Anonymous Asks (331)

“Are mono-ethnic churches biblical?”

I have never been to a truly mono-ethnic church. I have no evidence they exist. To remain truly mono-ethnic for more than a few weeks, a church would have to find a way to enforce ethnicity-based membership. Which leads to the obvious question: What makes a person, for example, Chinese? Is 100% racial “purity” required? Or would it be permissible for him to have one Tibetan grandparent, or if not a grandparent, perhaps a great-grandparent?

How would you prove such a thing, and why should you have to?

The common doctrines of Bible-believing churches generally preclude such silliness. In theory at least, most local churches agree with Paul’s teaching in Galatians 3:28 that we are “all one” in Christ Jesus. We may not all apply the teaching perfectly at every possible opportunity, but few Christians would dare to vocally enthuse about the suggestion of making fellowship contingent on adequate genetic evidence. In the West at least, we are all too scared of being called racists. That’s social death.

Almost Mono-Ethnic

That said, there are plenty of almost-mono-ethnic churches, and under the right circumstances, there’s nothing anti-biblical about that.

The early church in Jerusalem in the first few chapters of Acts would probably count as mono-ethnic: it was all Jews, though many saved through the teaching of the apostles actually lived in other nations but came to Christ while visiting Jerusalem to celebrate Pentecost. There were probably one or two Gentile proselytes (converts to Judaism) among the early believers, and a definite distinction was made between the Jews of Hebrew and Hellenic background, but there’s no denying the early church was almost entirely mono-ethnic. The fact that the admission of the Gentiles even had to be discussed (in Acts 11 and onward) effectively demonstrates that. Jewish Christians were amazed to find that “to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life”, though for the most part not horrified about it. The church in Jerusalem glorified God.

Effectively Mono-Ethnic

Local churches in homogenous cultures today are also effectively mono-ethnic. For example, 98.5% of the population of Japan is ethnically Japanese. Only a tiny minority of Chinese and Korean immigrant laborers in Japan are not. Thus, any Japanese local church would tend toward mono-ethnicity, not because the church actively seeks to be racially homogenous, but because of the secular Japanese government’s immigration policies.

Notwithstanding the (mostly woke) Western push for minority representation at every level of everything, natural demographics are not sinful even when they tend toward mono-ethnicity. It only becomes sinful when members of local churches engage in open, covert or unconscious discrimination against Christians of other ethnic backgrounds. Racial malice and insensitivity to others are moral issues, but they are not issues that arise often in monocultures.

Linguistically Mono-Ethnic

What then explains the existence of so many almost-mono-ethnic churches in ethnically-diverse North America? Frequently, the issue is language, and the culprit is the government practice of admitting large numbers of foreign immigrants without assimilating them, at least to the extent of requiring they learn English. When you see a sign on a local church building that says “Chinese Baptist” or “Filipino Pentecostal”, most of the time the members of that church have no intention to deliberately exclude Christians or visitors of other ethnicities. Often they are most welcoming and would be delighted if you decided to make their group your local church home. They are just pointing out that most or all of the services they provide are not in English, so that would have to suit you.

Wherever a culture or subculture within the state is monolingual, the result will tend to be the proliferation of mono-ethnic churches. Language barriers create effective mono-ethnicity, but this too is not a sinful practice unless it is deliberate and discriminatory. What’s important in a local church is that its members welcome any fellow believer who wants to meet with them, not the specific demographics of the congregation. Thankfully, most large Canadian and American cities offer a plethora of church options and the availability of services in many different languages.

For more on the question of how Christians of different backgrounds ought to relate to one another biblically, see this post on the “holy kiss”.