Unity in Diversity

Kevin Gushiken is the teaching pastor of Harvard Avenue Evangelical Free Church in Villa Park, Illinois. For years the church was predominantly Caucasian. But eight years ago the congregation merged with a neighboring Spanish-speaking congregation. Around the same time, the church experienced an influx of African-Americans, Filipinos, and Indians. Leadership Journal‘s Paul Pastor talked with Gushiken about how the church pursues a common vision while striving to honor the diversity of its members.

Did you always intend to be a multiethnic church?

Not necessarily, but I’ve always had a desire for racial reconciliation. I’m biracial—Asian and Caucasian. Growing up I saw racial reconciliation in the home, different ethnic groups coming together. I didn’t see until much later how important that was when, as a church, we started becoming more multiethnic.

You wrote that multiethnic ministry “just happened” for Harvard Avenue. But did you do anything early on that helped you become more diverse?

We started thinking about the community and we became interested in holistic ministry. We started a vibrant food pantry and a ministry helped the homeless. Our local community is very diverse. As we started to pray for our community and look carefully at our neighbors, people started to hear about the church as a place of love and grace in the neighborhood. When they came they found it to be a safe place.

Those more holistic ministries prepared our church’s heart to grow in diversity. We grew in our love for our local community, and that began to spill over. So when people from differing backgrounds came, we were already praying to be able to minister to these people well. We loved and accepted them, and they felt comfortable. No one made an issue that we have differences, because God had been working on our hearts beforehand.

What’s been the hardest thing for the church in transitioning into more diversity?

One difficulty is the cultural misunderstandings that arise. I’ll tell you about a challenge from the worship team. We have a Caucasian lady and a Filipino lady on the worship team. We thought we’d make it mix, but the Caucasian woman was having difficulties with the Filipino. She was trying to go and talk to her directly, but the Filipino lady was being evasive. She didn’t want to address it. Eventually, the Caucasian lady came to us and said, “I want to resolve this, but this person doesn’t want to.”

My wife and I started talking to them about cultural differences in conflict. We explained that the Caucasian wants to be direct and deal with it. But the Filipino’s cultural value is to save face. She believed the best way to resolve the conflict was to keep the relationship without talking about it. It’s a cultural disconnect. We began to do some cultural training. In the end, they reconciled and each culture was able to be honored and preserved—even if both had to compromise. It worked out beautifully.

So that is a huge challenge—investing the time and energy to work through things with people. It’s tough sometimes to do pastoral care being both culturally sensitive and faithful to what Christ wants us to do. It has taken a lot more time and patience than ministering to a homogenous church. But I think it’s helped us become a closer community as a result.

The second challenge is the tension between wanting people from different ethnic groups to be in ministry leadership, but also making sure we follow scriptural standards for leadership and ministry. Navigating leadership, ministry, and worship in a way that really honors Christ yet remains sensitive to our multiethnic dynamic.

What’s your process for faithfully diversifying your leadership?

We had an elders retreat several years ago. Our entire focus was on how to be faithful to Scripture yet sensitive to who God has called us to be as a multiethnic body. That weekend, we had some deep conversations about holding Scripture in tension with multiethnicity in our context. Then we took that elders retreat and had that conversation with the leadership at large.

After that we had a town hall meeting (without any voting). We had a conversation in the church about where we are, what God has called us to be, what type of things we had to consider, and what type of questions we had to ask. We had a good discussion with the congregation as we started to move in that direction.

Then we thought tactically. We identified people who had a heart for God and wanted to serve. We began to have individual conversations with them about where God might want to use them in our church body. Then we started to place them in various ministry roles generally in a way where they could serve first. We began to mentor them, to create relational connections to lead them toward leadership. Those mentoring relationships have been key to the success of this whole process. It’s been about building relationships, communicating clearly, and giving lots of opportunity for the congregation to own these ministry changes for themselves.

Has the church captured the leadership’s vision?

They really have. I’ll be honest, though. When we started to have these conversations, not everybody was onboard. Some people had difficulty with it, and we had a family or two who left the church because of it. Not because we were trying to plow through to our vision of multiethnicity—we were slow and patient. It became apparent that the families who had trouble with it wanted to be in a church with other people like them.

Since we’ve taken the slow approach the body has really embraced it. More than that, they have a passion for it. In fact, after we talked for a while at that town hall meeting—one person raised their hand and said “I understand why we are having this town hall meeting. It’s good and stuff. But for me I don’t understand why we have to have such a lengthy conversation because this is what God has called us to do. So if God has called us to do this, let’s go.”

A lot of people have shared that sentiment along the way.

What about your diverse ministry brings your heart the most joy?

This really goes to a deep level for me, since I am biracial. It’s seeing our diverse members coming together in worship and ministry without thinking about one another as Caucasian, Latino, African-American, or Filipino. They are a vision of the future, I hope—of racial reconciliation in the United States, and of every tongue, tribe, and nation unified in Jesus for eternity.