Last year I read and greatly benefited from Natalie Williams & Paul Brown’s book Invisible Divides. It explains the challenges of being working class in an English church—which at least among evangelicals are currently majority middle-classed—and outlines the ways that Pastors and others need to think differently in order to make multi-class churches.
One of the broad principles that would apply more widely that issues of class is that we need to notice our majority cultures. Majority cultures tend to be assumed, because they’re normal for most people, and then equated with Christianity. Because that’s the way we do things, that’s the Christian way, right?
Williams & Brown do an excellent job of breaking down some of the middle-classed thinking that they both initially assume was part of what it meant to be a Christian. There’s nothing wrong with these elements of middle-classed culture, there is something wrong with someone having to adopt them to join the community (read Galatians and think about cheese & wine instead of circumcision).
The reason it can be insidious, and the book needed writing, is that with many of the cultural aspects that they pull out, no one told either of them to do this or that because Christians do this or that (there are some exceptions here), they picked it up by osmosis. They assumed, reasonably enough, that because everyone did this, they needed to do it as well.
Someone I know who became a Christian a couple of years back had to ask if it was OK for Christians to own dogs, because they didn’t know anyone who did. It sounds silly, but how were they to know any different? If you’ve started reading the Bible and come along to church to hear some preaching, you would probably have the sense that it could contain lots of prohibitions you don’t know about yet because you haven’t read it all yet—naturally enough you look at everyone around you and imitate their lives.
The Onus Lies with the Majority
Which means that the onus lies with the majority culture—and we could be talking here about multiple different things that I’ll return to in a moment—to consider where they are asking minority cultures to do things that aren’t required by Jesus.
This is difficult. Really difficult. We can’t see our shadows until we’re shown them, most of the time. Often, we will need either someone who has straddled cultures, or someone from the minority culture, to show us what they find weird and to think with us about whether that’s something that Christians are meant to do or not.
This applies whichever way around the minority and majority is. Of course, sometimes—perhaps a lot of the time—the weirdness they are experiencing is because Christianity is weird. We must not soften what Jesus demands or allow people to sin because they come from a culture (the kingdom of darkness) that does things differently to ours (the kingdom of light—Colossians 1). The point is to figure out which things are just culture and can be good when directed towards the glory of God.
Spotting the Minority
If you’re majority culture, which in an English evangelical church right now means you’re probably a white, English-as-a-first-language, University educated, middle-classed, married parent—then it is very difficult to see this. It’s difficult to even notice you’re the majority.
I think there’s lots of grace here to learn along the way, but welcoming people who are different to us will require them to change and us to make sure we aren’t asking them to change where they don’t need to.
In Biblical terms we’re talking about welcoming the outsider. We need outsiders, and in the Bible they are typically the weakest members of society. That’s not surprising, being an outsider means you have less power.
The scriptures define the weakest as those who have known the brush of death: the widow (e.g. Psalm 68), the orphan (e.g. James 1), and the barren (e.g. Psalm 113); those who know exile: the sojourner or foreigner (e.g. Exodus 23); and the poor, which in the New Testament era often included slaves (e.g. 1 Peter 3). It’s probably not surprising that we are explicitly told to welcome into the community those who know well the things that Jesus has freed us from through his death and resurrection.
It’s worth noticing that these map reasonably well onto the differences we might encounter in the church today—though this shouldn’t be forced such that the differences bend out of shape. The major axes of difference that we encounter would include the single, childless, ethnic minorities and the working class. While these don’t precisely fit the Biblical categories (being from an ethnic minority is not the same thing as being a sojourner for example), there are commonalities.
All of our churches should be thinking about how the minority groups within them feel, and considering where we are placing on them burdens that the Bible doesn’t. This still is the cases when who the minority is flips the other way. I think a working-class majority church or a black-majority church should still be thinking about the minorities amongst them and whether they place demands or expectations which aren’t driven from the gospel but from their cultures.
This is mostly notable in areas of ‘leadership.’ It’s difficult to get ‘leaders’ from minority cultures because what we look for tends to be culturally bounded. If instead we looked for character, we might do better. Most churches leaders I know are live to this issue when it comes to ethnicity, even if they haven’t solved it. We should also think in similar ways about class, singleness, and childlessness. It might seem odd to call singleness and childlessness cultures. It may not be the best term, but the same broad principles apply: these people in your church experience life very differently, be curious about that.
It’s worth saying that if a majority culture is forcing aspects of their culture onto minorities within the church, that doesn’t make the culture bad. Not at all, the sin here is accidentally equating the culture with Christianity.
Aspects of all of our cultures are good and true and beautiful and will be carried into the New Jerusalem by the Kings of the nations (Revelation 21). The church should elevate and celebrate the good and true and beautiful that sits among the life of those within this church.
Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash
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