Third Culture Churches, Their Opportunities, and Barriers: An Analysis of the Outcomes of 'Every Nation' Church Planting in Central and Western Europe

Abstract

By analysing the church planting practice in Europe of Every Nation, a neo-Pentecostal denomination, this thesis explores the outcomes of international, cross-cultural church planting. Every Nation Europe manifests a gap between its espoused mission (reaching people of every nation) and its mission outcomes (reaching people in, but often not of, the nations where it ministers). To explain this discrepancy, I present a theory of third culture churches, local congregations populated by sufficient numbers of hybrid-culture identity people such that their mutual interaction creates an operant third culture, that is, a shared, emergent schema for interpreting experience and generating behaviour built from resources of two or more cultures. Using mixed-methods research, I explore the sample of Every Nation churches in central and western Europe using both a quantitative survey of Every Nation Europe pastors and a comparative case study of congregations in Berlin, Dublin, and Madrid. I demonstrate that 1) international cross-cultural church planting tends to produce third culture churches; 2) third culture characteristics manifest when churches are populated by at least 20% hybrid-culture identity people; 3) third culture churches often struggle to reach indigenous people while naturally functioning as an oasis of belonging for non-indigenous people; 4) third culture churches can effectively reach indigenous people when proactively pursuing this ministry objective with intentional cultural curation. Whereas international, cross-cultural church planting will only ever be supplemental to mission within any nation, I demonstrate that it can play a role in fulfilling Christ’s Great Commission in Europe when churches prioritise reaching indigenous people.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	RMS UnKnown (Supervisor)