I feel like the term “multi-culutral” has been coming up a lot lately in various conversations over the past several months. I am currently working at a church in West Los Angeles that is located in a neighborhood currently going through a season of gentrification. On the same block you can have a section 8 housing apartment complex next to a newly built luxury apartment complex complete with penthouse suites. As our church strives to reach out to our surrounding neighbors and community I have watched the demographic of our congregation start to change. You can have the working class immigrant sitting next to the wealthy American professional sitting next to the international college student studying at UCLA. On any given sunday we have a clash of cultures as we strive to have one service where we worship together as one body. But of course when you bring several cultures together they tend to want to merely tolerate each other, ask for assimilation, or self-segregate. So I found it interesting when Leonce Crump introduced the term of “trans-cultural” to describe how a church can pursue unity in diversity.
Carlos Corral shared the following video with me that I feel helps illustrate how two very different things can come together to make something new. The type of music in the video is called Banda Music, which was a result of German immigrants in Texas interacting with the northern Mexican rancheros bringing together polka and spanish guitar… together at last.