A Diverse Community (Newsletter piece)

As a part of the words of welcome to the Christmas Eve service I said:

Here at St. Paul’s we strive to create a faith community where ALL God’s people are welcome to come and explore God’s presence in the world. Wherever you were born, whatever the colour of your skin, whatever your gender identity or expression, whatever your sexuality, whatever your age. Maybe you are just testing if this is the right place for you, maybe you have been coming here for decades. Whoever you are, you are a beloved child of God and you are welcome here.

I included these words for two reasons. One is that this is a hope I have heard expressed from within the congregation of St. Paul’s. There is a desire that this would be who we are as a community of faith. The other reason is that if we do decide to name ourselves as an Affirming Ministry there is an expectation that a statement like this is shared at the beginning of our worship services on a regular basis. The statement helps remind us of the commitment we make as an Affirming Ministry to build an inclusive, diverse, and safe community.

How do you react to those words? Do you think they are a good description of who we are right now? Are they a description of who we want to be? Are they totally inaccurate? Do they make you uncomfortable?

There is a long-standing hope within the United Church of Canada that we would be a diverse community of diverse communities. One way this hope has been expressed is in a commitment in 2006 that the United Church would work towards living as an Inter-Cultural Church. As the “About” statement in the United Church Intercultural Ministries Facebook Group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/UCCanIntercultural/) says:

The United Church is committed to living out an intercultural vision. The commitment to becoming an intercultural church was made in 2006, reaffirmed in 2009, and the vision developed in 2012. It challenges us to change the ways our communities worship, live, and work together.

This decision moved us past talking about a church with Ethnic Ministries and toward being a church where different cultures would (hopefully, ideally) mix and mingle. It was an attempt to move past tokenism and recognition to full participation. How successful that attempt has been across the church is up for debate.

To be honest I think that at this point in time both the words of welcome I shared on Christmas Eve and the national commitment to be an intercultural church (more recently we have added anti-racist to that commitment) are still more aspirational than descriptive. That is not necessarily a bad thing. It is good to have aspirational statements. They remind us of who we believe God is calling us to be, they push us to move toward a goal. The danger is when we start to think we have already arrived and so that e can move on to the next goal.

It is hard to be a truly diverse, intercultural, inclusive community. To live into those descriptors requires us to re-think some of our understandings. We have to be ready to let people be in the community as their true selves and not expect them to become like us, We have to be ready to adapt, change, transform how do some things to allow different ways of being to happen as well. Truly intercultural spaces not only welcome people of different cultures, they allow those different cultures to be celebrated and practised – even (or maybe especially) when those practices differ from what the majority or dominant culture sees as normal or comfortable, or “this is how things should be done”.

So are we ready to take the leap of faith and open ourselves to be a truly Diverse, Intercultural, and Inclusive Community? Are we willing to let our culture as a congregation change as we invite new perspectives and different practises shape how we live out our faith? And here is the big question, are we ready to be patient as people discern if we are truly ready and truly open to diversity and inter-culturality? It takes time for people to know that we are indeed a safe place, and we have to find the ways to show, on an ongoing basis, that we are learning how to be that safe place. Only then will we be able to become as diverse and intercultural and inclusive as we might hope to be.

While we are at it, how diverse do you think we are right now? What sorts of diversity might there already be in our midst? I will address that question in another piece within this newsletter.