Inclusion

The new UCC God is Still Speaking ad was released Monday, and will start airing on April 4th. I saw it Monday night at an area church meeting. It's pretty funny. (Watch it here.)

One of the key points in the commercial is making sure that everyone feels welcome, not rejected. But I was thinking about how hard this is to do, and how often churches look very homogenous. I think it boils down to one major factor: culture. How you speak about God, life, and other deep/important things is going to be determined very much by culture. Music, language, participation, interaction among congregants: all these things are guided--if not determined--by culture.

So, what's a well-meaning, inclusiveness-desiring church to do? There's a limit on how many cultures can be crammed into one church service, after all.

Maybe the hospitable way of doing things is not (initially, anyway) to do an overhaul of the church's culture, but to make that culture understandable to the new people who have to negotiate it. Explanations about the traditions of a church give them new meaning for everyone, and make space for newcomers to be integrated quickly.