Today I participated in a roundtable discussion at Truth Lutheran Church in Naperville, IL. This was a valuable opportunity to talk to Asian pastoral leadership in the ELCA. En route to Naperville, I had an interesting conversation with Pongsak Limthongvirtan about Multicultural Ministries in the ELCA. He had some advice for me, which was to get a PhD. I'm still struggling with this as part of my discernment process, because I'm called to serve the church, yet I still don't quite know what that looks like... is it as a pastor, or as an educator, and of course, why not a pastor/ educator? This comment also made me wonder about my future in the church. Maybe I'm over-thinking the comment, but is the PhD to prove something, and what
In speaking with the pastors and lay leaders in attendance, we spoke about pastoral identity, "Lutheran identity," hopes and expectations for the Office of Multicultural Ministries, creative ministry, and a church that is becoming increasingly marginalized.
One of the aspects of "multicultural" ministry with which I still struggle is separated services. Two pastors in attendance stated that they have a native language service, with the second generation population attending a separate English service. Truth Lutheran Church even has two separate sanctuaries and the native language service is the same time as the English language service. There is a combined service once a month. There are fellowship opportunities to bring the separate worship communities together, but what binds the communities together?
Two of the pastors also spoke of bringing not just their ethnicity to the table, but their life and ministry experiences. There was mention of segregating the Asian/ Asian American population to their own church, but at what cost? Is that representative of the body of Christ?
We also talked about definitions of "identity" and "multiculturalism." Words have such loaded meanings, especially in speaking about self and lived experience. A word as a symbol can mean entirely different things among different people. How then do we communicate when a symbol carries a multitude of meanings? How then does translation occur?
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2 comments:
This is very interesting. At Ebenezer Lutheran in Columbia, SC we have the problem of two services at the same hour: one "contemporary" one "traditional", whatever that means. Without getting into the nuance of the struggle this has been and the harm it has caused on the Body of Christ, you raise an interesting point. When our discussion to heal ourselves came to a grinding halt--no one wants to budge and give up any "turf"--someone made the comment, "What if we had two established services, only one in English and one in Chinese. Would we try to unify them and use both languages? Would this ultimately harm our mission?"
Well, I think the answer is that Christ is always on the side of unity. This is why, in my opinion, the ELCA is in trouble. NOT because of all the stuff people like to talk about, but because there is such rampant congregationalism. When the majority of parishes stop being country clubs and make full use of the liturgy as a powerful life-pattern, then we may reclaim what Luther intended: to be a confessional movement within one holy, catholic and apostolic church.
Until then, we will carry on with our denominational alphabet soup and modern day tower of Babel.
I'm interested in what you think.
Tom White, Cantor, Ebenezer Lutheran
Tom, I really struggle with two services with two different styles. I think it forms to distinctly separate communities in what should be one single unified community. Issues of protecting "turf" are not community building and doing quite the opposite... in stating "this is MY church" or "this is MY service" there is an air of possessiveness that detracts from being brothers and sisters in Christ in community and communion with one another.
I recently met with an ELCA Laotian pastor outside St. Paul, Minnesota. He also spoke to the concerns of having a native language service and an English service. He talked about creating spaces for community, and particularly in worship. He mentioned that there is no Lutheran Laotian liturgy, so he and other leaders in the church have to be creative in their ministry. In creating a liturgy, the pastor sees leaders in the congregation and encourages them to take leadership roles. It's a dual language service which takes more time, but he wanted to communicate to the congregation that there needed to be more *space* to be creative in community.
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