EDTF (Ethnic Diversity Task Force) News from the National Conference

This year, at the Vineyard 2009 National Conference, we on the Ethnic Diversity Task Force used it as a place to introduce ourselves the larger Vineyard movement -- and we had a great time doing it! Every conversation I had felt like I was making friends with a kindred spirit on this journey toward a multi-ethnic community of believers.

Our task force hosted a luncheon during the conference where we invited minority pastors/leaders and their families to come together, eat and build relationship with one another. We had ordered 50 lunches to make sure we had enough, and ended up with over 60 packed into the room! It was a fun experience to see all the diverse faces and hear non-English speakers conversing in the same room.

There was also a bilingual worship event (Spanish and English) put together by some task force members along with other Spanish speaking Vineyard leaders. It was an additional evening event to the conference schedule at a local Vineyard church and was attended by over 60 people.

We also presented two workshops, one on the "Beginner's Guide to Crossing Cultures" and a panel discussion on "Best Practices for Building Diverse Churches" which were well-received by the attendees. I look forward to presenting both of these workshops again in the future, and particularly in the case of the panel, I hope that we can expand that dialogue out to a larger group of people as it seemed a particularly helpful conversation.

For next steps, we will be connecting with all the folks who gave me their contact information and get their feedback on their experience at the conference, we will be promoting our next Diverse Pastor Project in Evanston, IL, on August 28-29, and a number of training events on "Journeying Toward the Multiethnic Church" will be happening in various regions.

Just one more point before I sign off on this post. A fun -- and perhaps surprising -- bit of information that I learned this year is that of all the Vineyard churches who completed the census from 2007, 22% of those churches reported that they are ethnic or multi-ethnic (meaning at least 20% of the congregation are ethnic minorities). What do you think, does that make us technically a multi-ethnic movement?