Recently, I coined a phrase: “a robustly South African church.” It has stayed with me ever since. People sometimes assume I am speaking about music styles, local languages, or cultural expressions. I am not. By a robustly South African church, I mean a church that intentionally seeks to reach every person God has placed around it. As the gospel bears fruit, the congregation increasingly reflects its community—not because diversity is the goal, but because evangelism is. In a country with South Africa’s history, that matters.
The Church We Expect to See
Imagine you move to a new town. You ask someone where the local church is. As you drive there, you pass affluent suburbs, informal settlements, schools, shopping centres, retirement villages, and taxi ranks. You notice people speaking isiXhosa, Afrikaans, English, Sesotho, and other languages. Then you arrive at the church. Week after week, almost everyone looks remarkably similar. They come from the same background, live in the same neighbourhoods, and move in the same circles. No one planned it that way. It simply happened over time.
Now imagine another church. The preaching is equally biblical. The worship is equally reverent. Yet as you look around, you see something different. There are teachers sitting beside domestic workers. Students talking with pensioners. Xhosa-speaking believers serving alongside Afrikaans-speaking believers. Young professionals sharing meals with unemployed neighbours. New believers from very different backgrounds calling one another brother and sister. Neither church has compromised the gospel. But one more clearly displays what the gospel accomplishes.
South Africa’s Story Is Not Finished
South Africa carries a painful history. For generations, people were separated by race, neighbourhood, education, and opportunity. Sadly, churches were not untouched by those divisions. Many congregations still bear patterns formed decades ago. We should not pretend those realities disappeared overnight.
But neither should we believe the gospel has nothing to say about them. Paul reminds us that Christ “has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” (Eph. 2:14). He is speaking first about Jews and Gentiles, but the principle is glorious. The cross creates one new people where hostility once existed. The church is not simply a collection of people who happen to share similar interests. It is God’s new humanity.
Diversity Is Not the Goal
At this point, some readers may become uncomfortable. Is this an argument for quotas? For multicultural programmes? For diversity initiatives? Not at all. The New Testament never commands churches to pursue diversity as an end in itself. It commands us to preach the gospel to every creature. It commands us to show hospitality without partiality. It commands us to love one another sincerely. It commands us to welcome the stranger.
When churches obey those commands, something beautiful often happens. People whom society has kept apart become one family. A robustly South African church is therefore not engineered from the top down. It grows naturally as faithful churches refuse to let history, culture, or fear determine who hears the gospel.
What Our Communities Should Expect
Suppose your church is located in a neighbourhood where people from many backgrounds live. Should visitors reasonably expect to find only one group represented there? Or should they expect to find a church genuinely trying to reach everyone? Of course, no church perfectly reflects its community. Some areas remain largely homogeneous. Language-specific congregations serve an important purpose. Church plants often begin among one group before expanding.
The point is not mathematics. The point is posture. Are we content reaching only people who are already like us? Or are we praying, planning, and evangelising in such a way that anyone in our community would feel genuinely welcomed if Christ saved them? That question reveals much about our hearts.
A Foretaste of Heaven
The local church is one of the few places in South Africa where our country’s deepest divisions can be overcome—not through politics, but through the gospel. Every Lord’s Day, Christ gathers sinners whom the world would rarely gather together. They sing together. Pray together. Share meals together. Take the Lord’s Supper together. Raise one another’s children. Bear one another’s burdens. Forgive one another’s sins. That is not normal. It is supernatural.
When unbelievers see such love, they witness something that cannot be explained merely by personality or shared interests. They see the reconciling power of Jesus Christ. The church becomes a small preview of Revelation 7, where people from every tribe, language, people, and nation stand together before the throne, united in worship.
Let Us Reach the Whole Community
Perhaps the question is not whether our church is diverse. Perhaps the better question is this: If everyone in our community heard the gospel and believed it, would our church look much different than it does today? If the answer is yes, then perhaps we need to ask whether we have unintentionally limited our evangelism to people who resemble us.
Christ has not called us to build churches for one kind of South African. He has called us to make disciples of all the people He has placed around us. As we do, our churches will increasingly become what they ought to be—robustly South African—not because we pursued diversity, but because we faithfully proclaimed Christ to our neighbours, and Christ did what only He can do: make one family out of many peoples.