Lessons From the Global Church in Phoenix
As I work with international pastors in Arizona, I consistently encounter two challenges. The first challenge comes when we tell international pastors their presence is a blessing to our city and we need to hear from them. They will often say, “No, you don’t want to hear me. I don’t have anything to share. We rent space from some other church. They like us around as long as we are quiet and our kids don’t get their walls dirty.” This is a common challenge because those who come to America as immigrants often feel like they are a guest in someone else’s house.
The second challenge I face when I sit with majority culture comes when I ask Americans about appreciating something from outside America. I am sometimes dismissed. I remember asking a friend once if he had ever listened to Brazilian music, and he responded strongly, “Why would I have listened to Brazilian music? America has the best music in the world.” I laughed because growing up in Brazil it was normal to listen to music from all over the world. It was normal to watch movies with subtitles. Immigrants learn to listen to many cultures, and it seems most Americans miss out on this opportunity.
When I encounter Americans immersed in Western culture and look for how they listen to the global church that exists in their city, it often seems the habit of listening has not been developed at all. Of course they wouldn’t say, “we have the best theologians, we have the best music, we have the best books,” but looking at their bookshelves, friendships, and who they value as mentors shows this must be the case.
Depending on where an immigrant ends up, he or she will either feel like an unwelcome guest or could be welcomed with open arms and treated extremely well. I fall into the latter category. I have so many great things to say about America. I love this country. But I’ll save that for another day because I was asked to write about the lessons we can learn from the immigrant church in our city. This means I am going to explore some of the challenges facing majority culture churches in America. I want you to understand that my perspective is from someone who loves this country. I married an American. I chose to be an American. So I share as someone who has chosen to learn the language, learn the culture, learn the ways this nation views the Gospel. I made this choice because I wanted to communicate the Gospel to Americans, and to do that well, I immersed myself in the culture.
The Necessity of the Entire Body
Learning this new culture and language exposed idols in my own culture that I never realized existed. Similarly, one of the gifts of entering America as an immigrant is that it can be easy to see cultural idols to which many born and raised here may be blind. I find this quote from Lesslie Newbigin helpful:
All our reading of the Bible and all our Christian discipleship are necessarily shaped by the cultures which have formed us... The only way in which the gospel can challenge our culturally conditioned interpretation of it is through the witness of those who read the Bible with minds shaped by other cultures. We have to listen to others. This mutual correction is sometimes unwelcome, but it is necessary and it is fruitful.7
Also, the Bible gives us more to ground our discussion:
Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many (1 Cor. 12:12).
In America we have so many separate churches: one for slaves, one for freed people, one for Jews, and another for Gentiles. The immigrant Church in America is often off in its own corner unknown to the wider Church, but according to Scripture, local churches were always intended to be places where different people mixed together as one new family. Instead of gravitating toward homogeneity, they chose to be together because of their diversity. It was one of the important ways the early Church displayed the power of Christ to make us one.
When we pay greater attention to people who are mostly similar to us, we miss out on being connected to substantial parts of the body of Christ. In the name of efficiency and productivity, we are quick to amputate parts of our body. We are quick to send our own children and our elderly away. In many other countries the idea of putting our children and elderly away is unfathomable and yet here in America, it is incredibly common. The body of Christ that Paul discusses in 1 Corinthians 12 understands the value and worth of every piece of the body, especially the most vulnerable parts. Just like the eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you,” neither can the young say to the elderly, “We don’t need you.” Paul goes on:
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.” (1 Cor. 12:21-26)
With this in mind, let us remember that God has asked us to be in fellowship with those who are different from us. Even if the weaker part says, “No, I’m just a foot,” we have to choose for our own sake and for the sake of the body to continue to declare with our words and actions, “No, we are one body and God has chosen in every way to make us one body.”
Majority Minority
America is becoming majority minority. Studies show how migration patterns are changing the cultural and ethnic makeup of America. What is the evangelical church going to do about it? Are we going to try to hold onto the old ways or are we going to learn how to welcome immigrants with open arms to participate in the life and leadership of our local churches? Are we going to remain in our ethnically segregated silos or learn how to develop cross-cultural relationships?
Part of the challenge for immigrants is to understand that in a way, we are a people who live in exile. Some of us chose to come here; some had to come here due to violence, genocide, or extreme poverty; however, all of us have been sent here by God to be a blessing to our neighbors. Just like the people of God were sent into exile and told to be a blessing - to plant gardens, to get married, to build families - so also immigrants are here to be a blessing. Let me share three ways the Global Church can be a blessing to the church in America.
Shaped by Suffering Instead of Comfort
If you have been somewhere the Church has been persecuted, suffering shapes your faith. Three dear friends of mine in Turkey were tortured and murdered for the sake of the Gospel. If you know people who have suffered because of the Gospel, you do not need to use your imagination to understand what Scripture means when it talks about suffering and persecution. We don’t think, it means, “I can’t pray around the flag at school.” We are talking about life endangering persecution. For some, it means you might be killed by your own family for telling them you are a Christian. It means you can’t meet publicly without risking that someone might pull a knife on you. If you have been in that place you know suffering is a real thing; it shapes the way you pray and the way you live every day.
Growing up in Brazil, I can’t count the number of times I was robbed at gun or knifepoint. When you grow up in a context like that, you know every day could be your last, and it shapes your faith and prayer life. You know that you are completely dependent on the Lord.
On the other hand, if comfort shapes your everyday life, your nemesis is inconvenience. It can become easy for our prayer lives, churches, and life together to demand convenience as a prerequisite. This is why fast food does so well in this country; we want something quick and easy. It is challenging to remember our dependence on God in America because we are shaped by comfort far more than we are shaped by suffering. We avoid suffering as much as we can. In reality, the best way we can identify with Jesus is to put ourselves in a place to face suffering and also walk alongside people who are suffering, because that is what he did.
The Centrality of Prayer and the Holy Spirit
In America (unless you grew up in a pentecostal church), it can make people very uncomfortable to hear about dreams, visions, and the supernatural ways the Lord speaks to people. But if you look at what is happening in Iran and other parts of the world, the Church is rapidly growing by these means. They have no clue who any of our well known church planting organizations are, they have no coaching, they have no funding, and sometimes they don’t even have the entire Bible, and yet the Church is growing. How? By the power of the Holy Spirit. People are empowered, they know the power of the Gospel, and they know the power of the Spirit. They have been given a willingness to go and suffer or die to take the Gospel anywhere it needs to be taken. If all we have is God, prayer becomes all we need to hold on to him. All we can do to continue on is cling to the promises of his words.
When we go back to the safety and comfort given to us we must ask how much we really long for the new heavens and new earth, because we are lulled into believing what we have is pretty good. We like comfort, and it draws us into a spiritual laziness. We don’t want to have to fight for things in prayer, and we are fooled into thinking we don’t need to.
Do you want to see that person at work become a Christian? Fight for it in prayer. There is a direct connection between evangelism and prayer. If you are on your knees for an hour interceding for someone in prayer, guess what is going to happen when you see that person: You are going to have such an intense longing to share the love of God with him or her. If your heart is aching for people in prayer you will share the Gospel. You can have the best evangelism training, have Scripture memorized, receive the best evangelism tools, but if you are not praying then it’s as though you don’t see the miracle that is necessary for conversion to happen. You aren’t going to be bold enough to share if you aren’t crying for your neighbor in prayer.
The Holy Spirit is the power of God for the powerless. Those that come from the place of being a minority, even in America, know what it is like to be powerless, oppressed, and on the receiving end of injustice. Those that grow up in oppression know the power of God is real. They encounter opportunity after opportunity to see God come through. Have you ever had to pray for God to provide food? Have you ever needed the Lord to provide the last pennies for a bill? If you have, you have probably been able to see God come through. You can’t see that when you live in comfort. Perhaps that is the curse of having such affluence and abundance: you are deprived of seeing God come through in these dynamic ways. This is why the Church in America must sit with brothers and sisters migrating from places where they experienced poverty and injustice. We must listen and learn to know of the providence of God.
America also lacks in how we understand spiritual warfare. Something that has surprised me since coming to America is that people do not believe in demonic powers and principalities. I’ve encountered people who say they believe in God, but not Satan or demons. We can believe in God, but be atheists when it comes to spiritual warfare and darkness. If we really believed in the enemy, if we really believed that there is more than just what our eyes see when evil happens, then it should move our hearts to pray. How else would we fight spiritual things that we cannot fight with our own strength, our PhDs, or our financial worth? We need the power of God, which means prayer and the Holy Spirit are essential.
The Church as Family vs Consumer Church
American Christianity is like nothing I have ever seen. In Europe I was still immersed in Western Christianity, but even Europe sharply contrasts to the consumerism that permeates the American Church. Many of our choices in the American Church are made because we have the money and budget available. We are not only struggling with consumerism in our families. We struggle with it in our churches and how we handle our money. When I first came to Arizona and began walking around church campuses, I was overwhelmed by culture shock. I had never been to Disneyland, and I wondered if it was possible for Disneyland to look much better than these campuses. Millions of dollars go into our buildings while churches world wide have nothing.
Due to this wealth, the American Church never learns to be interdependent, especially because culturally we prize independence. We talk about the Church being family a lot, but family is a broken idea anyway in our society. Throwing the word out there to describe your church does not necessarily help bring understanding to what it really means to be a family. Many have no idea what “family” means beyond something dysfunctional. Combine that experience of family with how we structure and set up our churches congregants come, receive the service, and go home. Contributing members of the family serve here or there, but when things get difficult and hard what do we do? We don’t really know how to depend on each other. Many of us do not put the effort in to have a real experience of the Church as our family, and when we feel the consequence of that reality, we blame leadership instead of our own lack of involvement.
In America I have noticed when people are sick they don’t want to see anyone and they don’t want anyone to visit them. There is an idea that we shouldn’t inconvenience or bother anyone. In Brazil when I was sick, I would get sick of visitors; everyone came to my house, anointed me with oil, and prayed with me until I got better.
You will never get a full understanding of family unless you spend time with other kinds of family. If you were raised by a single mom, you will need to be around families that have fathers to get insight into fatherhood. If you were an only child, families with many siblings will fill you in on what is normal to them. This is the same as God’s people: if our own local churches are to be healthy, then we must get a fuller definition of family from the Global Church. I encourage you to spend time with internationals in our city: go to their churches, watch how they do church. Is it perfect? By no means, but their experience as being family to one another is rich and deep. That is what I mean when I say we need their ears and we need their eyes so we don’t miss out on those senses and misdiagnose what it means to be the family of God.
About the Author
Michel Duarte is on the leadership team for the Surge Network. He was born and raised in Brazil, was a church planter in Turkey, trained for missions in Wales, and now lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his wife Julie and their two children. They are in the process of planting a multicultural church called Somos Community Church.
