About fifteen years ago, I found myself in an elevator with two young, yarmulke-wearing, Conservative Jews. We’d been part of a group of a dozen or so in an Upper East Side apartment, working on designs for biblemesh.com, a sister site to kairosjournal.org. They were computer mavens in the employ of the main designer who’d done ads for some big name clients, and those of us who worked on content were baffled, dazzled, and somewhat bored by their tech talk of wireframes, Drupal systems, and such. We’d just broken for dinner, and, as we descended to the lobby, I expressed my admiration for their savvy and labors. They said thanks, but observed that there was a lot more work to do. To which I replied, “Well, we’ll just have to ‘git ‘er done’”. To which they responded with pleased surprise, “Git ‘er done?!” The way they said it led me to ask, “Do you know Larry the Cable Guy?” To which they responded, “We went to his concert last week!”  They loved him, both his persona and material. Mercy.

This exchange came to mind when, earlier this year, I checked out an SBC North American Mission Board video that was stirring some upset. It went out under NAMB’s SEND Network/New Churches imprint and was billed as a “Church Planting Masterclass.” The eight minute talk by a young, Japanese-American church planter unfolded as a lesson in “contextualization” along the theme, “All Things to All People,” referencing 1 Corinthians 9:19-23. 

His leadoff example of doing the right thing—the Pauline thing—spotlighted a minister from South Carolina who’d hired a voice coach to help him wash away his Southern accent so he could better connect with Bostonians. As we heard this anecdote, a sidebar appeared on the screen:

According to a 2012 study conducted by the University of Chicago, people with Southern accents are assumed less intelligent than their Northern accent peers, even among children.

Well, some people with Southern accents (and yes, some without) didn’t much appreciate that, and NAMB scrubbed it from the video. I’ll give that sidebar some attention in a moment, but first I think it’s worth suggesting that the speaker, Kenji Adachi, didn’t speak those sidebarred  words. Rather, they were superimposed by his “helpers” at NAMB, who seemed to desire a makeover for Southern Baptists, one giving us a more sophisticated look, fit for high-speed, low-drag ministry among our cultural betters. 

I wrote a draft on this, but put it on the shelf as other projects pushed it aside. But a new thing has popped up, one that connects with what I wrote earlier, so I thought I’d revisit the draft and tweak it for posting. Here’s the item that got me going, a recent tweet by Florida pastor Danny Slavich:

Reconciled diversity ("one") is as intrinsic to the church as purity ("holy"). In fact, the less homogeneous and more diverse a church becomes ethnically, culturally, socio-economically, generationally, the more holy and pure it becomes.

He caught some heat for this and did his best to engage critics in a follow-up string. He qualified and clarified his statement, explaining that he meant willingness to integrate, relative to the actual ethnic mix of the area. Along the way, he deployed the well-worn “getting-hit-from-both-sides” defense, and he couldn’t resist taking a shot at the Trump phenomenon (“I said this exact thing [more or less] in mid-2016 and no one said anything or pushed back. It was a basic consensus. Anyone know what could have happened in later 2016 that might have changed the conversation?”). As I read down through the gainsayers’ comments, I saw that Josh Abbotoy of American Reformer called Slavich’s ideal the “cosmopolitan” church, the same label that came to my fevered brow when I was writing my response to Kenji’s NAMB video. The overlap helped nudge me back to the topic.

MasterClass?

Perhaps you’ve seen ads from the secular MasterClass series (masterclass.com), offering a range of tutorials by notables in this or that field. Most of them are up in years, with long and distinguished track records in their field: Annie Leibovitz (72) on photography; Martin Scorsese (79) on filmmaking; Carlos Santana (74) on guitar playing; Penn and Teller (67 and 74) on magic; Doris Kearns Goodwin (79) on history writing; Bob Iger (71), former head of Disney, on business strategy and leadership; Gordon Ramsey (55) on cooking. MasterClass does feature some younger folks, but typically those who’ve already risen to the top with history-making performances, e.g., Steph Curry (34), NBA MVP who’s revolutionized the game with 3-pointers, and Simone Biles (25), with seven Olympic medals in gymnastics.

I suspect that Kenji was a bit embarrassed by the “master” label, but the PR folks will have their way. Granted, he does speak as if he’s an authority and visionary when he says that “it’s our responsibility of discipling to this next generation of church planters and disciple makers to raise their cultural IQ so that they can engage the culture well, just as Jesus intended.” It implies that those who’ve preceded him and his generation in church planting have fallen short of Jesus’s ideal that they be culturally savvy. Consequently, they’ve not done so well in engaging society. But maybe Kinji’s just saying we need pass the torch handed to us by great church planters of the past. 

That being said, I agree that there is good stuff in his talk. He’s getting after it thoughtfully and earnestly. And I’m sure Danny Slavich is doing a fine job in ministry. To them, I say, “Godspeed.” But I’m less enthusiastic over the generously-platformed implication that his is the way things are done—the goal toward which we must aspire with the means we must employ to satisfy Paul and Jesus. To NAMB, I’d suggest they cool their jets in labeling. Wouldn’t it be better to present Kenji’s approach as the “cosmopolitan church paradigm”—one among many honorable approaches—or label the video “Notions and Tips from a Young Minister in the Field”? I suspect the reason they don’t is that they agree with him and Slavich that this is the paradigm, and by declaring him a “master,” they diminish the lights they deem lesser. (BTW, you can read a transcription of Kenji’s talk at the end of this piece.)

Alas, my reflections run long (over 8,000 words), but they grow out of decades of working for, with, and around church planters, including eleven years of my own efforts at church planting. I don’t offer these ruminations as “masterful,” but as just one more set of possibilities, convinced that there are many ways to “do it right” within scriptural bounds and with Holy Spirit power. 

And the Bronze Goes to Carrol Fowler

If the gold medal goes to Master Kenji, then the bronze might go to Carrol Fowler, who neither altered his accent nor prioritized a cosmopolitan-congregation look. But he gave church planting a go, given his limited understanding of New Testament desiderata. I’ll explain.

In 1988, I found myself as the director of Southern Baptist work in Indiana, and I was able to bring in Carrol to direct our missions/church planting work. Though he was working for the counterpart department in Michigan, he was as Southern as can be, and not in the Virginia cavalier sense, but rather in the good ‘ole boy mode of appearance and speech. (Yes, he had had to work on his speech back in the day, but his wife Wilma helped him with his reading and communication skills, but not with his accent.) He hailed from the Delta region of Northeast Arkansas, where he’d pastored before heading to central Michigan to plant a church. 

A lot of retirees, including many from the North, had landed in that section of Arkansas and boosted its prosperity. Consequently, Carrol’s ministry in Horseshoe Bend was financially comfortable. But the tug of missions pulled him about nine hundred miles north to Onaway, where he supported himself bi-vocationally by coaching a high school baseball team and working for the funeral parlor, picking up dead bodies from homes and hospitals.

Before long, the effectiveness of his mission work caught the attention of the state Baptist office, and they brought him on board at their headquarters in suburban Detroit, and from there we snatched him down to Indianapolis. Before long, he was leading Hoosier Southern Baptists (a convention of only a few hundred congregations) to average one new church start a week for two years running. Then, when I took my turn at leading Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, we brought Carrol on to teach missions and to lead our NAMB-sponsored Nehemiah Project, devoted to training seminary students to begin new work. When he died of a stroke at age 66 in 2004, Tammi Ledbetter wrote an inspiring piece on him for Baptist Press.

He had a heart for small, county-seat churches and rural settings, but he could also negotiate the cities and relate to folks across the board. One of his good friends in ministry was Cato Brooks, the black pastor of Tree of Life Baptist Church in Gary, Indiana. Of Carrol, Cato observed, “He was probably the only Caucasian person I know who could intermix with African American men and use the term ‘boy’ and nobody would be offended . . . He could come to Gary, Ind., and walk through the community without fear.” He was just being godly, authentic Carroll, zealous for the gospel. And that more than sufficed.

Again, no ding on Kenji’s work. But the SEND video would have you think his efforts are more spiritually acute than Carrol’s— and that real spiritual action occurs in urban areas where you can more readily find the colorful tiles to bring into your studio for a heavenly masterpiece. 

My Evanston Fox Paw

In 2000, we moved to the North Shore of Chicago, where I became a church planter in Evanston and BCM director at Northwestern University. Initially, we lived just north of there in the village of Wilmette, a block south of the Home Alone church (Trinity Methodist), where Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) disguised himself in the outdoor manger scene and met the scary old neighbor at a Christmas Eve service. We were about a mile west of the Baha’i Temple and a half block east of a theater where we saw an Israeli film with English subtitles. Bill Murray grew up in Wilmette; so did Rahm Emanuel. 

A little ways down the street, we opened a bank account in a small branch, and two minor events there stick in my mind. The first was when I met an elderly lady exiting the bank. I stepped back and held the door for her, expecting her to smile and nod, or perhaps says thanks, but she marched right out without so much as a sideways glance. Raised in the South, I found this odd, and it inspired me to later on write a piece asking whether friendliness was a kind of goofy, superficial behavior peculiar to Dixie or rather a universal virtue. I concluded the latter. And yes, I kept on smiling and nodding as I met North Shore neighbors, no matter the cultural clash.

The other incident involved a teller, who, upon hearing me talk, asked where I was from. She’d picked up on something that gave her the sense that I wasn’t from around there. Perhaps it was a Southern softness in my voice. I knew I hadn’t come on with “Howdy. How y’all doin’?” or drawled, “Gotta hurry, Ma’am. Muh vee-hick-ul’s arunnin’ outdoors.” I didn’t say “bidnus” for ‘business’ and “Merkin” for ‘American’. 

My mom was a Michigander and my dad had lost pretty much whatever East Tennessee accent he might have had as he made his way through WWII Navy service in the South Pacific and a PhD program at the University of Edinburgh. As for me, since grad school, I’d lived a dozen years in the Midwest, and I thought I could pass for a respectable Midwesterner, but this teller outed me! And some would have me think she automatically deducted ten points from my IQ, the way some of us add ten for a British accent, as in “Jag you ah” instead of “Jag wahr.” If only I’d had access to this SEND video, I could have come off better. Yes, I’d begun that church plant with NAMB training and support, but my teachers hadn’t yet distilled and publicized the insight that my accent was a gospel retardant. 

Second-Rate Ethnic Churches?

On their site (www.allpeoples.cc), Kenji’s congregation explains, “APCC [All Peoples Community Church] exists to make disciples who love all peoples, connect all peoples, equip all peoples with the transforming grace of Jesus Christ for the glory of God and the joy of all peoples.” And down the way they add,  “We desire to magnify the beauty of God by being a multicultural tapestry of races, ethnicities, languages, and cultures woven together by our core identity in Jesus and not in our cultural or individual preferences.” And from the photos on the site, they do, indeed, have a variety of ethnicities in their gatherings. (The photo reminds me of our Evanston Baptist Church plant a few years in, with an average of around 40 in attendance, and a mix of students from Northwestern University, including folks—first or second generation— from Jamaica, Korea, Iran, Egypt, Indonesia, China, and UAE. (As you might expect, being student-heavy, we were financially challenged. We would have more people in the pews than dollars in the collection plate. Hence my gratitude for bi-vocational/tentmaking teaching in Chicagoland high schools and colleges. It gave us an Early Church feel.)  

As I said before, you might call Kenji’s work “cosmopolitan” church planting, and this at the congregational level, which is well and good. But Southern Baptists are even keener on cosmopolitan church planting at the denominational level (association, state, and national). Take the Chicago Metropolitan Baptist Association, in which I ministered in several roles for seventeen years. While there were some multi-ethnic churches like our EBC, there were more robust, decidedly-ethnic churches, including the largely black Broadview Missionary Baptist Church, which donated folding chairs for our launch service and brought a choir to sing in an Evanston lakefront park to generate interest in our new work. 

As you scroll down through the list of CMBA churches, you find congregations that announce themselves as Vietnamese, Japanese, Romanian, Chinese, and Hispanic (e.g., Iglesia Neuvo Pacto). There’s even one centered on immigrants from Myanmar’s Chin State (Chicago Chin Baptist Church). And it was in Chicago that I first heard the word ‘Francophone,’ referring to a French-speaking Haitian congregation. 

But the video leads us to believe that these churches fall short of Paul’s “all things to all people” standard. Perhaps if the Chin church sang some hymns in Spanish (as in APCC), they would more nearly hit the mark. But maybe they’re okay after all. And maybe CMBA would pass muster with church-planter Paul in that it is doing the Myanmar/Chin thing to the Myanmar/Chin people. Of course, I’m sure this “Burmese” church would welcome Romanian, Haitian, and Egyptian visitors to their gatherings, but I don’t think they ignore New Testament standards by leaving the full “tapestry” look off their list of goals. 

I suspect NAMB would give these ethnic churches a pass, but what about those insular “you’all clubs” that dot the North, those white SBC enclaves, built up by pastors “who would follow a car with Alabama plates into its driveway to make a contact.” Likely deficient in and indifferent toward “cultural IQ,” perhaps they sail right by the “ferners” greeting them at Costco. Or so the implied account goes. But couldn’t we grant them a bit of slack, counting them as yet another affinity group congregation, with their own Chin-state status? Might they be forgiven for seeking out people with their heart language and who tune in to an Auburn-Ole Miss game on Saturday afternoon rather than a Penn State-Wisconsin contest. And maybe their congregational interest includes love for the work of the SBC, with strong emphasis on the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions, the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions, the stewardship of six remarkable seminaries, volunteer-missionary trips to NAMB and IMB projects around the nation and world, strong devotion to biblical inerrancy, and linkups with the SBC’s Disaster Relief ventures. Besides, in the spirit of “We’re a nation of immigrants,” we could count them as genuine citizens of their city. Real Chicagoans. Real Bostonians. 

By the way, having been a member of several such “transplant” churches in the Midwest, I can report that they do, indeed, draw “indigenous” people with a range of ethnicities. I think, for instance, of a black deacon and his family at our little church in my Wheaton prof days. Weekdays, he was charged with maintaining the roofs of post offices throughout Chicago. For some reason, he preferred our worship style and culture, despite exposure to traces of Bubba talk from corporate transfers up from Boot Heel Missouri and from the environs of the Grand Ole Opry. And now that I’m back in Middle Tennessee, I’m astonished at the number of Californians, Ohioans, and Coloradans who flock to our church despite the fact that some staff members have drawls and we’re not leading the charge to tear down the Confederate statue in the town square. 

Let me suggest also that most everybody has a high cultural IQ of one sort of another. (A transcultural IQ is another matter.) It just depends on which culture you’re talking about. When I left the culchah of Chicago for seminary and a pastorate in South Arkansas, I was a little sad that I’d no longer have easy access to the Art Institute, Broadway plays and musicals on tour, the whole Cubs/Sox/Bears/Bulls/Blackhawks thing, the sight of Lake Michigan regattas, etc. But then I discovered that the culture in my new locale was just as deep and engaging, with, for instance, oil-field jargon (including gnarly pride, reflected in a bumper sticker reading “Don’t tell my mamma I’m a roughneck; she thinks I’m a piano player in a whorehouse”). Our congregation included a former congressman (portrayed in the movie Quiz Show, chairing the Van Doren hearings), who then served as a federal judge who dealt with Roger Clinton’s drug charges (Brother Bill in attendance at the hearing). The church had produced a Miss America, and one of my parishioners served on the Kennedy Center board. Another member took me and my boys for an advanced course in bass fishing, and yet another had scouted out Karl Malone for Louisiana Tech (from which he moved to the Utah Jazz for a Hall-of-Fame career). Bear Bryant hailed from just up the road in Moro Bottom near Fordyce, and Delta Airlines started in Monroe, just across the Louisiana state line. My secretary’s husband headed up a division of Murphy Oil, and they had a place in Whitefish, Montana, to which they retired. Much of the halon in airplane fire extinguishers was extracted from the ground nearby. Lamar Hunt, principal founder of the Kansas City Chiefs, the AFL, and MLS, was born in El Dorado to oil magnate H. L. Hunt. Charles Portis, author of True Grit, was also born there. It goes on and on.

The larger point is that, wherever you go, there’s rich heritage and social complexities, and you do well to delve into and appreciate the richness of wherever you land. (And, yes, that’s what Kenji’s doing.) In Boston, Opie, Andy, Barney, and Gomer might pick up on talk of “wicked tuna,” savor the sing-song accent of the “cousin from Bahstun” in the Sam Adams ads, and know how to find their way to Logan, The Garden, the Swan Boats, Quincy Market, and Yawkey Way. They’d come to note the prevalence of Dunkin’ Donuts over Krispy Kreme, locate MIT and BU on their respective sides of the Charles, and maybe find a riverside seat to hear the Pops play (with cannon fire) the 1812 Overture on July 4. All well and good. But Bostonians shouldn’t think themselves smarter than the guy who knows how to maintain a stripper well, write a novel twice made into a movie (one starring John Wayne, the other Jeff Bridges), or navigate the halls of Congress for twenty-five years. Everybody needs to show some humility. Still, to Kenji’s point, if you find yourself far from your Southern home, it wouldn’t hurt you to show some kind interest in Rutgers or Pitt as well as the SEC boys. Yankees may not know trot lines and “Sooie,”  but there’s no guarantee that, up North, the Duck Dynasty crew would pick up on talk of bodegas and schlepping. 

As for our “cosmopolitan” church in Evanston, of course it helped that I’d been a professor. We met right next to Northwestern University, where I would sit in on philosophy department colloquia. I could talk academics with the church attendees, pick up on their apologetics questions, and point them to resources for the integration of faith and learning. There was a level of rapport with the academy, which was itself quite multi-ethnic, so our makeup reflected that. But the “rainbow” was not our priority. It wasn’t even tertiary, and consciously so. When a campus para-church group officer, who was a member of our church, pressed me to make ours a showcase congregation for black-white mutuality, amalgamation, reconciliation, etc., I declined (much to his dismay), choosing rather to stay the course on doing (trigger warning) color-blind church and then letting demographics sort themselves out as they might.

Yes, churches have a culture, and ours more nearly resembled the ones I was raised in. Unlike a number of predominantly-black churches in Evanston, our services ran an hour, not two. Unlike pastors in the dominant mainline churches in the city, I preached through books expositionally, went door-to-door with gospel witness, and made things uncomfortable (to the point of their leaving) for attendees co-habiting without benefit of marriage. We had regular church member meetings, where we discussed everything as we nurtured and drew on the priesthood of believers. Unlike some little country churches without a nursery, we weren’t at peace with a crying baby in the service. We didn’t say “Close enough” to the “baptisms” of those who had been sprinkled as babies, but, rather, we immersed them upon profession of faith in Christ, after they’d provided a written conversion testimony and signed our church covenant. We’d pin members’ art work to the walls (some commissioned, some not), even one or two which would have disturbed the Westminster Divines, who outlawed images of Jesus. We invited folks from an Evangelical Free Church down the way to join us in an Easter week Tenebrae service. We consistently ranked in the top ten per capita in Cooperative Program giving among Illinois Southern Baptists and took mission trips to Brazil and Belgium, working with Southern Baptists on the field. From the pulpit, I gave the homosexual agenda a bad rap, and my sermon illustrations stepped on toes, including those of a student whose dad was a prof in a Muslim-studies/appreciation program at an East Coast university. (No, I didn’t go after these particulars, but rather suggested that Islam, among other things, was not manifestly a “religion of peace.”) We preferred hymns to CCM fare (though not exclusively), avoided “7/11 mantra” numbers, didn’t go with a lighted stage in a darkened room, and offered an invitation at the end of each sermon. Sometimes, I’d be the only one in the room wearing a coat and tie. 

Make no mistake; there was variety in the music. Our leader loved up-tempo Bluegrass renditions of familiar songs; our musicians brought a range of skills and predilections to our services, e.g., one undergrad, who went on to Cambridge and did a thesis on the 12th century acoustics of Saint Mark’s in Venice, played a “Canjo” he fashioned out of a Folger’s coffee container; another, who played double bass in the Chicago Civic Orchestra, was a regular, as was a piano performance major from Moody Bible Institute. We had a violin and a washboard, depending on the Sunday. Our “package” was not to everyone’s taste, but taste wasn’t the point. Rather, we tried to be biblically acute, good stewards of the giftedness of our members, and baptistically evangelical. 

I appreciated Kenji’s sorties into his community’s culture. As a church, we would also venture into Chicago for “art crawls” in the River North district; head up into rural counties to negotiate crop mazes; bike up the North Shore toward Wisconsin; frequent Rogers Park and Wrigleyville dives to hear the member-heavy Blind Anabaptist Blues Band perform. We took to the public courts and fields for youth-outreach home-run derbies and 3-on-3 basketball tournaments. One week we held “backyard Bible clubs” in the four city parks closest to recent shootings. I took the Citizens Police Academy course for newcomers, where I learned that we had four gangs in town—Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings, Vice Lords, and Black P. Stone Nation. I subbed in two local high schools, one where John and Joan Cusack attended (Evanston Township) and one where Rainn Wilson (Dwight of The Office) was an alum (New Trier in Winnetka). Sharon worked for a gay school superintendent in Wilmette, where the students got days off for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and we attended a Bat Mitvah, where I (thanks to seminary) was among the few who could follow along with the Hebrew in the printed program. We went to the students’ recitals, plays, sports events, and science fairs. We printed a brochure showing the Christian connections for the city’s street names and, with witness cards and distinctive T-shirts (identifying us as “Alley Sheep” instead of alley cats), we cleaned up the food-district alleys for the “restaurant capital of the North Shore.” Affixing “Serving Evanston in Jesus’ Name” stickers to the garbage bags, we stacked them (with city clearance) beside municipal bins on the sidewalks.

So yes, I think we got into it on the model Kenji commends. And I’m glad we did. But we didn’t think for a minute that, with our ethnic mix, we were somehow superior to ethnic churches in Lake Country to our north—e.g., the Messianic fellowship in Mundelein and the Filipino church in Gurnee; or, for that matter, to the predominantly Anglo churches to our west in DuPage County. We did make a special effort to attract more international students, inviting them to a “holiday banquet” on campus, where we acquainted them with the meaning of Thanksgiving and Christmas; but there we presented our culture (turkey and dressing, cranberries, pumpkin pie, carols, small Bible-themed dramas) as an opening to evangelism, not as a means of ethnic ingratiation. 

Targeting “The Cosmopolitans” People Group

Yes, our Evanston church turned out to be fairly cosmopolitan. From Northwestern and the community at large, there emerged an interesting mix of attendees and members. We had Southern whites up north for graduate study. International students were regulars, including one Chinese lady who said her non-Christian parents back home wanted her to gain exposure to American Christianity to see if she could get a handle on how that identity connected with so much prosperity. We had native Midwesterners, including an art instructor in Chicago city colleges; a black opera singer from Detroit whom we went to hear in the Lyric Opera chorus for Porgy and Bess; a black church clerk, a native Evanstonian who did financial accounts for a medical firm. One Hispanic member played saxophone in an “island sounds” group. None of this was planned. We just did “Bible/Baptist church” and community service/advertisement as best we could, and these folks showed up, some invited by other attendees, others just stumbling in on us.

It’s another thing to fix on the rainbow and to fix on those who fix on the rainbow. That sort of thinking can lead to “Oh, no, another white couple, further diluting, the POC concentration we’re striving to increase” and “Man, we’d better get on our horses and find some more Asians. If we’re not careful, our lassitude will mean we’ll look less like heaven each year.” It takes real concentration to find a good crew of doctrinaire cosmopolitans—those not only open to, indeed congenial toward, a range of ethnicities (which is typical of the vast majority of churches), but those who also strive to maximize that range with the conviction that to do less is to be worldly rather than heavenly minded. 

And then there’s the intersectionality concern. Do you risk slighting other demographics if ethnicity is your focus? I don’t imagine there will be old folks in heaven, so should we concentrate on the young and healthy as we work at a mirror image of the Heavenly City? What if you find space next to a retirement home full of geezers, folks who might show wanting to sing “There’s Power in the Blood,” seniors oblivious to the Mosaic Agenda? What’s a pastor to do? Should he buy himself some Sansabelt polyester slacks and SAS shoes with Velcro closures to make them feel comfortable?  Maybe ditch the jeans, the UNTUCKit shirt, and the well-groomed stubble. You know, like dropping the Southern accent. Well, maybe so, but it can get complicated. 

Problem is, obsession with a certain look for the church can horn in on zeal for a certain scriptural authenticity and integrity in the church, and the polychromatic priority can devolve into a monoideologic composition that looks down on sister congregations who are more monochromatic. It reminds me of the “social justice”/”equity” conceit, which looks toward—indeed insists upon—similarity or equality of outcomes, a utopian agenda that makes a hash of things.

Are You Sure About Those Accents?

But what about the study that found a stigma associated with Southern accents? As I was reflecting on this, I happened on a contrary study by the Preply blog (“Your guide to Fluency”). They ran a survey on which accents American found most attractive. 

Indeed, they found that 90% of the nearly two thousand people they interviewed said that accents could impact personal appeal. Breaking that down, they found that the British, Australian, and French accents were counted the “sexiest,” while the Welsh, Korean, and South African fell at the other end of the spectrum. As for Americans, we liked Southern accents (i.e., Coastal/Lowland Southern English) the best, with New York (e.g., “fahthuh” for “father”) and Midwestern (“cot” for “caught”) coming in second and third. (Boston’s came in sixth.) 

Southern talk moved to second on the “trustworthy” list (behind Midwestern), but ahead the accents of New York, Texas, Chicago, Boston, Hawaii, Southern California (Valley girl), Philadelphia, Minnesota, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Long Island, and Appalachian. It fell to sixth on “smartest sounding,” with Boston at fourth,  but it’s worth noting that despite the University of Chicago sidebar, those from “the heart of the Confederacy” seemed smarter than Yankees from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Long Island, and Minnesota, as well as Left Coasters from California. As for “most annoying,” Southerners came in second to Boston and just ahead of New York.

And then there was a poll run by the British newspaper, The Independent, which found the American Southern accent in second place on the “most attractive” scale, behind British, and ahead of Irish, Australian, and French. They speculated that it sounded “chivalrous.” 

Of course, none of this is decisive, but it does suggest that accents send mixed signals and we can tie ourselves up in knots if we try to jimmy them for better reception. Besides, in the gospel ministry, I’d pick “more trustworthy” over “smarter” any day.

And it’s fair to ask which of the Northern accents do the conceptualization adepts commend. If you, as a church planter, land in “Cousin Vinny’s” New York neighborhood, do you take your cues from the courtroom dialogue in the eponymous movie:

Vinny (Joe Pesci): “Is it possible that two yutes . . .”

Judge Haller (Fred Gwynne): “Two what? What was that word? . . . What is a yute?”

Vinny: “Oh, excuse me your honor. Two youths.”

Or the defense testimony of Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tome):

 “There is no way that these tire mocks were made by a ’64 Buick Skylock.”

If your parish is Vinny’s neighborhood, do you tell people that your “Yute program” is popular, one where the kids are learning the mocks of a disciple?” Is this a laudable example of “becoming all things to all people”? And what about appropriation? Aren’t those big deals. Shouldn’t you be a little embarrassed at picking up an alien accent (even Midwest “neutral”) to disarm or charm your audience?

This bugged Tony-and-Emmy-winning, Scottish actor Alan Cummings. As he observed in his autobiographical book, Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life,

For every play we did in every acting class, the expectation was that we would speak in RP, or Received Pronunciation—also known as Standard English, the Queen’s English, BBC English. Also known as talking posh . . . RP is associated with educated speakers and formal speech. It has connotations of prestige and authority, but also of privilege and arrogance. Some people even think that the name “Received Pronunciation” is a problem—if only some accents or pronunciations are “received,” then the implication is that others should be rejected or refined.

My Scottish voice, and, by extension, a major aspect of my authentic self, was not a priority in my training. And so, I grew to view that voice as unimportant.

Well, okay, you do what you do to get the acting gigs. But gospel ministers are not supposed to be acting. Still, wouldn’t it be cool if acting classes could not only remove regional hindrances to hearing the gospel, but actually transcend the regional to the international, enlisting the full caché of a globally attractive accent? If it’s clear that they would think even better of you if you mastered a posh British accent (with VITamin instead of VITEamin; PRIVacy instead of PRIVEacy, and SHEDule instead of SKEDule), maybe you should go for it, fast forward toward respect. 

Now, back for a moment to Larry the Cable Guy (real name, Dan Whitney, not to be confused with my old Wheaton-days pastor and MBTS/SBTS colleague, Don Whitney, author of Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life). If he was able to engage these Jewish Brooklynites with his message and without the aid of the Holy Spirit, how much more could an anointed “Larry” deliver the gospel and the whole counsel of God across vast ethnic divides. If he were bringing the biblical goods in Brooklyn, these guys, along with a fair number of Brooklyn’s non-white residents, might at least visit his church. 

What worries me is that we’re spending so much time and effort on sociology and anthropology, studying demographics, languages, and such, that we lose track of where the real power lies—the unalloyed preaching of the gospel and the whole counsel of God. No, I’m not hacking on the South Carolinian who sought out a language coach; God bless him for his sacrificial effort. But let’s not suppose that God’s blessing rests surpassingly upon those who seek out language coaches. Paul could have brushed up on his linguistic charm, but he did okay, even as he was “being all things to all men.”

Where are you from?

Kenji illustrated his approach to cultural engagement and contextualization by recounting two sorts of get-acquainted strategies, one at the entrance to Costco, the other on a public basketball court. Whether taking his son shopping or acclimating mission teams from the South, he shows how to make friends and become keener through listening, watching, and conversing. And I particularly enjoyed his exchange with the store greeter, who turned out to be from Tunisia. In advocating this get-acquainted approach, Kenji pushes through an annoying and wrongheaded barricade that some hyper-sensitive folks have erected to stop us from asking a supposedly rude question, “Where are you from?” 

In my experience, and Kenji’s, it’s a question that opens the way to some gratifying conversations, both welcomed and welcoming. As the popular account goes, by asking this, you underscore the other’s alien status, thereby offending him. Yes, I know that critical theorists love to speak of The Other as the objectified, marginalized, and even disparaged folks against which we pose and impose ourselves, the icky or ominous. But that ideological conceit serves principally to provide aid and comfort to the smugly “woke,” while nurturing toxic tribalism. On the contrary, I’ve found that most immigrants and their offspring enjoy talking about and comparing notes regarding their distant homeland. Of course, it depends on how you ask it. If, with a sneer, you open with, “Say, you ain’t from around here are you?” the fellow might recoil. But if you start with smile, “I think I’m picking up a bit of an accent, not so much Nashville. Where’s your original home?”, the vast majority are happy to engage with the inquiry and have a friendly conversation. 

Though it didn’t bother Kenji and it doesn’t bother me, he went into a woke danger zone when he used French (Ça va?/“How’s it going?”—literally, “It goes?”) to befriend the Tunisian. Though the official language of Tunisia in Arabic, and a Tunisian version of Arabic (Tounsi) is the “national language,” French is still the language used in administrative, commercial, and educational activities (e.g., secondary school science). Journalists use French, and it shows up, alongside Arabic on shop signs, road signs, and menus. So how did French gain such prominence in this little nation on the Mediterranean shore, squeezed in between Algeria and Libya? Well, about a millennium after Muslim invaders from Arabia (hence, Arabic) had conquered it as a precursor to Ottoman rule, the French invaded in 1881 and made it a protectorate until its independence was gained in 1957—which provokes today’s Pharisee class to exclaim, “Oh, no, Kenji! You’ve surely trigged this poor man, what with the colonial/imperialistic implications of your choice of French rather than the Arabic Kayf halika?” But, to our astonishment, the Tunisian in question hadn’t been sufficiently briefed on the protocols of woundedness.

Though striking up a solicitous conversation with newcomers can be a path toward introducing the gospel, it’s not all strategy, a pure means to the end. It’s also an outworking of neighborliness; of a calling to pursue “the welfare of the city” in which you find yourself, for its welfare encourages your welfare” (cf. Jeremiah 29:7); a sense of fellow feeling, undergirding the Golden Rule. We don’t have to be about reducing everything to an outreach tactic. You enlist church greeters not only to make a good first impression, setting the social hook for return visits. You also have greeters because it’s good to greet strangers. And if it’s all pious calculation, you risk precipitous indifference to the relationship when it becomes clear that your overtures are not “working” toward conversion or membership. And a friend can just be a friend, even if he’s dug in deep as a Muslim or atheist. 

Contextualization or Gratuitous Ingratiation?

The examples Kenji offers for contextualization are amiable—multi-lingual howdys at the big box; heart-language accommodations in the hymn service. Granted, he does say that “we need to understand vices, virtues, and idols, and be able to speak the gospel to them.” Once we pick on their priorities (e.g., education and honor among Asians), we can tailor our preaching and teaching to winsomely persuade them. Okay, but when, where, and how does Acts 3:19 (“Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out . . .”) come into play?

In asking this, I think of a workshop I attended in NYC back when we were starting up SBC LIFE. Several of us from Nashville, the others from BSSB/LifeWay, spent a few days learning from the guys at Folio, the magazine about magazines. They passed along some fascinating information, e.g., that advertizers favor coated paper over newsprint since the colors appear more crisply; that this was the day of niche publications, as evidenced by the fact that two turkey-hunting magazines had appeared in the previous year. But the most instructive teaching was that you needed to decide from the start whether you wanted to be a magazine with “edge,” or not. Edgy magazines express strong opinions and have the power to offend; non-edgy magazines major on jolly, innocuous topics, use “scissors with rounded ends,” and coat things with sweetness so they go down easy. In this latter category, we find Readers Digest, Saturday Evening Post, Christmas Ideals, and Martha Stewart’s tips. In the former class, we find political publications like The Nation and American Spectator. 

So the question facing us was whether SBC LIFE would have edge or rather stick to the happy talk typical of a church newsletter. Taking our cue from the Bible, which was full of edge as well as balm, we decided to include some edgy writing, whether in columns or news stories, particularly since we were in a denominational struggle with those who were hostile to insistence upon biblical inerrancy in our seminaries. This was a matter of contextualizing during the Conservative Resurgence, and, as editor, I fielded criticism from campers unhappy with our stands. And some of it came from inerrantists of a tender cast when I used a touch of sarcasm (from the Greek sarks, for “flesh,” which is torn). I was told that Christians should never use it, and I pointed to both Elijah vs. the Baal prophets on Carmel and Paul’s response to Corinthians keen on “super apostles.” Both Elijah and Paul were “contextualizing” in godly ways on these occasions.

Similarly, we did some edgy contextualizing in the “People’s Republic of Evanston,” where the United Way cast out the Boy Scouts in a day when they were excluding gay scoutmasters.  The city was heavily identified with “liberal” causes, so we found ourselves (and, indeed, demonstrated ourselves) cross-grain on several occasions. I’ll mention one.

Rotary International is headquartered in Evanston, and the July 4 parade (a very big annual event) was slated to honor the club in 2005, the hundredth anniversary of its founding. Float builders were encouraged to enter something that tied in to that observance with our national celebration, so we did. Reading up on Rotary, I found that they had a firm rule against contributing to any cause that included the practice or promoting of abortion. So we decided to praise them for that. We got permission to use their logo, and we quoted from their site on our side panels. Then, as we made our way down the heavily-lined parade way, folks would applaud as they saw our big rendition of the Rotary emblem approaching. But as the float came up even with the spectators, quite a few “swallowed their tobacky” when they saw in what connection we were praising the club. Our message wasn’t churlish; we weren’t exposing some dirty secret about the club. (Well, perhaps it was a secret, something the headquarters didn’t want spread abroad in their home town.) I got that sense the following week when a PR woman from their 18-story high-rise on Sherman Avenue gave me a call. She was distressed that I would attach their logo to an anti-abortion message, but I reminded her that I was just quoting from their list of policies and initiatives. Our church was just contextualizing, albeit in a way that offended many in whose context we were “ualizing”. 

Back in the days when I edited SBC LIFE, the convention changed its bylaws to exclude churches which affirmed homosexuality. (Two North Carolina congregations provoked this action, one of them licensing a gay to preach, another accepting a gay wedding.) As vice president for convention relations, I received a daily batch from a clippings service in Chicago, so I was very aware of the upset our action had generated in the national and regional press. I remember, for instance, a dismissive piece by a lesbian columnist in Detroit and also my service as a whipping boy on a “progressive” radio talk show out of Atlanta. That went with the territory, but I was distressed by those within our denomination who declared our drawing that line “a public relations disaster,” as if we’d done something bad. I came around to suggesting that the church was essentially a public relations disaster when it proclaimed the “whole counsel of God,” and reminded them of Christ’s warning, “Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! For so did their fathers to the false prophets.” (KJV) Of course, being despised is no guarantee that you’re righteous; but not being despised by at least some (if not many or most) is a sign of spiritual trouble. Unfortunately, we’ve become so PR obsessed that we lose our bearings. We want so much to be winsome that we hedge our messaging bets, convinced that all is lost if our brand is sullied by awkwardness and distastefulness. 

How About Hermeneutical Contextualization?

In closing, let’s look at the opening sentences of the video:

Hey, church planters. I want to talk about contextualization. And so you know, Paul communicated his philosophy of ministry in First Corinthians chapter nine. And he says that he becomes all things to all people that he might save some. He says that he does it all for the sake of the gospel. You see, Paul is, you know, God’s ultimate cross-cultural missionary, church planter.

Get that? In that chapter (v. 22b in particular) we find “his philosophy of ministry,” the essence of what Paul was up to. Not just an aspect of his approach, but rather his prime modus operandi, his sine qua non for evangelism and church planting. 

Surely that needs qualification. Paul didn’t become a Judaizer to Judaizers; nor bulked up for weight lifters; nor effeminate for effeminates; nor a Gnostic to Gnostics; nor a slacker to slackers, a dissembler to dissemblers, or a fashionista to fashionistas. Well, the context provided in this chapter and throughout Acts and the Epistles is that he worked to avoid needless offense (whether eating bloody meat or demanding full subsidy for his ministry), but he also worked at supplying needful offense, as we see, for instance, in Ephesus, where a riot ensued. He didn’t fret that the Lord had scared the willies out of the sorcerers, who accordingly burned their scrolls, or that his insult to hand-made gods drove the Artemis artisans crazy. He didn’t stand up for Sceva’s boys (“They were doing the best they could with what they understood”) or go out his way to praise the literary and artistic virtues of the cultish writings or pagan sculptings, all in an effort to build evangelistic bridges to the populace. He just preached the Word and let the chips fall where they might. And it turns out that many of those chips fell in some gratifying places. And when they didn’t, he didn’t kick himself for a lack of winsomeness, but rather moved on with his message to Tyrannus’s lecture hall. 

What I’m saying is that ministry built on contextual savvy and amiability can morph into servile contextualizing resulting in 1. a loss of confidence in the power of the Word, whatever the sophistication of the vessel; 2. an unholy faith in the power of public relations, appearances, and marketing; 3. an aversion to biblical awkwardness and offense, blaming the messenger rather than the message; 4. a tendency to look down on and talk down to fellow ministers not as enlightened or charming as you. 

Not saying Kenji is there, but suggesting that those who pick up on the counsel of this video must be wary of this slide. And also suggesting that NAMB is careless in showcasing this message without qualification. That being said, let me leave you with this other word of ministry philosophy from the Apostle Paul:

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit of power. That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

A Curmudeonly, Rhetorical Postscript

Kenji ends five of his sentences with “Right?” and one with “Okay?”—turning declaratives into interrogatives. It’s all the rage right now, but it does put the listener on the spot through, in effect, an attempt to co-opt him. Finding ourselves in a group of listeners, we’re really not in a position to say, “No. I don’t think so.” It would come off as churlish. But quite often that’s what you’re thinking: “Hey, slow down buster. Not sure I’m on board with that, and I don’t want you and others to think that my silence signals assent. Why don’t you just make out your case and let us reflect on it? If this is a nervous tic, relax. If it’s a rhetorical strategy, cut it out. If you’ve just picked it up from your peer group, you might need to upgrade your cultural IQ and think about some distance. Otherwise, you sound like those guys who have to repeatedly insert the often gratuitous and nonsensical word ‘just’ in their prayers. ” (As in, “Lord, we just come to you today to just thank you for the way you’ve just blessed us . . .”) Or perhaps like those whose punctuate their declarations with, “Yeah,” as if to say, “Wow, I’m really on track here. Standing back to gaze at what I’m saying, I’m pretty impressed.” 

Right?

______________________________________________________________________________

Transcription (the closest I can get) of SEND’s New Churches Series

 “All Things to All People” Masterclass/Church Planting Video featuring Kenji Adachi

 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?=BYgUPXnUB20), but the wording over which the insert appeared prompts a bit of commentary. 

Sidebar: Kenji leads a church in Fairfax, Virginia. Fairfax is the largest county in Virginia, with 1.15 million people and . .  . most diverse counties.

Hey, church planters. I want to talk about contextualization. And so you know, Paul communicated his philosophy of ministry in First Corinthians chapter nine. And he says that he becomes all things to all people that he might save some. He says that he does it all for the sake of the gospel. You see, Paul is, you know, god’s ultimate cross-cultural missionary, church planter. And he best engages his culture. And so when I think about someone I met (I was in Boston once) and this planter, I asked him where he was from. He said he was from South Carolina, and I was stunned. I said, “Did you grow up there?” I was stunned because he didn’t have an accent. And I said, “What happened to your Southern accent, because I’m a North Carolinian. He says this: “I got a voice coach when I first moved here, and to get rid of my Southern accent. Man, you talk about someone being all things to all people so that he can reach people for Christ. Um, this is so critical as we think about who we’re trying to reach instead of just thinking about who we are. We need both. We need to understand the culture around us.

I love bringing interns and church plant residents into our church that come from all white backgrounds or all black or black and white contexts. And they come into  our church that is multi-ethnic like our church, they don’t know how to completely navigate. I love taking them to Costco and for them to just to observe all the nations and tribes that are there shopping, right?  And then to open their ears and hear all the tongues, the foreign languages that they’re not accustomed to. I love taking them to the basketball court in the center of my community, and they will be the only white guy that’s American-born on the courts when they’re 25 plus people. They’ll actually first experience what is seems to be a minority in this diverse context. And so we need to think about how can we become all things to all people. And so the thing that we value most is this, we definitely value biblical and theological IQ, but also on the other hand we need to raise cultural IQ of God’s people, right? And so that’s taking truth and contextualizing it so they can live it out.

Sidebar: Cultural IQ is the capability to [adapt] and prosper in multiple cultures. People with high cultural intelligence are attuned to the values and beliefs and styles of communication of people from different cultures.

And it’s our responsibility of discipling to this next generation of church planters and disciple makers to raise their cultural IQ so that they can engage the culture well, just as Jesus intended. And so, if you may be wondering, well, I’m not a minority, I’m just a plain white guy, right? How am I gonna reach this diverse community that God’s called me to? You don’t have to necessarily reflect your skin color or ethnicity to reach a certain people group, okay? And we have to be careful not to appropriate culture, but to appreciate culture. And so I go to Costco and there’s a greeter there. And I asked him where he was from. He told me Tunisia. And as soon as he said that, I started speaking to him in Français, right? And so every time I walk in and see this greeter, I say, “Bonjour, Monsieur. Ça va” in his native tongue. I’d take my son Derrick when he was an elementary school student. And I would talk to him and others working at the store. You know when they say what country are you from? And they would answer. And I said, Derrick, do you know what’s the capital of that country? And I said, do you know countries border that? Do you know what language they speak? And we would have a conversation. And these men and women would be so thrilled. Wow, you know my people, you know my country. That’s appreciation, not appropriation. This is how we raise cultural IQ in God’s people. And so that they can be all things to all people. It also means understanding vices and virtues and idols in the culture, the things that they make a priority in their lives. If you think about, for instance, Asian-Americans, right? Place so much emphasis on education, honor, those kind of things. And so we need to understand vices, virtues, and idols, and be able to speak the gospel to them. Building a church that impacts the community is not so much about programming as it is mobilizing. And so the apostle Paul, he was driven by passion to reach people with the gospel. And, as a result, he was willing to become all things to all people, understanding different cultures and how to navigate through those, because he was thinking exponentially. We need to think about the how of church planting. It’s determined by the who, the when, and the where of the culture, and the foundation is already set through biblical ecclesiology. And so there are different types of people that God has brought into your context. These are the people that we’re called to reach. And so we must think different people, different contexts. And how do we best contextualize ourselves or our church? And it’s gonna take time to know the place well, and to be a missionary is to love the people through the best way that they can be loved. So one of the ways that All Peoples Community Church contextualizes is that we will pray in other foreign languages, we’ll read scripture in other languages, we will sing songs, maybe not necessarily the entire song, but songs in other languages. And so I had a brother come up to me. He grew up in a Peruvian-American home. He was born in the states, but his parents were born in Peru. And so we joke around all the time because we have a Korean-American in our church that speaks better Spanish than him. But Victor came up to me after service, and he says, “That song that we sang in Spanish, it really hit me. I didn’t think it would hit me in that way, because I don’t really speak Spanish, but it was his heart language. And so that’s one of the ways that we contextualize on Sunday mornings.  So your story and your context may be completely different that what mine is. And so I wanna speak to you and how do you navigate through that? So, for me, I grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, but I was born in Osaka, Japan. And at the age of six, I moved into the city that was half black, half white, grew up in a white neighborhood. By God’s grace, we were bused into a black neighborhood. 

Sidebar: Heart language is the language that a person spoke in the home during his formative years.

And so I didn’t know if I was white or black. I was just navigating through both cultures, that I could navigate easily with both of these cultures. And I was a third culture kid. And so you may have to learn how to navigate and live and understand the culture that is on one side of the tracks and also on the other side of the tracks. And that’s simply being a foreigner, that your citizenship is in heaven, and that you don’t have to place your identity in your ethnicity or your place of origin or where you grew up and definitely not your skin color, but your identity as a child of God, citizen of heaven, we can reach all people. See, the apostle Paul was driven by the gospel. That was his motivation that he wanted to reach all peoples, all nations and tribes. And he was willing to become all things to all people. He wanted to see an exponential movement of the gospel, not just one church or a few churches, but a gospel movement. And that’s our hope as well that we’re thinking gospel movement, because we will contextualize, and then we will become all things to all people.