Building Multicultural ChurchesNäide

Humility is the key to building multicultural churches.

I am convinced that humility is at the heart of being a follower of Christ. We are called to humble ourselves before the Lord for him to lift us up. To become a Christian requires us to acknowledge our total dependence on him, to realise that we cannot save ourselves and that we must rely fully on the grace of God. Humility is also central as we outwork the gospel, both as individuals and as churches. Humility is key to entering the kingdom and imperative for living out kingdom values. Humility is the essential foundation of building relationships with people who are different from us.

However, our natural state is not humility but pride.

We have pride in our background, pride in our culture, pride in our denomination, and pride in our church. Pride gets in the way.

Humility enables us to build with people and churches who are different from us. James and Peter both tell us, “God opposes the proud but shows favour to the humble” (1 Peter 5v5 and James 4v6 NIV). R.T. Kendall said the following:

I therefore define pride essentially as taking oneself too seriously. Taking oneself too seriously is the common denominator in all proud people. It describes those who resent criticism, who are insecure, who cannot laugh at themselves, whose need of praise is constant, who see themselves as overly important, who fancy themselves as being very special to God (and think God bends the rules for them), who tend to blame others for their problems, who hate taking the blame, who cannot bear not getting the credit for the good they did, and who have an insatiable need to prove themselves.[1]

Too often, we value our Britishness with pride. This is seen in the way we exported our British way of life at the time of the Empire, believing we were improving cultures and societies in doing so. Brits abroad are expats, but foreigners in the UK are immigrants. The irony of people talking about moving abroad because the UK is full of foreigners!

We all need humility to learn from and serve others, but it is not easy. Intentionally seeking to get to know people who are different from us helps us grow in humility and gives us the heart to understand and learn from their culture rather than just telling them about our culture. And so, as a result, humility of the heart is the foundation we need to build multicultural church.

[1] R.T. Kendall, The Power of Humility: Living like Jesus (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2011), Kindle edition, p. 8.