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Evangelism across the Cultures
Lusa Nsenga-Ngoy, BAME Mission and Ministry Enabler for the Diocese of Leicester writes about Evangelism across cultures in new book Anglican Evangelists. In this blog post will find an excerpt from this chapter.
A summary overview of the makeup of most Christian places of worship in the UK will reveal that ethnicity is equally a key determinant in people’s experience of worship. Where, when and with whom one worships typically varies according to one’s culture and ethnicity. A relative cultural myopia due to the homogeneity of many of our church contexts has likely contributed to this situation. In addition, the historic failure of hospitality from all traditional Christian denominations towards those who had migrated to Britain post-war still carries a negative balance in terms of our churches’ ability to develop and offer ethnically and culturally integrated experiences of worship. The worship hour in Christian Britain is certainly still segregated.
Paradoxically, a comparative study of the last two censuses in Britain (2001 and 2011) shows that, while the overall number of people self-identifying as Christian has declined, the figures tell a more nuanced story when ethnicity is considered. Indeed, at the exception of the indigenous white British population, all other ethnic categories have seen a considerable increase in the number of people affiliated to the Christian religion; in particular among people of Asian heritage showing an increase of nearly 400 per cent. Immigration has likely been a key factor in this increase, but the evidence of new converts from different ethnic and cultural heritage suggests the relative success of various outreach initiatives to evangelize across the increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse make up of British society. Yet that increase is barely evidenced in the life of most of ‘traditional’ denominations in Britain. Instead, we are seeing the proliferation of mono cultural, mono-ethnic and mono- linguistic worshiping communities in towns and cities across the UK. This inevitably raises a particular challenge in relation to cross- cultural evangelism.
Anglican Evangelists: Identifying and Training a New Generation has been written by thirteen authors who work in a range of contexts and come from different traditions within the church. Their focus in this book, is less on the nature of evangelism, and more on the calling and gifting of the evangelist. In different ways they reflect on the questions: what is an evangelist? How should the church identify and affirm evangelists? How do we train evangelists? How do we enable evangelists to equip all God’s people to witness to the kingdom of God?
'One of the delights of this book is that it takes the work of the evangelist from one niche area of ministry and places it in every area of ministry. Evangelism is our operating system. What a gift Martyn and the contributors have given to us and to this country if we can but grasp this.’
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