What do you think about when someone mentions the word diversity? Necessary, essential, woke slogan, corporate jargon? Is it a means to an end or an end in itself? What shapes your thinking about diversity? Is it modern social justice movements, loose notions of liberty, equality, fraternity or maybe even the Bible?

I was recently involved, for the first time, in a discussion with a team within Newfrontiers that has been tasked with thinking through the issue of diversity. The group itself showed some of our strengths and weaknesses. The discussion was chaired by an Indian man, with contributors from Albania, Iraq, UK, USA & myself in Sweden. There were 6 men and 1 woman on the team although two other women were present on the call. In terms of race, 3 were white and the others were people of colour. Just one single person was a part of the forum. I think the majority under the age of 50 although as I didn’t ask for ages I could be wrong. So was it a diverse group talking about diversity? Well, yes & no. From a geographical point of view there were some pretty big gaps: no one from Latin America or Africa for starters. And no one present was black.

It also highlighted that no matter how diverse something may appear on the surface it may still never be diverse enough. For example can two Indian men (one in the UK & one in Mumbai) really represent India? India has over 2000 ethnic groups and 447 languages so how do you represent that? And is representation even the goal for us as Christians? But if it isn’t a goal, then how do you avoid the trap of the lack of representation being minimised?

A movement in development

It’s an interesting challenge for Newfrontiers to face. The history of our movement is rooted in the UK and at the outset it had no intentions to be what it is today. That grew, it developed and as much as people from the UK went out (like myself), much of the growth internationally was because people came looking for them at conferences and Bible weeks and so on. This has led to a movement which for many years found it’s centre of gravity in the UK but now is a global and decentralised movement with multiple centres of gravity. If you looked at the list of 18 apostolic leaders up on the website you’d notice that 8 of them are not UK based and the vast majority of churches that are related to a Newfrontiers sphere are not in the UK. Although no one seems to know exactly how many churches there might be, certainly less than 20% are in the UK. But still a large proportion of Newfrontiers apostolic teams are Anglo-Saxon, English speaking and white. The teams don’t quite reflect the churches at a global level and that seems to be true also at national or regional levels. In addition Newfrontiers embraces a complementarian theology so many of the apostolic teams lack women who are not wives on them. The pale, male & stale label is not entirely unfair or misplaced.

The firm ground & the compass point

Yet at the same time, the heart for the nations and the conviction that the church is ‘one new man in Christ’ has led to change. And there is a commitment to continuing that. I genuinely believe there is a willingness to see gifted men and women from every tribe and tongue bring their contributions to shaping, leading, growing us as a movement into the future. We are not what we once were nor yet what we shall one day be, amen.

At a theological and cultural level, the group began to talk through questions such as how do we ensure that our pursuit of unity-in-diversity is shaped by a scriptural agenda based on the gospel, rather than a secular one based on Western (or even American or Asian) culture wars? We were reminded that no one reads the scriptures without cultural lenses on and that we also need to be aware of whether our guides to Scripture (commentaries etc..) reflect just one culture or embrace multiple perspectives. Yet we certainly find a strong case throughout Scripture that the Kingdom of God and the people of God were always intended to be a diverse one (more on that in another post). It is these multi-coloured threads that run through Scripture that we need to hold to as we ask the practical questions of what do we do with these truths?

That means asking at an international level, how representative of our multi-ethnic global family is our apostolic fellowship and our apostolic teams? What challenges do we face? What is going well? What could we do better? What does this looks like at the local level? How do we cultivate churches and leadership teams that genuinely reflect the diversity of the congregations and/or communities we serve? How well are we doing at this, which nations or regions are leading the way, and what can we learn from one another?

Some early thoughts

A couple of observations from this initial conversation. Firstly, I’m glad it’s happening! Who knows what will be done with both the asking of the questions and the suggested answers but the fact that it is happening at all and is, so far at least, being encouraged is a real positive. I think it’s healthy when a movement has the courage to do some self-examination and continue to seek to follow through on its theological convictions which as with many things Newfrontiers is expressed from Ephesians (chapter 2 in this case).

Secondly, it’s clear that primarily when people think about diversity there is a strong tendency to think about ethnic diversity. But as I suggested earlier and as we were challenged in the conversation that is not the only kind of diversity that matters in society nor is seen in Scripture. There is sex (male & female); age (young & old); relational (married & single); wealth (rich & poor) or if you prefer class or caste (elites & the rest) and all these things plus no doubt other issues also need thinking through.

There’s much work to be done but there are people committed to doing it. So there’s hope.