Does God want your church plant to be multiethnic? Are you doing something wrong if your church plant isn’t? Does God call some planters to multiethnic plants and others to monoethnic plants?
These aren’t theoretical questions, but deeply practical and relevant to your church plant and to your church planting network/denomination. How you respond to these questions will impact the way you go about assessing the needs of the community, who you consider co-planting with, how you put together your launch team, how you choose your planting location, and much, much more.
If you’re planting in North America in 2025, you and your planting team need to deeply consider the racial/ethnic makeup of your city and context as a critical part of your mission and your witness to the world.
Now is about the time when you’re expecting Revelation 7:9 to be brought up to argue that new churches in our diversifying country should be made up of people “from every nation, tribe, people and language,” and that every church plant should be multiethnic. And, yes, that’s what I’m saying… to an extent. I actually think that we should primarily seek to trust in and live out Christ’s reconciling power in Ephesians 2 more than to be visually diverse, though doing the former will inevitably lead to the latter over time. Furthermore, Revelation 7:9 is a picture of heaven – but not a picture of each local congregation. For instance, should every congregation strive to have people from every language? Probably not.
So should every church plant be multiethnic? I like Chuck Van Engen’s (slightly academic) answer: “Because God’s mission seeks careful and balanced complementarity between universality and particularity, churches in North America should strive to be as multi-ethnic as their surrounding contexts.” Universality means that God seeks to know all people, and particularity means that God shows up in specific ways – first to the Jews, then to the Gentiles, and now in ever more specific and contextual ways in our increasingly multiethnic neighborhoods.
Defining Multiethnic
I am a part of the Multiethnic Collaborative, a group of church planting leaders of color who are seeking to convene and equip church planting leaders to raise up the next generation of diverse church planters. We have chosen to define multiethnic broadly because the term has sometimes been used too narrowly to refer primarily or only to white churches with some racial diversity (at least 20% in order to “count” as being multiethnic) in the pews.
Instead, our Collaborative defines multiethnic church planting to encompass three types of church plants:
- Immigrant churches. According to Pew, the foreign-born population in the United States is nearly 50 million people, many of whom are already Christians, and those that are not are generally more open to Jesus here than they were in their home countries. So there is a vital and legitimate need to share the gospel with, and plant immigrant churches for, the large numbers of people coming from Mexico, India, China, Central America, and around the world in their native languages. These churches provide spiritual, cultural, and vocational support for one another.
- Ethnic-specific churches. Because ethnic groups need churches that worship in their own language and understand a particular culture, there is also a need for ethnic-specific churches, such as Cuban churches in south Florida, Filipino churches in Southern California, or primarily African-American churches. These churches play a critical role in evangelizing and discipling specific racial/ethnic groups and may not necessarily need to become multiracial churches at their inception.
- Multiracial churches. To reach our diversifying cities, we will need churches where people of many different races worship and serve together. These churches will reach both long-term residents as well as second and third generation immigrants. They will need to pioneer new forms of evangelism and outreach in increasingly diverse communities, grow in their cross-cultural competencies, and learn to embody racial justice within their churches and in their cities.
Valid Reasons for Monoethnic Churches
Many Latino, Asian, and Black planters feel a subtle pressure or false guilt because they are leading a church that is primarily or exclusively of the same ethnicity as them. But as you can see from how we’re defining multiethnic above, not every church needs to be multiethnic to be biblically faithful – at least not initially.
Another scenario for monoethnic churches is that the context you’re planting in is simply not racially or culturally diverse. For instance, the states of Maine, West Virginia, and Vermont are all more than 90% White. Detroit is more than 80% Black.
Another clear reason for an ethnic-specific church is because people need a church in their own language. According to the U.S. Census, almost 20% of the U.S. population (or about 68 million people) speak a language other than English at home. This means that we need a multitude of churches planted for those whose primary language is not English. For example, Spanish, Mandarin, and Tagalog are the three most common languages spoken in the United States other than English.
Greer Anne Wenh-In Ng writes, “As long as there are first generation immigrants needing faith communities that function in their mother tongue, and as long as racial discrimination continues to exist on this continent… ethnic minority churches will continue to have a place.”
The Need for Multiethnic Churches
This points to another critical role for the witness of multiethnic churches – the reality of racial discrimination and injustice. Our country’s racial unrest, sparked but certainly not limited to the 2020 killing of George Floyd, highlighted the ongoing reality of racial tension in our country, including within our churches. So an aspect of multiethnic church planting that I’m particularly passionate about is serving as a witness to the reconciling power and justice of God in Jesus Christ.
As Van Engen advocates, we should seek to “be as multi-ethnic as their surrounding contexts.” And because our country will have no majority ethnicity in 20 years, that means that more and more cities will have significant racial diversity. And we must acknowledge that in order to minister to ethnic minorities, we must address the historic inequities that have plagued minorities in this country. After all, the Black church only came into existence in the first place because they were not allowed to worship in White churches.
So suppose you live in a racially homogeneous neighborhood or community. Are you off the hook? No, because it begs the question, why is my community racially homogeneous? Oftentimes it’s not because of neutral migration or immigration patterns, but because of intentional practices and policies. We must be courageous to ask and research why a community has historically been inhospitable to people of other races and ethnicities.
For instance, I live in Pasadena, California, which is currently 8.3% African American (down from a much higher percentage due to gentrification over the last 30 years). Right next door to us, South Pasadena was a “sundown town” (in which Blacks could not be in the city limits past sundown) in the early part of the 20th century and even now is only 3% African American. South Pasadena is what it is today because of racial policies from the past.
So if you are planting a church to embody the love of Jesus Christ who came to “proclaim good news to the poor… to proclaim freedom for the prisoners… to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18), then racial justice will impact where you plant and how you seek to bring God’s redemptive and restorative shalom to that city.
Ultimately the gospel of Jesus Christ is disruptive and boundary-breaking. When Jesus brought a tax collector into his inner circle, when he shared with the Samaritan woman at the well, when he praised the faith of a Roman centurion, his disciples were stunned. What are the implications of the radical love of Jesus in our incredibly multiethnic, multi-lingual, multiracial neighborhoods and cities?
Cultivating Multiethnic Church Planting Ecosystems
While individual church plants “should strive to be as multi-ethnic as their surrounding contexts” as van Engen says, no single congregation – no matter how diverse – can represent the fullness of God’s Kingdom. Instead, let’s work together to cultivate multiethnic church planting ecosystems on a regional level.
This will require the breaking down of another kind of barrier – denominational silos and territorialism. For the sake of this broader Kingdom vision, networks and denominations could partner together within a city or a region to plant healthy ecosystems of immigrant, ethnic-specific, and multiracial churches (for instance, see hcpn.org). Based on a combination of prayer, the Spirit’s leading, broader demographic trends, and a growing pipeline of diverse planters, we can identify and raise up planters to reach many of the sub-cultures and languages within a city. We can collaborate to plant the wide variety of churches needed to bring God’s love and justice within those churches and those communities.
Finally, let me mention two other ideas to help every planter find the form of multiethnic church planting that fits their calling and context. First, we need to identify gifted planters of color to start more ethnic-specific church planting networks to meet that particular need. Second, we need to bring immigrant and second-generation church leaders together to cultivate healthy church planting dynamics rather than “splants” (a church split that becomes a church plant). This is all part of a healthy ecosystem.
Revelation 7:9 will not happen fully in individual churches, but we know that the global church is collectively multiethnic and that heaven will be, too. Your plant can help bring it about.
