 individuals. In about 6 weeks this has grown to over 1,600 churches and almost 1 million people and there are many churches just starting and continuing this through the month of July. I am in awe of God’s providence and the way He works. I am amazed at how quickly and smoothly this was orchestrated and coordinated with little advance notice. Unbelievable, yet so believable because God is even bigger than One Prayer.

What a blessing and honor to have been a part of this. Dialog has been started, partnerships have developed and relationships are continuing grow all because we felt God calling us to start our tiny little church plant a couple of months early to be a part of this global project.

Praise God & thank you Craig Groeschel! This has touched many lives and was (and will continue to be) a vehicle to share God’s love and His salvation unto some who may not have ever been touched had Pastor Craig not followed through with this. Wow…wow…wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!