by Sandra Van Opstal

At Urbana, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Mission Convention, 22,000 students from 140 different countries celebrated the New Year as they worshiped singing “Siempre te alabare” (“I will always worship you”). It was an awesome sight to see a multiethnic group of emerging leaders expressing their love for Jesus. It was even more exciting that for 21,000 of them this song was not in their heart language. Throughout the week they had expanded their worship vocabulary. Seeing this multiethnic community singing and dancing before our King was an awesome sight!

Over the past few years I have had the exciting honor of learning, leading, and training in multiethnic worship. As I train, the question I get asked most often is, “Is singing Latino or gospel songs really necessary if there are so few minorities in our church?” or “What value is there in singing songs if the people are not represented in our church?” One year when we really began to experiment with diverse worship a frustrated student in my fellowship burst out in a meeting, “Why are we focusing so much on diverse worship…why can’t we just worship?” After the meeting I asked her what she meant by “just worshiping.” She said, “Normal worship. You know, like regular worship.” That conversation launched her into a three-year journey that would lead her to becoming the worship leader for our fellowship and the one answering that same question. To this day whether it is a pastor at a conference or a musician at church, I am continually asked that question. It seems like a waste of time to work so hard at learning multiple musical styles, leading styles, and ways to approach worship if everyone in your congregation would be happy with the way it is.

On my own journey of understanding diversity and worship, the bottom line questions are: Do you want to be reactive or prophetic? Are you shaping your community’s worship around what is presently there, or a vision of what you would like to see? Is your aim to give people what they want and feel comfortable with, or what they do not even know they are missing?

If you are a community that is committed to creating an environment that is inclusive of people from other ethnic backgrounds, consider how your worship experience reflects that. If you desire to see the ethnic make-up in your church reflect the diversity you see around you, then visitors in your corporate worship times should be able to say to themselves, “They speak my language here!” or, “at least …they are trying.”

We see this in the scriptures as the Holy Spirit is poured out on the early church. In Acts chapter 2, Luke’s account of Pentecost shows us God’s way of reaching out to humanity. In Jerusalem, where the story takes place, there were Jewish people from three different groups.

First, there were Jews from Judea who spoke Aramaic and felt at home in Jerusalem. Second, there were Jews from all around the region who spoke different languages, but were likely bilingual and bicultural and could also connect. Third, there were converts to Judaism who were not ethnically Jewish and likely spoke different languages as their native tongue.

At Pentecost God honors their linguistic diversity. After Jesus dies, when the Spirit comes with power the people are empowered to speak the gospel in ways that connect with those who were present. God equipped the early church with the gifts of tongues so that the people would hear the gospel in their own heart language. God did not give the gift of ears, but the church was enabled to speak in someone else’s cultural language. God gives them an experience that helps them feel at home and shapes the ministry of the early church with a multiethnic flavor.

All of us in some way can relate to this experience of feeling welcomed. An experience where we have gone somewhere and just felt like “this is home.” An experience where we see or hear or see something that reminds us of home, and we feel included and welcomed. It happens to me when I smell cilantro and onions or when someone calls me Sandrita! There are also times when we do not feel welcomed. Some of us from ethnic minority groups feel this in our worship communities where our heart language is not being spoken. The Jews at Pentecost were there to worship at the festival time with other Jews from all over the land, and many of them probably did not feel “at home” in Jerusalem.

In the midst of it, God speaks to them in their own heart language. He does not ask them to check their cultural distinctiveness and the beauty of the way he created them at the door. God was letting them know he LOVED them, valued them, and created them. He allows them to have an experience of hospitality where they could say to themselves, “They speak my language here!” God through the display of the Holy Spirit was creating a new community of worshipers. In his book One New People, Manny Ortiz says, “Into a world where class, power, ancestry divided rich from poor, free from slave, men from women, came a revolutionary society that welcomed all who bore the name of Jesus (1 Cor 26-29). Into an ethnic oriented world that isolated Jew from Greek, barbarian from Roman, came a new kind of gathering place (Gal 3:28).” The model of the New Testament church reflects a multiethnic church beginning at Pentecost and reflecting the eventual oneness we see in Revelation.

The communities in which I lead worship have committed to being on a journey. They have a desire to invite people to be themselves. Empowered by the Holy Spirit, they seek to celebrate the diverse design of our creative God. And they enjoy and learn from one another in their uniqueness. They are saying through their worship, “We value who God has made you ethnically and we want to invite you to be at home. We speak your language…or at least we try.” So when someone asks me the million-dollar question, “What value is there in singing songs if the people are not represented in our church?” I ask them if they would like their worship to say the same thing.

This journey has been long, it has had its ups and downs, but there has been no greater delight then seeing Asian Americans being led by a white worship leader in singing Fred Hammond’s “Lord of the Harvest.” Or seeing a Latina student tear up as an Asian American male sings out “Mi alabanza sube a ti.” Our workplaces, schools, cities, and country continue to increase in ethnic diversity. The question for our emerging Christian communities is, will we display a sign in our windows that says “Se Habla Espanol”?

Sandra Van Opstal, Co-director of Chicago Urban Program with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

1. United by Faith: The Multiracial Congregation As an Answer to the Problem of Race by Curtiss Paul DeYoung, Michael O. Emerson, George Yancey, Karen Chai Kim. Oxford University Press, 2004.