Diaspora Ministry Design and The Innovator’s Dilemma

Photo by Daniel McCullough on Unsplash

Last week a denominational leader asked me about how they might structure diaspora ministry. Missionaries who have returned home have the skills and experience to plant churches within these immigrant communities. Take, for example, a career missionary family who finds themselves in the US after serving in Afghanistan.  They want to continue to work with Afghans, and there are large diaspora communities in the US where they can work. Should the missionary report to the missions agency of the denomination, or should they be a part of the denomination’s domestic structure? In counseling this leader, my suggestion was that they should start with their philosophy of ministry.

Churches tend to have a “pull” model, in which they seek to pull diaspora ministry into their church. I mean that literally. They want the English-as-a-Second-Language course taught in their church building. They invite immigrants to join them. They host activities designed to expose their congregations to immigrant communities to see them engage in the life of the church. It is a good approach that many churches are using to great effect. Immigration-focused ministries like World Relief excel in helping churches do this kind of ministry. It also aligns with much of the church growth philosophy prevalent in many churches. I have heard it from the pulpit in the last few weeks: the way to grow in Christ is to go to church. The church is where you will be discipled. It fits a pastoral worldview. They believe this approach has the greatest potential in reaching the community.

Missionaries tend to work on a different paradigm. Particularly those moving “back home” from distant cultures focus more on contextualizing ministry to the culture being reached. We could call this a “push” model. Rather than inviting diaspora communities to join majority culture congregations, they utilize the incarnational model. They move into the community with the goal of starting an indigenous congregation. They are not building on an existing ministry so there is nothing to invite people to join, at least not in the beginning. They learn the language (if they do not speak it already), eat the food of the diaspora community, seek to develop leaders from within that community, and avoid inviting people to join majority culture congregations. This is the mentality of the missionary. They want to plant an “Afghan Church” as they believe it is the best way to reach the larger community of Afghans. A motivation for this is that they want to pass on leadership to Afghans who will then reproduce Afghan churches.

The multicultural church movement is seeking to create a “third way” that is neither reflective of the majority culture nor a particular culture. This is a reaction against homogenous churches, either homogenous by being majority culture churches, or homogenous by being from the culture of a particular diaspora community. Their strength is diversity. Their weakness is their foreign nature. Advocates of multicultural churches often say that this “foreign culture” is Kingdom culture. A visit to one will reveal a different feel than a homogenous church offers. In other words, multicultural churches are their “own thing.” I would imagine their numbers will grow as our culture becomes more diverse.

The push and pull models exist because of the nature of the teams involved. Church leadership teams cannot help but think about growing the footprint of the church. That is why the team was built. Missionary teams are going to focus on planting indigenous churches for the same reason. It will be hard for either the “pushers” or “pullers” to break out of this mentality. This should remind the reader of the innovator’s dilemma. Creating new teams may be necessary to overcome this reality.

So, if you are designing diaspora outreach for a denomination, keep in mind the inherent difficulty of getting people to rethink their paradigm. Choose the outcome you desire first. If you are hoping to serve the needs felt by church leaders to do outreach into diaspora communities, you should consider a pull strategy. If you are hoping to plant new churches cut from the cloth of different cultures, the push strategy may be more effective. If you foresee a day when multicultural churches are your norm, you can design the approach around this concept. In any case, you should avoid putting new wine into old wineskins but create something specific to the outcome desired.