What exactly are “ethnic” churches, and why should they exist? Shouldn’t we all be one in Christ? Political correctness forbids admitting it, but for many, ethnic churches are probably perceived as a parochial analogue to government affirmative action programs for the disadvantaged, tinged with a bit of racism. This patronizing, guilt-ridden attitude is held by many within the ethnic churches themselves. I know this, because as a lifetime member of Japanese churches, I have repeatedly heard this sentiment expressed and even argued by influential church members and pastors within the Japanese churches. If insiders think of themselves that way, then it seems likely that such sentiments must be more prevalent outside the ethnic church.

Although “ethnicity” includes a cultural component in its meaning that the word “race” does not, the two terms are so highly correlated that most definitions of ethnicity inevitably use the word “race” as nearly synonymous. Merriam-Webster defines “ethnic” as: “of or relating to large groups of people classed according to common racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin or background.”

But let’s be honest. When you go to an “ethnic” church, you will know it even before the first word is spoken, or you see what they serve at potluck, because most people attending will be of a racial stock that is non Caucasian. These different ethnic peoples will of course have different-sounding names, customs, languages, and life experiences that further serve to differentiate them from typical members of the Caucasian churches.

In a literal sense, all churches are ethnic churches because there can be no such thing as a church that does not use the framework of a particular culture as its intellectual foundation. But to use it in that way would trivialize the term “ethnic church” to the point where it means absolutely nothing and might as well be expunged from our vocabulary.

The term “ethnic church” can have meaning only if we restrict its use to a relativistic one. We commonly use it to refer to a church that specializes in serving those of an ethnic or cultural background different from the dominant culture of that particular religion. But the dominant culture and language of a religion can change over time. A language that might be dominant in one generation might theoretically become “ethnic” after the “revolution.” This means that the term “ethnic church” is dynamic rather than static; relative rather than absolute.

The First Ethnic Church

When seen in this light, the phenomenon of the ethnic church is not a peripheral issue of Christianity, but goes to the very heart and soul of what Christianity is all about. For the Christianity of today is not a descendant of the dominant mother church in Jerusalem headed by James the Just and the apostles of Jesus. Quite surprisingly, it must trace its spiritual-theological ancestry instead, to the ethnic church started by Paul, the apostle to ethnic peoples, also known as Gentiles.

The raging issue in the first century, as recorded in the book of Acts and the Pauline epistles, concerns the legitimacy and nature of ethnic churches. The dominant cultural milieu within which Christianity was born was Judaism. All of the original apostles were thoroughly Jewish in their culture, and they found it impossible to separate their Jewishness from their belief in Jesus as the Messiah.

An analysis of the book of Acts reveals that the mother church in Jerusalem had merely tacked a belief in Jesus onto Judaism. As Acts 21 shows, they continued to worship in the temple as before and expected good “Christians” to continue making all the traditional Jewish animal sacrifices.

It was Paul, the Outsider Apostle (because unlike the others, he had never known the historical Jesus), who first tried to differentiate the essence of the gospel from the swaddling clothes in which it was wrapped. He made the isolation of gospel from culture his life mission. That is the inner logic of ethnic churches:

“When I am with the Jews, I seem as one of them so that they will listen to the gospel and can win them to Christ. When I am with the Gentiles, who follow Jewish customs and ceremonies, I don’t argue, even though I don’t agree, because I want to help them. When with the heathen I agree with them as much as I can, except of course that I must do what is right as a Christian. And so by agreeing, I can win their confidence and help them too.

When I am with those whose consciences bother them easily, I don’t act as though I know it all and don’t say they are foolish; the result is that they are willing to let me help them. Yes, whatever a person is like, I try to find common ground with him so that he will let me tell him about Jesus and let Christ save him. I do this to get the gospel to them and also for the blessing I myself receive when I see them come to Christ.” (I Cor. 9:20,21).

But not everybody can be comfortable as a cultural chameleon. The apostles at headquarters and the mainstream conservatives were troubled with Paul’s relativistic attitude toward that which many saw as absolute. The first General Conference, the so-called Jerusalem Council recorded in Acts 15, was convened specifically to address the problem of ethnic churches. Were they legitimate in God’s eyes? If so, where should one draw the line between being Jewish and just being Christian without being Jewish?

The Council accepted the legitimacy of ethnic conversions in God’s eyes because of testimony that the ethnic converts had experienced the same outpouring of the Holy Spirit that Jews had experienced, despite the fact that they were not keeping Jewish ceremonies. What did this imply in terms of God’s will? Did the Gentiles now have to start keeping Jewish ceremonies, or did it mean that Jewish Christians could stop troubling themselves with Jewish ceremonies?

The Ethnic Solution

The answer, it turns out, was none of the above. They settled upon an apparent double standard for Jewish and Gentile Christians that ultimately satisfied no one (certainly not Adventists). The Jewish Christians were to go on keeping the law of Moses as before, but the ethnic converts were exempted from all Jewish requirements except for food offered to idols, meat of strangled animals, and fornication. And so a great gulf was fixed between the mother church in Jerusalem, and the ethnic churches. There was no unity even in practice. This double standard, it seems to me, can be most parsimoniously reconciled on the basis of cultural relativity from God’s point of view, assuming that James the Just was not misguided.

The two cultures may have been relative, but not necessarily equal. Paul, writing toward the end of his career, proclaimed: “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Rom 1:16).

The Greeks were the ethnic people of Paul’s day from the Jewish perspective. Today when preachers quote this text in their sermons, they have a tendency to mumble the last two phrases of it because it betrays our humble spiritual ancestry: The mighty modern Christian church sprang from just an “also”; Ishmael rather than Isaac.

The dominance of the Jerusalem church and Jewish culture was forever eclipsed after the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Paul’s orphaned and beleaguered ethnic churches grew up to become the dominant model for modern Christianity, rather than the church of the Apostles in Jerusalem. The last had become first and the first had become last.

The disappearance of the Jerusalem church has allowed the Gentile church to represent their practice as universal and monolithic, but the record of Acts 15 and 21 shows that this is simply another case of the winners writing history. So even as Conference officials speak, sometimes patronizingly, about the “problem of the ethnic church,” the world church, and the Christian world itself, stand on the shoulders of Christianity’s first ethnic churches.

The process that brought about that great transformation has not stopped. Paul did not and could not eradicate cultural barriers to salvation for all peoples for all time (and some would argue that he was blind to some in his day). Culture is dynamic and continuously evolving. Believers of every time and place must relate to the gospel from their own cultural perspective in order to make it their own.

Missionaries find it hard if not impossible to separate the essentials of salvation from their own unique environment or culture. This inevitably results in the direct or indirect preaching and teaching of their own culture along with the gospel. This mixing of culture with gospel results in the creation of additional barriers to salvation for those of a different culture than the missionary, at the same time that it lowers the barriers to salvation for others of the same (or similar) culture.

So what is the solution? Stripping salvation of all its cultural adornments is not a solution. For religion would then become a lifeless, artificial, inhuman thing. We must, after all, speak in some language, follow some customs, and celebrate or commiserate with each other’s joys or sorrows in some ritual.

If God is neutral with respect to culture, then salvation must not only be possible within one’s own culture, but preferable. It is preferable, because the God of culture is also the God of economy. Why throw away something only to be forced to reacquire the equivalent thing at a great cost of time and effort? This inefficiency is magnified by many fold because such a convert also loses credibility within his own culture when trying to evangelize the people of his/her former culture.

A few people may feel alienated enough from their own culture that they may be happy to abandon theirs and start over all again. Too often, perhaps, such alienated beings are praised and idealized as model converts. But being in such an alienated state of self- loathing can hardly be considered normative, let alone praiseworthy, even for a heathen. The historical solution has been to encourage each people to celebrate their salvation in their own culturally unique ways by making sure that there is a church serving as many unique cultures as is practically possible within each geographic area.

Many who strongly believe in ethnic churches consider it significant that the first recorded miracle after Jesus’ departure was the miracle of “tongues” at Pentecost (Acts 2). The miracle of tongues enabled the disciples to preach the gospel in the language of “every nation under heaven.” The presence of ethnic churches representing “every nation under heaven” can be seen as our way of reenacting the miracle of Pentecost today in the same way that the Adventist church’s commitment to the medical ministry is a reenactment of Jesus’ healing ministry.

Ethnic Churches and the Incarnation

Those who would argue against ethnic churches overlook the obvious fact that while God may be culture free, people are not, cannot and, I would argue, should not be. It is good to have ethnicity and culture, for without it, man would remain a savage doomed to reinvent the wheel each generation. If God is unprejudiced and desires salvation for all, then he cannot be satisfied so long as there are environmental or cultural barriers to salvation for any group. Ethnic churches are justified because God is not willing that any should perish merely because they refract life through the prism of any particular culture or ethnicity.

The phenomenon of the ethnic church can be seen as an extension of God’s never-ending outreach toward man that is epitomized in the Incarnation itself. God revealed himself as human, rather than a Martian, because we are humans, rather than Martians. And so he must reveal himself to be an ethnic person, for we are all ethnic people. But even the ethnic church cannot break down all barriers. In the final analysis, it is the function of each member within each church to break down that final barrier to salvation by customizing it to meet the needs of every individual, rather than merely the sexual, age, economic, or philosophical class to which the individual may belong.