Two days ago I shared some of our journey into becoming a church with 3 separate language services. Yesterday, Steve Kneale who also leads a church with multiple languages put his thoughts down on paper, or whatever it is you call it when you write a blog post. Steve mostly agrees but not entirely.

I think there are plenty of ways to skin this particular cat & there’s generous freedom to work things out in your own way. But it’s helpful to respond because it sharpens my own thinking & because between these few posts it might help others as they navigate the challenges of multiculturalism.

So with all the various caveats out of the way, let’s dig in a bit.

Context

There are some differences because of context. Steve leads a church in England & the national language is English. Local languages include Farsi & Urdu. Bethel translates services into two languages English & Farsi.

We are an English speaking church in Sweden, where the national language is Swedish. There is a case to be made that our default operating language should be Swedish because after all that is the language of the country we’re in. We could use our services to help people ‘operate in Swedish because, outside of church, they need to know Swedish’. Except that’s not quite true of everyone. Most of our expatriates in the International service, work in English & Stockholm is certainly geared up to allow them to do that. For these people, they do not need to know Swedish at all.

The same cannot be said for the Congolese, who definitely do need to know Swedish & most of them probably don’t need to know much, if any, English.

Steve’s church, wonderfully, stands out because they ‘are more multicultural than anything else in the area.’ He believes, ‘the gospel is best communicated to our community multiculturally, even if it is harder and more awkward to do so.’

I’ve no reason to disagree with that and instead many reasons to applaud it. Our reasoning is that in our context we need to communicate the gospel in multiple languages to multiple groups and that, for now, is best done primarily in separate language contexts.

Our contexts explain some of the differences & the differing responses.

Annoyances

In my post I said that “Doing bi-lingual services was very jobbigt (annoying) & we quickly decided that route was not for us” and Steve quite reasonably argues that we should not seek to avoid this kind of annoyance because what you demonstrate when you take the all together path is so valuable.

Indeed I was asked this question on Twitter as a follow up to my post so I think it’s worth explaining in a little more depth what I meant and again how it might differ from Steve’s situation.

My guess is, that in Steve’s church the English speakers cannot speak much, if any, Farsi. So when they listen to the service they understand the English & the Farsi washes over them like elevator music.

Likewise the Farsi speakers cannot speak much, if any, English (but it would be helpful to them if they could learn a bit more). So when they listen to the service the Farsi is crystal clear and the English comes & goes a bit but the two together is a helpful integration tool. It’s important for them to hear English because as Steve says it is, ‘helping people engage in English to serve them as they go out from the church and find the world around them is English-speaking too.’

That’s not how it was for us when we had only one service & considered having English & Swedish side by side.

There EVERYONE understood the English. For us 100% of the people understood one of the languages. But 50% (not exact percentages) of the people also understood the second language, Swedish. So they were hearing everything twice which made concentration harder & sermons less engaging. In the end it wasn’t a help to them and instead it became a hindrance. In fact it was the Swedish not the English speakers who complained & said, ‘let’s ditch Swedish for the time being’.

In other words it makes sense for Steve to translate into Farsi because many of his people are bad at English (& I assume would like to better). It doesn’t make sense for us because Swedes are so good at English. I cannot imagine Steve’s church binning English because they’re all so good at Farsi.

So by way of example, this coming Sunday, as it is half-term here and to give some of the team a breather the Swedish congregation will join with the International congregation & more or less everything will be in English. And they will be able to sing, pray, listen to the sermon & fully understand it all without anyone translating anything.

But. They speak English because we’re the weaker brother in this situation. It’s pragmatic & generous on their part. Yet to reach more hearts we need preaching in the language of the Swedish heart & oddly enough translation into English just got in the way.

Last week I was preaching in the Swedish service (in Swedish, although when I preach on a Sunday in the Swahili service I’ll be translated) and a couple talked to me about how they heard the name of the church, thought it was an English church & decided it couldn’t be for them but they came, heard the Bible taught in Swedish & changed their minds.

If we had a Swedish name, the Singaporean exchange student, the Indian IT workers & accountants, the South African engineers & the American embassy workers would all have assumed we weren’t for them. Such is the world we’re in.

Now there is a case that could be made for having Swedish & Swahili to sit alongside each other. That would be far more akin to the situation in Steve’s church so let me explain why we currently don’t do that, although one day we might.

Cultural gaps

Our Swedish & International churches have a similar flavour & style to them, the preaching is similar, the worship songs are similar and sometimes the same just in different languages. They could easily mix, and although I didn’t mention that, from time to time that is exactly what we do, more on that in another post.

However, for our African friends our services are a bit tame and an hour short. I was once asked why all our songs were funeral songs (they weren’t, they just felt that way to them). Now, we could mix (and sometimes do) a little bit of Congo, a little bit of Swedish, a little bit of everywhere else and when we do it’s lots of fun and we all enjoy it. Week by week though we felt we would end up pleasing no one and short-changing everyone.

Our friends from the Congo are undergoing one of the biggest adjustments of their lives. A few years ago they were living in refugee camps in equatorial Africa. The houses were terrible and the sun was hot. Now they’re in Sweden & the houses are great & they can’t remember when they last saw the sun. Nothing works the same, nothing is the same. But once a week they can come to church & they can dance, sing, pray & praise freely in a way that is water to thirsty souls. It is a huge blessing & joy to them. Not everything needs to be a Swedish lesson. It might not last forever, it’s not a strategy written in blood or stone, but for now it’s a gift.

What we do together

I fully agree with Steve that mixing together forces us to consider our traditions and ways. Today I had lunch with two of the Congolese leaders and while we ate ugali, rice, beans & sardines we talked (with translation) about choirs (why they have them & we don’t), about marriage practices including discussing polygamy & dowries, the role of tribes, what training leaders looks like & how to buy a car. Some of those topics took us back to the Bible & some didn’t.

Steve also said, ‘Separate services, on our understanding, are effectively separate churches’ and he’s not wrong. It’s something of a misnomer to suggest we’re one church, we’re much more like the Trinity. Hard to explain and yet three in one.

But although our current model is three separate language services, it might not always be that way. However while it is we are constantly trying to figure out different ways of showing our togetherness. So for example there is currently just one youth group that serves all 3 services & the primary language is Swedish because it is the shared language of the majority of youth.

We have joint services 3 to 4 times a year with all the mixing of languages, songs, prayers that Steve does every week. We have a single church day out for everyone. We will have, in the future, shared training days for our leaders. We swap preachers (need to do that a bit more) & we constantly pray for one another.

But it might be more accurate to say that we’re more of a gospel partnership in that sense than strictly speaking a single church, and that’s the way in which we currently seek to demonstrate that we are one new tribe in Christ.