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Letter From the President Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site. Especially through the Partnership for Mission Church we are engaged in shared work around the world and across a variety of denominations. We receive multiple blessings from this shared work. After our two most recent cluster starts in Portland, OR. with the Churches of Christ, and Philadelphia, PA with the Presbyterian Church—USA I have been reminded how the partnership with South Africa allows us new ways of exploring the issues of race and culture. We have from the beginning taken the questions of race and culture seriously. We use a cultural model of change rather than organizational systems alone because from the beginning PMC worked across race and cultural boundaries. We worked in the heart of Baltimore and the countryside of Maryland in the beginnings. We partnered with Inupiaq congregations on the Seward Peninsula of Alaska. We continued to see the differences and similarities between rural and urban congregations. Still we were captivated by the assumptions of North American patterns. With our work in southern Africa the interaction across race and culture boundaries has helped us break some of that North American captivity. One of the simplest ways these two settings differ is between native peoples being minorities as in North America and native peoples being majorities as in southern Africa. We can depend upon major differences in how the majority/minority pattern changes the crossing of race and class boundaries. Even though we function predominantly with denominations with debt to European immigrants in both cases, we see how those same people being in a majority or minority status changes the shared patterns of European Christendom-based churches. In southern Africa, even some of the least likely denominations to welcome cross cultural and race ministry seem much more apt to take the plunge across those boundaries than most denominations in North America. We find the power variance is patent. I use the expression “plunge” across those boundaries because our southern African partners have chosen that word to name a key characteristic of the second phase of PMC in their practice. In the process of experimenting and engaging in adaptation, they invite congregations to plunge across race and culture boundaries. While such an option is encouraged in the North American version, until we have learned how to do the plunging process from the southern Africans we had not felt secure to make it a central characteristic of the second phase of PMC. Over the past two years we have been integrating what we call the Missional Engagement Team process with the Plunge process from southern Africa. With the two new cluster starts we see the melding of these two processes. Personally I am excited by the fact that we are able to learn in this very concrete way from our partners in southern Africa. I am convinced that the clusters in Portland and Philadelphia will gain immensely from this integration of the Plunge and METs. In the end, I believe we will see congregations crossing those boundaries that seem to bedevil so many local churches and doing so without the general pattern of recrimination and race and cultural resentment that characterizes so many of these attempts in North America. May God bless this innovated phase two and continue to bless our growing world-wide partnerships. Peace, Pat Keifert |
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