When I was growing up it was popular to think of the world as like a melting pot, with all the various people mixing cultures making up a new blended whole. Then when I became a missionary, I learned the truth. People are not melting into anything much at all. No doubt the world is stirring up a mixture of influences in the public square, but despite all the swirling, the melting is not really happening.
Most of my ministry has been in cross-cultural communication. I remember when I was a minister to international students, each year we would host a banquet welcoming all the new students who arrived at the school and gather the ones who had been around the university for a while. People from all over the planet would come to our church fellowship hall for a great feast.
A Slice of Heaven on Earth?
Without fail, no matter who the key note speaker was, each year they would make a comment about how heaven will be a like our international gathering. All the nations one day will gather at the great feast of the bride of Christ (Revelation 19) much like the people gathered from every tribe and tongue coming together in unity at our banquet. I most definitely believe that is what heaven will be like! “Every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord” (Romans 14:11). But as an international ministry worker, I knew our banquet was not all that it appeared to be to the casual observer.
Because I worked with international students everyday, I knew that the seemingly unified gathering of nations was really a living demonstration in people group segmentation. At one table what seemed to the untrained eye like a group of happy Asians eating in blissful unity, was actually three groups of happy Asians eating separately, together.
What I noticed was that all the Malaysian Chinese were sitting together in the middle of the table with the Singaporeans at one end and a pair of Taiwanese rounding out the other end. Everyone was speaking Mandarin.
Another table had a group of Cantonese speakers talking much louder and much more animatedly.
The mainland Chinese all sat together in a group of tables in the corner. You could always tell the newly arrived mainland Chinese by the way they dressed out of the current style.
The students from India were sitting together (by cast?) in their groupings all eating vegetarian. Way across the room sat a cheerful group from Pakistan eating chicken or beef–no pork. Neither table acknowledged the other the whole evening.
Meanwhile a table of Swedes and Norwegians were carrying on conversation with other Europeans they met at the dinner–the students from England joining in, even though they don’t consider themselves to be Europeans. It’s not like they were going to sit with the boorish Americans!
The sponsors from our church who were not working in the kitchen, often found themselves mingled in the group, but mostly sitting next to the oldest person at the table.
The members who provided the meal usually dropped off their dishes, and left. Only a few marginal church members ever stayed and got involved with the dinner, despite the constant encouragement from the international student workers for them to join in the fun. The pastor was the only other staff member who came besides me.
So what the banquet really symbolized was not unity as much as momentarily suspended diversity.
The Homogenous Unit Principle
The truth missionaries know is that when you find a group of people together, there is usually some unifying factor they have in common. They observe that people often group with others who have some kind of social, economic or political commonality with them. Other factors that bring people together include: ethnicity, age, gender, lifestyle, geography, religion, kinship, crisis—the list goes on!
People do borrow from each other a lot of influences about culture and ideas. But, in the end my grandmother had it right, “Birds of a feather flock together”. As a missionary, one of my most important lessons was learning to understand the ways people group themselves. As a church marketing coach, the better you understand how to apply segmentation, the more potential you have to help churches reach people.
This tendency for people to migrate to groups of people similar to them is called the “homogenous unit principle”. Church growth leaders in the United States have been criticized for years by the anti-church growth crowd for applying this principle in the United States.
Now that church leaders are beginning to realize they need to adopt the missionary mindset (“Missional” being the buzz word du jour with pastors), the concept is becoming more appreciated.
In a nutshell, the homogenous unit principle is that wherever you find a group of people, you will find they have something in common that unifies them. This is not about race or politics or economics alone. For example a group may be racially diverse,—like international students from all over the world gathered together at a banquet because they are all students.
You can have all kinds of people from every walk of life at your church, but scratch the surface and you will find they mostly have the same politics, earn about the same income, or have some other social factor that brings them together. Before you say they will all have Christ in common, go back and look at how they are really gathered. Isn’t the fact that they also have another common factor, theological idealism notwithstanding?
Sometimes people want to militate against the idea behind the principle. After all, Christ has called us all to be one (John 17:20). We are to be one in Christ. Shouldn’t economic, societal and political differences be mute points within the church? Yes! But we are talking about reaching lost people. They are not in the church, yet. We need to understand how to reach people like a missionary would.
Imagine a missionary is trying to reach a group of people based on their race. As he researches the group, he discovers they are really two groups of people. The group is divided into two tribes of people who have been at odds with each other for centuries. Even though the missionary could think of the dispute between the tribes as an ungodly sinful thing, he knows if he tries to target both groups using the same strategy, he will not be effective. The best course of action would be to bring the two tribes to Christ separately and let the love of Christ and the Holy Spirit work on transforming the dysfunction between cultures.
The fact is the unchurched people you want to reach won’t come together in unity (like they will in the Feast of the Bride of Christ) before they become believers. You need to take this into consideration as you plan ministry outreach. In the New Testament Paul and Peter had separate outreach strategies, Paul focused on the gentiles and Peter targeted his work among the Jews. Even within these strategies, I am sure Paul had to segment the gentile people into various groups and Peter had his segments of Jews (I.e. the Pharisees, Sadducees and Zealots were all separate groups).
Is Sunday Morning Really the Most Segregated Time of the Week?
I have heard sermons and read articles from people wringing their hands about how the church is too segregated and we should work to break down barriers of race, economics, politics and culture. I totally admire the idea. In fact I have spent the majority of my ministry ministering with people of races and backgrounds other than my own. I prefer cross-cultural ministry to any other personally. God has allowed me to play a role in leading people to Christ from every continent, race and religious background. But I still see value in the homogenous unit principle.
While working toward unity of faith in Christ, ask yourself why is Sunday the most segregated hour of the week? The reality is Sunday is only time in the week that you see how segmented the world really is. We may all work together in our society, but we don’t all have the same friends or live the same way. We may all participate in the same economy of our country, but we all don’t make the same amount of money or choose the same products. We may all vote, but we certainly don’t agree on politics! Sunday morning really is the only time people group together with their real “tribes” to carry out our most important rituals and practices of faith. We happen to see the segments more clearly on Sunday.
I would never want to legislate the separation of any groups. And I would not be a part of any church where everyone was not welcome. But I know that when given the choice, people will cluster in homogenous groups. It is a fact of life.
The ministry marketing mindset I want to convey is really better described as the “Missionary Mindset Meets Media”. We need to think more like missionaries and be more realistic about how we plan outreach.
One of the reasons the United States is the only place on earth the church is not growing statistically is due to the fact that we cannot come to terms and accept even the most obvious missionary principles.
Don’t let yourself be sidetracked by national authors who write one theological treatise after another against church growth and people group segmentation. I promise you, if they were plopped down in the middle of a people group overseas and took seriously the task of starting a new church or ministry among them—they would have to give up their ivory tower theology very quickly!
Applying the Homogenous Unit Principle in Ministry
Understanding how people group themselves is an important part of ministry outreach. If you understand how people group themselves you can reach people better.
One missionary understood through his investigation that taxi cab drivers in an Asian country were all from the same clan, and mostly only related among themselves. They lived, ate, drank, married and buried among themselves. Because they were such a tight-knit group, a church planting movement was able start among the taxi cab drivers. When one family was reached the others became open and the movement spread like dominoes falling.
In Spain the same thing happened among the Gypsy population. They are now about 50% evangelized because that closely related group has been reached with evangelistic outreach that is another demonstration of the homogenous unit principle.
I wish the world would all get together in one harmonious group. Hey, I’d even offer to buy them all a Coke. But the fact is they don’t blend so well. You need to understand how to segment the people to whom you reach out if you are going to be effective!
Everything I needed to Know about Segmentation I Learned from IHOP
In the next few posts I will talk about demographics. I mentioned I learned the world is not like a melting pot at all. As a missionary I was trained to understand the world is more like a waffle. Imagine the squares of the waffle as homogenous people group segments. Each little square of the waffle needs to be understood and reached with the gospel. Now imagine the syrup is like the gospel. (Can you tell I haven’t had breakfast yet?) Some squares of the waffle have syrup others do not. The logical next step would be to find a way to get the syrup into all the squares of the world’s waffle.
When you understand the homogenous unit principle, you have taken an important first step in getting inside the minds of the unchurched people in your community. You are laying a foundation for outreach that will connect more people than ever before with the gospel.
In your community, there are all kinds of people group segments. Some are highly reached, others are only slightly reached. What can you do to reach them better? Or perhaps your calling is to get the gospel to the segments that have no syrup at all.
That was Paul’s calling,
“It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation.” (Romans 15:20)
The only way Paul could accomplish his goal would be to identify which segments had no witness and go after them with relevant outreach. Let’s spend sometime looking at how to use demographics in ministry communication so you can reach people this way too…
Comments are closed.