A question of culture.
The “homogeneous unit principle,” offered by Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission, has become a controversial subject. It stresses that churches grow most quickly along their own cultural lines—thus, for instance, you can expect a church that tries to combine black and white American cultures to grow very slowly, if at all. As an introduction for CHRISTIANITY TODAY readers, we asked Tim Stafford, west coast editor of Campus Life magazine, to get together C. Peter Wagner of Fuller Seminary and Ray Stedman, a pastor at Peninsula Bible Church, for a discussion of the principles.
Stafford: The New Testament upholds the unity of the Church of Jesus Christ, which overcomes cultural distinctions like Jew, Greek, slave, free. Dr. Wagner, why do you think we should maintain cultural homogeneity in the church?
Wagner: We need to ask the sociological question, “How do churches empirically grow?” When churches don’t grow, and the Great Commission is not being fulfilled because somehow the church is irrelevant to the community, what are the reasons for this? One of them, we’ve found, is a failure to discern the principle of homogeneity.
I think the sociological level is a starting point. The second level is biblical/theological/ethical. Even if the homogeneous unit principle does help reach the lost sheep and bring them into the fold, that is not a sufficient reason for a Christian to hold it. But we start by asking, “Do churches grow better?” We find that they do.
Stedman: I question the validity of making numerical growth a kind of supreme measure of whether a church is succeeding or not. We need to produce the kind of a church the Lord wants—one that mixes all castes, clans, creeds, and races. That’s what demonstrates the quality of reconciliation.
I would agree that numbers is a sign of health in a church, just as you can detect health in a child by the fact that he is growing. But culturally you should see gradual change. The world is always divided into classes, castes, racial and vocational divisions, and that’s where you need to start. But you mustn’t stay there.
For one thing, you lose the value of various backgrounds and the flavor of diversity. Second, you don’t demonstrate to the world the reconciling character of the Gospel. I don’t think people are impressed when they come into a church of, for example, Republicans at prayer. They don’t come out of a church like that and say, “My, what tremendous power is evident here.” What it appears to be is often what it really is: a social club made up of people who like the same life style. A church can grow like that, but it does not fulfill the mind of the Lord for the church.
It impresses people to see Republicans and Democrats living and loving and working together; likewise with hippies and businessmen, blacks and Chinese and whites.
Wagner: Empirical studies don’t bear this out. Churches where outsiders see their kind of people grow faster. Do you have any evidence that the other is really attractive?
Stedman: I can’t compare figures with you, but I can use our own church as an example of this. I think that we have some very distinct life styles mingling and comingling. Yet it’s a growing church. The walls keep bulging out; we have to keep getting new people; we have to start new services. All the marks of growth are there.
We have, for instance, a group of single adults that meets in a restaurant on Sunday mornings. It’s growing fast, now about 550 strong. It grew from about forty within five years time. It’s had three divisions and each one is growing just as rapidly as the original. But even within that group, there are all kinds of people.
Wagner: Suppose I were called to be pastor of your church, Ray. You left and I went in, and I said, “You know, one of the first things we ought to do here is, we ought to stop those singles from meeting alone in that restaurant. We ought to bring them into our married couples’ classes.” Would you agree with that procedure?
Stedman: No. As I say, I think there’s a basis for starting works on a homogeneous basis of appeal. Marital status is one.
Wagner: By describing a singles ministry where the singles meet by themselves, you’re describing the homogeneous unit principle.
Stedman: But it’s still a unit within the whole body of the church. We’re talking about the church itself as a unit. There may have been those kinds of divisions in the church at Jerusalem, but the whole of the church brings together those various groups.
Wagner: As the church growth movement has analyzed it, the larger the church gets in membership, the more it can absorb fellowships of different homogeneous units.
In our church, Lake Avenue Congregational, we detected a couple of years ago that one of our problems of growth was in the adult Sunday school. We knew that our Sunday school classes were getting too big. Since then our classes have been dividing and growing.
The Pathfinders were what you could classify as young parents. They were all white, similar educationally, from the same area, and so forth. But there were members from South Pasadena, Arcadia, and San Marino, who were upper socioeconomic. There was also a group of people who lived in Pasadena, Altadena, and San Gabriel, who were a slightly lower socioeconomic group. So they said, “Definitely we don’t want to split along these lines.” They divided the class on a completely random selection.
But for a period of time, two to three months, if anybody was dissatisfied with his or her group, he could change. And lo and behold, all the people from South Pasadena, San Marino, and Arcadia were voluntarily in one class, and all the Pasadena and Altadena people were in another class.
We tried to bypass the homogeneous unit principle, or to prove that it didn’t necessarily hold. Predictably, it didn’t work. This is just part of the innocent human nature that God has made in us.
Stedman: But what you’re calling a homogeneous principle is really a characteristic of the flesh. It’s a reflection of the innate selfishness of human beings, who want to be with our own people in our own group where we feel comfortable. The Spirit of God has come to counteract the flesh. It’s a process, and it takes time. In no one period of time or in one church are you going to see the process totally completed. But that to me would really mark growth in a church—I mean growth in a biblical dimension. People should grow in their ability to reach out across gaps and chasms to other people of different backgrounds and cultures, to show love and understanding.
Wagner: We divide the classes to win unbelievers to Jesus Christ. If we’re going to do that we need to offer them a starting point, namely, groups of their own homogeneous unit. When unbelievers come in, they will feel welcomed and folded in a group of their own kind of people. Christians can form conglomerate fellowship groups, and perhaps in some cases it’s the will of the Holy Spirit. My argument is that insisting on this across the board reduces the chance of embracing unbelievers. They are in the flesh.
Stedman: Maybe we agree more than we think we do. When you evangelize you almost always will do it on a homogeneous principle. But its purpose is to introduce new Christians to a larger group with a much more diverse background. When you look at the church you should see what the world is unable to create.
Wagner: In my book Your Church Can Grow, and in a new book, Our Kind of People, to be published by John Knox Press and is on the ethical implications of the homogeneous unit principle, I give an example of what I am saying: Temple Church in Pershing Square in Los Angeles. It’s a Baptist church right in a mosaic of inner city ethnic groups. In one church they have an Anglo congregation, a Spanish congregation, a Chinese congregation, and a Korean congregation. And they’re aiming for two more, at least. They all participate in the government of the church. Everyone is a member of Temple Church.
Stedman: Do they then intermix in worship services?
Wagner: I was coming to that. They have to worship in four different languages. But the first Sunday of every quarter they all get together in the “Sounds of Heaven” celebration. No sermon, since they couldn’t understand it. But they minister to each other in music, in testimony, in baptisms. The pastor’s vision is to build a new sanctuary with a round cylinder in the middle and five partitions going out with soundproof walls. That way every congregation worships in its own language and style, except at a predetermined time each Sunday morning, when the walls all go up. One of the congregations in the center ministers to all the congregations for a period of time, and then they go back to their own service. To me this is a beautiful illustration. When Koreans go to that church, they’re with their own people. They can be won to Christ. They say, “Yeah, I understand the Gospel.” For one thing, it’s in their language. Each congregation maintains cultural integrity. Yet there’s a sense of interdependence and love among all the four congregations.
We have in our unified school district, 43 per cent blacks, 38 per cent whites, and the others are other ethnic groups. We bus our children to schools. I live in an integrated neighborhood. Our children go to integrated schools. Blacks need Christ. Whites need Christ. But there’s no way one church can meet the needs of both of those communities. If we began having a service with soul music that ran two-and-a-half hours, with the kind of black preaching that appeals to our black community, we would be considered ridiculous by everybody. We would stop winning people to Christ. But why should we do this, when New Revelation Baptist Church is winning numbers of unbelievers who are black, and we’re winning numbers of unbelievers who are white? Neither one is racist.
Stedman: That troubles me. You’re denying the reconciling power of the Gospel. I think there has to be a time when you get them together. You’re only saying you couldn’t do it because it would be difficult. But I think it could be done. The church can be flexible and have services of different styles, with all the people joining and belonging to the same church.
Wagner: That can happen. I’ve been to churches that had two different services, and actually had two homogeneous units. One homogeneous unit goes to one service, and the other goes to another, which isn’t much different from going to one church on this corner and one church on that corner.
Generally speaking, churches that have tried bicultural models, with certain exceptions, have been unsuccessful.
Stedman: But the Great Commission is still incomplete until they have become disciples. It’s not just, go and win people to Christ, but to make disciples of all men. Disciples are those who have learned to love and live together despite differences. Diversity in unity is the great hallmark of the church as distinct from the world.
Wagner: But to deny people the privilege of worshiping God in their culture doesn’t seem to me to be a Christian virtue.
Stedman: I don’t think you deny it to them. You adjust to it. You have varying styles available in different times and places within the church. But the important thing is that people sense that they belong to a larger body that includes all these groups.
We’ve experimented in this way. There’s a black church in East Palo Alto that we’ve exchanged pastors with. We’ve taken our congregation over there and met with them; they’ve come over and met with us; we’ve exchanged choirs and choral groups. We’ve had close ties with this church. But to try to merge the two churches and have joint services together at this stage would be difficult, unwelcome to both groups.
Wagner: You’re one step ahead of us, and I envy you for it.
Stafford: We’ve been talking as though cultural distinctives are neutral ethically. But some people would say that the reason black people are uncomfortable with whites and white people are uncomfortable with blacks is that whites are racist. In erecting an all-white church there’s an inescapable aura of offense to blacks, which is an extension of our whole culture. Given the fact that the separation of blacks and whites in America is central to our economic problems, central to our social problems, and central to our educational problems, shouldn’t the church be doing more than just exchanging pastors or having an occasional choir cross town? Shouldn’t the church embody the answer to our racial situation?
Wagner: My position is that culture is not sinful. There are always demonic elements in every culture, but it’s not sinful to worship God in your language or in your style.
I think that one of the major manifestations of this today is the evangelism of the Jews. In the New Testament the Judaizers were insisting that Gentiles, in order to be true followers of Jehovah, needed to be circumcised and keep the law and the Sabbath. But the Jews through the centuries have had the tables turned on them. In the last hundred years or so it’s been fairly well agreed that much of the so-called mission work to the Jews was largely Gentilizing, rather than Judaizing. Mission agencies insisted, in an implicit form, that Jews, in order to become true followers of Jesus needed to join Gentile churches and that Jewish men needed to marry Gentile women.
Much more recently the messianic synagogue movement has arisen. Members say that it’s possible for a Jew to follow Jesus Christ, to bar mitzvah his children, to keep a kosher kitchen, to attend messianic synagogue on Friday night, to wear yarmulkes in a service, to grow beards, to marry Jewish women, and to still be Jews and be followers of “Yeshua Hamashiac,” Jesus the Messiah. The multiplication of these synagogues is a testimony to the vitality of the homogeneous unit principle.
Now the question is, does this increase or decrease hostility between Jews and Gentiles? Most Jews who have been won to Christ in messianic synagogues love Gentiles more than they ever have before. Since I learned more about the messianic synagogue movement, I have felt much closer and more appreciative of Jews. It has helped break down barriers; they’re now following Jesus the Messiah and we’re following the same Jesus. They’re doing it their way and we’re doing it our way, but we’re all brothers and sisters in Christ and we rejoice together and love each other much more than we did before.
Stedman: Long-range, you may have a breakdown of cultures, as you visit each other’s services. It may become possible to mingle some of these congregations and see people move from one to another.
Now to come back to your original question, Tim, I think there are some dangerous elements in the idea of having homogeneous groups that make no attempts to break down these barriers. Take the whole question of black-white relationships in the South. I strongly believe that had white Christians who won their slaves to Christ really treated them as Christian brothers and sisters the whole race issue might never have sprung up in the South. In the early church there was a cultural breakdown going on in the intermingling of slaves and masters in the same congregation.
Wagner: I don’t think so. There was probably a slave church in Rome that met by itself.
Stedman: Well, why, then, in the letters to the Ephesians and to the Colossians and so on do we have the words addressed to both groups right in the same letter? “To the church at Colossae. To the church at Ephesus. Masters, treat your slaves rightly. Slaves, be faithful to your masters.” These were read to the congregation. They were evidently all sitting there together.
Wagner: Let’s go to the New Testament now, because this is very important. If this homogeneous unit principle is not the way New Testament churches developed, that’s sufficient evidence to scrap it.
Jesus was born into a culture. He was not a Gentile. He was not a Samaritan. He was a Jew. Not only was he a Jew, but he was a very special kind of Jew. Among Jews, there were many different homogeneous units. There were priestly and secular classes. He was not a priest, but a layman. There were also socioeconomic classes. He was of the working class. There was a much more important division between Hellenists and Hebrews. He was not a Hellenist, he was a Hebrew. There was another important difference among Hebrews, and that was between Galileans and Judaeans. He was a Galilean. He was an Aramaic-speaking Galilean Jew, a specific homogeneous unit in the sociocultural makeup of the first century.
Since Jesus grew up in that culture—and if he was truly human, he was thoroughly a part of that culture; that’s a theological deduction—it would be natural for him to form his own inner circle from those of his own homogeneous unit. Eleven of the twelve disciples were Aramaic-speaking Galilean Jews, with one exception, Judas Iscariot. Ish-Kerioth means man of Kerioth, which was a Judaean village. There were two candidates to replace Judas—Joseph Barsabbas, who was probably a Cyprian, and Matthias, who was an Aramaic-speaking Galilean Jew. Matthias was chosen.
The basic ministry of these twelve people was not conglomerate or crosscultural. When Jesus sent them out he said, “Go not into the way of the Gentiles; into the city of the Samaritans enter not; but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” They were going to their own people. When the Syrophoenician woman came along, Jesus used language that could be considered racist. At first he gave her the silent treatment. He finally healed her daughter, because of her faith. Compassion always crosses culture. But Jesus initially wanted nothing to do with her, if we can take the text at face value. And there are other examples, as when the Holy Spirit sent Paul and Barnabas to the Gentiles. Paul’s churches were mostly started as splinter synagogues. The people in them were mostly God-fearers, not Jews or proselytes, although there were some of them; those God-fearers began winning the Gentiles. So the churches that Paul left behind were Gentile churches.
Stedman: That’s a beautiful example, Pete, of approaching the Scriptures with a conclusion already in mind. You can interpret various passages so that they seem to support one conviction, but when you approach it from another point of view you find something entirely different.
Wagner: I grant you that. But it’s a reasonable way to read the Scriptures.
A Balanced Stride
Readers should not side exclusively with the ideas of just one of these men. The emphasis of both is important.
If C. Peter Wagner thought or taught that the “homogeneous unit” was the governing principle of church life I would be concerned. But he seems aware that homogeneity, if twisted, can be a convenient excuse for bigotry. Obviously, specialization has to stop somewhere, or churches would be tailored just for men, or women, or the elderly, or children.
On the other hand, you cannot have a congregation where year after year everyone who attends will not only be welcomed but also feel at home. Given the differences in people, at some point some people will feel out of place, whether because of language, culture, age, style, or emphasis. Wouldn’t Ray Stedman agree that Christ’s church should be composed of congregations with varying personalities? Certainly assimilation is not the ultimate answer.
The question, then, is not who is right, but which emphasis is best for me? I would have been wise several years ago to have heeded Wagner. He warned me not to try to reach too many different people in one church. Sure enough, the congregation eventually split in our attempt to extend our imperfect love too far and too fast. We were young and obsessed with solving in a few years problems that had been centuries in the making.
This does not mean, however, that Christians are not to consistently work toward reconciliation in all areas of life. I thank God for other congregations that continue to work to remove the walls that keep us from loving each other. Even the most painful lessons I learned from black believers made me a more healthy person spiritually. The world needs to see the reconciling love of the Gospel in our local churches. “Balance” is the appropriate word. The two positions are not that much in conflict. But were I forced to choose between growth versus reconciliation, I would choose the latter.
DAVID R. MAINS
David R. Mains was formerly copastor of Circle Church in Chicago, an experimental black-white congregation. He now serves as director of Chapel of the Air in Carol Stream, Illinois.
Stedman: I don’t think that’s an argument in your favor. I preached through the Gospel of Mark not long ago and I saw that Jesus spent at least half of his ministry traveling among Gentiles. He didn’t preach only among the Jews. If you trace his work with the disciples, in Mark’s Gospel, particularly, you see that he is trying to break down the cultural barriers of the Jews, so they could see the whole of the world.
Wagner: But no matter how many months Jesus spent in Gentile territory, it doesn’t change the fact that when he left there, he left Galileans behind. They weren’t even Hellenists, to say nothing of Gentiles. Jesus started no Gentile church. When Peter later went to the house of Cornelius, that breakthrough blew everybody’s mind. The way I see it, all those acts of Jesus—the parable of the good Samaritan, the healing of the centurion’s servant, and the potential contacts that he did have with Gentiles—were all serving to prepare the way.
Stedman: They were deliberate teaching methods of his to break down the limited cultural background of the disciples.
Wagner: Those are your words, not mine. My words are that he was preparing the way for his final command, which they had not heard before, “Make disciples of all nations.” They needed to have that preparation in order to go out. Jesus was a good teacher, but even when he left, none of the twelve fully understood that.
Stedman: But that was because they were lacking the Holy Spirit. Jesus said, “Wait in Jerusalem until the Spirit comes. Don’t try to evangelize, yet.” The Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, and now all of us have him. We should start immediately to break down these cultural barriers as soon as people come to Christ.
Stafford: Peter, you said earlier that all culture is neutral. Are there times when, because of a political or racial situation, the atmosphere is inflamed and the church needs to violate the homogeneous unit principle?
Wagner: Yes. I call them “social disaster areas.” South Africa may be one of those social disaster areas today. I believe that the churches in South Africa may have to violate the homogeneous unit principle. They may have to sacrifice growth temporarily in order to combat the racism of that country.
Stedman: What would you say about Japan? I have thought for a long time that Japan’s culture deliberately encourages deception: putting on a face, being polite to people you are ready to murder, hiding every real feeling. I think that the Gospel in Japan must confront that.
Wagner: I don’t have an opinion on Japan, but I will always contend that every culture has a demonic element, and that the entrance of the Gospel into any culture has to change part of that culture.
Stafford: But how do you tell? You talked about blacks and whites in America. Some see that as a sign of the demonic in our culture. We could even talk about the white suburban culture that makes up our home churches. A good many Christians are saying it represents a wealthy, ingrown, proud, and secure mentality that needs to be confronted. It produces an atmosphere of comfortable religion that is antagonistic to the Gospel. I assume that you don’t agree with that. But how do we make the distinction? The South African Christians don’t agree that their country is a social disaster area either. Some would, but the vast majority of white South Africans wouldn’t.
Wagner: That’s a very hard decision for someone to make, and I can’t really decide about someone else’s culture.
Stafford: How about America?
Wagner: America has gone through an interesting change. I think the sixties will go down as the most important decade of the century, socially. We have made a subtle sociopsychological change in America, which I think is positive. For the first time in our history, our academic and legal systems are recognizing the valid existence of disparate groups in America. The idea before the sixties was that everybody melts together in a “melting pot.” Now the idea is that America is a society in which people can affect each other like ingredients in a stewpot, so that they all come out of the pot differently from the way they went in, but they all maintain their identity.
Few are talking any more about an integration of black and white churches, diluting the minority culture, but rather about a mature recognition of each cultural expression. If the Spanish prefer to worship in Spanish rather than in English, then I don’t think they should be denied their privilege to do that.
Stafford: I don’t think the issue is denying a minority the right to maintain its own culture. The issue is the right of the majority culture to be isolated from the minority culture. If it’s true that every culture has within it a demonic element, that element needs to be confronted. Any majority culture has the ability to ignore other cultures. A black in America can’t ignore whites. A white can almost completely ignore blacks in most parts of America. Doesn’t the Holy Spirit confront the arrogance of people in a majority culture by forcing them to confront others, by forcing them out into the highways and biways of other cultures? Isn’t it a high responsibility for pastors to work in that?
Wagner: I agree. Not only a responsibility of pastors, but the responsibility of prophets. We need to listen to the Sojourners, The Other Side, people like Ron Sider. I agree that this is the way the body of Christ works.
Stafford: Doesn’t the homogeneous unit principle, in application, contradict that a good percentage of the time? If our churches are geared toward a white suburban culture, if our jobs and our homes and the places we eat are solidly in the majority, when are we contradicted by other cultures?
Wagner: We’re not, unfortunately. The homogeneous unit principle is a starting point. If it’s an ending point, it’s sub-Christian. If we don’t form these relationships where we’re judged, and flavored, and blessed by Christians of other cultures, we are missing out on God’s best. How to do it is hard to say.
D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.
