We sometimes refer to ourselves as a church for all peoples. According to the Kansas City Star that wrote a front page story on us a few years back, we rank among the top 2-3% of multicultural churches in the United States.
Our students don’t think twice about someone’s ethnicity, but I’m old enough to remember a time when that was not the case. Sometimes things happen that make me smile and appreciate how God works.
Consider the following chain of events during the past 24 hours or so of life at KCBT. Our mission pastor went to meet with the pastor of a sister church ministering to Nepalese refugees here in Kansas City. Through this contact we now have a Bhutanese pastor as a student in our Bible institute that we call the Shepherds School of Ministry. To this meeting, our mission pastor Jay took with him TK, a member of our student mission council who is a Cantonese speaking Chinese young woman raised in America and who majored in Spanish in college. She is vitally interested in being a link between these two churches in reaching out to the Nepalese and helping them get established in their new home.
As a member of the student mission council, our Spanish-speaking Chinese student is also interested in our church-as-the-missionary project to befriend the B-speaking K people of the Middle East. With this in mind she was very interested when a Muslim friend of hers told her that a Jewish community center is working with a significant group of Iraqi refugees to help them assimilate into their new lives. Now, we are investigating how we might be able to help our Jewish friends mentor them to learn the ropes of living, shopping and working in Kansas City.
This type of thing happens with great frequency and sometimes we just take it for granted. It occurred to me that I really should jot some of these happenings down from time to time.
While this was going on, I was doing a “webinario” live from my office with a group of 15 pastors from Chile to Spain, sharing pastoral insights from the first chapter of Nehemiah. This evening our student mission council met in my office to continue planning for The Summit the first week of next March. Wow. God is at work.
From there I walked into the auditorium for my regular weekly commitment teaching a Bible study to folks from our Hispanic ministry representing at least a dozen different nationalities. Over the next few days the digital podcast of this study will be downloaded by Spanish-speaking believers from Mexico to Argentina to Australia to Japan to India.
Life is sweet. God is good.
Day in the Life of a Multicultural Church
We sometimes refer to ourselves as a church for all peoples. According to the Kansas City Star that wrote a front page story on us a few years back, we rank among the top 2-3% of multicultural churches in the United States.
Our students don’t think twice about someone’s ethnicity, but I’m old enough to remember a time when that was not the case. Sometimes things happen that make me smile and appreciate how God works.
Consider the following chain of events during the past 24 hours or so of life at KCBT. Our mission pastor went to meet with the pastor of a sister church ministering to Nepalese refugees here in Kansas City. Through this contact we now have a Bhutanese pastor as a student in our Bible institute that we call the Shepherds School of Ministry. To this meeting, our mission pastor Jay took with him TK, a member of our student mission council who is a Cantonese speaking Chinese young woman raised in America and who majored in Spanish in college. She is vitally interested in being a link between these two churches in reaching out to the Nepalese and helping them get established in their new home.
As a member of the student mission council, our Spanish-speaking Chinese student is also interested in our church-as-the-missionary project to befriend the B-speaking K people of the Middle East. With this in mind she was very interested when a Muslim friend of hers told her that a Jewish community center is working with a significant group of Iraqi refugees to help them assimilate into their new lives. Now, we are investigating how we might be able to help our Jewish friends mentor them to learn the ropes of living, shopping and working in Kansas City.
This type of thing happens with great frequency and sometimes we just take it for granted. It occurred to me that I really should jot some of these happenings down from time to time.
While this was going on, I was doing a “webinario” live from my office with a group of 15 pastors from Chile to Spain, sharing pastoral insights from the first chapter of Nehemiah. This evening our student mission council met in my office to continue planning for The Summit the first week of next March. Wow. God is at work.
From there I walked into the auditorium for my regular weekly commitment teaching a Bible study to folks from our Hispanic ministry representing at least a dozen different nationalities. Over the next few days the digital podcast of this study will be downloaded by Spanish-speaking believers from Mexico to Argentina to Australia to Japan to India.
Life is sweet. God is good.