Over the years I reckon quite a few Oak Hill students must have written some top drawer essays on the Homogenous Unit Principle (HUP) for the Missions in the Modern World course. It would be great to see lots of these up on-line. Happy to host!
I guess it would also come up in a big way in the newish Race & Religion course?
I thought Dean Jensen spoke a lot of sense on the subject:
Some homogenaity is inevitable once you decide to have church at a particular time and place in a certain language and so on.
We must keep Eph 3:10 in mind: the church is intended to display the manifold (variagated, multi-coloured) wisdon of God.
Remember that there are different types of homogeneity: race, class, education, wealth, language etc. A congregation that is homogenous in one way may be very diverse in another.
A firm principle is that there should be no Christianized aparthied: any congregation should always be open to all.
Having said all that, just because some homogeneity may be inevitable, that doesn't mean that one should give up on the fight for a diverse represntative church.
I think there is much more of a case for homogenous units as a temporary evangelistic stratergy with converts eventually being potted-on into a more deliberately diverse proper Sunday Morning Church.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
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5 comments:
Marc,
One approach -I think it was Michael Griffiths was for a Church to have a series of fellowship groups that met together for specific things and were homogenous groups -Chinese, African, Students... but all part of one church with a regular "together time" -preferably a weekly Sunday gathering
I'm not sure I agree about the 'temporary evangelistic strategy.' Wasn't it Jesus who said something like 'by your love for each other shall all men know that you are my disciples'?
Part of the church's witness is its loving diversity and converts need to know that what they are being brought into is a diverse church.
Plus, in practice, I don't believe the 'potting on' ever really happens. People get comfortable in their homogeneous groups and stay there.
Yep, I can see that, Ros.
I guess in all this its worth distinguishing principle & pragmatism.
I guess the real church meeting should provide the witness of which you speak even if some guest events or even Christianity Explored courses are specifically targetted.
I agree with your point about the difficulty of potting on, but I think it could work after 8 weeks of Christinaity Explored (or even another 8 weeks of Discipleship Explored) in a cafe.
The homogenous unit principle stuff is often bound up with *church* planting, though, so your arguments would apply.
I intend to blog on this one at some point, when I am ready to weather the potential backlash.
It seems to me though that it is entirely justifiable as a short term evangelistic strategy. I think it inevitably flows once you 'allow for' targetted evangelism at all. And, provided the intention, plan, prayer etc. is for intentional heterogeneity in the longer term, I see no problem. In fact, I might even argue that our unintentional long term homogeneity (look around most conservative evangelical anglican churches and you'll see a lot of homogeneity) necessitates short-term intentional homogenous evangelism (even church planting) to reach those groups we are currently ignoring.
The key is the 'short term' in my mind. You might e.g. start a church plant with 20 people and target a particular group, with the medium to long term aim of growing more diverse. This would be explicit in the mission statement/values of the church from the word go and communicated as part of the 'vision' or something.
Long term intentional homogeneity is gospel-denial through disobedience. Long term unintentional homogeneity (like what we currently have in many of our churches) is gospel-denial through laziness. Short-term intentional homogeneity may well be good planning, and a tool to long term heterogeneity.
Pete,
I agree with much of that. Are you happy to have these short term units as "churches"?
If so, I think you want confession, singing, Bible reading, sermon, Lord's Supper etc. every Sunday morning.
I'm not sure the Lord's Day service of covenantal renewal is meant to be our main evangelism anyway but if you bought that it would under cut lots of the HUP principle discussion as much of it is about when to meet (in my experience).
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