An annotated⁽¹⁾ reprint of the Essay from Orion Monitor #2, 1998

By Dennis Hokama

Are Ethnic Churches Racist⁽²⁾?

Now is the time to come to terms with the raison d’etre of the Los Angeles Japanese SDA church. If the editorial in the March-April 1996 issue of the Orion Chronicles⁽³⁾ cannot be challenged, then the fact that we serve a Japanese language/ethnic sub-culture is irrelevant in God’s eyes.

Since we have invested so heavily in preserving that which God thinks irrelevant, then it would seem to follow that we are at best guilty of being bad stewards of God’s resources. We are in the same category as people who live a lavish, wasteful lifestyle. We should have simply joined a local SDA church and put the extra driving time and gas money to a better use than burning it on the freeway.

But perhaps we are also guilty of some form of subtle racism in showing such a preference for serving and meeting with people just like us rather than dispensing our service without regard to the race of the person. If God doesn’t care about the race of a person, then why should we? It then follows that ethnic churches are sinful of both accounts, should be abolished as soon as possible, and should feel ashamed of ourselves in the meantime.

Judging from some of the comments that have been made during the recent town hall meetings, some in this church share the opinion of the former O.C. editor. If our own members do not understand the justification for having a Japanese church, then how can we expect members of the Hacienda Heights church to have sympathy for it?

But is this analysis and the resulting conclusion valid? If not, then where did it go wrong? For lack of a better place, let us start at the beginning. Before we can hope to understand what the purpose of a Japanese church is, we must first establish what an ethnic church is, for a Japanese church is a particular example, or a subset of all ethnic churches.

Ethnicity

According to Webster, “ethnic” literally refers to “racial” groupings of people rather than cultural distinctions. Racial distinctions are usually associated with characteristic cultural distinctions, and political correctness dictates that we ignore the racial component and deal with the cultural component as if is the same as race. But the Monitor is not a politically correct paper, and if we submit to it, then we blind ourselves to one of the most important underlying dynamics of the ethnic church.

One of the most obvious of all social phenomena is the tendency of people to sort themselves according to their genetic or racial groupings. This happens at parties, at schools, at churches, on playgrounds, and work places; everywhere there are people. People of the same race will tend to congregate. And people of the same race will tend to sort themselves according to closeness of kin. The saying “blood is thicker than water” is an acknowledgment of this phenomenon.

This phenomenon is not restricted to humans; it is a characteristic of all living things. Dogs run with dogs, fishes swim with fishes of their own species, etc. And within species, animals generally choose the company of close relatives to that of non related animals of the same species, everything else being equal.

In a 1980 (Wu, et al) experiment, for example, monkeys (Macaca nemestrina) were given a choice of sitting next to two companions that they had never seen before. In each case, one of the companions was a half sibling related through the father. The other monkey was an unrelated control. There was a statistically significant tendency for the monkey to choose the company of its half sibling.

In a 1979 experiment, Waldman and Adler investigated whether tadpoles also preferred to associate with their siblings. Tadpoles from different egg clutches were colored differently and then were allowed to swim together in the same tank. At a certain point, a grid which separated the tank into 16 compartments was lowered to trap the tadpoles in one of those 16 compartments. There was a statistically significant tendency for siblings to be closer to each other than non-siblings.

This is not the place to discuss why this phenomenon occurs. But it is important that we recognize that it does occur, and that it is a phenomenon that transcends (subscends?) our rationalizations for why we behave that way. A tadpole, after all, does not rationalize, but does it anyway.⁽⁴⁾

The fact that a phenomenon is natural does not make it “right” or “wrong”. But man has a choice as to whether to acknowledge the phenomenon and use it constructively, suppress it, or deny and ignore it.⁽⁵⁾ The creation of ethnic churches represents a decision to acknowledge it and use it constructively.

Culture

It is the cultural component rather than the racial component that is politically correct to acknowledge as being the rationale for “ethnic churches.” Webster defines culture as:

a particular human groups mastery of the art of living. Various phases of culture are language, religion, customs, industries, all of which are the general social inheritance of the group . . . "

Culture is needed to simplify the infinite complexities and uncertainties of life for any given individual. It is an algorithm (a formula making short cuts possible)that enables us to build upon the achievements of four thousand years of human history rather than being condemned to reinvent the wheel every generation.

The achievements of culture are fantastic. It got us from the stone age to the computer age. But the laws of nature dictate that a price be exacted for every shortcut; the greater the shortcut, the greater the price. In return for giving us focus, every culture also comes with a corresponding set of blinders or filters that narrows our conception of reality, just as a microscope narrows our focus in proportion to its power of magnification.

That is the way it must be, because our minds can only hold as much information as it could five thousand years ago, and we still have only 70 years to gather it before we start to forget more than we learn. This is another way of saying that culture is as biasing as it is powerful. This "narrowing" of focus does not necessarily mean that we literally do not see something. It does mean we instinctively judge something as "bad" or "good" with the confidence that our judgement is endorsed by God and/or the laws of the universe.

The culture we live in, for example, treats democracy, equality, and monogamy as nonnegotiable. This creates a stable society wherein we can concentrate on doing our homework or going to work rather than spending our time inciting a theocratic revolution or gathering harems (O.K., in the case of women, campaigning to be included in someone's harem). But it also biases us against the Old Testament in which monarchy, theocracy, polygamy, and slavery are all condoned (accepted). Even Jesus and Paul in the New Testament never condemn slavery, but instead use the institution positively as an appropriate analogy describing our relationship to God.

The point is that one's culture has a lot to do with one's ability to accept or reject a particular religious belief or practice. With culture, we are unrepentant Chauvinist pigs; without it, we would be virtually subhuman savages. We cannot be human without being culture bound, because the very language we use to think and talk with, is part of our culture, and without our language and thinking skills, we are not human. Therefore every man must carry his culture around with him like a second skin, much like a hermit crab carries around a shell as part of its own body.

The Ethnic Church

So what is an ethnic church? It seems like such an obvious question, but I ask it because behind this glib phrase, usually lurks a benign but patronizing attitude. Political correctness forbids admitting it, but for many, ethnic churches seem analogous to the government's affirmative action program for minorities. You know, the "we have to put up with ethnic churches because those insecure minorities can't compete with regular folks" attitude.

In a literal sense, all churches are ethnic churches because there can be no such thing as a church that does not use the framework of a particular culture as its intellectual foundation. But to use it in that way would be a triviality meaning absolutely nothing, and we might as well expunge the phrase from our vocabulary.

The term “ethnic church” can only have meaning if we restrict its use to a relativistic one. We commonly use it to refer to a church that specializes in serving those of an ethnic/cultural background different from the dominant culture of that particular religion. But the dominant culture and language of a religion can change over time. A language that might be dominant in one generation, might theoretically become "ethnic" after the "revolution.” This means that the term "ethnic church" is dynamic rather than static; relative rather than absolute.

The First Ethnic Church

When seen in this light, the phenomenon of the ethnic church is not a peripheral issue of Christianity, but goes to the very heart and soul of what Christianity is all about. For the Christianity of today is NOT a descendant of the dominant Mother Church in Jerusalem headed by James the Just, and the Apostles of Jesus. Quite surprisingly, it must trace its spiritual-theological ancestry instead, to the ethnic church started by Paul, the Apostle to ethnic peoples, also known as Gentiles.

The raging issue in the first century, as recorded in the book of Acts and the Pauline epistles, concerns the legitimacy and nature of ethnic churches. The dominant cultural milieu within which Christianity was born, was Judaism. All of the original Apostles were thoroughly Jewish in their culture, and found it impossible to separate their Jewishness from their belief in Jesus as the Messiah.

An analysis of the book of Acts reveals that the Mother church in Jerusalem had merely tacked a belief in Jesus onto Judaism. As Acts 21 shows, they continued to worship in the temple as before, and expected good "Christians" to continue making all the traditional Jewish animal sacrifices.

It was Paul, the Outsider Apostle (because unlike the others, he had never known the historical Jesus), who first realized the serious consequences of not having ethnic churches to eliminate cultural barriers to salvation. He made the isolation of gospel from culture his life mission. That is the inner logic of ethnic churches:

When I am with the Jews, I seem as one of them so that they will listen to the Gospel and can win them to Christ. When I am with the Gentiles, who follow Jewish customs and ceremonies, I don't argue even though I don't agree because I want to help them. When with the heathen I agree with them as much as I can, except of course that I must do what is right as a Christian. And so by agreeing, I can win their confidence and help them too.

When I am with those whose consciences bother them easily, I don't act as though I know it all and don't say they are foolish; the result is that they are willing to let me help them. Yes, whatever a person is like, I try to find common ground with him so that he will let me tell him about Jesus and let Christ save him. I do this to get the gospel to them and also for the blessing I myself receive when I see them come to Christ. (I Cor. 9:20,21).

But not everybody can be comfortable as a cultural chameleon. The Apostles at headquarters and the mainstream conservatives were troubled with Paul's relativistic attitude toward that which many saw as absolute. The first General Conference, the so-called Jerusalem Council recorded in Acts 15, was convened specifically to address the problem of ethnic churches. Were they legitimate in God's eyes? If so, where should one draw the line between being Jewish and just being Christian without being Jewish?

The Council accepted the legitimacy of ethnic conversions in God's eyes because of testimony that the ethnic converts had experienced the same outpouring of the Holy Spirit that Jews had experienced, despite the fact that they were not keeping Jewish ceremonies. What did this imply in terms of God's will? Did the Gentiles now have to start keeping Jewish ceremonies, or did it mean that Jewish Christians could stop troubling themselves with Jewish ceremonies?

They evaded that theological issue by settling upon an intellectually embarrassing double standard for Jewish and Gentile Christians that ultimately satisfied no one (certainly not Adventists!). The Jewish Christians were to go on keeping the law of Moses as before, but the ethnic converts were exempted from all Jewish requirements except for food offered to idols, meat of strangled animals, and fornication. And so a great gulf was fixed between the Mother church in Jerusalem, and the ethnic churches.

But there was no question at the time as to which of the two kinds of believers had priority in God’s eyes. Paul, writing toward the end of his career, proclaimed:

For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek (Ro. 1:16).

The Greeks were the ethnic people of Paul's day from the Jewish perspective. Today when preachers quote this text in their sermons, they have a tendency to mumble the last two phrases of it because it betrays our humble spiritual ancestry: The mighty modern Christian church sprang from just an "also"; Ishmael rather than Isaac.

The dominance of the Jerusalem church and Jewish culture was forever eclipsed after the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Paul's orphaned and beleaguered ethnic churches grew up to become the dominant model for modern Christianity, rather than the church of the Apostles in Jerusalem. The last had become first and the first had become last.

The disappearance of the Jerusalem church has allowed the Gentile church to represent their practice as universal and monolithic, but the record of Acts 15 and 21 shows that this is simply another case of the winners writing history. So even as Conference officials speak, sometimes patronizingly, about the "problem of the ethnic church,” the world church, and the Christian world itself, stands on the shoulders of Christianity's first ethnic churches.

The process that brought about that great transformation has not stopped. Paul did not and could not eradicate cultural barriers to salvation for all peoples for all time, because cultures are always evolving, and true believers of every time and place must relate to the gospel from their own cultural perspective in order to make it their own.⁽⁶⁾

Missionaries find it hard if not impossible to separate the essentials of salvation from their own unique environment or culture. This inevitably results in the direct or indirect preaching and teaching of their own culture along with the gospel. This mixing of culture with gospel, results in the creation of additional barriers to salvation for those of a different culture than the missionary, at the same time that it lowers the barriers to salvation for others of the same (or similar) culture.

So what is the solution? Stripping salvation of all its cultural adornments is not a solution. For religion would then become a lifeless, artificial, inhuman thing. We must, after all, speak in SOME language, follow SOME customs, and celebrate or commiserate each other's joys or sorrows in SOME ritual!

If God is neutral with respect to culture, then salvation must not only be possible within one's own culture, but preferable. It is preferable, because the God of Culture is also the God of economy. Why throw away something only to be forced to reacquire the equivalent thing at a great cost of time and effort? This inefficiency is magnified by many fold because such a convert also loses credibility within his own culture when trying to evangelize the people of his/her former culture.

A few people may feel alienated enough from their own culture that they may be happy to abandon theirs and start over all again. Too often, perhaps, such alienated beings are praised and idealized as model converts. But being in such an alienated state of self loathing can hardly be considered normative, let alone praiseworthy, even for a heathen.

The historical solution has been to encourage each people to celebrate their salvation in their own culturally unique ways by making sure that there is a church serving as many unique cultures as is practically possible within each geographic area. Many who strongly believe in ethnic churches consider it significant that the first recorded miracle after Jesus' departure was the miracle of "tongues" at Pentecost (Acts 2). The miracle of tongues enabled the disciples to preach the gospel in the language of "every nation under heaven.” The presence of ethnic churches representing "every nation under heaven" can be seen as our way of re-enacting the miracle of Pentecost today in the same way that the SDA church's commitment to the medical ministry is a re-enactment of Jesus' healing ministry.

Those who would argue against ethnic churches overlook the obvious fact that while God may be culture free, people are not, cannot, and I would argue, should not. Ethnic churches must exist to offset (not neutralize) human biases; not to placate God's lust for kim chee, chow mein, sushi, refried beans, or collard greens. If God is unprejudiced and desires salvation for all, then He cannot be satisfied as long as there are environmental/ cultural barriers to salvation for ANY group. Ethnic churches are justified because God is not willing that any should perish, merely because they refract life through the prism of any particular culture.

The Ethnic Church and the Incarnation

The phenomenon of the ethnic church can be seen as an extension of God's never ending outreach toward man that is epitomized in the Incarnation itself. God revealed himself as human, rather than a Martian, because we are humans, rather than Martians or Saturnians. But even the ethnic church (in the absolute sense) cannot break down all barriers. In the final analysis, it is the function of each member within each church to break down that final barrier to salvation by customizing it to meet the needs of each individual we befriend.

As SDA’s of Japanese culture or descent in the greater Los Angeles area, it is our unique mission to destroy cultural barriers against the gospel for people identifying with the Japanese culture. It is a mission for which the Los Angeles Central Japanese Church is uniquely qualified. As the only full service Japanese SDA church in the greater Los Angeles area, we need not apologize to anybody for feeling a burden to maintain it.

Endnotes

1. I decided that for historical purposes I should just reprint the essay as it was (except for a few minor corrections), and a few extra subtitles, but add footnotes rather than make editorial changes or additions.