Planting Churches among the City's Poor - Volume 1

P ART I: D EVELOPING U RBAN C ONGREGATIONS • 41

3. Marginal Ethnics – those who occasionally think of themselves as ethnics.

4. Assimilated Ethnics – those who explicitly and self-consciously exclude themselves from ethnic collectivity. 52

The presence of these subgroups will affect our outreach strategy. Chaney lists the implications for church planting as follows: 53

1. The church should make every effort to win the `assimilated subgroup’ to Christ and incorporate them into the English speaking church. 2. To reach the “marginal” group for Christ requires adding a staff member from the marginal group and incorporating some of the marginal group’s worship forms into the English service. 3. The “fellow traveler” ethnics require a bilingual or bicultural church. This subgroup may eventually require a new congregation. This may begin as a separate-language class that evolves into a separate congregation. 4. Unassimilated or `nuclear’ ethnics, require a church indigenous in language, culture, and, as quickly as possible, leadership. They demand a church that looks, sounds, and functions as part of their culture. Models of Multicultural Worship A variety of models of church structure can accommodate a multicultural body that expresses unity in Christ and respect for cultural diversity. 54 Those that best suit cross-cultural urban church planting include:

1. Single-language multicultural church . There is one service in the predominate language for several different cultural groups. The

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52 See Chaney, pp. 135-139 World Impact missionaries might note the high degree of correspondence between this concept of ethnicity and our model of C1, C2 and C3 ethnics.

53 Chaney, pp. 162-165

54 See Tetsunao Yamamori, “How to Reach Urban Ethnics”, Urban Mission 1.4, March, 1984, pp. 29-35 and Jerry L. Appleby, Missions Have Come Home To America: The Church’s Cross-Cultural Ministry to Ethnics (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1986), pp. 93-97 for a full discussion of these models.