Wading Thru the Waters of a Bi-cultural Church

uncaBrian: btw, we’re running into some difficult issues

Friend: for what?

uncaBrian: at hoc6

Friend: ohh… like?

uncaBrian: it’s really making me rethink things and realize my pride and all

uncaBrian: i suggested to the deacon board that we not do a joint worship service for easter cuz I feel like there’s just too big of a cultural divide and the way we worship vs. they way the chinese side worship…just too disparate…like the worship service makes us even more aware how disunited we are vs. actually uniting us

uncaBrian: but eventually, i got to thinking…this is one of the biggest facets of the postmodern church… multi-cultural, inter-generational

uncaBrian: and basically, one of the biggest mistakes we’ve made is that during the joint services the chinese tries to accomodate the english, and the english tries to accomodate the chinese

uncaBrian: the problem is the chinese sacrifices their own prefs and only somewhat meets the english’s prefs and vice versa…so we’re in the middle…where nobody is happy…so we compromise, instead of finding commonness

uncaBrian: so i got to thinking…postmodernism actually has a lot in common with “pre-modern”, which is where a lot of the chinese culture is

uncaBrian: postmodernism isn’t as big of a leap for chinese, because we’re already so group oriented, we’ve been dealing with the bi-cultural thing for a while, we love stories, etc.

uncaBrian: so, if it comes down to having joint service, i’m realizing that maybe we need to just admit that there’s “an elephant in the room”, namely, that we are totally different

uncaBrian: and instead of trying to mask those differences through a series of compromises, maybe we can celebrate those differences

uncaBrian: so, i was thinking that, from an inter-generational viewpoint, we can do some story-swapping…old ppl love stories…young ppl love stories

uncaBrian: in postmodernism, especially, young ppl love to hear stories from old ppl

uncaBrian: they don’t like lectures, but they love the stories…the history

uncaBrian: we can share/swap worship songs, but maybe share stories behind them also

uncaBrian: we can also arrange the chairs into more of a semi-circle to add a more family-style feeling to the worshipo

uncaBrian: i don’t know…basically, this is how i’m trying to wade through this present challenge, realizing that postmodernism doesn’t mean that we necessarily have to secede from the church, but that it presents a new way of looking at how to approach church unity