Deeper understandings A multicultural church
The church cannot but be so, because the gospel is transcultural calling of the Spirit.
Editor’s note: This series is intended to be a public conversa- tion among teaching theologians of the ELCA on various themes of our faith and the challenging issues of our day. It invites readers to engage in dialogue by posting comments online at the end of each article at
www.thelutheran.org. The series is edited by Philip
D.W. Krey, president of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadel- phia, on behalf of the presidents of the eight ELCA seminaries.
By Winston D. Persaud and Dirk G. Lange
C
an the church be multicultural, or is that just another “Western,” Northern Hemisphere thing? For too long, Lutheran traditions stemming from northern Europe and nurtured in North America have presented themselves as somehow universal. They have offered their forms and questions, both ritual and theological, to the global church as authoritative. How myopic is
that? Even within North American Lutheranism, ethnic loyalties and ethnically embodied confessions curiously and surprisingly still rule both hearts and minds. The many ethnic origins of Lutheranism in North America, though diluted today, still exert considerable spiritual and theologi- cal control—sometimes conscious but mostly unconscious—over both worship and theology in parishes, at seminaries and in churchwide dis- cussions. Though there is an interest in the “global church” and things global (especially, for example, music), we fail to notice our deep ethnic expressions and biases in wor- ship and theology.
Lange Persaud
Lange is associate professor of worship at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, Minn. Persaud is professor of systematic theology and director of the Center for Global Theologies at Wartburg Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa.
The first step toward a multicul- tural expression in worship and, therefore, within communities of faith begins with a consciousness- raising of these often-unnamed ethnic biases. The Lutheran confes- sional writings give us a means to engage that work. Contextual in origin, the confessions surprisingly propose an agenda for worship that is ecumenical, multicultural and even charismatic. We begin with a realization: the church cannot but be multicultural because the gospel is transcultural. There is one gospel of Jesus Christ by which sinners are justified (made right with God) by God’s grace alone, through faith alone (trust in God’s undeserved promise of life and forgiveness), in Christ alone. No particular culture can be identified with the gospel. To do so is to violate the very gospel that constitutes the community of faith in Jesus Christ through the
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Consider what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 8:6 (“there is one God, the Father … and one Lord, Jesus Christ”); Galatians 1:6-9 (“even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed”); and Ephesians 4:4-6 (“There is one body and one Spirit … one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all”). Martin Luther’s words ring out: “[The Spirit] has called me through the gospel” (explanation to the Third Article of the Apostles’ Creed, The Book of Concord, eds. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, page 355). A community of faith that is not multicultural in the face of a multicultural world—that world in which the eternal “Word became flesh” (John 1:14)—has made an implicit choice to equate a culture or cultures as more fit to be bearers of the gospel.
The very gospel is then at stake. The consequence? A community in the Southern Hemisphere sadly ponders whether it can move rhyth- mically in worship because they “learned” that dance wasn’t a fitting expression for praising God. One cultural (ethnic) form of worship (northern European) has claimed a universal privilege.
What may have begun as an orig- inal, Spirit-filled insight—a “pneu- matic moment” (spirit filled)—is captured, controlled, put in a box, fossilized. A moment of the Spirit becomes a human ceremony that, whether ethnic or otherwise, ends up trumping the gospel. Devotion as a human activity, as emotion, is
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