from my understanding reading through this article. i have a question that comes to mind... so the worship is multi-cultural, but what about the spiritual formation and community core, which is the small groups. are they reflective of the worship congregation demographics. the cynic in me says that more often than not it reflects like many small congregations that are single race.
another thing that comes to mind is that true embrace is messy. in large corporate worship there isn't an intimate factor where people encounter the messiness. smaller groups force the interaction the eventually all mess comes to be dealt with. by messiness, i don't mean this as a bad thing
I think both points you raise are good ones. In large corporate worship, it is easy to distance one's self from the mess. And if one's small group is predominantly monoracial, that still prohibits the messiness (I love that word that you use!)
Plus, I have to wonder how "multicultural" the worship truly is. You may have many different people occupying the pew space, but what about the structure of the service itself, the songs that they sing, etc. I think one quote in the article was very telling:
"He also stands out because he is African-American. Most integrating megachurches are led by whites, and white Christians generally don't stay at black-led congregations, Emerson says."
Most of the most "successful" multicultural megachurches have white pastors....I wonder what that says?
2 comments:
from my understanding reading through this article. i have a question that comes to mind... so the worship is multi-cultural, but what about the spiritual formation and community core, which is the small groups. are they reflective of the worship congregation demographics. the cynic in me says that more often than not it reflects like many small congregations that are single race.
another thing that comes to mind is that true embrace is messy. in large corporate worship there isn't an intimate factor where people encounter the messiness. smaller groups force the interaction the eventually all mess comes to be dealt with. by messiness, i don't mean this as a bad thing
I think both points you raise are good ones. In large corporate worship, it is easy to distance one's self from the mess. And if one's small group is predominantly monoracial, that still prohibits the messiness (I love that word that you use!)
Plus, I have to wonder how "multicultural" the worship truly is. You may have many different people occupying the pew space, but what about the structure of the service itself, the songs that they sing, etc. I think one quote in the article was very telling:
"He also stands out because he is African-American. Most integrating megachurches are led by whites, and white Christians generally don't stay at black-led congregations, Emerson says."
Most of the most "successful" multicultural megachurches have white pastors....I wonder what that says?
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