Today, Minnesota is home to a diverse group of individuals from Central America, Laos, Liberia, Russia and many other locales. In response to this influx of cultures, more missionaries are coming to the U.S. to attend to the spiritual needs of these diverse groups—establishing churches and religious programs that speak to these individuals’ unique Christian traditions.


Reaching their own communities
“Much of the focus of international missionaries in the U.S. begins as they try to reach people of their own nationality living in the U.S., but it often very quickly expands beyond that,” says Carl Nelson, president of the Greater Minnesota Association of Evangelicals.

“An example would be many of the Liberian congregations that have been planted in the U.S,” Nelson says. “They were initiated to minister to Liberian immigrants, but several Liberian congregations in the Twin Cities now have truly international congregations.”

Nelson recently visited with the president of the Liberian Ministerial Association, who observed that the external situation that forced them to come to the U.S. was the civil war in Liberia, but that he and many others believe that God had a purpose in mind for them to be missionaries to America and to plant churches here.

“Initially, they reach their own nationalities, but many of them have a fundamental desire to reach the whole U.S. culture,” Nelson says. “Some of them are motivated by a missionary fervor to reach what they believe is a lost society.”

So how prevalent is this missionary work throughout Minnesota and beyond? “While I don’t have exact specifics, we know it’s happening—particularly in major metropolitan cities, and the Twin Cities is in that group,” Nelson says.

Indeed, a visit to the Web site www.ethnicchurch.com displays dozens of Christian churches in Minnesota serving Hmong, Chinese, Portuguese, Hispanic, Arab, Sudanese, Russian, Laotian, Korean and Liberian individuals. And this missionary presence is found throughout the Twin Cities—from the Hmong worship services at the New Life in Christ Worship Center in Brooklyn Park to the Twin Cities Chinese Evangelical Free Church in Minneapolis.

As Nelson points out, there is a rising influence of Hispanic churches within U.S. denominations. “The Assemblies of God recently joined the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference because well over one-third of their congregations in the U.S. have major Hispanic memberships,” Nelson says.

“Latino Christianity is going to be a growing force within American Evangelicalism in the coming decades,” he says. According to the National Hispanic Leadership Conference, nationwide the Hispanic population will hit 24 percent in the next decade. In the Twin Cities and greater Minnesota, there are more than 28 Hispanic-based churches.


Voice of renewal
“The presence of international Christians is also trying to be a voice for renewal within some U.S. denominations, like the Episcopal Church, and is being felt through the establishment of new Anglican congregations under the jurisdiction of particularly African Bishops,” Nelson says.

Not surprising, incoming missionaries have made a significant impact on certain ethnic communities throughout Minnesota. For example, according to Nelson, there are some 40 Liberian congregations in Minnesota—several of them today have an international membership.

These congregations are simply a sampling of the many ethnic Christian churches that have been established by missionaries who saw the need to serve particular demographics.

“A Catholic parish in Minneapolis, near my home, is bursting at the seams with primarily Vietnamese worshipers today,” Nelson says. “And several newly-planted Anglican congregations in Minnesota, including Church of the Cross in Hopkins, receive leadership from Asian and African bishops. And one local Baptist denomination recently ordained three Karen ministers to work here in Minnesota” (Karen are an ethnic minority group from Burma, and there are an estimated 5,000 in Minnesota).

In some cases, American denominations are helping these international missionaries; in other cases, it has been slow to take hold among lay people and church leaders.

“The Church remains so rooted in the paradigm of the Western church evangelizing the rest of the world that we haven’t paid much attention to the evangelists coming to us here,” Nelson says. “The truth is most U.S. churches don’t have this on their radar. Many of these church-planting missionaries are independent and not part of local denominations and therefore go unnoticed by most U.S. church leaders.”

However, the Christian & Missionary Alliance (CMA) and the Southern Baptist Convention have particularly good track records of supporting pastors and church planters to reach Hmong, Laotian and Vietnamese populations in Minnesota. The Northwestern District of the CMA offers a wealth of resources for pastors, clergy and lay people who may be looking to reach diverse communities within Minnesota.

“The center of global Christianity has shifted from the west to the east, and from the north to the south,” Nelson says. “So it is inevitable that the U.S. will be a growing recipient of international missionaries if, for no other reason, than that the Church is declining in the U.S. The Church is thriving in much of the rest of the world, and particularly a Christianity that is evangelistic, Pentecostal and theologically orthodox.”