The Multicultural Leader

"institutional completeness"

Had a chance to listen to Ambrose University College sociology prof Dr Joel Thiessen present a paper ("Christianity in Multicultural Canada") to the Evangelical Missiological Society annual meeting in Edmonton, Feb 24, 2012.

He gave me a name for a phenomenon that we notice quite often with immigrant, "ethnic" churches -- "institutional completeness." Here is Thiessen's explanation:

Christian immigrants develop what sociologists call “institutional completeness” whereby most, if not all of their psychological, social, and spiritual needs are fulfilled through their local congregation and/or ethnic group (Bramadat and Seljak 2008; Breton 1964: 194; Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000). For instance, their social networks are concentrated with those they know in their church and practical needs such as language skills, finding a job, or prayer are met through fellow congregants. In other words, their religious community is their cultural and social community.[1] In contrast to many other Canadian Christians, immigrants, especially visible minorities, rely on institutional completeness to provide them with stability in life via a strong Christian ethnic subculture in the face of significant personal transition and upheaval and possible prejudice and discrimination upon immigrating to Canada.

As we discover, Thiessen affirms there are both positives and negatives with 'institutional completeness.'

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[1] This is also true of Christians in general, particularly conservative Christians who seek to remain “pure” apart from the “corrupt” and secular world around. However, this is uniquely true for most Christian immigrants in Canada today.

Transitioning to a multicultural congregation

Thanks to Missio Dei, the online journal of Tyndale Seminary in Toronto for publishing an article I wrote on the process of transitioning to a multicultural congregation.

In the 1980s a new church was ini­ti­ated in the north-​​west Greater Toronto Area. It was devel­oped as an essen­tially white, Anglo-​​European back­ground con­gre­ga­tion. Early on, how­ever, peo­ple from other cul­tural back­grounds began to attend largely because of a per­ceived com­mon denom­i­na­tional her­itage. In the mid-​​90s the con­gre­ga­tion went through a lead­er­ship hem­or­rhage that left the group with a largely Caribbean-​​background mem­ber­ship. For almost a decade they have been led by an Anglo-​​European back­ground pas­tor with a degree of inter­cul­tural sen­si­tiv­ity. Now their con­gre­ga­tion is at a cross­roads and the pas­tor is won­der­ing how to engage his lead­er­ship team in a dia­logue about becom­ing an inten­tion­ally mul­ti­cul­tural com­mu­nity. One leader spelled it out: “we are multi-​​ethnic in com­po­si­tion, but it’s really only one cul­ture group that influ­ences the decision-​​making.”

look here for the rest of the article

Beyond the Welcome -2

Had a chance to attend the Toronto version of the World Vision event,  mentioned in a previous post. Disappointment would have to be the word... I was expecting to go into the actual research data and findings. I kind of think that's what most people in the room were there for too -- some frustration was expressed. [I had brought a group of about 12 leaders from our national movement, specifically hoping to get into the content of the research]

Instead we had a nice introduction to the fact that churches need to engage more with new immigrants... I guess I was thinking that most of the people who would show up for an event like this would, in fact, be people who are already engaged and want more depth of content and reflection to help us with our ongoing work.

I always seem to get suckered into these kinds of things, offered/advertized as an all-encompassing national strategy, by some national org... then I'm always reminded of my basic modus operandi -- small is better, work with those want to be worked with, 'comprehensive' means nobody really deals with on-the-ground stuff; don't be a joiner; do your own thing, in your own place, in your own sphere of influence... see where it leads.

Thankfully the full research document, findings and suggestions (51 pages) are included on the CD takeaway from the event.  Here is the table of contents from the research report.

1. Introduction

1.1 Study Partners
1.2 Study Purpose and Main Research Questions
1.3 Research Approach
1.4 Study Scope and Sites
1.5 Research Methods and Analysis
1.6 How the Report is Organized
2. Why This Research Study
3. How Recent Immigrants Experience Church
3.1 Church Experience Depends on the Context
3.2 Church Experience and a Limited Sense of Belonging
4. How Churches are Responding to Recent Immigrants
4.1 A Positive Trend: A Growing Response
4.2 A Trend Lacking Depth: Limitations in the Response
4.3 What is Hindering the Response of Canadian Churches?
5. Suggestions for Improving How churches Respond
5.1 Promote a Vision for Change
5.2 Create Structures That Support Change
5.3 Develop Processes that Encourage Change
Appendices ....

Beyond the Welcome

Looking forward to the final report and toolkit from the research conducted by Centre for Community Based Research and Tyndale Intercultural Centre (TIM) and coordinated/funded by World Vision.

Beyond the Welcome: How Canadian Churches are Responding to Canada’s Immigrant Reality

forums across Canada this spring to feedback the research can be found here (scroll down to 2nd event). Bill van Geest is the presenter.

Can Multicultural Social Theory Help Us?

last fall I presented a paper at the Evangelical Missiological Society annual meeting in Charlotte, NC. -- Can Multicultural Social Theory Help Us in Leading Multicultural Faith Communities? The paper is going to published by EMS (I believe that is the plan), but here is an mp3

Cg1011 Dan Sheffield-Can Multicultural Social Theory Help Us Lead

of the presentation (minus the images on my ppt.)

leadership: why gender & culture matter

In April 2010,  American Psychologist published a research article by Ayman & Korabik (she's at U of Guelph!). The authors do some in-depth work on the interplay that gender and culture have on diverse leadership models. Here's a quote...

In a diverse workforce, people from different cultural or social groups must constantly interact with each other. In such settings, people’s own cultural identities and their assumptions about and perceptions of others from different social groups (e.g., White and African American, Latino and Asian) relate to ingroup–outgroup dynamics, and these assumptions and perceptions may have an impact on the leadership experience. In these types of situations, the composition of dyads or work groups based on their gender or culture matters because it can affect a leader’s ability to be successful. For example, in an experiment in which a Japanese leader behaved either as an American leader would or as a Japanese leader would, his American followers did not consider him to be as trustworthy when he was behaving like an American leader compared with when he behaved like a Japanese leader.

Moreover, the increasing diversity in today’s workforce means that to be effective, leaders need to develop a multicultural perspective and an understanding of the points of view of those who differ from themselves. Doing so involves two things: (a) eliminating ethnocentrism (i.e., the belief that one’s cultural values are the same as everyone else’s, regardless of the evidence) and (b) increasing isomorphic attributions or the extent that people from culturally diverse social groups are able to reach a similar assessment of a given situation or action. The elimination of ethnocentrism, by reducing the imposition of one’s frame of reference on others, can result in less hostile judgments toward those in outgroups. In addition, by reducing the ethnocentrism present in leadership research, leadership models can become more inclusive of other cultures and representative of all social groups.

creating identity in racially diverse congregations

Our American friends always make this stuff about 'race,' but even so, this journal article by a couple of sociology profs has some good insights...

Dougherty, K. D., & Huyser, K. R. (2008). “Racially Diverse Congregations: Organizational Identity and the Accommodation of Differences.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 47(1), 23–43.

The authors looked at racial reconciliation programs, ethnically diverse staff, experiential charismatic worship and small groups, among other things.

My friends over at unity in christ have a brief condensation of the article on their site.

course at Tyndale summer school

Over the past several months I have been working with Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, Ontario [one of the world's great multicultural labs] to design a course focused on developing leadership capacity for facilitating multicultural communities.

Their website has just posted info about the course for next summer: Becoming an Interculturally Competent Leader [July 18-22, 2011].

Here is the course description:

This course is designed for students who currently function, or who anticipate functioning, in inter-cultural environments. The course will enable participants to develop a biblical theology of diversity and to understand and apply the theory and dynamics of intercultural relations. The course will also examine leadership practices suited for facilitating intercultural dialogue and empowering diverse congregations – as a missional response to the demographics of our changing neighbourhoods and workplaces. Through lectures, discussions, exercises and assignments, participants will develop leadership skills for engaging with cultural and religious differences in both community and congregation.

 

difference & Christian mission

I gave a presentation at the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) Conference in Minneapolis October 30, 2010... here are some of summary points from my ppt.

“conceiving the same on the basis of the different” makes identity secondary to and derivative from difference. [Deleuze, 1968]

–I am different from you, and that is my identity

“The freeing of difference requires thought without contradiction, without dialectics, without negation; thought that accepts divergence;” [Foucault, 1977]

–Will you allow me to be different, period?

“a theology of difference would stem from the diversity intrinsic in God’s creativity and would analyze the ways in which humanity has distorted God’s abundance of difference… of which the urge to suppress difference is one expression.” [Titus Presler, IBMR, 2010]

The encounter with Other challenges us to see the unexplainable beyond ourselves, and calls into question everything we have previously understood or constructed. [Levinas]

• If mission is intrinsic to Christian identity – that is, to be a Jesus-follower is to follow Jesus into the encounter with difference – then ‘engaging the other’ who is different is, in fact, intrinsic to Christian faithfulness.

• Christian mission, then, is not a marketing campaign to persuade people of other faiths, or non-faiths, to accept my version of reality [we are called to be a ‘witness,’ to state our experience with Jesus], but a community of practice which has come to believe a particular set of convictions about reality and would like the freedom to offer those convictions for consideration by persons who hold other sets of convictions, while at the same time allowing them to be different, period.
• And it is in this engagement with difference that I am adjusted and shaped toward the image of God, because I come to recognize the different other as also shaped in the image of God, period.

We need to be released from our “present dependence upon one set of cultural forms so that we can provide the place wherein we are able to do theology in the only way that it can be done properly – by learning with increasing capacity to confess the one Lord Jesus Christ as alone having absolute authority and therefore recognize the relativity of all the cultural forms within which we try to say who he is. [Newbigin, 1995]