Today, I’d like to provide further explanation about planting multicultural churches, which is second on our church’s prayer list this year. The final goal of any missionary work is to plant churches. We can evangelise in various ways from doing charitable work, building schools and hospitals to teaching English and sports. But ultimately, it must lead to building churches. If our church is to do missionary work in London, we need to plant churches that has services in English, not in Korean. Currently, all our services are translated into English and there are English cell groups. However, we need a church where everything takes place in English if the congregation is to be made up of mainly non-Korean members.
You may think ‘why can’t the existing churches in the UK do this work?’. The problem is they do not fully appreciate how great language and cultural barriers can be. Even if you look at second generation children, they may attend English churches when they are young as English is more convenient. However, as they grow older, they return back to their own ethnic churches given the cultural differences. Also, many immigrants may prefer an emotional Korean multicultural church, rather than a rational English church.
There are some large churches in Korea which offer services to foreign members of the congregation in their own languages. There are also churches in London where the services are held in English and afterwards there are small group gatherings by nationality where there’s fellowship in their own language as well as sharing of their own national dishes. However, we should not stop there and go further to help those individual ethnic groups that are large enough and with a mature leader to become independent and plant their own churches. It may be comfortable for them to remain under the umbrella of a large church, but by becoming independent, they will feel more responsibility to pray for and to evangelise to their own people.
Revelations chapter 7 describes a scene of a great multitude from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing and worshiping before the Lord. Some read this and think that a church with a congregation from many different nations is beautiful, but my opinion is different. I think that is only truly possible in heaven. Here on earth, God made people speak many different languages and scattered the people, so I think that we need to consider the language and cultural barriers that still exist.
If we look at the non-Korean members of our church today, many have direct or indirect connections to Korea. I’m grateful that there are also a few who come for the spiritual fervour of our church. But for our church to embrace more non-Korean people, we first need services to be held in English and then for many different ethnic churches to be planted through a multicultural church.
If our church plants such a multicultural church in the future, I hope that we will be open to worshipping in English until non-Koreans members settle into the church. Due to positive influences form Korean culture, we will be able to more easily attract those who are interested in Korean culture, but may feel uncomfortable attending our Korean services. Please watch this space and keep on praying!
